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October 27, 2005
Poets As the Lowest Form of Humanity
There is a good case that can be made that poets are the lowest form of humanity. And I don’t think this is just a local, or a social problem. It’s no doubt a historical scourge which may yet result in a cleansing of all vestiges of the literature once associated with the term of poetry. If the so-called poets actually produced more, it might constitute a real threat to the material language. These are the mere lifestyle poets, whose main employment is getting known as poets, after which their production slows down to just a dribble. They write as little as they possibly can, just to keep up the front and the label. All these feeblers can really manage is their illusory reputations, which is pretty easy considering no one has ever heard of them, except poetry critics, like William Logan. He claims to read every newly published volume, the research results of which he vomits back to delighted readers of The New Criterion.
The discussion and business of poetry, though, is all too easy to mock.The real problem is that regular people, so to speak, are too easily flattered by association, and go around puffing up some poetic aspect of themselves, that they think is fashionable, or historical, or even immortal. (Three levels of social climbing. This thesis is so suggestible it takes steam on its own, and can infiltrate the psyche.) But I would like to relieve any specific person who feels crowded by these charges, with the bigger truth--as regards humanity. For none of us are perfect examples of that; and none of us can be poets, entirely. Instead, you might say it is the poet in each of us that is trouble; and who has come to represent a low point in humanity. We may be touting some current prattling poet, as if his twittering triumpths represent our finest shades of intention. As if his broken utterances were our own, his musings our actual unspoken thoughts, or his clipped images some smoky figurings that are own own, poorly realized and surely never to be expressed, um, own obscurities. These poets of vaunted self-expression, whose subject is . . . nobody you’d ever want to know.
And truly this poet is not the one, who we want to become bigger than life and actually represent us.This is the pathetic poet only, in all of us, but now he has infested college campuses, now he teaches! Now he gets his own awards and hands other people awards, which is really funny, Still, it isn’t really the self-proclaimed poet that is the problem--they are their own worst problem. It is the fact that the rest of us have agreed to this lowering of what was once humanity’s highest form of literature, and let it lay in the gutter. Why is this? And what is the crime of it? I don’ know, I am still in the stunned phase, capable of only of research . . .
I have to ask a couple of likely candidates at Monty’s Krown. I say to John, who has the reassuring aspect of deep silence, but does speak when spoken to, and who looks just like that guy who does The Actor’s Studio, “if somebody said to you they knew and recommended a certain Poet, what would you imagine that person was?” He says, thoughtfully: “it would depend on who was recommending, what I thought that poet probably was or wasn’t.” A nice evasion. An excellent way of not facing the question, which, I must admit, is fated to be rhetorical; so he is smart to avoid it. Later, I ask Tom, a more direct fellow, what he immediately thinks the word “poet” means, and he immediately says, “a person who can express what we all go through as human beings.” Well, that is good; but does Tom think of himself as a human being? Hardly, He is unresolved on that. Does Tom, who looks like Lord Byron, I realise, think anybody was currently doing that? (Expressing what we all go through.) Emphatically, no! In other words, even if there were poets, there aren’t now. And that’s good for him.
I have been forced to force this ragtag band of interlocutors into answering the consuming question on my mind, and as the circle tightens the answers grow more extraordinary and pertinent. I asked the girl who looked like Emily Dickinson, when I found her finally in the shadows, and she said, flutttering, a poet was an expressionist, a literary person, one would put themselves out on the edge, an amazing soul, a light in the world . . . I couldn’t shut her up. A poet meant alot to her, so much so she never met one, for they were her ideal. I wanted to be a poet just for her, momentarily.
Once upon a time, I used to think graduate students in philosophy were the lowest form of humanity, but that was only briefly, and when I was one myself. But it still helps me in the dialogue now with Rosenencrantz and Guildenstern, who make up two halves of one incomplete graduate student. So if you ask them a question, they look at each other and one answers, insufficiently, and then the other one corrects him, incorrectly. Undaunted, for this is my public, I asked: “What is a poet?” The less profound of the two said, “a poet is a person who writes poetry.” A half hour later I was still yelling at him. But then the other one said, “it doesn’t matter, because they aren’t any good at it, anyway.” Boy was he smug.
But, and finally, then I had a full understanding of the matter. Not only have poets achieved a reputation for being clingers on the most irrelevent rung of humanity, they are also a laughingstock. Like politicians, nobody knows why they go into it, and then they find out they aren't even credible at it. Pardon my diction. The problem is they write these damn little “poems” all the time, these candy bon-bons, epiphanies, sob stories, these sensitivity lessons, these horrid pieces of unworked wisdom, little stand up comedy routines, pathetic musings, psycho-babble. What’s this, I hear? My audience is cheering! “Death, death, a merciful death to the legend of the muse.”
Posted by mortimer at 02:36 AM | Comments (2149)
October 14, 2005
You Can't Get Here from There
“ Well, some parts of nature are
Seemingly old. Mountains have a face storing
Up the years. I say, uprooted trees are a
Living nightmare--in a storm. And the ocean
I’ve heard, almost contains a universe of its own.”
from The War in Heaven
First, it just started out as an impromptu harangue against all techniques which claim to be able to fix dates in the past, tell the age a piece of wood or a living tree, against radio carbon dating, isotopes in general, against mitochrondial DNA, all which I have been unreasonable suspicious of since, aeons ago, my seventh grade pal Tom Kurvirt did a paper in high school on Carbon-14 and its amazing calendar producing half-life. Then, I found myself embarked on a blanket assertion that we, the living, were so mired in novelty we could never find ourselves relating to anything in the past. Especially with the unleashed direction of science, which has taken a contract out on the future. Ever since, as the song goes, Tom and I were in 7th grade, nearly half a century ago!
Here is our tremendous failure of imagination. We easily accept a method of calculating how much time has passed, and lay out a long hallway carpet going back through centuries, and through ancient worlds, into space, defining space as a thing needing more time. But we never bother to imagine how impossible it would be getting back. And we don’t consider the fact that the method employed in reconstructing the past is not capable itself of construction. It can imitate, it can combine, but it could never create anything. Things don’t happen in reverse, no matter how much we understand by reverse engineering, or how pleasant are our retrospective fantasies. We just add on time if we want, say, to allow for geological evolution to happen.
The big problem is that understanding how something appears to be made, does not demonstrate that it was actually made that way. I am going to repeat that, it will be required. Taking apart a clock does not reveal how time passes. (In a coming lecture I shall discuss “Aging as a Function of History”, so if you don’t find this amusing, look forward to that!) And the principle of Uniformity, explicity stated by James Hutton and Charles Lyell in the 1840’s, in which “the present is a key to the past”, is rather infuriatingly blind to other possibilities. Like the past being a key to itself.
Here is the colossal conflict: The past can be apparently projected from the obvious age of any substance. The tree has arrived in time, hasn’t it? The only problem is that if you go back there, in time, this substance is nowhere to be found. These trees, I will famously assert, are NOT THERE when you go back to the age of the tree rings. If there are trees at all (and not gnomes), or a windswept prairie with sagebrush lolling around.
Well, we thought we had the perfect dating technique! An understanding of how the substance grows, and all you do is . . . retroject! Project backwards that time finding. Time won’t scream, if you crank the film backwards. Though it seems like a travesty, a rape . . . As if the past were made of the same logically progressive reality as what we fluidly observe, to put it clinically. Imposing, as it were, clock-time on historical time. Using the now hackneyed Uniformity gauge. Jimmying the door. An outrage! A mixing of two ways of thinking. Which is an insult to the intelligence of a seventh grader. A silly song: These trees are old, they have been here so long. Longer than us, damn them. Their rings show time has passed in some, some, some . . . natural process. Easy then! Calculate how many years it must have taken (with nobody watching) to produce these stupid, I mean beautiful, trees.
But, says old Methuseluh himself, if you went into that past as calculated, there would be no trees at all. Because trees were created more recently, than the time it took to grow them by a natural process. Or earlier, when they weren’t trees at all, but Runes, dancers, sketches of trees. You dummy. This is the colossal truth. Nature is a cycle of marvels, and terrors, of creation. And as a cycle, it contains both the young and the old. If you found the young sapling that was this ancient , 4,743 year old Bristlecone pine, still alive today, there is, guess what, a bigger pine tree right next it, for trees grow in forests, dummy. And there are pinecones there too. How about that? Baby pinecones, for God’s sake. For nature, let’s go around again, is a cycle. It cannot be fathomed by science. Just investigated, and used for medicinal purposes.
But history, ah there is a linear set of events, call them catastrophies, for that is poetic enough, in which new aspects of the world come into being. Such as is happening right now with our fantastic passion for technology, and its products. But virtually nothing here is nature in the old sense. We have obliterated the past. And you can’t get back into that past with a forumla derived from a section cut from a tree. If you could get there, you certainly can’t get back here.
Posted by mortimer at 08:50 PM | Comments (4195)
October 03, 2005
The Shakespeare Effect
From my point of view, it certainly seems like I just cobble myself together, gather body and soul, while in the place, the dim bar whose name is painted backwards in gold-dust letters, on the plate glass window behind me, while I just look up from being lost in thought to, dimly, recognize where I am. I never actually have gone there, but come to consciousness there, and then after an hour or so, no longer perplexed, I say goodbye to my few stationary friends, or slip out without ceremony at all, and galavant on home in the night like it was a new beginning. So it is true I am always repeating this scene, always walking home from the Purple Tavern, which once again I left-- but it is destiny, because I never actually go there in the first place. My trajectory is one way, so to speak, and is to eventually get back to my house, which I left only down the street half a block. No, and for the third time, like The Drunken Porter in Macbeth, I reiterate that I am essentially helpless in this particular story, and not responsible for any mayhem and madness, or murder and paranoid dreams of Kings or would-be pretender Kings around me.
Shakespeare has had his effect, on our thoughts and actions, and none of us can escape it; and I can tell you how and why. Oh yes, I have my ducks in a row for my unassailable explanation of the priveleged place of Shakespeare, but can only tickle the theme there in the imitation British pub just down my street, by asking the few cardboard figures I have propped up to ask. “What pray tell, is the source of all Knock Knock jokes?” Ah, the Drunken Porter himelf. Act II Scene 3, “Here’s a knocking indeed! If a man were porter of hell gate, he should have old turning the key. Knock, knock, knock. Who’s there, i’ th’ name of Bezebub?” I don’t always speak with this accent, nor did Will in his pub, nor do I always argue backwards, but the language and logic have their vestiges, their heraldry.
What has to be disabused is the notion that Mr. Shakespeare expressed universal truths. No, he pigeon-holed local truths which, furthermore, are in many cases many generations and locales gone now. Thus period costumes are most fulfilling, and rightly I scorned his antique phraseology when first handed it ; but now, this is boldly to attone and also to transcend. In most important ways, he is gaining force, because history is a steamroller or a snowball if you prefer. (Surely you groundlings have heard of . . . The Snowball Effect.)
In the Tavern of Historical Personages, and also here at Monty’s Krown, in a town named after the butler, I raise a pint, for Will was never an ancient seer or wisdom maker, but the implacable creator of contemporary consciousness for his day. It is one wing of a historical effect, the dullest even, which causes people now to regard him as miraculously central and expressive of something or other THEY think should be universal truth. I have named my local haunt three ways; Macbeth has talked to three weird sisters, and talk is running amuck, as a modern playright dallies in our midst.
This playwright is the stamp-putter on odd psychological realities (“how is it when every noise appals me”). The master of things happening offstage, which means in the imagination. What we have isn’t the best use of the language for some already grasped piece of wisdom or, which is just as marketable, tripe; but it is the creation and capping of that same potentiality in the language, which I (the shy lecturer) repeat for the hundredth time is a transhistorical medium of material reality. More lasting than reality itself, and capable of prefiguring, configuring, and post-figuring. But this can only be accomplished by a person, because only a person (with a leaky pen), has both individual consciousness, the source of these cartloads of sentiment, and language, which also fights for it’s rightful territory. And while I’ve got you riveted to your barstool, for one reason or another . . . answer this:
The question that was critic-wise produced, as to why Mr. Shakespeare is so superior, so a cut above the others of his countrymen. Zounds, alas and alack, but this is easy. Such a process can only produce one poet, because time rolls favorite meanings right into our very speech. Whoever stands tallest will stand alone eventually. Whoever speaks, will echo louder down the ages. For the words have power to cut the fabric and leave a specific coat to wear. We live in the Shake-scene, bear its prophetic imprint. It is in art as in science, someone assumes the discovery, the mantle where are placed things to come--and that is the prevailing spirit, and by centrifigal force, a new universe virtually is shaped. The master scribe knows very well these succeeding times are not a matter of truth, so much as a business for creating liklihood. In fact they revel in the idea . . . that truth IS likelihood. It is The Shakespeare Effect. What is conjured, happens. A poet describes the world, and that becomes the world. .And bawdy tellers of jokes, are cascading descendents of the knock-knock porter. Hamlet becomes your brooding chum, the world is too much with him, soon or late.
Or he is your very self. And Macbeth, well we all know him too.
Posted by mortimer at 09:58 PM | Comments (3272)