Posted By BillHeise on February 22, 2010

The Music I Grew Up With

The music of the 60s and 70s was new and exciting, both to me and to the world. The blues had broken of the backwaters and made it to the center of the world stage. I would listen to the rhythm of the music at punishing volumes, but as exciting as I found the music of the 70s, I never liked the lyrics. I didn’t know it at the time, but this was because the lyrics of the 1970s were the last lyrical expressions of the High Modern period in literature.

Many people discover there is more depth in poetry than in the lyrics of their youth when they discover (usually in college) poets like Yeats, Eliot, and Lawrence. So the lifecycle gets fed: people go from their youthful aspirations, where they are hoping to find fulfillment of their ideals, to fulfillment of their ideals with a deeper and more fulfilling poetry that sums up (better than they could themselves) their hopes for themselves and for their lives.

I have no problem this, but that has not been my experience. I had simply ignored the lyrics which had seemed so shallow to my eyes. These lyrics did not reflect my expectations or aspirations for my life. So I continued to listen to the experimental rhythms and sounds of the 70s and was extremely glad when in the 1980s what had been underground throughout the 70s burst to the fore and crushed the superficial and elitist disco of the 1970s. This was the experiment with punk rock, an anti-elitist movement targeted specifically at the losers in the race to the top of the social scene. Hey, that was me!

But even the lyrics of the Clash and Nina Hagen couldn’t hold my interest for long. Soon I got tired of the repetition of calls for revolution without any actual revolution coming. And it was then that I realized that the Clash’s calls for revolution repeated the calls for revolution which had come from Gil Scott Heron’s “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised.” And I started to think about why people kept calling for revolutions that never came. And I started to examine the lyrics that I had been ignoring for my whole life.

My Life as a Reader

The first time I went to school, I was being fed a diet of modern poetry. And that was fine. At least I figured that what I was dealing with was a more serious form of lyric poetry than I had been introduced to through popular music. But modern poetry didn’t satisfy any more than the lyrics of the 70s satisfied me. I figured that there was something wrong with me, and not with the lyricists themselves; and this was confirmed when I failed out of college due to my inability to really read very well.

While I had failed out of college, I still continue to read. I was looking for someone to organize my disconnected experience for me, and due to my diligence I found Joseph Campbell. Campbell had shown me the first time how all human learning could be reconciled within itself. And this, to me, was quite exciting. It seemed to me (and to Campbell himself, I’m sure) that he had his finger on the human condition. Moreover, he was repeating what I would later learn to call the “master narrative” of Modernism: he, for the first time in human history, had wrapped up all human knowledge in a neat and tidy package. And by reading Campbell, I was participating in that larger goal. This was a “master narrative” shared by diverse poets like Yeats and Eliot, who also were trying to encompass the unencompassable metaphysical reality that surrounds the everyday world. And this, in my opinion, is one of the reasons that so many people latch on to people like Yeats and Campbell.

The Failing of the Modern World

Yet I had realized there were problems with Joseph Campbell’s approach to life, particularly in respect to his transferring our attention away from “the words” towards “the words behind the words.” Sure, it sounded good, but how could Campbell guarantee that “the words behind the words” are any safer than the actual words themselves? This is the problem I had when I went back to school. I figured someone would know the answer, since I myself did not.

When I went back to school in the mid-80s, most of my professors were still focusing our attention on the New Critical approach to reading literature. This was the attempt to isolate the poem unto itself and to read it without reference to other influences such as culture or history. This approach, called the “autotelic” approach to reading poetry, had a great vogue from the emergence of T.S. Eliot as the great poet of the modern world and by Brooks and Warren’s Understanding Poetry.

However, since the 1960s, nearly coincident with my birth in 1962, the Modern approach to life had been failing bit by bit on the very subject that had attracted my attention and for which I went back to school of answers: where was the ground on which poetry stood. And keep in mind that this was what Brooks and Warren were promising in their Understanding Poetry. Under-standing points to the floor, the foundation, not only the understanding of poetry, but of human understanding itself. Thus, through poetry, my mind was taken with the problem of the foundation of human knowledge. Where was it? What was it? Was it?

The Rise of the Postmodern World

I held out hope while I was still an undergraduate that the Modernist goals of my professors in the undergraduate program could be realized. But when I got to graduate school some of the more advanced and enlightened had embraced the (then relatively new) Postmodernism, which said that the “master narrative” was incomplete and possibly incoherent. I found this an exciting development and was taken with it from the moment I heard about it in Mark Kipperman’s Byron and Shelley seminar.

I embraced (with some reservations) the Postmodern worldview all through graduate school, and this caused me no end of problems, for my medieval professors, who were among the most conservative in the world of academic literary criticism, thought I was far too liberal, while my liberal colleagues thought I was still holding onto some of the last vestiges (as they saw them) of a discipline that everyone thought was dead except the most conservative members of the faculty. Both were right, and neither would give me the chance to figure out what I thought. They demanded allegiance first. Original thought could come later, if at all.

Poetry After College

So I graduated college I still didn’t really like lyrics very much. They still seemed to me to be derivative of the larger and now dismissed (at least in academic circles) Modern ideal. But after I got out of college, I missed the academic experience and attempted to recapture it from the margins. I went back to teaching part-time, and I decided to write some poetry of my own.

And it was when I was writing poetry that I first came to experience the difference between writing criticism of poetry and writing poetry itself. Rather than trying to pull all of human and poetic experience into a closed and perfect circle—the experience of writing criticism of poetry—I found that I just had to inscribe a little bit of my own experience. I never thought of this as enough, so I decided to write my poetry in sonnet form.

So my first attempt to write resulted in my attempt to write a (never-finished) series of 100 sonnets, of which I give you two here:

I have walked with her in sunflowered fields
And watched the heron fish in silent streams.
To hear with her the summer bluebird yields
What other lovers only find in dreams.
We’ve walked a while in gorgeous gorges green,
When dappled springtime treetops towered above,
Admiring tender wildflower shoots, unseen
But by the careful eye, and talked of love.
And we have sat upon the ocean’s shore
And wondered at the beauty of the sea:
A glittering surface, trimmed in rhythmic roar,
While in her depths she dwarfs immensity.
What greater gift can heaven or nature hold
Than smiles and sunny days as we grow old?

This poem recalls the general memory of my life with her. We had actually walked in sunflowered fields and cherished the single heron we had seen in DeKalb and then seen again on our honeymoon. We joked that the one heron was the only heron and that it had followed us to Cancun (yes, we knew it wasn’t true). We had sat on the shore of the ocean and walked through the very specific Clifton Gorge (“the gorgeous gorges green”) in Yellow Springs, OH. What more could life hold for me than to have her smile at me on a sunny day?

The second sonnet recalls a specific place on a specific day at the Morton Arboretum in the fall of 1996.

We stood here when we watched the spring renew,
And fingers of young life pushed through the ground.
The dutchman’s breeches were spread with dew,
And new wildflowers filled these hills around.
Then had we hoped the summertime would bring
Respite from barren winter’s pinching cold
And that the year should bring us our own spring
And we should escape our winter: growing old.
So now we stand in awe, breathless, as all
The leaves we hoped for then are yellow changed.
Surrounding golden splendor hovers bright, since Fall
The leaves and all our hopes have rearranged.
For now we know the winter should be mild,
Since we who stand amazed await our child.

The sonnet contrasts the world of “then” with the world of “now.” “Then”—at the time when the first sonnet was written—we were hoping that the world would renew itself and we could escape the winter of our death through imagination, as Yeats had attempted to escape into the world of Byzantium by transforming himself from what he was (and old man wearing a tattered coat) into a golden and eternal bird. “Now” the world is renewing itself, not in the way we expected back “then.” Instead of transforming the world through imagination, the world was coming to life with an even fuller increase than we could have imagined as “we who stand amazed await our child.” Even as the natural world is dying away, we ourselved increase.

The Value of Poetry

I have to tell you that I’ve always been proud of these two poems. But their subject is personal. I love the image of the surrounding golden splendor hovering bright, because I can still see it, and I know that words cannot convey what I can recall every time I read my poem. I know that the image of the dutchman’s breeches spread with dew doesn’t flow over the palate as I would have liked, but I never changed the line, because I can see that image so clearly in my mind as well.

The immediacy of the images made it impossible that anyone who was not there could experience what I intended, and this is why I never even attempted to finish the sequence, much less publish what I had written, for who could be interested in the subject matter but me?

I was raise in an environment where the value poetry was determined by how well an individual poet could tie his individual experience back to the larger poetic universe. Great poets are those whose works lead us into believing that they have spanned the entire universe and placed in their imaginative vision a vision of the larger universe. (See James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake). Because they succeed in capturing many minds and putting them under their spell, tradition raises them up as great poets who stand out from the pack. And this is why to this day there’s no question but that Yeats was the best poet of the 20th century (Eliot was a close second), for he managed to give original and new conceptions to the whole range of poetry from Shakespeare and Spenser to Blake and Shelley while preserving his individual vision.

Into the Warhol(e)

But there was that school of thought at the margins that had captured my imagination when I was introduced to it in grad school. The demands of aesthetics meant that every exclusion from the world of art had to be challenged. This process started with the Dada movement as early as 1910, where the gatekeepers of art had been challenged by Marcel Duchamp to lay out their reasoning for excluding his work from a modern art show. The rise of the Duchamps/Dada school led to the destruction of those gatekeepers, because they couldn’t lay out their reasoning without destroying their reliance on the philosophy of aesthetics which proclaimed that everything was art. Dada also ultimately led to the destruction of the authority of Eliot himself, who was not only a great author but an important critic, a gatekeeper himself who decided who lived in who died in the art world. They didn’t really need him, particularly after the explosion of education in the 1960s.

The defining event in the art world was Warhol introduction of the Campbell’s soup can into the art world. This was a minor deal in terms of art production, but it relied on the existing technology of the “found-object.” Warhol was crossing new boundaries. The barriers between the commercial and the fine art had been breeched. Moreover, Warhol gave another twist on the old idea when he added the element of mass production to his production of soup cans. This also became a big deal because it broke down barriers of expression that had been closed, if not from private view, then from public presentation. He was opening up to the commercial world of kitsch the once-closed, non-kitschy universe of art that Eliot had presided over.

In some respects, Warhol was continuing the tradition of Eliot, even as he destroyed him. Now (finally) everything could be included in the world of art, not just the Eliot-sanctioned poetic tradition. Oops, Eliot must have thought as he turned over in his grave. But in my mind, Warhol was simply the last of a series of chasers after the aesthetic dream to be all-inclusive. And of course, as soon as the new generation of artists discovers—if they have not yet already discovered—the fact that Warhol’s soup cans were founded on the notion of the “found-object,” Warhol will go the way of Eliot.

My Problem with Aesthetics

This cycle is one of the problems with the aesthetic tradition. As I read that tradition, the aesthetic tradition is built upon the foundational notion that art should be all-inclusive. And this means that every time someone begins to define art in any way, all the new artist has to do is to figure out what possibilities have been left out of art, and include them. This inculcates in the art community sense of permanent revolution, because artists will always be leaving something out of their artistic expression.

This practice has a valuable place in society. It is built on the natural tension within the most immediate social unit to the individual: the nuclear family. Individuals feel the tension to compete with fathers and mothers, and this gives them a sense of oedipal (or electrolite) tension. But unlike the family, where oedipal tension is resolved in most individuals into more appropriate behaviors, the artist continues this behavior into adulthood.

The Divergence of Values

This means that the drama of the art community is unlike the drama of the community of family. Most people grow up, get jobs, and reconcile themselves to the human defects of their parents. They look back on their strident posturing against hypocrisy as a youthful dream that has made way for a more realistic approach to an imperfect life. We are not perfect, and neither are our parents.

The artist, on the other hand, continues the oedipal cycle beyond its place in the life cycle by grasping on to a youthful dream and holding on to it too long. The sense of the perpetual revolution continues, as well. Not only do people like Warhol come along with new ideas, but they still feel the oedipal need to kill their fathers. This gives to those living in the art community no incentive to try anything but to try to outdo the last artist in a perpetual cycle of revolution without a firm endpoint.

This, in turn, causes the artist to trade living in the present, with its imperfections, for a living in the future, where all problems may be solved as soon as we get rid of “the opposition.” And there are lessons from history here. In the French Revolution, Robespierre wielded the guillotine until someone else got control of it, and Robespierre fell under the blade. The same thing happens in the modern (or postmodern) community of the left. The first move of the progressives (those who live in the future they can imagine but who have been stopped by the evil right) it’s not too come to terms with their opposition, but to exclude them from the community. They are not just people with a different opinion. There are people who cling to evil. And as evil people, they don’t have to be taken seriously. Why should they be? They are evil.

People on the right do the same thing from the opposite direction. They believe that if only if the ignorant left could be eliminated that we could travel backwards through time to the founding documents of our founding fathers.

In the artist’s case, the ability to rule out one political party effectively destroys their argument that they are the keepers of the whole truth. In fact, their ability to keep the whole truth in mind is dependent upon keeping those who disagree out of the discussion. That is a recipe in need of correction, just as Eliot needed correction by Warhol.

For this reason I do not believe that artists are misunderstood as much as they are exclusive. After they have excluded parties that do not agree with their premises, they get involved in another thing that should not be included in a discussion of metaphysics: a race to the top of the mountain. Only one person can be a leader in a hierarchical universe. And this, too, competes with the notion that the universe should be ordered democratically. But it is nevertheless what occurs in fact. After the artist dismisses those who have fallen prey to economic learning, logic, etc. they turn on themselves in a fury. Andy Warhol comes along and dismisses T. S. Eliot from the chair that he occupied for a generation. And so it goes.

I liken it to a game of follow the leader. There is a sense of danger if you do not follow the leader, for tragedy will surely ensue as you are passed over by more adventurous and more daring new artists. Most people age and get wiser. Others are uninvited to participate in the future of all-inclusive art. Those people fall way from youthful folly to a more comprehensive view of the world. But those who do not get tired of chasing an impossible dream continue on, blind to their own folly.

Captain Fantastic

Eventually the people, who loved poetry during Yeats’ and Eliot’s lifetime, stopped listening to those calling for constant revolution, for the experience of revolution was not coincident with their experience of life. Those people wanted to reconnect their individual experience with the larger tradition. But in a sense, the tradition itself has gone the way of Eliot after the advent of Warhol.

I take my example from a personal memory. Bernie Taupin was (in my mind without a doubt) the greatest writer of lyrics in my youth (and in my mind, ever).Bernie had written the lyrics to Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy in the mid-70s. Bernie Taupin was apparently taken with Tim Vasin’s character of the same name (Captain Fantastic) on the 60s British television series Do Not Adjust Your Set, and he had decided to write the lyrics to what was I believe their bestselling album.

And in this interview, the question of lyrics came up in an interview with Elton John, the man who put Taupin’s lyrics to music. The interview starts out with the question “There’s a contention that in popular music, rock and so forth, words don’t count. It’s the beat. The beat. Do words count?”

Elton’s answer sort of throws Bernie under the bus. “Of course they matter (I’m paraphrasing here), especially to the person singing them. Captain Fantastic was a very personal experience.” I notice that he leaves out the Brown Dirt Cowboy, since that experience was not his own.

My answer at the time would’ve been the definitive no. In those days I was looking to poetry to tie my experience back to the greatest works of literature and art. I had never heard of Tim Vasin, nor would it have mattered to me if I had. To my then young mind, Taupin’s lyrics were absurdly shallow. Take, for instance, Curtains, the last song on the album.

I used to know this old scarecrow
He was my song, my joy and sorrow
Cast alone between the furrows
Of a field no longer sown by anyone

I held a dandelion
That said the time had come
To leave upon the wind
Not to return
When summer burned the earth again

Cultivate the freshest flower
This garden ever grew
Beneath these branches
I once wrote such childish words for you

But that’s okay
There’s treasure children always seek to find
And just like us
You must have had
A once upon a time

Elton’s answer to the problem of lyrics was no help. They meant something to him, but not to the rest of us.

How I Learned to Love the Lyrics I Had Once Scorned

But I have since changed my mind on this subject. I no longer seek to reconnect myself to the larger tradition through the medium of poetry. And this was due to my having attempted to write poems of my own. I would say that there was a lot of junk in my attempt to tie my personal experience back to the sonnet tradition. The sonnet tradition itself allows me to experiment with various rhetorical forms, but the language is stilted, the form too constraining. This is another reason why I never attempted to publish my poems.

But I went back, as I periodically do, and read my poems this week again. And I’m still convinced that I was right not to publish them, but am now convinced that Elton’s answer was the right one. I can still read my poems, not because they are sonnets, but because I have lived those experiences, and they are as fresh to me now as they were when I wrote them.

The lesson for me is that the lyric content endures, if only in my memory, while forms come and go. They capture a passing moment of pure (and private) memory, and as soon as I attempt to translate my private moment into public speech, I will lose my memory to others who will do with my memory what they will. This introduces a division between my private expression and its public expression that can never be closed.

So I learned to appreciate the lyrics of songs by getting away from the attempts to tie lyrics to the larger world and instead embracing small moments for themselves without necessarily pointing to anything but themselves.

And this, which was never enough when I was in graduate school, had to suffice after I got out of graduate school, because I never found those things I was looking for in graduate school. And I still wanted beauty, I still wanted art, in my life. But the thing about growing old is that you take your experiences as they come, and when they come they do not always come in the shape or form you expect them to. Young men grasp after their ideals. Aging men grasp after anything still floating in the detritus of the shipwreck of experience. And though it’s not enough for me to have only this poetry, having this poetry in my life is better than having none at all.

Categories: English, Personal, Philosophy
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