http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yrP7-1q6Nao

Jobs became famous for wanting to change the world, and he did so many times, marketing a scientific innovation invention by made by others that he had seen at Xerox PARC, the graphics based computer, with its mouse and its more intuitive design, to the masses. But that’s what happens to those who are business innovators. They take ideas from others and market them better than anyone else. Then, after their innovation is followed by others, they claim credit for the innovation itself. This is why, after Bill Gates copied Steve Jobs’ copying of Xerox PARC ideas, Jobs claimed that his invention had been stolen by his lifelong rival, Bill Gates: “Bill is basically unimaginative,” he said, “and has never invented anything, which is why I think he’s more comfortable now in philanthropy than technology. He just shamelessly ripped off other people’s ideas.”.

But Gates took Jobs’ idea for the graphical user interface marketed to the masses, leaving Jobs’ company as a niche company which charged higher prices for the premium of owning an Apple computer. As the company settled into a state in which the company dominated only 5% of the market, Steve Jobs got fired as CEO. He went on to found NeXT Computers, as well as giving a small company called Pixar some startup capital which will with which they experimented and eventually produced the first all digital film, Toy Story.

These things would’ve been enough to secure his legacy as one of the great technology leaders at the turn-of-the-century, and yet his greatest contributions to technology were still to come. After Apple failed to win its share of the mass market, Jobs was invited back as CEO. He quickly got the company into the black and then with his experience designing high end graphics workstations gleaned from NeXT Computers invented the iMac, followed by the iPod, still the most popular MP3 player in the world. He changed the distribution system of music from record stores to an online based music distribution system with iTunes. He changed retailing, by opening up a line of Apple Stores, a store that has the highest sales per foot of floor space of any company in the world. Then, he finally got the recipe right for a shift away from the personal computer to a cheaper computer that people had been trying to invent for years with only limited success when he introduced the iPad.

As he did so, his company, which he had rescued from being in the red and so from potential oblivion, became briefly the most valuable company in terms of market capitalization in the world.

Me and Jobs as Products of the 60s

Steve Jobs is only seven years older than I am, but he and I are both the products of the 60s. We both went to college; we both dropped out. When he was in college, he took a class in calligraphy, which he later credited with his obsession with fonts in his Mac OS. I, too, took a class in calligraphy (it was called paleography when I took it) when I was in graduate school, but have nothing to show for in except for a story that no one wants to hear about how I learned to instantly determine which font (of 30 – 40) I was looking at through a decision tree that I made in class. As a result, Steve Jobs died infinitely wealthier than I ever hope to be.

I can’t decide whether this matters. Nobody pays any attention to blog, but I write it without any expectation that anyone will be interested in what I am writing, being more interested in expressing my thoughts on what matters to me. Steve Jobs, on the other hand, was a cultural leader. When he spoke, people listened, because he was an oracle of the future. Listening to what Jobs had to say gave people insights into their own future that they lacked on their own. This is how a community is built, whereas my approach to my blog involves me in quite of selfish blowharding that is not reflected in the larger culture. This thought was on my mind when I took off blogging for the summer. Unlike Steve Jobs, I have no desire to make money with my blog or my writing. I write my books because I want to read them and no one else in the culture is writing what I want to read.

My success as an author cannot be measured in monetary terms; and although I often have to explain to others the selfish philosophy that governs my life as a writer, I don’t regret the course my non-remunerative life has taken. I live happily with my wife, and she and my kids are all that has ever mattered to me. I spent my youth chasing idealist dreams, and I pursued them into graduate school. My life after graduate school meant learning about how business works, and it turns out is not at all how they told me that the world works was in graduate school. As a result, I went to work as a minor cog in the world dominated by people like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and companies like Wal-Mart, who had mastered the way the world in actuality.

I originally decided to go into academia because I wanted a quiet life or I could be in control of my destiny. When I realized that academia and I have different sets of values, it and I parted ways, as I turned to entrepreneurship, which I learned about when I was reading my hundred books on business, marketing, finance, etc. I was happier doing this that I ever was in academia, which put limits on my ability to think outside the box despite their belief that they (academics) were the only people who could think outside boxes. I learned a great deal when I was reading about business, including my insight (derived from Pareto, but like Jobs I’ll be happy to claim invention) of the basic inequality of nature, which contradicted everything they had taught me in graduate school. I took a job as a temp, got hired full-time as a secretary, got promoted based on my skills as a programmer to market analyst, quit that job for a job in the field I got my promotion for (which I rightly perceived as my skill as a computer programmer, not for my remedial skill as a marketer), and eventually went to work for myself as an independent contractor. There, I was happier than I had ever been in grad school, where people had attempted to keep me in line by constantly testing my political allegiances. I would still be an entrepreneur if not for my having had a stroke in 2004. So I changed my profession again. I founded a company, and I now view myself as an entrepreneur of ideas gleaned from my own attempt to integrate my academic experience with my business experience, which I package in my books.

On the basis of the difference in outcomes between myself and Steve Jobs, it might seem unfair for me to poke holes in the thoughts of a man who is among the last great American entrepreneurs (so far), but this is exactly my intention in this post.

Going Back to School

The chief difference between myself and Steve Jobs (in my humble opinion) is that he went to work after dropping out of college, whereas I felt that work was less fulfilling. I read incessantly when I was out of college, and when I went back I found that I was better read than almost all my classmates. But what I was missing, and the reason I went back to college, was a sense that I had not been able to give myself a well-rounded education when I was out of college. I had encountered Joseph Campbell, who was the first of many comprehensive thinkers about the world when I was out of school; but Campbell left me with some deep questions about how I could resolve the world I lived in with the world of “the word behind the words,” which he pointed to as having answers that words themselves could not get to. This seemed to me to take me out of my independent and individual self and impose upon me a requirement that I alienate myself from myself an instead grasp a new set of principles based in our common inheritance with no guarantee that I would ever be able to get back from the division-less area in space back to my individual self. The whole thing requires that I believe that the “higher” construction is real and not a delightful but impossible fiction. Unfortunately, I could not believe this, and I went back to college looking for answers to what appeared to me to be unresolvable questions. I was sure that someone knew.

It turned out when I went to grad school that others had discovered a similar gap between words and what they refer to as soon as I got into graduate school. Derrida’s work fascinated me, and I attempted to work it into the knowledge that I built up over two years working in a local bank. It turned out that I came to a different conclusion than my academic colleagues, many of whom had never had any business experience. For them, going into business meant simply a capitulation to greed; and more than once I had a conversation with academics who believed that they could have gone into business and made money, but they had pursued a “higher” calling whose point of pride was that they had made a conscious decision to turn away from making money altogether.

I’ve always been very wary of such professions. In my own life, I’ve attempted to learn about business, because my parents told me that I should learn enough to follow all of the things they reported on in the news. This involves a smattering of national and local politics, sports, weather, and of course, business. When I was young I never really cared much for sports, and weather was something, as Mark Twain once said, there’s not much you can do about changing. Politics and business, on the other hand, require a good memory for past behavior and the inability to predict future behavior based on your deeper knowledge of the past. This makes both politics and business appropriate for intellectual inquiry.

In the 1990s, when I was in graduate school, New Criticism, with its sense that aesthetic objects were to be counted for as “autotelic” objects without reference to culture or any other external factors, was waning. In its place came a New Historicism, which made culture the static metaphysical object in the universe and the individual as being in negotiation with something larger than themselves. But with the switch from autotelia to negotiationata, I still perceived a problem in the resulting configuration; for it seemed to me that this same problem existed with culture has had existed with the metaphysical individual at the center of the aesthetic universe. No one could say what the boundaries were for culture anymore than they could say what the boundaries of the individual were.

Being a new idea competing with an older idea, people in academia were sure that they had finally reached the Promised Land. Having gotten there, there was no more reason to explore the world for cracks in their own configuration the world; all that remained do was to cleanse the academic world of those who did not believe as everyone in the academic world believed. So this demotion of the individual played out in the world of politics, where two opposing points of view were posited, and through election one won out. Academics secured the election which had taken place within their ivory tower by declaring within that ivory tower a state of permanent revolution, and only one side (the left) could perceive the “truth.” This made it very difficult for me to ask questions about things that had already been decided on; and it made me into a creature of the right within academia, because only someone on the right could ask questions that involved the resurgence of an idea as old as individual liberty without negotiation with larger collective forces. And within the medieval period, which sported more conservative scholars, I was thought to be too liberal in my desire to throw open all things medieval to the forces of Derrida’s corrupting vision of society. I was firmly on the left, as far as most of my medieval professors were concerned.

I find it endlessly fascinating what happened in academia in the 90s. Rather than looking within their ranks for cracks in their system, academics started to displace the frustrations they had with their own “perfect” system onto business people, excluding them, who in turn had dismissed academic thought as a useless pursuit and who (according to my academic colleagues) were more concerned with their own greedy point of view than with collective action. This placed “them” by definition far from the “truth.” But, at the same time as my academic colleagues were making the case for the absolute exclusion of business people from the universe of wisdom, even a cursory reading of the logic of definition would convince anyone that definitions are relative, not absolute. In my opinion, my academic colleagues had made an unacknowledged switch, which I am in the habit of calling the Absolute-Relative Switch. In such a switch, you reserve relative constructions to your party (this can be done on the left and the right), while maintaining that the other party means what they say absolutely. This is the stuff that radio partisans thrive on, but academics and those on the left are not immune to such a fallacy.

Now in my world, businesses always been excluded from liberal arts on the basis of the study of business not fitting in with the standard configuration of the universe given to us by academia. In academia, some people have knowledge, while other people don’t. This is the way that classrooms work: teachers have knowledge, while students are (or should be) in class to learn what their teachers have spent a lifetime learning. This makes it possible for academics to congratulate themselves on pursuing a higher calling, while demonizing their students, who are not thought to be as serious about the “higher” calling of the life of the mind as their professors are. But this is only true if a professor has a secure position in the world and not one of many relative positions that one could take. This would destroy the classroom setting by making the distinction between teacher and student a completely arbitrary thing, so my academic colleagues maintain their absolute positions on some things (like the importance of knowledge and of the importance of teachers who pass on the accumulated knowledge to their students) in an otherwise arbitrary universe in and on which business people operate.
I just didn’t think that my academic colleagues, who had walled themselves off from society by relying on a firm (read: absolute) boundary between themselves and the world that they judged without wanting to be judged, were correct in their assessment of how easy would be to make money in the world should they have chosen the path that they dismissed as only the path of greed. I found them to be as greedy (not more or less so) than their fellow men who stood outside their arbitrarily constructed walls.

My experience with business has been that business is organized on different principles altogether. Whereas academics can elevate themselves up to a higher world while dismissing the lower world as being one of “greed” in a bit of what we academics used to like to call a synchronic analysis, business people have a more diachronic analysis of their position in the universe.

And here’s the rub. If you follow my link under diachronic analysis, you will find that it leads to the notion of “historical analysis.” Looked at from this academic point of view, it appears that business people are shallow thinkers who think in “lower” terms, while academics pursue a set of “higher” values. This accords with Aristotle, who said in Part IX of his Poetics that “Poetry, therefore, is a more philosophical and a higher thing than history: for poetry tends to express the universal, history the particular.” This, too, reflects the academic position that the first thing one needs to do to seek the “truth” is to abandon one’s attachment to one’s individual life and instead tend to a “higher” truth. According to this model, the business person has no notion that there is a “higher” world that could be pursued if only they would give up their base and debasing focus on themselves at the expense of their betters, who have turned away from selfish greed.

In many senses, my academic colleagues are correct. [See my the first point in my article on Rush Limbaugh, who dismisses Darwin as one of the two worst thinkers in the history in favor of a (presumably static world in which things don’t change beyond a certain point).] But that is beside the point. The academic view point is limited to thinking about the past, as the indication of diachronic linguistics reference to “historical linguistics” ought to tell us. In such a universe, there is no room for thinking about the future. As a result, academics tend to believe that the future will come out of present experience, as I note here, and the disallow all other changes and ideas that do not pass through their hands.

But there is another problem with the academic construction of the problem: the problem is that such a “higher” truth based in “historical linguistics” might be a fictional construction. And here I perceive the difference between academic thinkers and business people. Academics spend a great deal of time thinking about the historical past but cannot tell with certainty what the future will hold except that it must of necessity come out of the historical experience that only academics have fully grasped. Business people, despite not being very good academic thinkers, spend a lot more time thinking about the future than academics do, because success in business involves having a new vision that has never been thought of in the past. So the past is a deep and detailed record of things that have happened; but I learned in my year of 100 books that it is useless to concentrate on the rise of railroads except as a model of the past. New ideas come from thinking outside the box, which academics are all for; but only to the extent that they are included in the final box that thinkers end up with. If not, they, like all dictators before them, will stand in the way of progress.

In my Poker Tales, I note some serious limitations of this model, which seem more appropriate to a European sensibility than to an American one. In particular, I noted the difference between European and American models of culture in my chapter on “Reykjavík” and later in my chapter on the “Four Parisians” who come to America with some high-minded ideals but who get taken to the cleaners by the absolute fool “Belcher” Owens because they are not looking at the world as it is, but as they would like it to be. America works because we have a model of how the world works that is more efficient than older European models because it does not hold on to any residual metaphysical constructs but allows prices to run free on the basis of two cooperating people involved in a transaction without any metaphysical guide that would prohibit setting of the (not a) just price. It was my aim in writing Poker Tales to rehabilitate aesthetic culture on the American model, which (like my point in graduate school) is built on no solid foundation whatsoever but only on the basis of someone’s being at the forefront of something so obvious while being at the same time so brand new that no one has ever seen it before.

On the Cutting Edge

In that respect, Steve Jobs is on the cutting edge of societal evolution. He has stepped outside the box and sees a world that other people can only follow once he has seen the way forward. In that respect, he is the upper 1% of the 1%. He’s a leader who was able to adapt because he dropped out of school and went his own way. On his death, he has been hailed as a hero, the latest (and everyone hopes not the last) innovator in a world of followers. This is the basis of his belief that collective behavior is not responsible for new ideas; it is only a brilliant mind that can see farther than others can: “People don’t know what they want until you show it to them” he once said.

Occupy Wall Street

At the moment that Jobs died, we had reached reached a pivotal moment in American history. As wealth has grown, the difference between the wealthy and the poor have grown. This has given us Barack Obama, who wants to redistribute wealth on more equitable lines. I am all for this, as huge relative differences in wealth lead to different interests in each party and a lack of social cohesion around common goals (this is why I voted for him). But Obama has attempted to redress the problem by using the academic viewpoint of Saul Alinsky, a man who is for the “real” people as opposed to the abstractions of big corporations. This continues the historical and so academically respectable position of excluding big business from the more noble goals of fighting for the little people. So deeply ingrained is this way of thinking that all of my friends on Facebook with few exceptions are clamoring to support Occupy Wall Street this week.

That’s fine, but it is in their surety that the past will dictate the future that I find troubling. Three of my friends have ignored my warnings about their misunderstandings of the business mind that they wish to exclude from the conversation on account of their being greedy SOBs who are not thinking about the collective good. Rather than take heed to my warnings, they stop communicating with me (I am sure they are thinking that there’s something wrong with me and are too embarrassed on account of my having evil (not just different) views on the subject; but that is perhaps my own paranoia talking, and I can’t really know this). Although they won’t say it to me personally on account of their having grown up in a gentler age, I am convinced that each of them is thinking “he’s one of them,” the “other,” whom the Occupy Wall Street folks continue to (very selectively) target. This indicates to me that their targets are more political than philosophical, but when I attempt to engage them on their to my mind errant philosophy, they either shut down, or they confuse their public professions of loyalty as being no more than private expressions of their own preferences and ask me to shut my pie hole, because they was just expressing their thoughts. This makes me the bad guy who is stepping on the untrammeled right of free speech; it is only when I stop objecting to their misconstrual of the philosophy that underlies their protests that free speech can again take center stage. Objections themselves have become reasons to support what “us” have always supported and to label as “them” what “them” object to, securing the “us”‘s position from ever being subject to a philosophical challenge. “Us” knows what “us” knows, and we like it that way.

As I say, I don’t have a problem with anyone’s public expressions of their view, but I do have a problem if you express your views but do not allow others to disagree or question you on your views. This was what happened to me in graduate school; and while I could have maintained my position as an outsider on the inside, I thought it would have been more work than it was worth to me personally. I, like the Old-Timer in my Poker Tales, went away and did my own thing without regards to the consequences to the collective needs of a society that had made it perfectly clear that my services (being so definitively “other” in the world of ‘us-or-them’) were unwelcome. I, like Steve Jobs, dropped out of college once more and went to work in the private sector, where I had no other obligation than to meet the needs of my customers through my superior knowledge of obscure things.

Steve Jobs as Master in the World of Niche Marketing

My desire to pursue my own goals at the expense of the collective goals is parallel with Steve Jobs’ individual goal that made him a leader among economic producers in this economy. Jobs has been the most successful exploiter of niche markets in which the consumer stands still, while the producers have got to be nimble marketers in order to meet the consumer’s changing needs. I trace the development of a divide between producers and consumers in my essay on Wal-Mart economy in my Writing for People Who Hate Writing, where I point out to the young consumer who wants a job in the productive society that writing is important in the world of production, but that it also requires a very different skill set than is required of you as a consumer of products marketed to you.

And to be clear I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with Steve Jobs. But there is something wrong with Steve Jobs as a producer of metaphysical value. Metaphysics has been the principal on which we have hung our collective notion of art and aesthetic value. We see people all the time posting their thoughts on poetry and art, and in almost every instance people are trying to peer through and beyond reason to a whole and complete thoughts on which they can hang their whole and complete person. At the same time, people tend to find flaws in their whole and complete personae. In this, I thought, was the lesson I’ve learned from Derrida and his followers. There is no center at the center of ourselves. We will always be looking to maintain our sense of ourselves, while knowing that if we ever stop and find the center, that we’ve made some sort of mistake. This is the point I made a long time ago talking about Nina Hagen.

It is in the middle space, between extremes, that I find the approximation to the “truth.” Such is the nature of “truth” that it must be passed through imaginative re-creation in our minds before we can get to the truth. And the universal nature of imaginative interference means that we can never (never, never, never, never, never, never, never) get back to the ontology of truth. No one, not Joni Mitchell or Rush Limbaugh, has found it as it in in its ontological perfection. It is, in my opinion, the weakness of both sides that they think they have come to the end of the road of “truth.” This is a too-easy solution in which “us” are in possession of “truth” and it is only “them” that stands in the way of forming a more perfect society. This seems to me to be the product of a specialist society in which no one knows the truth but in which at the same time everyone thinks that someone else knows the truth.

Limbaugh’s hero, William Buckley once wrote “Someone somewhere remarked that Erasmus was probably the last man on earth about whom it could more or less safely be generalized that he knew everything there was to know.” He then goes on to qualify his remark: “By ‘everything’ was meant everything in the Western canon.” This leaves out all the “other” cultures that didn’t participate in Western culture. And it was in precisely those “other” cultures that Steve Jobs placed his emphasis. But he, too, thought that there was an “end” to human problems when he contracted cancer. Like Steve McQueen before him, he chose to undergo more experimental treatments that were aligned with his own mind’s orientation to the world than more traditional Western treatments. Jobs apparently believed his doctor when he told him that “he was either going to be one of the first ‘to outrun a cancer like this’ or be among the last ‘to die from it.’” He, like Limbaugh’s hero, was an idealist who thought that it was possible ever to have known everything. Buckley had displaces “all-knowing” into the past. Jobs, being a business person, placed it into the immediate future, perhaps just out of reach but still graspable.

The reality of both positions is far grimmer. Sometimes perfectly good people (like me) are fine, and then they fall over, having had a stroke at 7:00AM, right in the middle of a semester in which I was doing what I thought was good work of teaching people an introductory class in writing at a local community college, rather than a class at an Ivy League school on the works of allegory in the Middle Ages and Renaissance (my academic specialty). Such things are random, and would be completely unnecessary in a rational world. But the world is not rational. How we deal with that fact tells us a lot about ourselves and our culture. In America, we tend to displace the faults of the world onto “other’s” in order to maintain our sense of ourselves as whole and complete persons. It is for this reason that Steve Jobs, despite all his brilliance, could not surrender his body to be opened up by others, and so (perhaps) died sooner than he would have had he followed a more scientific route to health.

Some folks surrender themselves to God, who is thought to be all-powerful. Others scapegoat “others,” rich people, or poor people, or blacks, or whites, or people who believe in ‘liberal’ or ‘conservative’ causes. But nobody, apparently, has decided that there always will be room for improvement in our relation to an evanescent “truth” that flits away each time you attempt to grasp it. My “middle way” is my attempt to keep open the avenues of truth in a universe where everybody has their version of the “truth,” and that having their own private verion of “the truth” is good enough for them. But such a system rapidly becomes one of autonomous and private monads who do not grasp themselves but only others as in any way limited. When I or anyone else attempts to challenge their most intimate and personal ideas, they can do no more than object to my bad faith.

I don’t resent Steve Jobs’ vision of the universe; his is one of many. But he made his money appealing to consumers who took him at his word and believed that they can have things delivered to them without having to look at the universe themselves for new ways to make money on their own. This consumer orientation is responsible for the utterly irresponsible demands of those members of Occuy Wall Street who are demanding a free college education that will continue the academic policies that make it possible in the first place for students not to understand how the producer end of the supply and demand chain actually works differently from the consumer end. Such a position will inevitably lead to a decline in productive workers (as it already has in the Jobs generation, as model producers are being freshly minted in China and the other BRIC countries but not in America itself) in favor of consumers who take no care for the very different skill sets required to make them into productive workers.

Like my experience in academia, I conceive of the problem differently, and I get frustrated sometimes by my lifelong friends’ inability to see things as I do. I put them down to having been raised in a “culture” that Steve Jobs is largely responsible for. But as I have said before, “culture” is a choice as much as it is a metaphysical boundary of experience. And I, like Steve Jobs, have no obligation to participate in it but to transform it from a different (not necessarily a better) position. But, unlike Steve Jobs, I recognize that there can be enormous consequences to taking personal choice too far. At some point, our rhetoric runs up against reality, and when that happens, something’s got to give. In every case in recorded history, unknowable reality trumps the knowledge of the wisest among us, no matter how shallow or deep the knowledge that each of us carries around with us on a daily basis.

That makes it doubly or trebly or infinitely more important that we don’t lose ourselves in our own conceptions of how we want the world to be and try to transform it in our own image, but instead concentrate on how the world is and then react after the fact. This is the lesson that education should teach us. It is at that point, when we get so full of ourselves, that we should remember our forefather, Socrates, who said that his wisdom consisted of his knowing nothing. Sadly, however, the lesson of Socrates has been attacked by Nietzsche, who hated Socrates for his position that he knew nothing; and by his modern predecessor, Rousseau, who thought, like the Occupy Wall Streeters still think, that is only the consequence of mankind’s having fallen out of alignment with our original natures, which were once at one with nature’s equitable distribution of resources.

Such a position only makes sense if it is true. And the “truth” is not for Occupy Wall Street crowds to know without a conversation with those who think differently (as I do) than they do. As I note in my Writing for People Who Hate Writing, conversations take place in the “middle space” between two people who have firm opinions on how the world works. When they disagree, each should go back to their corner and rethink their position in relation to the different position that the other has taken. After considering one’s position, one should go back to the “middle space” and try to make their case again, taking in all the points that their opponents have made that seem good to them and dismissing with carefully wrought arguments those that do not measure up.

This is precisely what is not happening in American “culture” today. Both sides come to the table with their positions set in stone and expect the “other” position to budge. When they do not, each side is assured that their position is more secure, while the position of the “other” is not just different but “evil.” Holding such atomic (monadic) positions, moreover, requires no education. Instead, it is the sort of “instant intellectualism” that is available to everybody of all classes (as Descartes says, everyone knows that there is nothing wrong with their own thought).

In my universe, nature is not equal in the first place. It seeks to eliminate the strong and eliminate the weak, as Darwin (who Limbaugh dismisses as one of the two worst thinkers in history) was the first to discern, and which Pareto first noted as a systematic feature of the natural universe. If I am right about Pareto’s having a better vision of the universe than Rousseau, then people like Obama and his college-educated followers in Occupy Wall Street are wrong to attempt to build a human society along the lines of nature in the first place.

Conservatives abandoned education after they couldn’t get heard in the 1990s during the PC decade. Steve Jobs, too, abandoned education after he found that it was too constraining. The reaction I would have expected to this was for academics to rethink their positions in terms of their shrinking manifest. I stuck it out, because I have always believed that the better-educated mind was the superior mind but with the reservation that no one knows what the future holds.

I managed to make it through graduate school to the end, but only by ignoring people who demanded my submission to their political construction of the universe but who were not really interested in much more than my submission to their power. Having passed through an environment that others find so toxic relatively unscathed, I have not lost my enthusiasm for education. But I think that my experience has changed my opinion of the world. I do not believe that politics is important at all. I do believe that philosophy is more important than ever. And I believe that both of these positions have no place in the world of American culture as it is currently configured.

I hope to change that through my art. But, then, as I have often asked on these pages: Who am I to be saying any of this when so many famous people in the past and the present have achieved fame saying different things, while I rest content in my suburban home, poor and far away from New York, Washington, and LA, where the real work of building “culture” takes place?

Everyone (including me) believed this when I was in graduate school, but it put a premium on aligning oneself with Derrida’s skepticism. Those who believed in skepticism were in the know (and what a contradiction is implied in that formulation!) and could be allowed into the academic inner circle. All my professors attempted to do with me the entire time I was in graduate school was to lecture me on my own misbehavior based on my own misconfiguration of the problem. In their minds, Derrida had solved a problem that had bedeviled a lot of the best literary critics of the previous generation. And who was I, after all, to question them or Derrida? When I continued to ask thorny question (like how it was possible to know anything in a universe in which all our knowledge of anything can be deconstructed), I was shunned as an unbeliever (another problem in a skeptical universe; who gets to call it art in a relative universe but those who are in positions of power already? I have discussed this here, if you’re interested). See 1:20 in the following video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CsGYh8AacgY

When I was in graduate school, I had no answers to my belief that something was wrong in the graduate school universe, and I wrote my dissertation more in the spirit of inquiry into method than actually answering the questions I was raising. It wasn’t until I got out of graduate school and started reading old books in my now abundant leisure time that I found what I had been looking for all along, and in the most unlikely place. Augustine, who I had been avoiding along with Plato on account of his reputation in D. W. Roberston, Jr.’s A Preface to Chaucer, had held the answer all along. I change it a bit in my work, though.

Both of my latest works are separate attempts to answer my graduate school critics by deconstructing deconstruction on the basis of my new found confidence in a world that persist in spite of academic doubts about its existence (I’m quoting myself here; weird). In my work of satire, I make the case that artists and literary critics, and not the usual scapegoat of the bourgeoisie, have placed their spears in the shifting ground of a deconstructable universe as though they had found solid ground. Within the world of fiction, I point to some of my favorite works of fiction that have led artists and critics to set up as arbiters of faith in a thoroughly deconstructable universe. Only artists and critics are exempt from deconstruction, and they get quite upset when someone tells them that they are not.

In my work, I point out as gently as I can (because I modeled my main character on myself) that his youthful dreams of transcendence are totally unrealistic. But he refuses to see the world more realistically, as my antagonist, who is also based on another aspect of myself, does. In the end, neither of those two me-based people have the answers to the question of transcendence.

Gentle Giant’s Mr. Class and Quality

As a result of my thoughts in recent weeks, the lyrics to this song, Gentle Giant‘s ‘Mr. Class and Quality,’ have been on my mind. In them, the writers give vent to their feelings about the limitations of the bourgeois “middleman” who travels within strictly restricted boundaries. Their feeling is that the “middle” is nothing more than a detour from the “end” of literary experience.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JvNzZ7RXQtM

Look around my rooms and see the prizes I have showing
Working hard to build my life and plan the way I’m going
House and car and pretty wife – they’ve all been won by knowing
All been won by knowing
All been won by knowing.

Paperwork, white collared shirts – where would we be without them
Man of class and quality – I never shout about them
Choose my friends for my own ends. You can’t succeed without them
Can’t succeed without them
Can’t succeed without them.

Middleman sees straight ahead and never crosses borders
Never understood the artist or the lazy workers
The world needs steady men like me to give and take the orders
Give and take the orders
Give and take the orders.

The bourgeois man has trophies of his accomplishment (“prizes I have showing”) as the result of his “hard work” and his “planning.” But, as everyone knows or should know, life throws us curves out of left field. It is in our reactions to unforeseen events that we should measure a man, and not on the basis of how much “paperwork” a man wearing “white-collared shirts” who “never crosses borders” has managed to fill out in his lifetime.

The moral of the song is that people who think they know based on giving and taking orders have not reached true knowledge, because the path that they have taken leads one down a path without looking for or thinking about other ways of looking at the world. The bourgeois way of “knowing” is contrasted with the more open knowing of people like “us,” who embrace the very pleasures of not knowing what is coming next. This, in the 1960s was equated with freedom. And if, like me, you were alive in the 1960s and were under 30 years of age, you could partake in the new world. And if you were over 30, you could partake if you gave up your attachments to things like order and solid middle class values. But some people wouldn’t budge, and they became the enemies of right-minded thought.

My Name Is Nobody

That is essentially the plot of Sergio Leone’s My Name Is Nobody:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2RYq1PLdT0s

In that film, Leone pays a final tribute to his beloved Western genre, even as he kills it. My Name Is Nobody is the story of an aging gunfighter (played by Henry Fonda) who meets a young gunfighter (played by Terrence Hill). When he meets the young man, the old man takes it as a challenge. He is prepared to fight it out once more, but the under-30 Nobody (played, as I said, by Terrence Hill) has other plans for Henry. Rather than making him into a martyr, Nobody plans to make Henry into one of the greatest heroes ever by having him kill more men than have ever been killed in a single gunfight before: the 150 members of The Wild Bunch (the title of another Western by Sam Peckinpah; Leone loved Peckinpah; see this clip for Terrence Hill’s homage to him in the film). He succeeds, and this move takes Henry Fonda out of his ordinary life day to say life as a gunfighter who is constantly meeting up with people who want to kill him and transports him to the realm of heroes. Only then can he live out the rest of his life in peace and quiet.

In my opinion, Leone thought he was transporting his linear heroes of his youth into a more timeless universe of art. When I was a young man (in the 60s and 70s), I, too, want to live in that timeless universe of poetry, much as Yeats transported himself from the daily back-and-forth of existence to an existence in which he could be at one with himself as a golden bird singing songs to drowsy Emperor (see my post on Creed’s Higher), but as I’ve gotten older, I’ve seen that such a world can only exist in fiction.

If I wanted to recreate it in fact, I would have to pretend that I, like Yeats, wasn’t seeing what I was seeing. This is my opinion of many of the most strident people in academia. It’s not that they don’t mean well (they do), but they do not acknowledge any change of state in their reconfiguring their universe from one based in reality to one based in an unrealizable fiction.

My Post-Academic Life

It was not apparent just how big a break this involved with the premises I had been working with for my whole life until I was out of graduate school school. Then I took some time to read 100 books on all aspects of business, reasoning that I knew nothing about how business works. I was stunned when I realized that the premises on which I had been working within academia were not the premises that obtained outside of academia. I was shocked, but I was also curious. Realizing that I hadn’t been all that happy in academia in the first place and realizing that there were few jobs available anyway, I decided to take my chances on becoming an entrepreneur, where the rewards were better and the pressure put on me to conform was significantly less.

I have never had a problem with my academic friends, who seem to me to have a far deeper and broader appreciation for life than someone like Rush Limbaugh, who has a more commonsense approach to money than those who believe that “others” pursue money for its own sake; but within academia, I was viewed only as the sort of person who must be lectured to. If I wouldn’t listen to reason, I would be (and should be) tossed aside for more reasonable men who had the sense to agree with what everyone was saying about artistic experience. When I got out of academia, I was subject to criticism by conservatives (and even my own dear lovely and far too liberal wife) as being too liberal on some topics. As I’ve said before, this has left me feeling as though I’m a man without a country. I wanted nothing more than to be left alone with my free thoughts, and I found that within and without academia, free thought comes with a steep price after all.

My Novels and Books

I’m willing to pay that price, because I know that it is the price of freedom, and America’s greatness in the world has been fixed to our ability (until the recent death of Steve Jobs) to come up with new ideas (telephones, automobiles, jazz, airplanes, transistors, rock and roll, computers, rocket ships, rap, etc. have all been American led inventions). In my work, I want to bring America back from the artistic abyssal world of Nobody to the world of time, in which Creed can return again and again (and even again, if necessary) from the static and so impossible world of Nobody’s unity to a world in which people have to live their lives one moment in time without convenient refuge in a world of fiction that can never be in fact.

I Come Through

It has taken me years to get to the point where I feel I have a new idea that everyone is unconsciencoiusly aware of of but no one has yet expressed. Because of this this, I expect to be misunderstood by anybody who reads this far (and let’s be serious, nobody will), but my world of temporary fiction also finds its ground in the 1960s, in which Paul McCartney and the Beatles could sing ridiculous fantasies about women who came in through the bathroom windows (not as people are supposed to through doors but who did not have enough sense to know that her version of reality is distorted by an also magical silver spoon (not gold, as it was in Yeats’ poem). This version is by Joe Cocker, because, let’s face it, that guy can sing:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MiXh2gnasw0

When the young woman comes in through the bathroom window, she wanders by her own lagoon (a Spenserian argument if there ever was one) but she, like Redcrosse, is a baby in her own mind, being young enough to still be sucking her thumb and so not old enough to have discarded the silver spoon that covers her ignorance of the way the world actually works. The way the world actually works is through time, as Sunday’s on the phone to Monday, and Tuesday’s on the phone to Wednesday, all the way back to Sunday, when the whole cycle starts all over again (it never gets back to me, as Joyce’s masterpiece Finnegans Wake didn’t either). This reminds my over-trained literary mind of the reference to the omphalos in James Joyce’s other masterpiece, Ulysses in which he imagines the impossible dream of being able to get back to Eden through his mother’s mother’s mother…until he gets back to the historical Eve from whom all women sprang.

It doesn’t work; and the reason is quite clear to anyone who has never read a book in their life. It doesn’t work because it is patently ridiculous to believe that unseen things do exist (like imaginary chains that link us back through our mother’s womb to Eve) while seen things (like the beach to which Stephen closes his eyes to in order to imagine such nonsense) do not. But because they have long histories in literary history, those who dedicate their lives to reading frequently think that they indicate a deeper purpose of meaning in the universe and not just nonsense. This is because James Joyce said so, and he was a genius, and geniuses wouldn’t say such things unless there was more than a kernel of truth in what he ways. This is also the reason that the worst offenders in this respect are not the ignorant with their abundant common sense, but airy academics, who believe that what they read in texts must somewhere exist in the real world and cannot be a complete fantasy. Charlie, in the fantasy above, was right when he complains that there is no such thing as a candy mountain. For not believing his senses, he is punished with the loss of a kidney.

I obviously disagree with my academic colleagues and friends, but then who am I do contradict so many great and powerful thinkers?

As You Like It was the subject of one of the most shameful episodes in my academic life. I had been studying for my oral exams for over a year, reading everything I could, including a whole extra series of Renaissance books. When the day of the exam came, my adviser asked me a question about the role of Adam in As You Like It. I had no memory of the play whatsoever. I fumbled through the question, but she and I and my other advisers knew that I had no idea what they were asking about.

That’s really too bad, because I had learned to love this play even before I came to write my autobiographical portrait of Shakespeare as a post-stroke exercise (that is also, for those interested, why I started writing this blog). I sent it to another of my professors, who sent it back with some comments on my accuracy. The book should be in press later this year.

Reading Ben Jonson in Jaques in As You Like It

My book starts off with the appearance of Shakespeare as he comes of stage, having just finished his only performance of himself on the stage, written in at Act 5, scene 1 (a scene that I cannot imagine wasn’t added in for a one-time performance like the Clove and Orange scenes in Jonson’s Every Man Out of His Humor).

In my book—and I suspect in real life, but we can’t really know what went on in real life—Jonson was a rising star who Shakespeare rescued from getting hanged, gave him a job, and who gave the groundbreaking play entitled Every Man in His Humor. That play started a fashion for classicism on the London stage. It was centered on life in the city. Shakespeare followed Jonson’s new city plays (in his Italian comedy Much Ado About Nothing and in his Julius Caesar), his division of plays into acts and scenes (before Jonson they were traditionally divided up into scenes) and his use of choruses in his Henry V. But (I suspect) he got tired of following Jonson and had decided to fight back.

He did so in a completely (and deliberately) unconventional play, which featured autobiographical features (like the Forest of Arden, named after a historical place named after the eponymous family into which Shakespeare had married), the removal from the city into the country (his Duke Senor asks ‘Are not these woods / More free from peril than the envious court?’), and women who become men and whose own brothers don’t recognize them. Shakespeare is highlighting his own desire for ‘fiction’ over straight ‘fact.’

As a result, he turned Jonson into Jaques, a man who is extremely well read, who is melancholy, and who has no business in the play except to comment on the action of others. I am not the first to have noticed that we can remove Jaques from the text entirely and it would not affect the story at all. He is simply there for the comic relief that he provides, just as the other great Shakespearean character, Malvolio, of Twelfth Night is there to be mocked as an overly-serious practitioner by a humorous clown.

A Representative Scene

In the following scene we can catch the meaning of the fools who inhabit Shakespeare’s sacred wood. In it, the courtier Touchstone has fallen in love with the simple country wench Audrey:

TOUCHSTONE. Come apace, good Audrey; I will fetch up your goats, Audrey. And how, Audrey, am I the man yet? Doth my simple feature content you?

AUDREY. Your features! Lord warrant us! What features?

TOUCHSTONE. I am here with thee and thy goats, as the most capricious poet, honest Ovid, was among the Goths.

This sets up a divide between ‘honest’ Golden Age poet Ovid and his subsequent reputation among the Goths. Jonson had been trying (and succeeding) on founding his poetic formula on his appeal to the Golden Age of Rome. But Augustus was so enraged with Ovid for his participation in the affair of his daughter Julia that he exiled him to Tomis on the Black Sea (See Tacitus’ Annales to read up on the reference to Julia; see Ovid’s Tristia for hints of his own commentary of his exile). Shakespeare appeals, as was his wont, to the later amplifications of Rome’s initial message to the later (and baser) Gothic race. This turns his unhappy life into a happy one whose works bring joy to the multitude. Jonson, like Augustus before him, is a curmudgeon; Shakespeare is a poet who brings life to Jonson’s dour vision of death, the end of life.

Jaques, who is spying on the couple, raises the question of the proper seat of knowledge in man:

JAQUES. [Aside] O knowledge ill-inhabited, worse than Jove in a thatch’d house!

This would seem to be a throwaway line, but on close inspection Shakespeare has a larger purpose in his comment on the thunderbolt flinging Jove inhabiting a ‘thatched house.’ This is the equivalent of the modern ‘people who live in glass houses’ metaphor. Ancient Roman knowledge doesn’t fit in thatched houses anymore than Jove should be granted entrance to a house if he’s going to be throwing lightning bolts around at random.

The start of Shakespeare’s metaphor comes from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, where during the only tale in the whole work that has a happy ending, Baucis and Philemon (Book 8), they are transformed from their normal lives to a position on high, from which they can see the rood their old house, covered in flood water except for its thatched roof.

This sets up a divide between the Gothic people who came much later and who appreciated what Augustus in his day could not: his frivolous works on love.

Shakespeare is not as hopeful about the wisdom of the Roman poet, who transforms Baucis and Philemon from their lives as individuals into eternal beings who live forever out of time, just like Creed or Yeats wishes to forgo time for a more perfect existence in a timeless Byzantine world.

I am not inclined to read Yeats’ poem as entirely successful, and neither, I think, (had he lived to read it) would Shakespeare. Shakespeare was not the sort of snob that Rod Sterling cast in the episode ‘The Bard‘ on The Twilight Zone who looks askance as Julius K. Moomer bungles his perfectly-written lines in order to please the public. He was much more open to money-making than the much more experimental Jonson was.

Modern readers who are not inclined to read Shakespeare, can look to Yeats’ ‘Leda and the Swan,’ where the rape of Leda gives rise to the genealogy of Helen, for whom ‘honest Troy’ fell under the sway of the lying Greeks. The heroic epic it engendered, and at cost of so many lives, may not have been worth the price that individual Leda had to pay as her helpless fingers cannot push away the entry of Zeus’ actual penis (here covered by metaphor, but we all know what is happening here) into her actual body.

Shakespeare is not willing to allow violent raping, thunderbolt-flinging Jove into his ‘thatch’d house.’ He puts these words into Jonson’s mouth (as I read Jaques as Shakespeare’s representation of Jonson in the play) because Jonson is the poet who, in 1599 or 1600, is turning the playhouse towards his vision of a classically-trained audience of a few people of a serene and scholarly bent who would prefer golden roofed houses of eternity to decaying houses in which lovers do not have to say ‘Good-by, my love’ forever, as they do in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Shakespeare—and I follow him here—vastly prefers the many groundlings who occupy and feed the public theaters (and who made Shakespeare rich in the process) with their hunger for action and adventure.

This can be seen if you agree with me that Shakespeare is not only talking about the general view of literature but also with very specific reference to the thatched roof of the then new Globe theater which would burn down 16 years later after a cannon went off during a performance of Shakespeare’s Henry VIII. Jonson’s form of poetry does not belong in Shakespeare’s theater. Don’t worry if you disagree with me here. I am old enough to know that not everybody will agree with me. That’s okay with me. I will be the first to tell you that you are not alone. And, after all, who am I? I ask only that you engage me rather than dismissing my reading because you have another opinion. That is the role of reason in public discourse.

Back to Shakespeare

In any case, Shakespeare continues his dialog:

TOUCHSTONE. When a man’s verses cannot be understood, nor a man’s good wit seconded with the forward child understanding, it strikes a man more dead than a great reckoning in a little room. Truly, I would the gods had made thee poetical.

Audrey doesn’t know the word poetical. She asks Touchstone to tell her whether it is a ‘true thing’ born of honesty. Of course not, he answers:

TOUCHSTONE. No, truly; for the truest poetry is the most feigning, and lovers are given to poetry; and what they swear in poetry may be said as lovers they do feign.

AUDREY. Do you wish, then, that the gods had made me poetical?

TOUCHSTONE. I do, truly, for thou swear’st to me thou art honest; now, if thou wert a poet, I might have some hope thou didst feign.

AUDREY. Would you not have me honest?

TOUCHSTONE. No, truly, unless thou wert hard-favour’d; for honesty coupled to beauty is to have honey a sauce to sugar.

He hopes to corrupt her honesty. He’s a bad man. Jaques pipes in with an aside: ‘A material fool!’ before the pair get arguing about her sluttishness (this exchange raised the biggest laugh of the night):

AUDREY. Well, I am not fair; and therefore I pray the gods make me honest.

TOUCHSTONE. Truly, and to cast away honesty upon a foul slut were to put good meat into an unclean dish.

AUDREY. I am not a slut, though I thank the gods I am foul.

TOUCHSTONE. Well, praised be the gods for thy foulness; sluttishness may come hereafter.

The dishonest Touchstone continues with his dishonest attempt to bed the innocent woman Audrey. He has invited a dubious preacher, Oliver Martext (another reference to specific events in the Shakespearean universe; these have to do with the Marprelate Controversy, which had been current during the time when Lodge had written his Rosilynd and who Will Kemp (one of the founders of the Chamberlain’s Men) would have been, according to the Arden edition of As You Like It, p. 44-5, a likely role for Kemp to play; man, that’s obscure stuff which you do not need to know to appreciate the play).

Jonson/Jaques steps in to the scene to make sure that the pair get married properly after Martext tells them that they need witnesses. He attempts to force them into a true church, so that they will be properly married. But, apparently Touchstone is okay with that, as if he mars the text he will be free to have sex with innocent Audrey before skipping out on her:

TOUCHSTONE. [Aside] I am not in the mind but I were better to be married of him than of another; for he is not like to marry me well; and not being well married, it will be a good excuse for me hereafter to leave my wife.

That doesn’t seem honorable at all.

I’ve said it before. I’m not a political person. I don’t have anything against those who are political. And I do not mean to diminish anyone else’s political positions. I would simply prefer not to talk about them and get about the work of raising my family and doing my work. Nor does that I mean that I don’t have political positions. My political positions are based on the idea of freedom. I want the government out of my life and out of my pockets. Live and let live is my motto, and as long as you don’t have your hands in my pocket, it doesn’t really matter what you believe, nor should it affect my relationship with you.

But in reality, it’s not so simple, or at least it hasn’t been for me. My experience in graduate school made it necessary to declare myself on a whole host of political issues. In my humble opinion this was the result of intellectuals working in the post-Marxist world of the 20th century.

Hegel, Husserl, and Marx

The dialectical universe posited by Hegel (of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis leading to the appearance of ‘Spirit’ in history) was appropriated and reversed by Marx, who thought that the appearance of economic factors were the drivers of history and that the (unselfish) mass proletariat were being appropriated by a few oligarchic (and selfish) capitalists. I have no problem with that theory as theory. People can (and do) believe all sorts of things.

People who cling to Hegel cling because he solves many of the previously unresolved problems of ‘truth’ in the history of philosophy. However, the belief in Hegel arises, not from the truth of the matter—how could anyone prove such things as are posited in the Phenomenology of Spirit?—but from the deep representation of the history of philosophy in his Phenomenology. The representation of ‘truth’ is posited by Hegel, but in fact that Hegel begins with a section on ‘Consciousness,’ and from this starting position works his way to a section of ‘Spirit.’ There is some imaginative work going on in his configuration of ‘the truth.’

Once we recognize the creep of imagination into Hegel’s ‘picture’ of ‘the truth,’ we have a problem sorting out truth from fiction in the Hegelian world. This was the work of Husserl in the 20th century, who asked about the boundaries of experience and found that by ‘bracketing’ off characteristics of objects outside the mind that there was little left of the individual mind which was a central and critical piece of the Cartesian puzzle.

Soon we had the whole Cartesian experience of a solid individual at the center of the universe who is connected to God (or a metaphysical substitute for God) falling apart in the works of Wittgenstein (in particular) and Derrida (more generally). It was in the sphere of public language that communication takes place, and not in the private language of the individual mind. This leads Roger Scruton to divide modern theories between first person accounts (Descartes) and third person accounts (Wittgenstein) of individual minds with no sure resolution to such problems.

Marx is a late attempt to reveal the causes of the world through the reversal of Hegel’s drive towards the appearance of ‘Spirit’ in the world. Marx was more interested in those things that the drive towards ‘Spirit’ were concealing from thinkers. History was being driven, not by the positive role of top-down ‘Spirit,’ but by the gradual forgetting of the true causes of history: bottom-up economic factors.

In terms of the tradition of philosophy’s quest to bring the ideal and the possible in line with the world of the actual, this theory has a lot going for it. Marx posits a history of philosophy based in Plato’s doctrine of memory. We as individuals have forgotten our ancient home, which is not in our individual selves (species) but in the generic (genera) sense of community.

Now, as it turned out, the Soviet Union had tried to implement this ‘perfect’ system and they found that, although it appeared to bring the ideal and the real together for the first time in history, it suffered setbacks. Eventually, the Soviet Union collapsed out of the weakness which was born of their inefficient use of resources in a competitive world of competition. China has learned many (though not all) of the lessons of the failed policies of the Soviet Union.

The lesson here is that a simple reversal of a bad theory does not a good theory make.

Academia’s Marxism

No one will admit it, but academics rely too much on Marx in their configuration of the economic world. I don’t want to argue with them, so I will simply tell you a story that happened to me when I was leaving the Champaign-Urbana campus for Dayton, OH. Another perfectly nice woman was facing the fact that, though she liked graduate school and was a great student, she was going to run out of time before she could finish her dissertation. She was discussing her plans with me. She said (without any sense of irony) that she was going to teach the world outside academia about economics. She thought that Americans in the business world were unsophisticated rubes who had no organization in their greedy pursuit of a dollar.

Her problem (in my opinion) was her hubris in thinking that a) America business didn’t know about business, management, finance, and economics and that b) she did. She is not alone in academia.

I would characterize her as a Marxist, but she would have argued with me had I said it to her face. There are all sorts of subtle grades available to them to avoid affixing the appellation of Marxism to their thought. But the fact remains that people within academia have a very narrow (yet unbelievably deep) sense of economic possibility that is ultimately derived from Marx’s reversal of Hegel’s too optimistic configuration of the universe into a neatly balanced set of opposites based in nature.

Herbert Marcuse

Herbert Marcuse wrote one of my favorite books in the academic tradition: One-Dimensional Man. In it, he posits most men as having a ‘one-dimensional’ approach to looking at the world. But, being a dialectician, he knew that there were two sides to any question. By concentrating on only the one-side, the ‘positive side,’ ‘one-dimensional man’ becomes an oppressor. It is the obligation all men to ‘fight the power’ of one-dimensional man by bringing—by revolution, if necessary—the repressed, oppressed, and suppressed wonders to light.

We can glimpse his plan by looking at his Table of Contents, which I reproduce in full:

PART I One-Dimensional Society
	1 The New Forms of Control
	2 The Closing of the Political Universe
	3 The Conquest of the Unhappy Consciousness: Repressive Desublimation
	4 The Closing of the Universe of Discourse
PART II One-Dimensional Thought
	5 Negative Thinking: the Defeated Logic of Protest
	6 From Negative to Positive Thinking:
		Technological Rationality and the Logic of Domination
	7 The Triumph of Positive Thinking: One-Dimensional Philosophy
PART III The Chance of the Alternatives
	8 The Historical Commitment of Philosophy
	9 The Catastrophe of Liberation
Conclusion

Analysis of Marcuse

Marcuse sets himself up, after Marx and Hegel, in an ‘either/or’ dialectical pattern. From this firmly held position, he utilizes a set of military metaphors: defeat, conquest, triumph. He then proceeds to sort people on the basis of the ‘you’re-either-with-us-or-against-us’ model.

He believes, moreover, that all this sorting is ‘natural,’ rather than ‘artificial.’ Artificiality, in fact, is something we should rid ourselves of. In the introduction to the book, Marcuse talks about this very fact.

Such abstraction which refuses to accept the given universe of facts as the final context of validation, such “transcending” analysis of the facts in the light of their arrested and denied possibilities, pertains to the very structure of social theory.

In other words, he is going to tell us ‘the truth’ using social theory rather than the ‘lies’ that the one-dimensional men tell themselves. He continues to ground his thought in history, rather than metaphysics:

It is opposed to all metaphysics by virtue of the rigorously historical character of the transcendence. The “possibilities” must be within the reach of the respective society; they must be definable goals of practice. (xli-xlii)

There are a lot of assumptions in these statement that I for one cannot accept. The first is Marcuse’s denial of his ‘transcendence’ as metaphysical, because of the ‘rigorously historical character of the transcendence.’ He is, in other words, trying to be ‘metaphysical’ through history rather than leaping off into another (non-existent) world of spirits, ghosts, and undines. That is fair. Another is that the possibilities of social theory ‘must be within the reach of the respective society.’ That is also fair, if true.

Unfortunately, neither assumption is necessarily true on its face. Just because he has denied metaphysics as ‘otherworldly’ doesn’t mean that he is searching for something other than transcendence. He has simply reconfigured ‘transcendence’ from the other world to this, and by this rhetorical maneuver he thinks to have solved the problem of metaphysics.

This has a long history in Western civilization, starting in particular with the Humanist movement, which substituted history for transcendent truths (see Lorenzo Valla for the most important proponent of this idea). This was followed up in the Enlightenment, where reason was all and we were to ecrasez the infame of religion in order to restore lost human perfection.

Marcuse’s system only makes sense if there is no break in the rational argument. But there is a break, and rather than acknowledge it, Marcuse allows a vague ‘unconsciousness’ to impinge on an otherwise perfect consciousness. What is in our unconscious mind? Who knows? It’s unconscious. But that doesn’t forbid thinkers (like Freud) from telling us what they think is going on in our unconscious minds. (It’s all about sex, you see. Oh wait. It wasn’t all about sex after all. It’s now all about chemical imbalance in the brain. What will those wacky psychologists think of next?)

The unconscious mind is one of those tools that have allowed Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment thinkers to posit solutions to ever-present problems of human life and to bleed off the waste product of their thought into the unreal world of the unconscious. By this move, Marcuse erases any uncertainty of outcomes. He knows. If you don’t agree, then there is some ‘unconscious’ tendency to ‘one-dimensionality’ buried in your unconscious mind (or is it your subconscious; silly me is always getting get those two mixed up). You must be sent for reeducation in order for you to see ‘both sides’ of every question. And your progress will be measured on your willingness to accept the claims of under-carriage of society and to reject the outward and appealing body of the societal automobile.

This is a classic reversal that has a long history in Western philosophy, one which is repeated in Marx’s reversal of Hegel. In rejecting the theory, you are rejecting the way of Socrates himself. And who you to reject the thought of a thinker like Socrates?

My Experience

There was no relief from these kinds of ‘with us or against us’ arguments when I was in graduate school. For this reason, I had a hard time fitting in. I take full responsibility for this.

What happened (in my opinion) was that I left school at 19, determined to find answers outside of school that I could not find within. During the course of my education, I worked through Joseph Campbell. This was the greatest experience of my life out of school. But I found him wanting in certain respects. I went back to school confident that someone knew the answers that had eluded me but seemed so apparent in figures like James Joyce, a man whose work appealed (and still appeals) to me as the intellectual to beat all intellectuals. I went back to school determined to resolve what I (foolishly) thought were easily resolvable questions.

While I was out of school, I had worked in a bank. This gave me a better sense of economics than those who had worked in academic environments their whole lives. Not that my sense of how the economy works was very good. My sense was merely better in a relative sense.

This business experience made me suspect in the eyes of my Marxist-trained colleagues. I thought if I just explained myself to them and just explained my reservations about their configuration of thought that we could have a public discussion and resolve these questions together.

This actually worked in my undergraduate program. But as soon as I got into graduate school, everything changed at once. On the first day of school, I became involved with one of my teachers because I spoke up and said I like to outline every paper in advance. She told me I was a Nazi, and for the rest of the semester—until I made it my new year’s resolution never to answer a question with anything more than a yes or no—I was singled out whenever anybody (students as well as teachers) needed to have someone take the Nazi position on teaching.

Unfortunately, I didn’t catch on at once. At first I thought that it was just a matter of having gone to a second-rate school. I hoped that the first-rate school that I got into for my PhD would prove me right. It turned out to be worse at UIUC than at the second-rate school.

My Unfortunate Position

This was only apparent to me who was on the outside looking in. I decided to major in Medieval Studies on account of my having taken a class with Caron Cioffi in The Sources of Chaucer. In that class we read Virgil, Ovid, Dante, and the Roman de la Rose in preparation for reading Chaucer’s Troilus. The comprehensiveness of that course of study appealed to me. I was fortunate to have met Sylvia Huot as an undergraduate student. She was the world’s expert on the Roman de la Rose, and she got me excited about that work in particular.

Medieval Studies at UIUC was extremely conservative on account of having to master many languages like Old French, Latin, and Old Norse. And I actually enjoyed the conservative nature of Medieval Studies as opposed to ‘looser’ subjects that didn’t have such emphasis on rigor.

But at the same time, I was a forward-thinking person who thought that there was something wrong with the standard picture of the Middle Ages as other (‘alterity’ is what we used to call it). This seemed to me to divide modern reactions from medieval reactions (‘specific difference’ (‘species’) in the language of logic that I was working in) without a base of similarity (‘genus’ in the language of Aristotle). Everything was difference. I found that position (ironically) to be the modern position. Moreover, after 4 years of learning the language of logic, I knew that Aristotle had a fuller description of logical processes than modern man did.

Moreover, I liked the medieval configuration better (still do). This was largely due to the fact that the standard rules of disengagement (of us from other) didn’t seem to apply to my cherished Roman de la Rose. I thought that it deconstructed the world of logic from the metaphysics that i was being told that ‘every medieval thinker must adhere to.’ It did, but not in the proscribed manner.

My thought on the matter was that the author of the Rose knew what he was talking about better than I did. This was not a controversial position. It only became so when it conflicted with the need to keep my modern vision separate from the medieval vision and to value the modern position as more enlightened than the medieval position.

My dilemma was that my adherence to standards of academic rigor made me a conservative in liberal circles (one of ‘them’), while my embrace of deconstruction made my work too liberal for comfort in conservative circles (one of ‘them’). I was a man without a country.

How Marx Took the Place of the Metaphysical Point of View

The modern concept of revolution pre-dated the work of Marx, going all the way back to Rousseau, Voltaire, and their collective call for the French Revolution. Eventually that failed, and people started clamoring for another revolution in 1848 even before Marx had written.

After that movement, too, petered out, tensions slowly within the revolutionary movement to get on with the work of recreating modern society once and for all. These included a young German named Marx who wrote The Communist Manifesto and a bunch of other stuff. Marx’s work fed into the incipient revolutionaries’ work of creating a ‘new’ and ‘modern’ form of government. He put a footing under the work of revolution by offering a more palatable target than Hegel’s vague ‘Spirit’ to aim for. He provided an immediate target of greedy bourgeoisie capitalist pigs who existed now, not in some future that no one could see yet.

With such tools as Marx provided, the real work of the revolution didn’t get underway until the anarchists of the 1890s and completed by the the Russian Revolution in 1917 (history, alas, moves slowly).

Once the revolution had started overseas everyone in America–at least those forward-looking intellectual types–wanted one of their own. But alas, when people overseas were reveling in their bloody revolutions, America remained silent and (for the most part) peaceful.

My Dilemma

My dilemma began in the 20s and the 30s, as well, and if I knew then what I know now…well let’s get into woulda, coulda, shoulda. By the 20s and 30s New Criticism had arrived. It was a system intended to seal off the literary text from cultural influences and focus on the individual mind as the source of all influences. In other words, it, too, was a ‘metaphysical’ system that looked for ‘transcendence’ within the ‘historical’ world and not form some spiritual world that no one had ever seen.

By 1960, New Criticism was coming under perssure by people like Derrida. From my point of view, Derrida was correct. The metaphysical point of view was untenable. In its place, Derrida erected a deconstruction to save metaphysics from the onslaught of science (which everyone knew was not the basis of art).

Before I had fully digested Derrida, I was momentarily captured by the conservatives, who complained about the useless criticism of deconstruction. I wanted to apply deconstruction to liberal culture, as liberals had applied it to conservative culture on the gander principle (‘what’s good for the goose’ etc.). Not surprisingly, I had no takers. This conservatism lasted only a couple years, since conservatives were great complainers but they had no answers that satisfied me.

The culture wars gave great sense of purpose to both sides of the dilemma, but answered no questions. This was my dilemma. I knew something was wrong on both sides, but I had no answers (yet).

I followed the course I always followed and went on to forge my new vision away from the political obsessions of my academic colleagues. This mystified many of them.

What I Did to Combat PC

I basically ignored the cultural issues that obsessed my academic colleagues. I got drunk with a friend when I was called to a mandatory meeting on how the academy was being accused of being politically correct (pc). They were, but they had decided to have a meeting to sort out why it was not only okay but correct to enforce their beliefs on students. I thought it was funny to be in a room of students and teachers who knew that their premise was okay but who were having a hard time coming up with reasons why. This seemed to me to be mixing up cause and effect, but I kept my resolution not to speak and I got a bunch of stories for my blog (all of which I will tell you if you stick around long enough).

My point was that politics isn’t all that important in the real world. It is one way by which we organize our social lives from a disorganized mess into structure. This my academic colleagues had gotten. But they had missed the medieval reason for stepping back from science as an (or the) ultimate end of experience.

This, too, was something I learned from Aristotle, who opens his The Nicomachean Ethics by declaring politics as the ultimate end of the human quest for ends. I thought, based in my reading of Cochrane, that this was short-sighted.

This is the reason I broke with the conservatives fairly early on in the process of the PC Wars. I have always believed what Cochrane says about Roman conservatism in Christianity and Classical Culture when he’s talking about Livy’s account of the idealized past:

What [Livy’s assumptions about the past] involved is a claim that it is both desirable and possible to erect a future upon the basis of an idealized past. Such a claim is, however, utterly unrealistic. In the first place it ignores the truth that history does not repeat itself; that ever-changing situations constitute a perpetual challenge to the ingenuity and endurance of mankind. In the second, it presupposes that men are in fact at liberty to choose between perfectly arbitrary and abstract alternatives of ‘vice’ ‘andvirtue’; in other words, that there is nothing to prevent them, should they so desire, from living the life of their own grandfathers, the ‘valiant men of old’. But this presupposition is wholly fallacious; since it implies that human beings stand in no essential or intrinsic relationship to social reality which, in point of fact, they themselves actually constitute. These effects are not accidental. On the contrary, they are the direct and inevitable outcome of a logic which, by ignoring this relationship, grossly misconceived nature of the ‘law’ operator in human society. The logic in question is, of course, that of classical idealism. (91-92)

Critics like Allan Bloom have glossed over the break with classical reason that Cochrane sets forth so clearly. This is why, despite the barrage of charges that have been leveled against me over the years, that I claim not to be a conservative. It is why I question, both the idealism of the classical world and of the modern world. Both conservatives like Rush Limbaugh (who bases his foundation on the Founding Fathers) and liberals like Barack Obama (who bases his foundational principles on the 100-year old ideas of the Progressives). On the subject of history there is no essential difference between the two.

My Strategy

When I was in grad school I hid in plain sight. One day I was called into the office of the head of Rhetoric Studies at UIUC (the employer who arranged my employment for my full scholarship). He had gotten in trouble with the new conservative newspaper industry. When being interviewed he had defended a particularly liberal Marxist who wanted to tear down the ‘one-dimensional’ constructs in her students’ heads and replace them with fuller ‘two-dimensional’ constructs. When the idiot—he was a conservative engineer who didn’t purport to know anything about English; he had come into his meeting with the great professor with a sense that there was something wrong—wouldn’t acknowledge the professor’s standing as knowing more than he did, he kicked him out of his office with a move known in rhetoric as a ‘this interview is over.’ The student was offended and wrote a horribly scathing article calling for the professor’s job.

The article appeared on Thursday. On Friday I got a call to appear in Herr Director’s office. I had made a huge mistake when attempting to show my students the way they would be graded at the end of the semester. I gave them an ungraded assignment and I graded them as though it was the end of the semester. I realized that this was a mistake even before I got called into the office to meet Herr Director. But my students had complained to Herr Director, who knew that I was a conservative (I said I hiding; I didn’t say I was very good at it).

I was worried about losing my job and so my scholarship. (I’ve since been told that I was in no danger of losing either). So my strategy was to go in and admit everything, tell him I wouldn’t do it again (and I never would have, even if Herr Director had not demanded compliance; it was a stupid idea (not my first or last)). This nipped his diatribe in the bud. He went on with his lecture anyway to my chorus of ‘I’m sorrys’ and ‘It won’t happen agains.’ I capped the whole thing off with an offer to come in once a week and report on my progress. Well, Herr Director wasn’t concerned with monitoring my behavior. He merely wanted to make sure that I was in line. He let me go with a stern warning not to do it again.

How I Got Though Grad School in One Piece

The lesson I took from this encounter was surely not the lesson Herr Director meant to impart. I took it to mean that if I just hid away that I could operate in plain sight and do whatever I wanted to. Politics, I learned from this encounter, was only useful in an environment in which people are willing to translate their power into action. In drawing back from debate—both with me and the engineering student-turned-citizaen-journalist—to his certain position, Herr Director was withdrawing back into a metaphysical ‘transcendent’ position in much the same way that Marcuse denies the otherworldly nature of thought but not his search for transcendent solutions.

My solution was different. I would forgo transcendental solutions for more scientific (albeit more limited) solutions. Culture had replaced the individual as the center point for metaphysics sometime after I was born. But my position as a perpetual outsider forced me to recognize that culture was not metaphysical anymore than the individual was a perfect vehicle for metaphysical thought.

Culture turned out to be something I didn’t have to participate in to have better ideas about things that people who were better educated than me (Who am I, after all?) had. In fact, during my horrible experience in graduate school, I learned a ton of stuff, and because it was relatively easy to hide in plain sight, I have often said the rewards are greater that the disincentives and that I would do it again.

But I have a strong constitution, and my way is not for the weak of heart.

So I should perhaps write about Joyce’s works, explaining them to you and telling you where I find those rare moments of weakness that I hope to exploit. But as I said the other day, that sounds like being in grad school again, that’s not fun for me. This is my blog, and blogging should be fun. So instead, I’m going to work with works that surround Joyce’s work.

This week’s book is an extremely short one by Roland Firbank entitled Valmouth. It was published in 1918, three years before Joyce’s Ulysses.

The Plot

The plot of the novel is simple. As usual, Wikipedia does a fine job with matters of plot, so I will let them take it from here:

Valmouth  (1918) is based on the activities of various people in a health resort on the West Coast of England; most of the inhabitants are centenarians, and some are older (“the last time I went to the play…was with Charles the Second and Louise de Querouaille, to see Betterton play Shylock.”) The plot, such as it is, is concerned with the attempts of two elderly ladies, Mrs Hurstpierpoint and Mrs Thoroughfare, to marry off the heir to Hare-Hatch House, Captain Dick Thoroughfare. Captain Thoroughfare, who is engaged to a black woman, Niri-Esther, is loved frantically by Thetis Tooke, a farmer’s daughter, but prefers his ‘chum’, Jack Whorwood, to both of them. Meanwhile Mrs Yajnavalkya, a black masseuse, manages an alliance between the centenarian Lady Parvula de Panzoust and David Tooke, Thetis’s brother.

That’s fairly simple, and you can read the book, which is only 85 pages long, in an afternoon.

Academic Reviews of Valmouth

Steven Moore has collected and annotated a series of reviews of Firbank’s work in his Ronald Firbank: an annotated bibliography of secondary materials, 1905-1995. The reviews are not always kind. Here, for instance, is a review by Anthony Powell from the August 15, 1959 issue of Punch:

A brief overview of RF’s career—Powell mentions the part he played in the 1929 Rainbow Edition—and a measured appreciation of the novels: “The fact is there is nothing else quite like them. Deriving from the ‘nineties, and stamped heavily with their own period, the ‘twenties, they are little more than bursts of description and dialogue linked together. There is no shape, no story and only a vague suggestion of character. There are sudden crepitations of nervous wit, double entendre*—sometimes extremely funny, sometimes less funny—fantastic ideas, and incredible situations. For the professional writer there are also all kinds of ingenious innovations in the manner of expressing how people look and talk; for the literary idler, the books can be opened at any page and closed again as soon as they have given sufficient entertainment. They make no demands whatever.” Powell goes on to declare Valmouth “one of the best” and notes that “almost every satirical writer of to-day shows signs of Firbank influence, though perhaps not always necessarily acquired direct from Firbank himself. “While Firbank didn’t set out “to convey ‘realism,’ he achieved ‘realism’ at another level.’”

This is interesting to me, because I like literary works that break with nature rather than collect the facts of human nature under the auspices of nature. For this reviewer, the lack of shape and story gives way to ‘bursts of description and dialogue linked together.’ But the critic Anthony has only the model of realism to carry him forward. And since the novel is so lacking in realism, he decides that Firbank has achieves ‘realism at another (‘higher’) level.’

This is apparent in reading the interrupted dialog in the first few pages. In fact, the very first piece of dialog in the novel is this:

“Some suppose…while others…; again, I’m told…And in any case, my dear.” The voice came droning in a monotonous, sing-song way.

‘Of whom are you so kindly speaking, Mrs. Thoroughfare?’ asks the priest who is traveling with them. He never gets an answer, because Mrs. Thoroughfare is a woman easily distracted and the novelist has no real interest in telling his story. The whole point of approaching the subject of conversation in this way is to diminish its content for the form, and the form, which holds everyday conversation up, is useless in terms of emphasizing meaning. It’s just a bunch of connecting tissues with all the meat sucked out of an otherwise good filet mignon.

This strategy is not deployed, in my opinion, to achieve a ‘higher’ realism at all. It is a strategy employed like the strategy that governed the last (and least commented on in the modern ‘realist’ world) period of William Shakespeare. This morning I’ve been reading the Arden edition of Cymbeline, and the editor was talking about the shifting quality of Shakespeare’s verse in the later romances. When he was young, he wrote little poetry, but then he discovered Marlowe, and he began to write poems which rivaled and then surpassed the art of the master. In Cymbeline, we see him shifting strategies again, as he has given up writing tragedy, as he had previously given up writing histories and comedies, and has begun writing romance. Romance, Nosworthy (Cymbeline’s editor) tells us, requires a certain unreality of situation and character, which was radically distinct from the tragic vein, where concrete objects are given in concrete terms.

This, I think, is what is happening in Firbank’s Valmouth. He has set out to create, not another level of reality, but one of unreality by taking the everyday, ordinary world and discarding its contents for a fantastic world of forms of his own making.

Another Academic Review

Not all critics have been as kind to Mr. Firbank’s attempt at escaping this world into a world of his own making. In the February 1920 issue of the London Mercury, we read:

It is clear (to this reviewer) that his aim is to write nonsense rather than sense and perhaps to put forward under a film of absurdity a certain natural perversity which would not be welcomed if it were more lucidly expressed. He has a certain gift for inconsequence and highly etherealised frivolity; but this may be inextricably connected with his demerits, in which case it would be useless to ask him to change.

I myself don’t think that what Firbank was doing was nonsense. I think what he was doing was something more like what Shakespeare was doing at the end of his career: he’s searching in the stratosphere for things that are missing in his actual life, attempting to put the world back into balance.

Why Would Firbank Do Such a Thing, Joel?

That’s an excellent question, reader, and since you’ve asked, I will do my best to give you an answer. There are several reasons the Firbank would forgo tying down his thought to something ‘natural.’ The chief of these is that he was involved in a long tradition of aesthetics which forwent the concrete data of experience for the more abstract data of the ideal.

The aesthetic ideal has a complicated history, and I don’t have the time (or the inclination) to cover it all. I’ll start off relatively late with Goethe, who dismissed allegory, which was rational (‘Boo hiss!’), for a metaphysical view of the world known in his day and ours as symbol (‘Yay for symbol!’). Symbol was supposed to have found a cure for the rational nature of allegory, which could not reach up to and beyond the skies.

Symbol is a matter of perspective. Joseph Campbell has used symbol in describing his elevated perspective, “When you see the Earth from space, you don’t see any divisions of nation-states there. This may be the symbol of the new mythology to come; this is the country we will celebrate, and these are the people we are one with.”

Well those are nice thoughts, but as I suspected when I failed out of school and as I learned in graduate school, no one believes this anymore. There is a rupture épistémologique at the heart of this world—a break between the knowing mind and its object—and on that account my professors had lost faith in anything but their own minds as guides to experience. (For more on look here.) My litCrit professors started to speak in skeptical terms about the possibility of sure knowledge of the world outside ourselves.

Sodomy…

So no one believes it in our day, but in 1918, Ronald Firbank had good reason to believe that his method would secure him from the ‘natural’ reaction of society. For in 1918, sodomy was still a crime. Oscar Wilde had come to a bad end just a generation before after he got involved in a civil and then a criminal trial:

‘On 25 May 1895 Wilde and Alfred Taylor were convicted of gross indecency and sentenced to two years’ hard labour.’ (Wikipedia)

Firbank, too, was a gay man. In order to express himself on the issues that concerned him personally, he who used esoteric symbolism to covertly make points about sexuality that he could not make overtly. Therefore, Firbank is a good read for homosexuals who want to look for hidden meanings in works they read. And more power to them.

…and LitCrit

But I’m not all that interested in repressed sexuality as a theme. I’m interested in tracing the outline of aesthetic history through Firbank’s work. I think some of the decisions authors make are larger than individual authors, and I want to guide my readers through my thought process in forgoing ‘nature’ for ‘unnatural’ things.

Firbank was a late adherent of a movement that has come to be known as The Decadent Movement. This was part of the larger Symbolist movement, which was more generally still part of the Romantic (and post-Romantic) Aesthetic Movement, which gain their strength from being opposed to the use of (‘mere’) reason in aesthetic motions. [Sticklers who read the underlying articles will find that I’m generalizing too much here and the Symbolism would be loathe to have been confused with Decadence and vice versa; but I maintain my general impression of all being species under the genus of Romantic aesthetics ].

The Decadent Movement got its impulse from the novel Au rebours (which sadly I have read or I would have read that novel instead of Firbank’s less-famous-but-more-entertaining novel). The title may be translated into English as Against the Grain or Against Nature (That’s right: Against Nature; see, I do know what I’m talking about).

Au rebours, like Firbank’s novel, has little in the way of plot.

Though the book is widely believed to have no structure whatsoever, it does tell a relatively simple story. (Wikipedia)

In the field generated by generated by Romantic formulations on anti-rational art as the way to achieve ‘higher’ consciousness, the decadents had decided that absurdity was to be valued over the rationally-constructed universe. Decadent literature like Au rebours poses itself as an act of pure contrariness to nature. That caused some critics in the late 19^th century to embrace anarchism, while others (like Jean Moréas, the author of 1886’s Symbolist Manifesto) turned away from the anarchic trends of Romanticism to more stable beliefs:

he published Le Pèlerin passioné which rejected Northern European and Germanic influences, such as Romanticism (as well as some aspects of Symbolism), in favor of Roman and Ancient Greek influences. (Wikipedia)

My point is not to get into the abstract details of post-Romantic criticism but to pick apart pieces of Goethe’s epochal decision to forgo reason for a less secure way to reach the heights that criticism from its outset had set for itself. Moréas was one of a sea of people who were turning this way and that looking for ‘a stable ground’ in a sea of change.

Interrupting the Natural Flow

In Firbank’s world, poetry comes through interruption of the world, not through continuity with the natural (and by all accounts logical) world. This allows Firbank to grasp thoughts and feelings, attitudes and ideas, that mere reason cannot grasp on its own. And I certainly don’t have a problem with that (look at the non-ending ending of my Poker Tales for proof of that). But I do have a problem with the notion—shared by one and all in the world of Romantic and post-Romantic aesthetics—that by forgoing reason that we could have through art a foundational experience that reason alone stands in the way of.

My insight here is in line with the Postmodern reaction to the Moderns, who were constantly announcing that they were ‘almost finished’ with their completion of the critical process that had eluded critics since the beginning of criticism. Authors like Bloom, D’Sousa, and Horowitz have lamented the postmodern move away from stable texts to a sea of relativistically determined text which the LitCrit community has charge of.

Conservatives who hark back to a ‘golden age’ of literature are making the same mistake that the Moderns made. They have projected their hopes for literature onto a medium (literature) that is incapable of supporting the weight that they want to place on it.

In my view, such a state of affairs will never hold. Reason, as they knew in the Middle Ages, was not up to the task of ordering its own experience. (See Cochrane for the origin of my thought on this matter). Faith was deployed to sop up the overflowing juice of reason (my metaphor: life of the mind as a metaphysical French Dip sandwich). Reason led to things that contradicted faith, like Aristotle’s ‘eternity of the world.’ Medieval Christians believed that the world had a beginning and in a creator of that world. Reason, if pursued too far, would lead into error.

During the Enlightenment period, Christianity was thought to be a false belief given to sheep-men by powerful master-men. All the collective sheep had to do was to overthrow the few powerful master-men and put themselves in place of an aristocracy of the few a ‘communist’ democracy in which the power of all men to rule themselves would overcome the oligarchy of the few. In this environment, Christianity became the power of infamy (infame) which good men and true had to wipe out (ecrasez). Thus religion became the overflowing juice in the metaphysical sandwich, and if we could just ecrasez l’infame and get back to reason, all would be right with the world once more.

Firbank, Goethe, and Joyce

Goethe’s idea of symbol, which is now fading, was the product of the realization that reason could not in fact reach above the stars to heaven itself and so could not order all of human experience by itself. This, in my opinion, duplicated the work of Augustine, the greatest Western Father of the Church, who also recognized the limitations of reason. He simply posited another way to the heart of the matter. The emotional content of the human reaction (which Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, the founder of modern aesthetics, had found could not be fit into the new rational framework of Descartes) would lead men back where reason alone could not follow. Romantic and post-Romantic symbolism have all been tied to this anti-rational insight.

Firbank, working within that framework, had taken an imaginative approach to experience, rather than a strictly ‘rational’ approach to experience. So in a sense, maybe the London Mercury critic was right to believe that Firbank was subverting ‘normal’ reason to a new sort of reason that is not subject to the limits of normative reason. But I would argue (strongly, if necessary) that a reason that allows a ‘higher’ and ‘lower’ form of itself on account of its ‘lower’ form not being enough to contain that which it sets its eyes upon, may have a problem in and of itself. And perhaps the way out of this rational trap is not, as Goethe said, to turn towards ‘emotion’ for relief for reason’s inability to satisfy the needs of our metaphysical expectations, but to turn from metaphysics as the basis of aesthetics and turn toward a limited reason.

That is not how critics in 2010 deal with the problem of the inability of reason or emotion to foundational ground. Critics in 2010 have turned from aside from the positive aspects of scientific to political subversion. This leads them to believe that Firbank was engaging in a political subversion of conventional mores. Once again, I don’t have a problem with this approach, but it does not tell the whole story.

Working at the same time that Firbank was writing Valmouth, Joyce was writing Ulysses. In that book, Stephen confronts the limits of reason on Sandymount Strand (a beach). Unlike Goethe, he has access to the whole range of philosophical and mystical thought which ranges from Jakob Böhme to the work of Schopenhauer. Joyce attempts to put all that philosophy into a neat package that will explain all of experience once and for all, but he finds that there is an invisible world that he cannot reach through his senses. He closes his eyes and attempts to walk in darkness as he asks himself “Am I walking into eternity along Sandymount strand?”

The sad fact of the matter is that, no matter how much Stephen wants to believe that he is, he isn’t. And Joyce the author knows it. But Joyce the author has no answers to the problems that confront him on Sandymount Strand, and he continues in his wild imaginings long after he knows they aren’t true because there is a long long tradition behind these thoughts.

Firbank also ties his imaginings to a long-standing traditions, but they are not nearly so mainstream. Mrs. Hurstpierpoint adheres to a Catholic cult which practices flagellation (much like the albino in The Da Vinci Code). His ‘most marvelous creation,’ says the author of the introduction, is Mrs. Yazñavalkya, who author of our introduction refers to as a ‘bizarre concoction of all that is foreign and exotic, her nationality is never revealed.

She is referred to as an oriental, a negresss, a mulatress. Named after an Indian Hindu goddess, she invokes a variety of gods from assorted Eastern religions at suitable moments. Her English patois is a brilliant if inconsistent mixture, and her own native language is of Firbank’s invention, a contrivance he was to use again in later novels. Her very foreignness excludes her from the class system, and she tends to Granny Tooke of the dairy farm with as much devotion as to Lady Parvula. Her ministry has a strong element of eroticism about it, though she claims never to treat gentlemen, preferring to restrict the relief she gives to her own sex, always aiming ‘to end off with a charming sensation’, and even attempting to procure lovers for her patients where required.

Thus, Firbank’s indirection involves the political reader in a process of translation—of men for women; of a white upperclassman for everything that Mrs. Yazñavalkya is not). It would be impossible to draw a one-to-one correspondence between the two, just as it would be impossible to draw a correlation between the beliefs of Stephen and the vast traditions on which he relies. The ‘truth’ that Joyce thought he could have if he could just enough distance from the earth (think Joseph Campbell symbol stance at the end of the universe), the ‘truth’ that Shakespeare was looking for in his romances, is elusive, even after the work of so much genius.

The Not-Last Word

The Modern impulse was to search for reality in works of art. Critics like the London Mercury reviewer can see nothing but obscurity that would be better expressed in the open. The Punch reviewer is more forgiving, offering to see a ‘higher’ reality when reality itself is not forthcoming. The postmodern critic sees this as a strategy of subversion, and it may be. But I am struck by the fact that style, not substance, is key in Firbank’s work. Firbank, in my opinion, is more willing to let the correspondence between his work and reality go, allowing himself in the imaginings of his own mind without recourse to some elusive ‘truth.’ I, who have hidden so long in plain sight that I find it comfortable now, find Mr. Firbank’s indirections themselves delightful, and I think that should he ever express them more directly that his expression would in fact be far less than they are now.

The English language, which arose from humble Anglo-Saxon roots to become the lingua franca of 600 million people worldwide and the dominant lexicon of international discourse, is dead. It succumbed last month at the age of 1,617 after a long illness.

That IS shocking. Here I was thinking that English has rapidly overtaken the rest of the world as the lingua franca of international communication and of international commerce much as Latin was the lingua franca of the Middle Ages. I guess I learn new things everyday.

The story is filled with tidbits like this:

The Cook County (Ill.) Board, apparently fed up with what it perceived as negativity in the mainstream media, decided to produce its own magazine to ensure “regular positive press.”

But the initial run of 5,000 copies had to be tossed because the magazine had too many spelling and grammatical errors.

I live in Cook County, and if throwing away 5,000 magazines was our biggest problem and not, say, government corruption, high taxes, and one of the worst school systems in the country (Chicago’s), then I would be all for shoring up the English language. But since this problem ranks towards (or at) the bottom of my concern with Cook County, I’ll have to pass.

Such stories are amusing. Take this one on how a typo messed up a billboard dedicated to praising ‘pubic (not public) schools’ in South Bend, IN.

They’re also comparatively rare. Sure we see more of them nowadays, but we see a lot of things we didn’t used to see. That’s because there’s more media now than there used to be.

Newspapers to Blame

Mr. Weingarten blames newspapers of all things for the decline of English, as if newspapers don’t have enough problems what with their going out of business on account of new and more efficient models of information delivery.

Why pile on to a dying industry? Perhaps it’s because Mr. Weingarten is part of the dying industry and hopes to save it by putting more pressure on the industry he loves before he retires. It seems to me that this is like smothering grandma with a pillow and then pulling the pillow away and urging grandma to “Breathe, Grandma, breathe!” as she gasps for air. To each his own, I guess.

In one of his columns, entitled, ‘Gene Weingarten Column Mentions Lady Gaga‘ (I’ve corrected the errant capitalization of Washington Post’s title to accord with my Chicago Manual of Style), he writes:

Call me a grumpy old codger, but I liked the old way better. For one thing, I used to have at least a rudimentary idea of how a newspaper got produced: On deadline, drunks with cigars wrote stories that were edited by constipated but knowledgeable people, then printed on paper by enormous machines operated by people with stupid hats and dirty faces.

Everything is different today, and it’s much more confusing. For one thing, there are no real deadlines anymore, because stories are constantly being updated for the Web. All stories are due now, and most of the constipated people are gone, replaced by multiplatform idea triage specialists. In this hectic environment, mistakes are more likely to be made, meaning that a story might identify Uzbekistan as “a subspecies of goat.”

You’re a grumpy old codger, Mr. Weingarten. (That DOES feel better. Thanks!) But more than that, you’re going old, Mr. Weingarten, and like many old people, you are feeling the certainties which you once thought so solid and reliable slipping away. I’m only 48, but I’ve felt it too. In my opinion, the problem is not to be confronted by retrenching into your little, too-small world. The answer is to be found in opening yourself to new and yet-unexplored areas of experience.

A Perennial Topic of Conversation

This has been a topic of conversation…well, forever. That’s because the human mistake-making animal makes mistakes. No one in South Bend wanted to make a mistake that would embarrass the South Bend pubic schools. Yet, beneath it all I’m sure they’re better than, say, the Chicago Public Schools, which have not made such a mistake but are nevertheless worse off. It (and by ‘it’ I mean ‘##it’) just happens.

Typos attract attention, because, unlike normal language, they are so obviously wrong. When grammar mavens find people who do not know what they themselves do, they grow indignant. This is an inherent part competitive environments in which people are perpetually looking for some reason to lord things over others.

But, as I argue in Writing for People Who Hate Writing, no one really cares about your use of semicolons rather than commas if you have organized your topic in a way that is informative. On the other hand, no will care if you use semicolons exquisitely if your topic doesn’t speak to them (because they will have put your book, article, ad, or column down).

This enforces an obligation on a communicator to have a good message that will stand out in a crowd of good messages. But there’s more to it than that. It means that messages that accord with what’s already in our minds will click because they are already in our minds, while brand new messages will have a harder (though not an impossible) time finding purchase in the same mind.

Nevertheless, we all know (and by ‘we’ I mean ‘I’) that it’s more important to have our minds accord with the way things are, rather than the way things used to be, or the way we want them to be. In the economic world, those few people who find the future direction will be rewarded disproportionally for picking up on ideas that the rest of the world is too scared or ignorant to pick up on.

The same thing is true in the world of communication. And that means that we can expect to be read by a lot of people if we appeal to their sense that the good old simpler days are gone forever and that we, like they, long for them. But the best message is not that one but the one that forces engagement with some of the more unpleasant truths of life and resolves them in a new and as yet-unsuspected manner.

Though it may take longer to grow an audience, history will judge the forward-looking idea to be better than the backward-looking idea, though the backward-looking has many more readers at the time. Time does not standstill, though individual thinkers within time lose track of the fact.

My Plumber’s Model of English

Let me give you another example of what I mean. I use a plumber when my toilets get backed up. He has a lot of knowledge about plumbing and I have a lot of knowledge about grammar. If I were to apply my standard of grammatical knowledge to my plumber, then I would probably be able to get a plumber (even in Cook County we have plumbers who went to college). But the supply of plumbers would be extremely limited, as most plumbers (like Mr. Weingarten did apparently) have dropped out of college, if they ever went at all, and speak the horrifying language of ‘Dese and Dose.’

The diminished supply of plumbers comes from my demand that my plumber be able to recite his sentences in perfect English, an obligation which comes from my area of specialized expertise and not on my sense of his or her specialized knowledge of plumbing. If this form of narcissism is acceptable to Mr. Weingarten, that’s fine. It’s a free country. It’s not acceptable to me, because a brand new plumber may charge the same amount of money per hour as a 59 year old plumber but will (given similar tools and methods) take longer to figure my plumbing problem out than a plumber who has studied plumbing for the amount of time that Mr. Weingarten has studied his field.

On the other hand, a 59 year old plumber may be used to the old-fashioned ways of doing things and may resist the ‘new-fangled, time-saving ways of young whipper snappers’ in favor of old-fashioned, time-tested ways. Knowledge is not static, and when it comes to hiring plumbers time is money.

So our ability to estimate the costs of a plumber has nothing to do with age. It has to do with his or her knowledge of how best to attack a plumbing problem. That’s why we hire plumbers in the first place in a world of specialized knowledge. Hiring a plumber is costly, but it saves us having to figure out plumbing problems for ourselves.

Summary

My point is not that grammar is not important (it is). My point is that it’s not as important as Mr. Weingarten thinks. Organization matters far more than grammar, and forward-looking organization matters more than backward-looking organization.

What Mr. Weingarten has forgotten is the role that time plays in the universe. Times change. People have a hard time changing with the times. Despite his announcement that after 1,617 years of the English language prospering, Mr. Weingarten has decided that he is done with it (and at the height of its power at that). But I suspect, as you do, my readers, that it is Mr. Weingarten who has dropped out and that English will continue to change and (dare I say it?) prosper without him.

This paper had a lot to do with the development of my subsequent philosophical positions. As I said, it written in the fall of 1988 during my first semester of graduate school. I hadn’t even decided what I wanted to study yet. The most important thing for me was Bradstreet’s shift from ontology to epistemology in her allegory. This played an enormous role in my choice of dissertation topics after I had decided on medieval studies. Within medieval studies I basically decided to rewrite allegory from it classic ontological orientation–especially works like D. W. Robertson Jr,’s A Preface to Chaucer: Studies in Medieval Perspectives (I can’t believve this book is no longer in print; 20 years ago, it was the cat’s meow in medieval studies, and I actually had one of my fellow grad students ‘in my face’ when I ytold him that I thought the book had things wrong (Who am I? right?); how things change)–to an epistemological organized based in my study of Aristotle.

My thought was then to turn over the Platonic worldview based in metaphysics for a scientific worldview derived from Aristotle. It was a radical position at the time (in academia; no one cared on the ‘outside’). I have since abandoned this position as equally untenable. I have shifted my position to a free ground without a solid foundation in mind or in being. The mind grasps after the fact (a posteriori) for ‘the truth’ of things and always stops before getting to the final solution.

One final note: this paper is a reworking of a paper I have actually submitted for publication. I have gotten rid of most of footnotes in favor of hypertext citations. Although I give the reader hypertext references to all the poems that I could find on the Internet, I have left the page numbers to many of Bradstreet’s poems in place for the simple reason that hypertext versions change and with them their line numbers sometimes change. The reference for the cited work is as follows:

Bradstreet, Anne. The Works of Anne Bradstreet. Jeannine Hensley, ed. with a forward by Adrienne Rich. The John Harvard Library. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1981.

Copyright © 1986-2010.
—–

Anne Bradstreet was the first European poet to write on American soil. Being the first poet, her career has held a special place in the mind of American authors ever since. Being a woman, her poetic career has been of special interest to feminist writers, as well. But her early work is derivative of a handful of male European authors. The most important of these was the French metaphysical poet Guillaume de Salluste Du Bartas, whose Divine Weekes, though forgotten now, was the model for the greatest works of English poetry by Edmund Spenser and John Milton. In her early poetry, she often compares herself unfavorably to Du Bartas.

Early in the 20th century, to save her dignity, Samuel Eliot Morison divided Anne Bradstreet’s poetic career into two distinct parts. During the first part of her career, Bradstreet had been trying to imitate male European authors, and Morison notes her expression of frustration at her inability to imitate male authors (particularly Du Bartas) well. But in Morison’s mind, the early Bradstreet is a private poet working in a public mode. After the publication of her The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America in 1650, Morison assures us that she was “completely cured her of the Du Bartas disease, and of writing imitative poetry” (331). She achieves poetic independence from her imitation of Du Bartas only when she turns away from the public poetry of The Tenth Muse and concentrates on a more private, personal, domestically-oriented poetry. This second phase of her career culminates in the lyrical and meditative “Contemplations,” her most famous poem.

Two generations of scholars shared Morison’s disapproval of Bradstreet’s imitative period and accepted Morison’s judgment that by shifting away from Du Bartas Bradstreet had achieved personal and creative independence. It came as a shock, therefore, when, in 1970, Kenneth Requa showed that “Contemplations,” which had been seen as the crown jewel of Bradstreet’s intensely personal second-phase poetry, owed a profound and unmistakable debt to Du Bartas’ Divine Weekes. The revelation threatened not only to break the neat two-part division by which scholars had understood Bradstreet’s career, but might ironically seem to suggest that she had reverted to “the Du Bartas disease” in exactly that poem where critics were apt to celebrate her poetic autonomy.

Given the use of Du Bartas as a source in “Contemplations,” the poem is difficult to account for if we continue to accept Morison’s absolute division of Bradstreet’s career in two phases that are distinguished by Bradstreet’s achieving creative liberation by forsaking Du Bartas. Under that model, the return to Du Bartas appears to be a reversion to the sort of poetry she wrote when she so often declared her lack of creative self-confidence, though the poem appears to show Bradstreet at the height of her powers.

If we modify our understanding of the shape of Bradstreet’s intellectual career, however, it is possible to place “Contemplations” within the course of Bradstreet’s poetic career, despite its reliance on Du Bartas’ Divine Weekes, while still recognizing that it is the work of a mature poet who retains a masterful control of her pen. We may do this by recognizing that in “Contemplations,” Bradstreet quotes not only Du Bartas, but also key moments from her own poetry. The poem should be read as a self-conscious reflection and commentary on the shape of her own poetic career. Read as such, we see the poet as critics have not. Rather than a career divided into two parts, Bradstreet treats her poetic career as the resolution of the problem of how to write a philosophically acceptable poetry. During the course of her quest to find a way to write appropriate poetry, she emerges as a far stronger personality and thinker than she has appeared in the writing of many critics.

Du Bartas’ Perfect World

One of the chief reasons for dividing Bradstreet’s career into two parts is the fact that as soon as she stops imitating Du Bartas she stops making statements of her own poetic inadequacy. But it should be noted that these statements are not only the protestations of a young poet faced with the prospect of imitating a master. They also reflect the fact that from the very beginning of her career Bradstreet expresses a real difference of opinion about the possibility of writing “divine” poetry. To understand Bradstreet’s reservations about imitating Du Bartas’ poetry, it will be helpful to review the metaphysics that underlie it.

The first book of the Divine Weekes traces God’s creation of the material of the world. This creation is linguistic: when God utters the Word, an ambiguous “forme-less Forme” is engendered. We are told that “This was not then the World, ’twas but the matter” (I i 285). Mere linguistic creation is paradoxical and therefore insufficient. God’s linguistic creation receives univocal “meaning” when the sun is created. “No sooner said he, Be their [sic] Light, but lo/ The forme-less Lump to perfect Forme gan grow” (I i 521-22). The sun becomes a sort of demiurgic presence in the world, performing further creative work by imparting form to the formless mass.

The sun’s importance in this creation myth leads to what appears to be a form of solar worship, which pervades the Divine Weekes. Du Bartas writes:

As th’Iron toucht by th’Adamants effect
To the North Pole doth ever point direct:
So the Soule toucht once by the secret power
Of the true lively Faith, lookes every hower
To the bright Lampe which serves for Cynosure
To sail upon this sea obscure. (I vii 569-74)

As a result, the sun becomes Du Bartas’ muse. He announces that he will not be too bold in reaching for a high muse too close to God, nor one too low:

My heedful Muse, trayned in true Religion,
Devinely-humane keepes the middle Region:
Least, if she should too-high a pitch presume,
Heav’ns glowing flame should melt her waxen plume;
Or, if too-low (neare Earth or Sea) she flagge,
Laden with mists her moistened wings do lagge. (I i 135-40)

Du Bartas’ focus on the “Devinely-humane” solar muse reflects the structure of Du Bartas’ world and demonstrates the role of the poet in that world. The divine Word creates only a formless and equivocal world. The divine itself cannot be communicated, being shrouded in paradox. The world receives unequivocal form and meaning by the introduction of the light of the sun. Therefore, the poet does not reach so high as to attempt to explain the divine itself, for this lies beyond the power of language. Instead, Du Bartas will glorify God’s creation by glorifying the created world that is illuminated by the sun. As the sun gives form to Nature, he will give form to his creation, and Du Bartas presents himself as a demiurgic figure.

Bradstreet’s Pale Imitations

Bradstreet never follows Du Bartas in this view of the office of the poet. Bradstreet’s muse is not half-divine but all-too-human, and it does not soar as does Du Bartas’. Thus we may account for some of the ways she changes Du Bartas’ imagery as she uses it. She writes:

My dazled sight of late, review’d thy lines,
Where Art, and more then Art in Nature shines,
Reflection from their beaming altitude,
Did thaw my frozen hearts ingratitude;
Which Rayes, darting upon some richer ground,
Had caused flowers, and fruits, soone to abound (p. 153)

in Du Bartas we read:

Pardon me (Reader) if thy ravisht Eyes
Have seen To-Day too great varieties
Of Trees, of Flowers, of Fruits, of Hearbs, of Graines,
In these my Groves, Meads, Orchards, Gardens, Plaines…. (I iii 837-40)

We find that Bradstreet has conflated sources here. Du Bartas himself refers to created things as being in his own gardens and groves, indicating some confusion in the poem between the poetic creation and the natural world, a confusion that is exacerbated by the linguistic nature of God’s very creation. Moreover, in Du Bartas the words “So bright a sun dazzles my tender sight” (I i 115) refer to looking directly upon the divine sun, emblem-presence of God, not the mere works of another poet! We may observe that, though she quotes him directly, Bradstreet stands in different relation to the world of nature and the world of God. Bradstreet’s philosophy denies her the ability to read the book of Nature as he had, and it seems that she substitutes the book of Du Bartas in her own thought in the place of the Du Bartas’ Book of Nature.

Such a figure may be found in Du Bartas, who follows the allegorical convention of the world as a book where we read the lessons of God:

But, as young Trewants, toying in the Schooles,
In steed of Learning, learn to play the fooles:
We gaze but on the Babies and the Cover,
The gawdie Flowers, and Edges guilded over;
And never farther for our Lesson looke
Within the Volume of this various Booke…. (I i 177-82)

For Bradstreet, Du Bartas’ book becomes a substitute for immanent nature, “Where Art, and more than Art in nature shines.” As creator of that book, Du Bartas has taken on, in her eyes, the character of the sun, his own emblem of the demiurgic impulse.

Every one of Bradstreet’s declarations of poetic inadequacy in relation to Du Bartas in her pre-1650 work shares this refusal to acknowledge that she has the sort of contact with the divine that Du Bartas ascribes to himself. Du Bartas asks, in invoking the muse, “that soaring neere the skie,/ Among our Authors Egle-like I flie” (II ii 31-32). In her poem addressed to Thomas Dudley, she echoes these lines to directly contrast herself to Du Bartas, saying, “To climbe their Climes / I have no strength nor skill / To mount so high requires an Eagles quill” (p. 5).

She directly compares herself to Du Bartas in the Prologue to the Quaternions, saying “A Bartas can do what a Bartas will/ But simple I according to my skill.” In “In Honour of Du Bartas,” she ascribes divine powers to Du Bartas, denying them to herself, saying that she would be able to write better “Had I an Angel’s voice, or Bartas pen” (p. 154). When she says that the influence of Du Bartas’ muse does not reach her “senseless senses,” she is borrowing Du Bartas image of the reader who does not receive his divine message.

In each case, Bradstreet is consciously rewriting a passage from Du Bartas to reflect her difference with him on the metaphysical possibilities of her own poetry. In each case, she refuses to take on Du Bartas’ easy conversation with the divine and speaks of her own poetic gift as being the result merely of “skill.”

These imitations of Du Bartas reveals the great conflict of her early poetry. She clearly believes a poet should have contact with the divine, but she nevertheless continues to refuse to imitate Du Bartas in this. This is most likely not simply the result of her belief that she is a poetic novice who believes she will eventually feel the spark of divine poetic afflatus. Instead, she is more likely expressing the reservation of a New England Puritan, for whom too much familiarity with the divine denoted excessive pride. Instead, Bradstreet’s imitations of Du Bartas show that she eliminates the vatic content from her own poetry when she imitates him. The Calvinistic problem of an unknowable God becomes in Bradstreet’s early poetry the problem of a vatic poet who cannot be imitated. Thus she writes of Du Bartas’ work: “Thy sacred works are not for imitation, / But monuments for future admiration (p. 154).

The Consistency of Anne Bradstreet’s Poetic Career

Her difference with Du Bartas remains consistent throughout her poetic career and does not support the idea that her career should be divided up into two sections. From the very beginning, she attempts to forge her own poetry on terms that are acceptable to her. For instance, in contrast to Du Bartas’ poem, nothing is at stake in the “contest” (p. that rages between the elements in “The Four Elements,” whereas the specifically verbal “debate” of the “self-jarring masse” threatens to “discreate all” in Du Bartas (I ii 308). Du Bartas’ debate contains the resonant possibility of the collapse of the linguistically-based universe. Without God all would return to the chaos of the jumbled elements of the beginning.

Bradstreet reworks the debate and adds doubt to Du Bartas’ image, saying that “All looked like a Chaos or new birth” ([italics mine] p. 15) This is not the primordial chaos, it merely “seems” so to the senses. In contrast to Du Bartas’ elements, Bradstreet’s elements preexist the poem’s writing, as does the calm. Hers is not a creation myth. The conflict between the elements arises out of nothing more than the pride of the contestants and never threatens the creation. Even at this early date we can see the “originality” in her “imitation” of Du Bartas.

Another example of Bradstreet’s unique philosophy is that Air wins her contest (p. 18). For Du Bartas, of course, fire, “the World’s best Element” (I ii 966), wins the debate, as is fitting for the emblem of the divine in the world. He speaks of it as:

Fountaine of life, Smith, Founder, Purifier,
Cooke, Surgian, Soldier, Gunner, Alchimist,
The source of Motion, briefely, what not is’t? (I ii 968-970).

Bradstreet’s debt to this passage is manifest as she expands her own professional catalog in “The Four Elements.” Yet, she differs from Du Bartas, while still associating fire with creation. Fire asks:

Come first ye Artists, and declare your minde.
What toole was ever fram’d, but by my might? (p. 8).

Fire is associated with the arts, but this is not Du Bartas’ divine inspiration. Fire seem to be merely mechanical, performing a type of action that may be performed by “well skill’d Mechaniks” (p. 8). Again, her art is associated with “skill” and yields only tools, not transcendence. Fire asks:

And you Philosophers, if ere you made
A transmutation, it was through mine aide. (p. 9)

Here, fire is the element of worldly change in the dubious science of alchemy, a science which seeks to usurp the functions of God. The passage indicates some hesitation on her part to believe that such a transmutation ever occurred. Whereas Du Bartas’ fire is represented as a first cause, the “source of Motion,” Bradstreet has reduced fire to an efficient cause and adds doubt that such lowly arts ever yielded anything higher. While Du Bartas’ Fire achieves preeminence because it is the “best Element,” Bradstreet’s fire speaks first because it is the “most impatient Element” (p. 8).

We also read of the diminished capacity of fire as a divine vehicle in the following passage:

Of old, when Sacrifices were divine,
I of acceptance was the holy signe. (p. 10)

Of course, this is an age that is past: Anne Bradstreet lives in a postlapsarian world in which there are few miracles, and the same symbols that once emblematized divinity may no longer do so. In a world where God cannot be known and the divine does not indwell Anne Bradstreet retains Du Bartas’ interpretation of the meaning of fire, but transforms it. Fire is not central as it is in Du Bartas.

Bradstreet’s Use of Du Bartas in Her Later Career

Fire is recognized as the agent of God in the “Verses Upon the Burning of Our House,” where she writes, “That fearful sovnd of fire and fire,/ Let no man know is my desire” (p. 236). To desire fire is an error, for, unlike Du Bartas’ “best Element,” Bradstreet’s fire destroys worldly things rather than infusing them with God’s immanence; and the event inaugurates her turning away from the world. She writes,

Farewell my pelf, farewell my Store.
The world no longer let me Love
My hope, and Treasure lyes above. (p. 237)

Part of this “Store” of worldly things is her husband, who is described as “my Magazine of earthly store” in “To Her Husband, absent on Publick employment,” p. 181). Wishing to exalt him above all worldly things, Bradstreet employs the image of the sun.

I like the earth this season, mourn in black,
My sun is gone so far in’s Zodiak…. (p. 181)

In this image, Du Bartas’ sun has been lowered to the level of the worldly and no longer represents God but the highest achievement possible in this life: the object of love.

In abandoning the worldly, Bradstreet leaves the worldly sun behind. “The Flesh and the Spirit” explores the opposition of this world to the next. When the allegorical character Spirit transcends the worldly sphere, she leaves the sun behind. She says,

Mine Eye doth pierce the heavens, and see
What is Invisible to thee.
My garments are not silk nor gold,
Nor such like trash which Earth doth hold,
But Royal Robes I shall have on,
More glorious than the glistering Sun…. (p. 176-77)

Bradstreet paraphrases Revelation 21:31 to explain the exclusion of the sun from heaven.

Nor Sun nor Moon they have no need
For glory doth from God proceed:
No Candle there, nor yet Torch light
For there shall be some darksome night. (p. 177)

In the same poem, Flesh suggests that Spirit is a fool to look for things beyond the sensible world, for they only lead to empty worlds of thought and imagination and nothing higher.

Doth Contemplation feed thee so
Regardlessly to let earth goe?
Can Speculation satisfy
Notion without Reality?
Dost dream of things beyond the Moon
And dost thou hope to dwell there soon?
Hast treasures there laid up in store
That all in th’world thou count’st but poor?
Art fancy sick, or turn’d a Sot
To catch at shadows which are not? (p. 175)

But Spirit answers

My thoughts do yeild me more content
Then can thy hours in pleasure spent.
Nor are they shadows which I catch,
Nor fancies vain at which I snatch,
But reach at things that are so high,
Beyond thy dull Capacity…. (p. 176)

In these lines, Bradstreet redefines the earthly sphere as shadows and the heavenly sphere as the truer reality. In another of her religious poems, “Of the Vanity of All Worldly Creatures,” Bradstreet writes:

Where shall I climbe, sound, seek, search or find,
That summum Bonum which may stay my mind?
There is a path, no vultures eye hath seen….(p. 160)

The eagle, whose climb Bradstreet had said she could not follow, is now changed to the image of a vulture, a bird associated with death, who flies very high but sees only the physical world. She tells us that the truth is not to be found in the physical world, for “Its hid from eyes of men” (p. 160). In this, Bradstreet replaces the poetic sun at the center of his universe with “darksome night” at the center of her own.

Contemplations

In “The Flesh and the Spirit,” the faculty of “contemplation” is able to penetrate to this higher reality. The poem called “Contemplations” explores this process in greater detail. We might expect a poem which concerns itself with turning from the worldly to the spiritual to abandon Du Bartas, whose poem she once substituted for the natural world; but no later Bradstreet poem is so heavily indebted to Du Bartas. “Contemplations” is perhaps Bradstreet’s most important and difficult poem. Often seen as evidence that Bradstreet is a poet of experience, Du Bartas’ “traditional” material has sometimes been seen as a poetic weakness in an early Pre-Romantic poet of nature. The a priori assumption that traditional images are mere ciphers accounts for the failure of many critics to understand that “Contemplations” transforms the traditional material in the manner we have explored above.

We may see that Bradstreet never really abandoned the themes that concerned her in her early work. “Contemplations” marks a return to the use of the worldly poet whom she once so desired to imitate and learned at last to transcend. The return to worldly themes and images signals Bradstreet’s final reconciliation of the place of her own transient poetry in the transient world.

The Poem’s Opening

The poem opens with a meditation on a rapture into which she had once fallen. The fact that she is not presently captivated by such a reverie is often overlooked. The speeches were speeches made “Sometime now past” (p. 167), and they recall her past experiences as a poet. Nevertheless,
Du Bartas’ book and the world of Nature seem to be intermingled in the poem.

Looking upon the trees “gilded o’re” (p. 167) by the sun, in stanza 4 she recalls that she fell into a rapture and writes “The more I look’d, the more I grew amaz’d” (p. 168). If the trees are beautiful, she seems to argue, then the “glistering Sun” which gives them luster is even more worthy of her attention. Her vision is gradually climbing to higher and higher natural objects and finally settles on the sun.

We have already seen that she rejects the worship of the sun in “The Flesh and the Spirit,” where she referred to the “glistering sun” (p. 177), the very words which she echoes here. We recognize her explicit rejection of Du Bartas’ solar worship in this poem when she writes “No wonder, some made thee a Diety:/Had I not better known, (alas) the same had I” (p. 168). Du Bartas made the sun a poetic diety, and we have seen that Bradstreet resisted this temptation. Therefore, when in stanza 8 she remembers her attempts to glorify God through His creation, she recalls her failure. Her muse is “mazed” in Stanza 8: she is deceived. The diction once again recalls her wonder at Du Bartas’ work. In “In honour of Du Bartas” she had been “mazed” by his work (p. 152).

The sun is the power of this world and is cyclical, and she notes that the sun causes day and night and that it revives creatures from sleep. In noting that the sun revives the seasons from winter, she says that “Quaternal seasons [were] caused by thy might.” We should not ignore the reference to the title of her Quaternions, which were written when she understood poetry as a false solar worship. ‘Contemplations” has a number of echoes from her own poetry. These, combined with the references to the muse and her former attempts to write poetry, indicate that one subject of this poem is a consideration of her lifelong attempts to write poetry.

Distinctions in Bradstreet’s Work

Having heard the “merry grasshopper” and the “black clad Cricket” sing beautiful songs in Stanza 9, she contrasts her own poetic powers to the powers of the natural creatures to sing.

Shall Creatures abject, thus their voices raise?
And in their kind resound their makers praise:
Whilst I as mute, can warble forth no higher layes? (p. 169)

This is a deliberate and unmistakable borrowing from Du Bartas, who asks at the very beginning of his work:

O Father, graunt I sweetly warble forth
Unto our seed the Worlds renowned Birth (I i 7-8)

We may clearly see that she is distinguishing her own poetry from Du Bartas’ in this image, recalling the grasshopper, who is often associated with the foolishness of poetry. In the Phaedrus, Phaedrus asks Socrates “What motive has a man to live if not for the pleasure of discourse?” Socrates tells the story of the grasshoppers:

[They] are said to have been human beings in an age before the Muses. And when the Muses came and song appeared, they were ravished with delight; and singing always, never thought of eating and drinking, until at last they forgot and died. And now they live again in the grasshoppers…

Socrates then tells how the grasshoppers may perhaps give them some divine wisdom if they continue talking rather than remaining silent.

By collating a reference to Du Bartas with her citation of Plato’s Phaedrus, Bradstreet sets her own poetic powers in relation to the achievement of Du Bartas when she dissociates herself from the ability to sing like the grasshopper. Du Bartas’ grasshopper-like poetry is immanent, but also has the sense of being a worldly distraction from what is important. The Anacreontic grasshopper sings all summer, does not save for hard times, and dies. “Life is no longer than thy mirth,” translates Cowley. This sense will recur in Bradstreet’s use of the nightingale, who “neither toyles nor hoards up in thy barn” (Stanza 28). In this poem, Bradstreet extends her consideration past the span of this life to include eternity and limits the domain of poetry to this world. By the end of the poem, she will thus congratulate herself for having failed to write like Du Bartas.

Bradstreet now associates herself with Eve and her poetry with Cain. Cain, like the cricket, is “black clad.” He is referred to as “Cloath’d all in his black sinful Livery” in stanza 16 (p. 171). The section on Eden is often read as an Old Testament type with an antitype of modern mankind; but the strength of Anne Bradstreet’s work is in her personal poetry, and in this strong personal poem it does not seem unlikely that she would have a more personal antitype. The reference to Cain, too, may be seen as a reference to her own poetry. When the Granddame (Du Bartas’ word for Eve II ii 206 and elsewhere) holds Cain in her lap, we are reminded that in her poem on Du Bartas Bradstreet had written “My muse unto a Child, I fitly may compare” (p. 153). Bradstreet also refers to Melancholy as the “black swarthe childe” of Earth” (p. 30). Thus, by reading through her collation of analogies, we find that she is talking about her early poetry as the result the contemplation of the natural earth, not the spiritual, world. She emphasizes the error of this approach to poetry by associating her poetry with “black clad” Cain. More that than simple melancholy, she associates her poetry with the first post-lapsarian sin.

When Cain and Abel make their sacrifices in stanza 13, fire, symbol of the divine, does not descend from the skies to take up Cain’s offering, as the divine did not touch her early poetry. When we noted that in “Fire” Bradstreet doubts that fire ever descended from the skies, we accounted for the fact by suggesting that it was because she feels she lives in a post-lapsarian world. We should now note that the portrait of Eve, with whom Bradstreet associates herself, is drawn from her post-lapsarian experience, as well.

The Fall in Du Bartas and Bradstreet

It might be tempting to argue that Bradstreet is rejecting Du Bartas as an influence in “Contemplations,” using images from the Divine Weekes only to dismiss them as vain and foolish. Such a reading does not take into consideration the fact that she owes a debt to Du Bartas for the language with which she discusses the effects of the Fall. Such borrowing is possible, because Du Bartas’ poem restricts its philosophy of immanence to the period before the Fall. The Fall, the incident which begins the second week, takes God out of the creation, and Du Bartas’ muse fails. The book entitled “The Imposture,” in which the Fall occurs, begins by asking “Who shall direct my pen to paint the story/ Of wretched mans forbidden-bit-lost glory?” (II ii 15-16). The answer is forthcoming.

Ah, thou, my God, even thou (my soule refining
In holy faiths pure furnace, cleerly shining)
Shalt make my hap far to surmount my hope (II ii 25-27)

But the book following the Fall begins:

This’s not the World: O whither am I brought?
This Earth I tread, this hollow-hanging Vaulte,
Which daies reducing and renuing nightes.
Renews the grief of mine afflicted sprights;
This sea I saile, this troubled ayre I sip,
Are not The First-Weekes glorious workmanship:
This wretched Round is not the goodlie Globe
Th’Eternal trimmed in so various robe;
‘Tis but a dungeon and a dreadful Cave,
Of that first World the miserable grave. (II iii 1-10)

After the Fall, Du Bartas no longer invokes the inaccessible solar muse, and portrays the earth as robbed of its immanence. Thus he begins to lament the loss of Eden’s “heavenly bowers” (II i 233). Bradstreet echoes this passage in speaking of the fool who “takes this earth ev’n for heav’ns bower” (Stanza 32). She appears to be saying that her early poetry was a failed attempt to infuse the fallen world with pre-lapsarian immanence.

“Contemplations” is characterized by her return to Biblical themes. Therefore, in stanza 21 she sits down by the biblical river of life drawn from Revelation 22. The biblical passage reads:

Then he showed me the river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb through the middle of the city; also, on either side of the river [was] the tree of life …. There shall no more be anything accursed, but the throne of God and of the Lamb shall be in it…. And night shall be no more; they need no light of lamp or sun, for the Lord God will be their light, and they shall reign forever and ever. (Rev. 22:1-5)

We heard echoes of this passage earlier in “The Flesh and the Spirit,” when we saw that she used it to reject love of this world for love of the next by rejecting the worldly sun for God’s “darksome night.” Here, however, she sits beneath the temporal sun which that poem rejected. There appears to be a blending of the locale of the Phaedrus with this biblical image, allowing Bradstreet to work with images at once both worldly and spiritual.

Bradstreet’s Resolution of Her Poetic Career At the End of “Contemplations”

Although the presence of the sun here has led some scholars to see the end of the poem as an acceptance of an immanent God through His creation, her previous use of this biblical passage seems to preclude the validity of such a solar image as a symbol for the divine. Instead, Bradstreet is commenting on the new role that she has found for poetry, though as a worldly and transitory occupation. As we see with the “black clad Cricket” and the “merry grasshopper,” poetry is a merry pastime, to be put aside when the time comes for more serious pursuits. The proper role of humanity is to live in eternity, which neither poetry nor the temporal fame she had sought in her youth afford.

But, despite her rejection of poetry as a substitute for eternity, she still remains a poet. When she writes in stanza 21 “I once that lov’d the shady woods so well,/ Now thought the rivers did the trees excel” (p. 172), she is writing of her change of subject material from the “shady” and transitory to the eternal. This involves a shift from a vertical to a horizontal subject. She does not seek higher and higher themes, but remains focused exclusively on the world of Nature. The office of poet is an earthly role, yet we know she retained it after her religious conversion. She now finds a way to fit the worldly activity of poetry into her metaphysical scheme, saying that she would perform it “if ever the sun would shine.” But the sun is not central to creation, as the biblical passage has shown, and will not shine forever; she has another destiny. Poetry plays a part only in her worldly existence.

Bradstreet next turns her attention to the fish of the river. The fish have been variously interpreted, but appear to be figural representations of mankind who are taught by nature and therefore not by God. In order to make it clear that she has a religious purpose in this passage, she alludes to another of her poems. The river’s movement toward the “long’d for Ocean” (p. 172) reminds us of the title of the poem “Longing for Heaven.” These fish, having been taught by nature, try to escape their natural element, diving deep and trying to jump up into the air. Nature cannot teach them that their destiny is in heaven, “where all imbrace and greet” (p. 172). The fish “know not their felicity” in stanza 24: they are destined to live forever. Calling them “wantons” (Stanza 25) recalls Du Bartas’ use of that very adjective to describe immoral poets (I ii 2, 6, and 31). She now completely rejects both the elements of fire (Du Bartas’ triumphal element) and air (the triumphal element in Bradstreet’s early work), substituting water, the element which quenches fire.

Next Bradstreet turns to a consideration of the nightingale. Du Bartas associates the Nightingale with rhetoric and wishes to find in the nightingale a model of poetry. We read

But all this’s nothing to the Nightingale,
Breathing so sweetly from a brest so small,
So many Tunes, whose Harmonie excells
Our Voice, our Violls, and all Musicke els.
Good Lord! how oft in a green Oken Grove.
In the coole shadow I have stood, and strove
To marrie mine immortal Layes to theirs,
Rapt with delight of their delicious Aiers? (I v 667-74)

Bradstreet specifically rejects the temptation to marry her songs to the “Aiers” of the nightingale. In Du Bartas, the Fall occurs when the “Grandame” is deceived by the “glozing Rhetorike” of the serpent (II ii 213). Where Du Bartas had used rhetoric divinely, rhetoric is also the agent of the fall. It would be odd if the song of the nightingale were now, following Bradstreet’s change in poetic subject matter, to be praised unequivocally. It is not. Bradstreet reminds us of the transitory nature of the bird’s song by citing Luke 12:18, writing of the nightingale as a bird that “neither toyles nor hoards up in thy barn” (Stanza 28). Such frivolity is also characteristic of the Anacreontic grasshopper. The message is clear: poetry is pleasurable, but humanity is not meant, like the grasshopper and the nightingale, to have such transitory pleasures as the ends of their existence. We may also remember that she used the image of the barn in her elegy on her father, whom God “in a celestial barn has housed him high” (p. 166).

Bradstreet now distinguishes the cyclical realm of nature from the linear destiny of humanity. She has carefully set the poem against the cycle of the seasons and the day. The song of the nightingale is also cyclical in “warbling out the old, begin anew” in stanza 28 (p. 173). The bird’s songs make Bradstreet want to take flight with the bird, and she is momentarily “rapt” again (Stanza 26). This does not mean that she falls into the same error as in her youth. There is great significance to Bradstreet’s assertion that the nightingale “feels no sad thoughts nor cruciating cares” in stanza 27, as Bradstreet makes it clear in stanza 29 that humanity must feel.

“Cruciating” ought to remind us of the crucifixion. The nightingale’s happiness means the loss of salvation. These raptures remind her that poetry can make her forget what she is, but this does not happen this time, as it did in her youth. Since it flies from her, she has only a transitory acquaintance with the bird and its song. In contrast to her youthful experience with poetry, she does not involve herself in the cyclical and deceptive aspects of poetry and rhetoric which involve a loss of the linear, but ultimately more satisfying, conception of life and death. This time, she can enjoy the song of the bird without vainly attempting to following it where a linear human being cannot go: into the eternal cycle of the seasons. She is now able to distinguish her linear human lot from the cyclical order of nature.

Although she associates cyclical rhetoric and nature with religious error, they are still capable of yielding allegorical meaning, if read correctly. In the Christian scheme of things, there is only one warbling out of the old and one warbling in of the new, since there is only a single Old Testament and a single New. The nightingale’s power to “prevent” the dawn in stanza 28 (p. 173) has the two-fold meaning of delaying as well as that of the Psalm 19 sense of announcing the dawn. Thus, if we read these events allegorically and abandon the temptation to view them as cyclical distractions from our final destiny, they announce religious themes. As ends unto themselves, they actually “prevent” our salvation.

On the literal level, the song of the nightingale is a distraction. They may be read allegorically, however, and as allegorical symbols, they herald the coming of a new cycle, a new day. Bradstreet has found a means of reading the natural world allegorically. The sun is setting at the beginning of the poem. In the new allegorical reading, its rising at the end shall signify the new faith that she has found while living in a temporal and transient world. It has been remade as a new symbol. Bradstreet has deliberately used Du Bartas’ images of poetry to establish the nature of the pleasure which have tempted her and which she now corrects.

Accepting Death (Not Poetry) as the End of Life

When the flood covers Du Bartas’ world, Noah apostrophizes: “O worlds decay! ô universall wracke!” (II iv 770). The same book opens recounting the vain song of victorious men of war who hope that the names of kings might live on eternally in memory (II iv 29-34), an idea that has tempted her, as we have seen. Bradstreet ends her poem by drawing these two Bartasian images together to form her Christian elegy which rejects the poetic fame she had sought in her youth for the new Christian vision she now accepts.

O Time the fatal wrack of mortal things,
That draws oblivions curtains over kings,
Their sumptuous monuments, men know them not,
Their names without a Record are forgot,
Their parts, their ports, their pomp’s all laid in th’ dust
Nor wit nor gold, nor buildings scape times rust;
But he whose name is grav’d in the white stone
Shall last and shine when all of these are gone. (p. 174)

In “Contemplations,” Anne Bradstreet recognizes that she had misplaced her hopes in her youth, referring to her earlier poetic endeavors as “pathless paths” which replaced a hope of an everlasting life in the lap of God with a prideful hope of a lasting worldly fame. When she finds God, the poetic expression of what she finds, “that divine Translation” of stanza 30 (p. 174), follows a concerted effort to redefine the Bartasian poetic model. She has finally bridged the poetic gap between the natural and the divine.

The Bible has been widely seen as the second important intertextual source for the poem. In “Contemplations,” there is a third source which can be observed, and it is perhaps the most important of the three. Despite conventional borrowings, “Contemplations” achieves its own independence of source and influence. This is largely due to the fact that her own poetic work provides a third source of intertextual material, which she now reworks as skillfully as she does those of the other two sources. Spenser and Milton, working in the same allegorical mode and upon the same problems, also find it necessary to rework the poetry of Du Bartas, who influences them. In the best poetry, convention, far from a derivative weakness, is a driving part of the experience of the poet. The recognition that Du Bartas plays a large role in the process of Anne Bradstreet’s poetic growth only serves to highlight her achievement against those other poets who have achieved great independent works through the consideration of a source.

The newly-installed course will study film, comics and a full range of topics connected to Zombies and Zombie Survival, although it will probably sneakily make students learn about story telling and the proliferation of technology, too. Or Dickens. Or something.

And to think that some were anouncing that serious education is dead just a few short years ago. Not me! I think it is appropriate to think that this course is being offered in a literature department, where people are focused on themselves and Dickens and somethings in their imaginations. The physics of the undead render a scientific perspective superfluous. Zombies are purely imaginative works, and I wonder where my academic colleagues would draw the line between imagination and science where there is no science.

See my Halloween discussion of Zombies and their place in modern American culture if you want to learn more.

I’ve been reading Brad Gooch’s City Poet: The Life and Times of Frank O’Hara. Frank was a member of the New York School of poetry. After serving in WWII (the Big One), he availed himself of veteran’s assistance and went to Harvard. After school, he moved to NYC, got a job at the The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), and began to write poetry. Wikipedia has this to say about him:

O’Hara was active in the art world, working as a reviewer for Art News, and in 1960 was Assistant Curator of Painting and Sculpture Exhibitions for the Museum of Modern Art. He was also friends with the artists Willem de Kooning, Norman Bluhm, Larry Rivers and Joan Mitchell.

This put him at the center of the modern movement of art. As Wikipedia article notes, he expanded the role of poetry from imitation of works of poetry alone to drawing on a wider canvas, including painting. This is in line with the tradition of America being the land which joins a vision of the self with a comprehensive vision (think Whitman’s Song of Myself).

WWII in Europeans had cleansed the countries of their Jews, homosexuals, and other outsiders to make way for a ‘pure’ race. They fled to the United States, where they were welcome. This affected the balance of power in the art world. Paris, which had once ruled the world of artistic taste, was passed over for the more vibrant and flexible world of America in general and New York City in particular. And Frank O’Hara, who had come to NYC after graduating from Harvard, was poised on the cutting edge of art: the avant-garde.

In the 1950s, O’Hara was able to produce an art that could bridge the world of past (Europe) and present (America). America had produced jazz. When I grew up, I was told that this was an unprecedented achievement in the history of art: a totally new form of art based in improvisation. (It wasn’t true, but I didn’t know it then.) But it was already ancient in terms of America in 1959, so ancient that its first generation was dying young. Billy Holiday, Lady’ to jazz fans, died on July 17, 1959, at 44 years old.

In response, O’Hara crafted a poem for ‘Lady,’ entitled ‘The Day Lady Died.’

It is 12:20 in New York a Friday
three days after Bastille day, yes
it is 1959 and I go get a shoeshine
because I will get off the 4:19 in Easthampton
at 7:15 and then go straight to dinner
and I don’t know the people who will feed me

I walk up the muggy street beginning to sun
and have a hamburger and a malted and buy
an ugly NEW WORLD WRITING to see what the poets
in Ghana are doing these days
I go on to the bank
and Miss Stillwagon (first name Linda I once heard)
doesn’t even look up my balance for once in her life
and in the GOLDEN GRIFFIN I get a little Verlaine
for Patsy with drawings by Bonnard although I do
think of Hesiod, trans. Richmond Lattimore or
Brendan Behan’s new play or Le Balcon or Les Nègres
of Genet, but I don’t, I stick with Verlaine
after practically going to sleep with quandariness

and for Mike I just stroll into the PARK LANE
Liquor Store and ask for a bottle of Strega and
then I go back where I came from to 6th Avenue
and the tobacconist in the Ziegfeld Theatre and
casually ask for a carton of Gauloises and a carton
of Picayunes, and a NEW YORK POST with her face on it

and I am sweating a lot by now and thinking of
leaning on the john door in the 5 SPOT
while she whispered a song along the keyboard
to Mal Waldron and everyone and I stopped breathing

Now, if O’Hara had stopped there, there would be no arguing about the role of poetry today. Granted, the poem ‘decenters’ the most monumental experience in a person’s life to one of several moments in Frank’s busy life. He is thinking about Linda Stillwagon, about strolling into the Park Lane Liquor Store asking for a bottle, and asking for Gauloises and Picayunes from a tobacconist in the Ziegfeld Theatre. He wants to include more than just classic works of art. He wants to include the ‘new’ (which, of course we all know is shocking because we’ve been to college). This includes jazz. He also positions himself at the center of the universe. The news of her death is shocking, but it is positioned in his day as just another in a string of events.

But in the end, O’Hara positions himself as one of the knowing, one of those who has the intellectual resources to make decisions about which works should be included in the MoMA and which should be excluded. His poem still has a literary component to the experience. He thinks about buying Verlaine or Lattimore’s translation of Hesiod (he goes with Verlaine in the end).

Henry Geldzahler

The 1950s and 60s in New York was a great place for people with credentials from Harvard to gather. Henry Geldzahler came to New York in 1960, fresh from Harvard, and in no time flat had become he Curator for American Art at the Met, and later the first Curator for 20th Century Art at the most prestigious museum in the most preeminent city in the art world.

In a documentary entitled Who Gets to Call It Art? (Available on Netflix and well worth watching) Henry’s life is subjected to a critique. Who does get to call something art? The answer seems to be that it is not a matter for just anyone to call something art: they must have ‘it.’ And Henry had ‘it.’ And he pushed the boundaries beyond Frank O’Hara’s Hesiod-besotted world in which ‘Lady’ had died, one event among a myriad. He stripped out all the ties to the world of literature and literary influence altogether. His landmark 1969 exhibition, New York Painting and Sculpture: 1940-1970, became a sensation, because it brought works by marginal artist (artists that O’Hara had been supporting over at the lesser known MoMA) to the forefront of art world itself. And the art world has never been the same after.

Lana Turner

Lana Turner was a movie icon, a legend. She appears in my favorite film noir of all time, as the women in white:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WGFer3-Aguw

Although an icon in movies, in real life, she was a bit of a ditz. As Wkipedia reports:

Turner was well known inside Hollywood circles for dating often, changing partners often, and for never shying away from the topic of how many lovers she had in her lifetime.

To see what a ditz she is, watch the clip from Lana’s appearance on What’s My Line here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wwBM6Odu1xE

This divide between reality and film is one of the things that I find so attractive in Miss Turner’s real life. Without the deeper Joycean undercurrent of myth to sustain her, what use is she, really? She’s just another ditzy idiot who draws our attention, not because she’s ‘really’ special, but because she plays someone special on TV (or in this case movies).

Lana Turner Has Collapsed

But, even before Geldzahler’s bringing forth marginal art to the center, Frank O’Hara had written a pleasant piece of verse which also stripped out all literary references and made a joke out of Lana Turner collapsing.

Watch it here, with Frank O’Hara reading and put to the music of Nirvana:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j4pe7O1udjo

Here’s the text for you old-time readers:

Lana Turner has collapsed!
I was trotting along and suddenly
it started raining and snowing
and you said it was hailing
but hailing hits you on the head
hard so it was really snowing and
raining and I was in such a hurry
to meet you but the traffic
was acting exactly like the sky
and suddenly I see a headline
LANA TURNER HAS COLLAPSED!
there is no snow in Hollywood
there is no rain in California
I have been to lots of parties
and acted perfectly disgraceful
but I never actually collapsed
oh Lana Turner we love you get up

Power

In Who Gets to Call It Art?, the wheels of art turn on a few key insiders (the documentarian would have us believe that it was Henry alone, in fact).This, in my mind, is a justification of their power. Those with insight get the most power, while the rest of us ‘low-lifes’ get little or no power. And that, in the documentarian’s mind, is okay, because he, too, has the insight to know what others in the universe don’t know. A select few get to participate in the world of art; the rest of us stand on the outside looking in.

But this inequity in power is not what America is about. America is the land of opportunity for the many, not the select Harvard few. In such an environment, most uf us are put outside by the gatekeepers of art. From this position of exclusion, people like conservatives (and not just conservative) demand entry into the world of the Harvard-educated few; but the Harvard-educated few are an exclusive club. They he had been given the entry into the world of art. Their world has set in place some very particular rules for entry. One of those rules is (paradoxically, I might add) that nothing can be left out of the world of art. And since conservatives want to wall off certain forms of art (I’m thinking of Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ, but there are millions more, and more offensive works of art), they remain excluded.

But from the point of view of a conservative, art is not living up to its ideals in a democratic universe. Nothing should be excluded from the world of art. But there they are on the outside looking in. They perceive the gatekeepers of art as an exclusive club led by an exclusively educated group of insiders. Those insiders tell the people that have the right to choose based on their personal taste, but in private, hidden away in their minds, art is not open to the public. It is something determined by a select few. (See the Devil Wears Prada for Amanda Priestly’s speech on views on the blue sweater Andy is wearing for an example of this).

What I don’t really like about art in America is the sense that art must travel through the senses of experts before it can be declared art. (see my section on Arthur Danto here). After all, that is not how new art was discovered by men like Henry Geldzahler. People like Henry used their curiosity about things that others had not yet discovered to make art in their image. And what is good for Henry is good for the gander and for me. Why shouldn’t I be allowed to participate in the world of art on my own terms?

The Limits of Power

As far as I can tell, nothing is stopping me. But in practice, I find a whole hoard of people telling me that I can be let in if only I will stop, turn around, and back in slowly. I’m not the stop, turn around, and back in slowly type of guy. And in the current world, a world in which people like me are not constrained by experts to behave in a certain way, I don’t behave. After getting rejected by people who know better, I will test myself on the market of ideas without the middle man to tell me no. I will publish my own book. New York, which so many people flocked to in the 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, and early 90s is no longer relevant.

Back to Lana

So I like Frank o’Hara’s ‘Lana Turner Has Collapsed,’ and I would not restricted poetry only to those who could connect themselves back to an extra-individual literary tradition. And this is what people like Bill Bennett and E. D. Hirsch attempt to do in attempting to connect men and women back to their ‘tradition.’ That attempt is laudable, but it is limited to those works which connect back to deep and abiding themes. Deep and abiding themes are great if all you’re looking for poetry which treats deep and abiding themes; but it takes too much art out of the picture. Television commercials, television shows, and light poems like ‘Lana Turner Has Collapsed’ are all outside of the range of that sort of poetry.

On the other hand, the elites who populate our schools are also limited in their approach to poetry. Yes, they have managed to open up the possibilities of art to include ‘Lana Turner Has Collapsed.’ But this is largely because they themselves have discovered or written such poems. They then declare that anybody can write poems on the model of ‘Lana Turner Has Collapsed.’ But the fact of matter is that such poems are light in comparison with ‘The Day Lady Died.’ When people (particularly conservatives) have asked for the distinctions (that people know in their hearts) about why ‘The Day Lady Died’ is a better poem than ‘Lana Turner Has Collapsed,’ the answer of our Harvard elites is that all poetry is equal in the eyes of the critic. There is no difference. Some people like reading one sort of poetry; others enjoy reading other sorts of poetry.

That’s fine, but it doesn’t answer the question of why (or if) ‘The Day Lady Died’ is a more important poem than like ‘Lana Turner Has Collapsed.’ It strikes me as an evasion. Maintaining that precarious balance in which everyone can have the art they want is more important than any rational intrusion, which will skew the world of art one way or another. Reason throws the balanced world of art into confusion. For that reason, reason is left out of the equation.

If, in order to include such works as ‘Lana Turner Has Collapsed’ we need maintain the balance that has served us since Harvard educated scholars celebrated the arrival of art onto American shores at the end of WWII, then perhaps the world of art is restricted to those few, knowledgeable people who the rest of us are supposed to follow because they are leading us. It only remains for the sheep of the world to know their betters and admit what the Harvard-educated elites already know.

But I for my part don’t think that the Harvard-educated elites have it altogether right. My feeling is that life is not organized around the need for balance at all, which is so prominent in their worldview. That’s an illusion fed by people in power who want to keep power for themselves. Life is competitive, and he who reaches farthest, get the most.

For my part, I believe in poetry and art. Unlike Bennett and Hirsch, I believe in including ‘Lana Turner Has Collapsed’ in the world of poetry and art. But, unlike the Harvard-educated elites, I believe in using reason to sort good poetry from bad.

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.