An Introduction that Got Away

Often times, I attempt to condense the world onto the head of a pin. The following is such an endeavor:

…fill the element
with signatures of your own frequency,
echo-surroundings, searches, probes, allurements,
elver gleams in the dark of the whole sea.
Seamus Heaney “Station Island” XII

Each poet provides, whether explicitly or implicitly,  a justification for their particular aesthetic project. Poetry is, after all, a fine art—un-useful, un-servile; such an art needs justification. What ends will it achieve for the poet? For the readers? For the poet’s community? We might ask these questions relative to the rubric of history, culture, politics, economics, psychology, or religion. Such considerations, however, are not at least directly the poet’s; they are certainly our own. Perhaps this is unavoidable. Yet we are not at a total loss, for poems are things made of language—the very means by which we share our considerations and reflections. The poem, as a topos of the community of language, provides us with the place of sharing in our understanding not only with the poet who has created, but with other readers who also experience this place.  Therefore, insofar as our inquiry arises from and returns to the experience of reading the poems themselves, perhaps we might join our own reflection on the ends of a certain poet’s aesthetic project with that poet’s own explicit or implicit reflection.

I’m often fascinated with words more than ideas. Thus, when I attempt to insert logic into my rhetorical endeavors, I sense the voice of a sophist arising from the darkness of the mind’s trash can. It’s an intellectual weakness which I’m ill-prepared to fight.

Another Treasure

While dealing with Yeats’s enigmatic question (and importantly the trail of experience leading up to it) Cleanth Brooks makes the following synthesis between “Among School Children” and Wordsworth’s “Intimations Ode”:

The mature man can see the harmony, the unity of being, possessed by the tree or the lamb or the child; but the price of being able to see it is not to possess it in one’s self, just as the price of possessing it in one’s self is an awareness that one does not possess it (The Well Wrought Urn, 190).

Buoyancy

It seems strange that an encounter with a mind through poetry can both deflate the spirit but then lead it to a subliminal acceptance or at least a kind self-awareness, however bitter and mysterious. From over a month ago in my reading of Walcott:

Rain will keep hammering the grass blades into the ground.

I admire this violence;
love is iron. I admire

the brutal exchange between breaker and rock.
They have an understanding.

I may even understand the contract
between galloping lion and stunned doe;
there is some yes to terror in her eyes.

What I will never understand
is the beast who writes this
and claims the centre of life.

“Force”

Two Short Excerpts

Most people enjoy contemplating the sufferings of tragic heroes, but they do not wish to be called upon for heroism themselves. Not caring deeply; looking at everything with irony, as a mere spectacle; and pursuing superficial pleasures: these are clever ways of evading or thwarting tragedy–in love, but also in every department of life. The smallness of aspiration against which Nietzsche inveighed in his portrait of “the last man” is not, as he suggested, a recent creation of bourgeois European Christianity. It is a pervasive inclination of ordinary human life.  (Martha Nussbaum “The Passion Fashion” The New Republic)

The industrial economy has made a general principle of the youthful antipathy to the past, and the modern world abounds with herlads of “a better future” and with debunkers happy to point out that Yeats was “silly like us” or that Thomas Jefferson may have had a Negro slave as a mistress–and so we are disencumbered of the burden of great lives, set free to be as cynical or desperate as we please.  (Wendell Berry “Marriage and Poetry: The Use of Old Forms” Standing By Words, p. 102)

Reflections on the Eve of Our Anniversary

This morning I was finishing up a professional WordPress page, and I wrote the following as part of my brief biography.

In the past year, and in the years to come, my own “raid on the inarticulate” has taken on a very particular task—namely loving my wife. Marriage, in the most beautiful of metaphors, can be likened to the salvation of grace preached by St. Paul in his letter to the Roman church:

νυνὶ  δὲ  ἑλευθερωθέντες  ἀπὸ  τῆς  ἁμαρτίας  δουλωθέντες δὲ  τῷ  θεῷ  ἔχετε τὸν καρπὸν ὑμῶν εἰς ἁγιασμόν, τὸ δὲ τέλος ζωὴν αἰώνιον.
And now, since you were set free from you errors and enslaved by God, you have your fruit in sanctification, and its end—eternal life.

As we have been given the end of what the Hebrew poet called “the way of life”—namely eternal life, and thus are able to freely pursue the means—the way of life itself, so marriage perpetually grants us the end of love given—love returned. Like salvation, marriage has been, and will continue to be, a beautiful mystery to grow through and into the greater mystery and miracle of life itself.

How One Might Mean

Then Ben wailed again, hopeless and prolonged. It was nothing. Just sound. I might have been all time and injustice and sorrow become vocal for an instant by a conjunction of planets.
                                                       The Sound and the Fury, p. 359

The Newest Additions to my Library

Thanks to my mother, I had the opportunity to go, as one might say, hog wild in the Half-Price Books on Northwest Highway. When the dust settled and I arrived at home, I found the following books in my arms:

    Yeats: The Man and the Masks, Richard Emwell
    Collected Poems, Allen Tate
    Dreamtigers, Jorge Luis Borges
    The Four Quartets, T.S. Eliot
    Resurrection, Leo Tolstoy
    Lancelot, Walker Percy
    A Turn in the South, V.S. Naipul
    Nichomachean Ethics, Aristotle
    Thus Spake Zarthustra, Nietzche
    History of Ireland, Richard Chauviré
    Confession of Faith in a Mennonite Perspective

Another Conclusion and Another Auden Poem

In the desert of the heart
Let the healing fountain start,
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.

from “In Memory of W.B. Yeats”

Every now and again

Every now and again I come across a poem which gives delight in its clarity (this last prepositional phrase being the distinctive.) Here’s one from a book I recently was priviliged to buy.

Anthropos apteros for days
Walked whistling round and round the Maze,
Relying happily upon
His temperament for getting on.

The hundredth time he sighted, though,
A bush he left an hour ago,
He halted where four alleys crossed,
And recognized that he was lost.

“Where am I? Metaphysics says
No question can be asked unless
It has an answer, so I can
Assume this maze has got a plan.

If theologians are correct,
A Plan implies an Architect:
A God-built maze would be, I’m sure,
The Universe in miniature.

Are data from the world of Sense,
In that case, valid evidence?
What in the universe I know
Can give directions how to go?

All Mathematics would suggest
A steady straight line as the best,
But left and right alternately
Is consonant with History.

Aesthetics, though, believes all Art
Intends to gratify the Heart:
Rejecting disciplines like these,
Must I, then, go which way I please?

Such reasoning is only true
If we accept the classic view,
Which we have no right to assert,
According to the Introvert.

His absolute pre-supposition
Is–Man creates his own condition:
This maze was not divinely built,
But is secreted by my guilt.

The centre that I cannot find
Is known to my Unconscious Mind;
I have no reason to despair
Because I am already there.

My problem is how not to will;
They move most quickly who stand still;
I’m only lost until I see
I’m lost because I want to be.

If this should fail, perhaps I should,
As certain educators would,
Content myself with the conclusion;
In theory there is no solution.

All statements about what I feel,
Like I-am-lost, are quite unreal:
My knowledge ends where it began;
A hedge is taller than a man.”

Anthropos apteros, perplexed
To know which turning to take next,
Looked up and wished he were the bird
To whom such doubts must seem absurd.

                         “The Labyrinth”  W.H. Auden 

Two ways one might live without Paradise

Joyfully, I spent a lackadaisical Friday afternoon reading the first few hundred lines of Wordsworth’s Prelude. In a way I was decompressing from Greek, in another I was indulgding myself. The true justification for such a reading perhaps is one of pursuing knowledge: I, by nature, reach out to read poetry (which my professors will tell my should not be read.) But where have I gone? “Is it perfume from a dress/ that makes me so digress?” This bit of writing has promised the Paradisial, but into what darkened corner of my mind must I peer to find it? Patience, to prevent my anxiety, I hear reply: ”outside.”  Where? I now know, again. I began in Wordsworth, but he began in Milton:

The World was all before them, where to choose
Thir place of rest, and Providence thir guide:
They hand in hand with wandring steps and slow,
Through Eden took thir solitarie way. (XII.626-9)

And here, the heretic and inheretor replies:

The earth is all before me. With a heart
 Joyous, nor scared at its own liberty,
I look about; and should the chosen guide
Be nothing better than a wandering cloud,
I cannot miss my way. I breathe again! (I.14-18)

What Joy awaits the careful reader? What high argument may the heretic yet have in store?