Thought For the Day

If I started a band, I would call it Spacetime Foam.






My brain is tired and that's all I have to say for now.

Damn it, I like Emerson

"Doubt not, O poet, but persist. Say, `It is in me, and shall out.' Stand there, baulked and dumb, stuttering and stammering, hissed and hooted, stand and strive, until, at last, rage draw out of thee that dream-power which every night shows thee is thine own; a power transcending all limit and privacy, and by virtue of which a man is the conductor of the whole river of electricity. Nothing walks, or creeps, or grows, or exists, which must not in turn arise and walk before him as exponent of his meaning. Comes he to that power, his genius is no longer exhaustible. All the creatures, by pairs and by tribes, pour into his mind as into a Noah's ark, to come forth again to people a new world. This is like the stock of air for our respiration, or for the combustion of our fireplace, not a measure of gallons, but the entire atmosphere if wanted."
Emerson, "The Poet"


Aside from the gender pronoun, which is easily corrected, this seems true to me. :)

The Cranky Old Man Speaketh (Againeth)

So last week I received in the mail four new books of poetry from the same publisher, as part of my subscription to their 2007 output.

One of them I found to be really brilliant, full of shimmery, crackling language and emotional life. Another, I found to be slightly less crackling, but still compellingly written and moving. Another, I found to be very well controlled but ultimately rather prosaic and even sometimes a bit tedious. Another, I found to be flat out boring and predictable, with uninteresting language and unsurprising "ideas."

If there's anything that links these poets, and their aesthetics, it is that they all seem to subscribe to the idea that poetry should stick close to the domestic and find its meaning in the emotion and experience of everyday personal life. This idea is so familiar that it's easy to take for granted. But is it an inevitable conclusion?

As far as I can tell, contemporary poets tend to fall into one of two aesthetic camps. They're either of the domestic/emotional/down-to-earth variety, or of the experimental-language/process-of-consciousness variety. Granted, some poets have dual citizenship in both these areas. But these are still the two main sensibilities.

I don't know where I'm going with this. It's not that both don't produce excellent poetry. Of the four books I mentioned, two are very strong, and even the third "prosaic" one is actually very well done. In fact, the first one I mentioned actually gave me a lot of pleasure.

But do we have to give up the old idea that poets are "comprehensive souls" who make connections between all areas and levels of reality and from those connections reveal larger visions? Why do we allow reality to be narrowed into such a limited humanistic container? Poetry can go anywhere; it can include anything; it must include everything.

I just want more. I'm not sure what I want or how to find it, but I want more.

Same ideas, different names

I'm taking a class in the American Renaissance. The professor has structured the class according to the following idea: Emerson and Hawthorne epitomize opposing views on life and art, and other American writers of this period tend to fall within one camp or another.

Emerson believed that humanity is essentially good, and therefore our first-hand spiritual intuitions about reality are to be trusted and affirmed. Our own souls must be our primary and final authority. Evil is ultimately illusory, not existing in itself but only as the absence of the good. If we look within, we find God.

Hawthorne evidently believed the opposite. (I say "evidently" because we haven't gotten to him yet in class, and my own experience reading his work is very limited.) Our intuitions are not to be trusted. Evil is real, and our own individual judgment is more likely to be evil than good. Societal restrictions upon our own individual souls are necessary and should not be removed. If we look within, we are more likely to find human weakness and evil.

This reminds me of a number of parallels. I am reminded of Jung and Freud, for instance. Freud was clearly of the Hawthornian strain. Jung didn't go as far as Emerson in trusting the individual soul, but in contrast to Freud, he is way further on the Emersonian side.

I am also reminded of Buddhism and Christianity. Christianity has the doctrine of Original Sin; Buddhism emphatically does not.

What all of this comes down to: What is the true nature of humanity, and of reality in general? Fallen or not-fallen?

Buddhist and Jungian that I am, I lean towards the Emersonian side. I think Freud and Hawthorne and Augustine are accurate about how people tend to be. Buddhism recognizes this; habitual ignorance and hatred are the main impediments toward enlightenment. The difference is that one philosophy sees this habit as the core of human nature, or at least as too strong to surpass. In the other view, evil is like clouds. Sometimes the sun is fully obscured, but the sun is still there.

Of course, this relates to my previous musings about vertical/horizontal and mystical/non-mystical. It seems clear to me that the academic literary world tends to be strongly Hawthornian, based on what seems to me a tragically inadequate view of what people really are, or can be. In my class, the majority definitely favors Hawthorne over Emerson. Our most recent discussion focused on Emerson's contention (also held by Buddhism and to some extent present even in Catholic theology) that evil is merely the absence of good, like cold is the absence of heat.

Some people can see only evil. Some thinkers look at art and see only the evils of bad capitalist people. Such an anemic vision of ourselves and of the world is killing English departments all over this country, and it is killing the literary culture in general. But despite this analysis I've just presented, I don't really understand the aversion to Emerson and the favoring of the Hawthornian attitude. I just don't get it, and I am thus excluded from the very area of the culture that I've worked rather hard to join. This troubles me. I'm tired of feeling like I'm behind enemy lines in the English departments and literary circles that should feel to me like home.