Author: Jeff

The sky split open.

I was re-reading the end of On the Road again. I was thinking about Dean Moriarty. I was thinking about the kind of friend that could write you 18,000 words in a letter, hitchhike halfway across the country to see you only to be left by the side of the road in a moth-eaten coat. I was thinking about God as Pooh-Bear.

I was fighting the urge to call California. The phone rang. It was a friend from California. Then the sky split open. The power went out for a few moments, and I timed a thunderclap that took 30 seconds to subside. And the rain poured.

It was calmer when I hung up the phone.

The air is so still and thick I can hardly stand it

Continue reading “Bad Night” →

There’s always beer

Continue reading “Dead Grammas” →

Another quote from Edward Weston’s Daybooks, on meeting Alfred Stieglitz in November 1922

Continue reading “More from Weston’s Daybooks” →

Watching a screener copy of A Beautiful Mind a bit of dialogue leapt out at me:

You have no respect for cognitive reverie you know that?

Yes, but pizza, now pizza I have enormous respect for— and of course beer.

I have respect for beer!

Continue reading “Genius” →

There is a word
Which bears a sword
Can pierce an armed man –
It hurls its barbed syllables
And is mute again –
But where it fell
The saved will tell
On patriotic day,
Some epauletted Brother
Gave his breath away.

Wherever runs the breathless sun –
Wherever roams the day,
There is its noiseless onset –
There is its victory!
Behold the keenest marksman!
The most accomplished shot!
Time’s sublimest target
Is a soul “forgot”!

Emily Dickinson #42

Synthesis is concerned about dualism.

That charge isn’t an easy one to answer. Some things just can’t be explained any other way. For example, I was reading an article by Andrea Lunsford and Lisa Ede called “On Distinctions Between Classical and Modern Rhetoric” today. It offers the thesis that in the classical world, the perception of what constitutes necessary or universal truth, or episteme, was fixed and thus, there was a truth that was independent of what we say about it. The function of the rhetor was to convey truth. However, for modern rhetoric:

Connections among thought, language, and reality are thought to be grounded not in an independent, charitable reality but in the nature of the knower instead, and reality is not so much discovered or discoverable but instead constituted by the interplay of thought and language.

So, the next time you burn yourself, or stub your toe, you can tell yourself that it didn’t really happen. You just constituted your reaction based on what you thought would happen. When you close your eyes, the world actually disappears, and all that rubbish. Like it or not, we’ve got to deal with this dualism. There is what we think, and then there is a world that is. Maybe we can’t know it— and negative capability is what we need to get by. But that doesn’t mean it’s not there.

Okay, so if reality is constituted by thought and language, then it is also contingent on our point of view. “A fool sees not the same tree that a wise man sees,” to quote William Blake. It seems not a difficult leap to see that the representation, in pictures or language, of reality is by its very nature iconic, or an idealized view. However, given what we know about the fallacies of the universal, that makes these icons also phantasms, eidolons constructed from moment to moment based on “the interplay of thought and language.” There is really nothing dualistic about something being at once ideal and imaginary; it only becomes Platonic when the real is considered to be imaginary, and the ideal a separate knowable thing.

That’s why Plato expelled poets from his republic. Because they created a competition for the real, by creating imaginary ideals. The concept of eidolons is not Platonic in the slightest. We’re constantly told that truth is an unknowable thing in the postmodern world, that it is constituted from moment to moment through the processes of history. Truth is relative. Ultimately, if this is the case, then philosophy is useless.

The schism between Rhetoric and Philosophy is this: Philosophy deals with absolutes. Rhetoric deals with possibilities. In the grandest sense, postmodern philosophy is not really philosophy but rhetoric. Clear as mud?

How about this, from Michael Polynyi (cited by Lunsford and Ede)

We must inevitably see the universe from a center lying within ourselves and speak about it in terms of a human language shaped by the exigencies of human intercourse. Any attempt rigorously to eliminate our human perspective from our pictures of the world must lead to absurdity.

This is what language based philosophy, or rhetoric for that matter, are all about. People see some things as ideals, as icons. Icons are always flawed, and phantasmagoric precisely because they aren’t real— they are constituted by consciousness. It’s not a duality. It’s our constitution of reality. Rhetoric wants to understand and shape these icons to its own end. Philosophy wants to take icons apart and see how they work.

Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the World.

Mike Sanders has been ruminating on issues of pleasure as they relate to blogging. It jogged my brain cells back to a text I’ve spent a lot of time with, Percy Shelley’s Defence of Poetry. Shelley saw man as a harp, stretched tight and blown by winds both inside and out to produce songs of pleasure. The good, to Shelley, would always be naturally reinforced by this process because it was the most pleasurable. There is no need for ethics or morality, if we only follow our pleasure. Of course, Shelley was branded as being immoral, because he denied the moral sentiments any place in his poetry. I like his argument on the subject, because I believe that life itself is a poetic act.

The whole objection however of the immorality of poetry rests upon a misconception of the manner in which poetry acts to produce the moral improvement of man. Ethical science arranges the elements which poetry has created, and propounds schemes and proposes examples of civil and domestic life: nor is it for want of admirable doctrines that men hate, and despise, and censure, and deceive, and subjugate one another.

This cuts to the core of my hatred of prescriptive theory. “Admirable doctrines” don’t do much to further the cause of man. I think the poetry of observation must remain aloof from prescription. Poetry indeed, rules.

But poetry acts in another and a diviner manner. It awakens and enlarges the mind itself by rendering it the receptacle of a thousand unapprehended combinations of thought. Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world; and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar; it re-produces all that it represents, and the impersonations clothed in its Elysian light stand thenceforward in the minds of those who have once contemplated them, as memorials of that gentle and exalted content which extends itself over all thoughts and actions with which it co-exists.

There is a peculiar oxymoron here— Mind is awakened and enlarged, and yet it is rendered— reduced or purified, until it becomes the receptacle of unapprehended combinations of thought? That is indeed the way that I feel when I read some people’s blogs. I love seeing how others connect the dots. It lifts the veil of strangeness from some, and exposes the beauty of others.

The great secret of morals is Love; or a going out of our own nature, and an identification of ourselves with the beautiful which exists in thought, action or person, not our own. A man to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another and of many others; the pains and pleasures of his species must become his own.

The great instrument of moral good is the imagination: and poetry administers to the effect by acting upon the cause. Poetry enlarges the circumference of the imagination by replenishing it with thoughts of ever new delight, which have the power of attracting and assimilating to their own nature all other thoughts, and which form new intervals and interstices whose void forever craves fresh food. Poetry strengthens the faculty which is the organ of the moral nature of man in the same manner as exercise strengthens a limb. A Poet therefore would do ill to embody his own conceptions of right and wrong which are usually those of his place and time in his poetical creations, which participate in neither.

Poetry has been working on my organ for a long time now. I like it. It feels good. But blogging is a newer pleasure, and it’s interesting to compare the attributes. Blogging, as a flexing of the mental faculties, is related to the type of pleasure which Shelley was on about. Stretching the mind, outside itself and into the otherness that surrounds, is a good thing. Reading the thoughts of others, and contributing my own becomes a sort of cooking and eating. I’m always hungry for good food.