My article on Willougbhy’s Apology in Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility has been published.
What is your favorite pun in the works of Jane Austen? My own has got to be in Chapter 19 of Sense and Sensibility when Sir John Middleton says of Marianne “her instrument is open.” How many puns can you find in Jane Austen’s works? Which ones are the best?
Posted in Romantic Literature | Tagged Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility | Leave a Comment »
Today is a great day for word and literature lovers the world over. George the “misunderestimated” is leaving office. The man who more than any other has made a virtue of stupidity will be gone forever, hopefully never to be heard from again.
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged George Bush, politics | Leave a Comment »
A Fine Art of Balance
Poetry Review
As anyone who’s ever taken a course in literature knows, the two basic elements of any narrative are plot and character. Without these bare-bones elements a narrative loses its legs and collapses. Yet the hard part every writer struggles with is how to make their choices about plot and character com-pelling. Put bluntly, readers want to read about interesting beings doing interesting things. In a sense all literary works are measured against our own internal sense of whether and how well that happens.
Some narratives are heavily descriptive and become interesting simply through what their authors show us. These people are usually close observers—eschewing jargon and convention, they find a way to really get into the person, place, or thing they are describing. In the vein of great describers I think of Pablo Neruda and his odes. Reading Neruda’s poem “Ode to the Watermelon,” for exam-ple, you get the sense that he really understood watermelons; we who would deride watermelons now had to look at them in a different way. Other writers are more plot people. Even as the characters they invent are lightly sketched, what those characters do makes them endlessly fascinating. I think here of Stevens—a great plot poet—who, for example, in “The Idea of Order at Key West” has his nameless heroine create an entire world by singing along the seashore. In the end, whether a writer chooses to emphasize plot or description, it’s the interplay, achieving the difficult balance between these two, that makes for compelling verbal art.
I was recently reminded of the push and pull of description and plot reading the first poetry books of two energetic Canadian writers: Asa Boxer and Nick Thran. Though they approach the elements of narrative from seemingly opposite emphases on plot and character, their different takes end up demonstrating the powers and limitations of narrative itself. One way this happens for these writers is through a particularly poetic concern for insufficiency, for the ways that, though language is our best connection to other minds and hearts, a gap remains between direct experience and the reproduction of life writing makes in our minds.
Boxer (despite the pugilistic last name) is the describer here. Like Neruda, Boxer feels very much at home in the ode—a concentrated meditation on a particular subject. In his book The Mechanical Bird (Signal Editions) Boxer gives us poetic studies of the ordinary objects that surround us: maps, polar bears, a young man called Amad, a gear train, hammers, and the mechanical bird of the title. Though his choice of subjects at times seems random, one of Boxer’s main interests here is correcting just this sort of assumption. His poems, across their different subjects, argue that there is a deep similar-ity in the apparently random differences between say, a damselfly and a tool box. This similarity is a poetic one grounded in the central idea of an ode—that we should attend to who and what we too often forget. Even in his rare ode about a person, such as the poem “Amad,” Boxer wants us to re-member the overlooked. “Where, in God’s name, will Amad find love?” Boxer’s lines ask, because clearly finding someone to love is as important for us as it is difficult.
One of the most effective instances of this is a poem simply titled “The Lobster”:
Sunk behind its dingy window
in a supermarket aquarium,
the lobster turns a muzzy eye
on the great élan of air.
Boxer’s skill shows itself in the unexpected use of the French word “élan,” which though it trans-lates strictly as momentum, also has connotations of balance, of speed, and of flight. By turning a “muzzy,” (blurred or confused) eye on the majesties of air Boxer gives the lowly lobster a truly noble height. Where Eliot, in the “Love Song of J.Alfred Prufrock” enlarged on his malaise by declaring “I should have been a pair of ragged claws/Scuttling across the floors of silent seas,” Boxer gives the bottom-feeding lobster a stoic courage:
You will never hear the lobster cry,
“What crime could be so great it moved the sea
to single out a bloated shrimp like me.”
Boxer here plays with the evident contradiction that the lobster cannot speak, much less intone the elegant iambic pentameter couplet he gives as its unspoken speech. Yet the moment works—like a kind of anti-Prufrock, the versifying lobster eloquently accepts its fate. We might say that what Neruda did for the watermelon, Boxer tries to do here for the lobster. Their focused attention on what we otherwise pass over works as a kind of verbal lovemaking for which the poetic ode is peculiarly suited.
Some of the romantic sensibility possible with the ode is shown in the title poem of the collection “The Mechanical Bird.” Birds have long been a common poetic subject. Few, for example, can read Keats’ “Ode to a Nightingale” and not be moved. But most machines are poetically dead to us, and odes to them are rare. Boxer knows this, and in his better poems like this one, he creates a synthesis between the living and the dead that helps bring to life an otherwise lifeless thing:
And she engages the heart
in her suit of dead feathers…
forgotten during God’s dispensation of grace;
and overlooked during the allotment of will.
Though one might object to the preaching—telling the reader that “she engages the heart” instead of showing it—(a classic error), the “suit of dead feathers” is nevertheless a powerful image of life conquering death, a way of vitalizing the machine-bird by clothing it in living substance.
In contrast to Boxer’s thoughtful ruminations on the lowly, Nick Thran, in Every Inadequate Name (Insomniac Press) is a poet who records the unexpected actions of human life. Of course there are states of mind here; equally there are moments without movement and poems about dead objects. But far more than Boxer, Thran often seems to take pleasure in the way actions drive a thought. One can imagine him enjoying the lines of Robert Creely’s haiku-like poem “I Know a Man”: “…shall we &/why not, buy a goddamn big car,” simply because the car will take you somewhere, anywhere, over the next hill to a new experience. Like Creely, Thran versifies like a man who enjoys journeys and collecting the knick-knacks of personal history he finds along the way.
Although their books occasionally have similar poem titles, Thran’s results are very different from Boxer’s. Take for example the ode-like poem “The Coin O’rama Laundromat, A Dedication”
This is for the Coin O’Rama
after it empties. The last one there –
the Korean woman with slender fingers
picking lint and old dryer sheets deep
from the bowels –
how the final moment must feel
when she closes the lid
of the trash can
filled with clouds.
Despite its title, this poem is not so much about the Laundromat as the people who go there. Like Boxer, Thran is asking us to attend to something overlooked—in this case the Korean woman doing laundry, but Thran’s history is a resolutely human one; he links how the woman feels with what she does. Unlike Boxer’s lobster poetically describing its miserable state, Thran’s human subject speaks solely through her actions. If Boxer’s lobster remains largely still, with only its eye in motion, Thran’s washer-woman moves her hands against a silent and unchanging background.
The glory Thran takes in motion is shown in his poem “Bloor Street,” Toronto’s main east-west thoroughfare.
Once in a Bloor moon the joke goes, and mother
rubs his hair. Then she and her husband head
to bed to make love. That’s “B” for the bed,
“l” for love, and the “o!” and the “o!”
a string upon which they wish
they could balance forever…
Knowing the poem is called “Bloor Street” we eagerly wait for the “r” that never comes. Instead Thran hides it in the words “string,” and “forever,” and in his final coda of Bloor as “the most ro-mantic street in the world.” The unexpected linking of the ugly word “Bloor” with the sexual ecstasy of the two parents is a powerful sign of how language is both essential and yet insufficient to express the depths of what we feel. Names, as Thran says, are often inadequate. Poetry tries, but only rarely reaches the wordless pleasures of an orgasm.
Another moment of the interplay between language, thought, and action occurs in the poem “Azucar.” The title seems to promise an ode, but like “The Coin O’rama,” it ends up being a lyric about the power of simple human actions to alter circumstances. In this narrative the writer’s mother has been learning Spanish. She lives below a Hispanic couple who constantly argue.
…Mother,
who tries hard to good in this world,
marched upstairs,
banged on their door till it opened
enough for her to ask
in a friendly, foreign voice
for azucar,
the Spanish word for sugar
she’d made a point to learn before bastard,
prison, abuse
and asshole, you leave her alone.
The sugar the mother borrows is used to make banana bread that she then carries upstairs. The woman’s courage and humility—not accusing, not calling the husband an asshole, and intervening with the ancient neighborly tradition of borrowing a cup of sugar, shows an unusual sensitivity to the power of ritual. The first ritual of sugar borrowing leads to a second—that of the sharing of food. And this second is a ritual that heals.
Thran ends the poem observing the cooling of the slices: they are okay now…(and after a stanza break) to eat. The double reference of the “they” as both the slices and the angry couple neatly links the readying of the treat to the promise that it has already brought some soothing sweetness to their dis-cord. The Mother’s faith that there is sugar to be found in this household symbolizes her belief that despite the distrust here, there is also goodness. That all this word-action is happening in Spanish—a foreign language for the mother—only adds to the power of her gesture. Thran’s poem makes an aesthetically appealing and narratively convincing argument that sweetness is a sure recipe for happiness in any language.
Inevitably, writers make different choices about how to move their readers. This is as it should be. But for poetry the emphasis on plot or description can make a big difference in whether its words matters to us. Ever since Wordsworth wrote The Prelude, many English-speaking writers have been privileging feeling and thought over action; they have insisted that how we feel drives what we do. Boxer’s The Mechanical Bird works largely within that tradition. Thran, on the other hand, in Every Inadequate Name comes from another place, one conceptually but not linguistically closer to the novel, where action is the mainspring of our feelings and thoughts.
published at Vehicule Press Blog
C. Durning Carroll
Posted in Books, Poetry | Tagged Canadian Poetry | 1 Comment »
Poetry Review
Two Or Three Guitars: Selected Poems
by John Terpstra
Two or Three Guitars is John Terpstra’s seventh book of poems. The Governor-General nominated writer has moved far along enough in his career for this latest book to be a “selected poems” that lets his readers look back on a twenty-five year career that began with Scrabbling for Repose back in 1982. These poems show an abiding interest in certain themes: travel, religion, history, and nature.Travels, both of the ordinary sort and of the kind driven by the need for emigration are featured here.
In Terpstra’s poems journeying often appears as a sign of dislocation. “If we were at Niagara now/we could see where this business begins,” he proclaims in the opening poem “Blondin on a Tightrope.” Much of the difficulty and interest in these poems lies in the fact that we are never quite at Niagara. In the separation between what the physical body can do and what the imagination can experience comes the source of much of Terpstra’s versifying.
Endings in Terpstra’s poems arrive with much the same sentiment as beginnings. In the last poem of the collection, “How It All Goes Around” Terpstra dreams that “I would ride the single drop on the windshield, in the/downspout,/jump the last few inches/and slip between the particles of earth.” Though in both works Terpstra is driving along a road, he would prefer “the highway blasted through,” as a way to get to authentic existence. Travel, like existence itself, is endlessly cyclical; one goes somewhere only to return to one’s starting point.
Immigration too is a form of travel, but one driven by powerful economic circumstances. Even as this kind of journeying remains consciously chosen, its dislocations are far more powerful than those made by ordinary travel. In “Forty Days and Forty Nights” Terpstra assumes the voice of a Dutch immigrant coming to Quebec and he narrates that character’s frustrations upon discovering that Canada is not the promised land he had hoped for: “…two days later I drove/the coal truck from my second job, and dumped/a one-ton load down the basement chute/of the wrong house/and the next week/wasn’t paid, but shovelled those lumps of black/back through the window, until I couldn’t breathe.” Terpstra finds rich veins of material in the gritty realities of physical work and the ways backbreaking labor shows up the gap between real life and the world of dreams.
God and the angels are forces that for Terpstra constitute holiness not only because of the miracles they do, but because they can witness multiple events simultaneously, something we limited humans cannot hope to achieve. In “The Little Towns of Bethlehem” the poet imagines a nativity scene un-folding in dozens of little towns across northern Canada. The poem, with its crazy quilt of place names like Aklavik, Tignish, Esther, Picture Butte, and Pickle Lake becomes a mental travelogue of those small and usually forgotten places where people still live and miracles, like the birth of chil-dren, can still happen. One lovely thing about all these works is that Terptstra’s sentiments always seem authentic; his are poems of genuine feeling and real tenderness.
In the poem “Hypotheses” Terpstra moves in a potentially rich direction by connecting his observations about nature with a grander idea about how we think and see the world. “The location and number of stars is determined by/the trajectory of individual branch tips, each of which bears/responsibility for a single pin-prick of light.” A few lines later he admits: “These are, of course, preposterous hypotheses, and it is/likely that only those willing to admit to an uncommon/empathy with trees would ever admit them.” Perhaps so, but in giving an intentionality to na-ture Terpstra puts forward the very powerful idea that feeling the natural world as beautiful proves something. Terpstra’s point here is that maybe spirit and science are not as different as we tend to believe. Poetry, despite its poor current reputation in popular culture, can provide us with a way of synthesizing two of the most powerful forces of contemporary society—religion and science. In “Hypotheses” Terpstra’s language comes tantalizingly close to achieving this.
Lest we take this idea of the connected universe too far, however, Terpstra reminds us that risk is everywhere, both from people and from the forces of the natural world. In a fashion typical for him, “The Devil’s Punch Bowl” combines these physical and emotional dangers as a way of trying to keep us alive to the idea that a feeling of total connection also opens us to threats from everywhere. “How cold the wind feels/on all our open wounds,” he reminds us. “I know what rocks awake/and men can do, now/There is no true protection./Forgive me.” In this awareness of the harm we do and have done to us, Terpstra performs one the basic jobs of the good writer—promoting sympathy for the world, whether that world is natural or of human. His final wish for forgiveness shows a poignant sense that we humans are inevitably responsible both for the pain we can’t seem to help causing others, and the ways in which we harm nature by not seeing the harm we do. If being human means having the power both to love and to hurt, then asking for forgiveness is the clearest testament of our humanity, for it externalizes the fact that we have hurt and been hurt by causing pain.
Two or Three Guitars provides a rich selection of the poetry of a peculiarly Canadian writer—one who takes what is best in this country: tolerance, sympathy, a powerful sense of humanity, and combines these qualities with a deep appreciation for the natural world to make a music that seems to rise from a hidden place, but that we nonetheless recognize as a tune we have long known and understood.
C. Durning Carroll
Published in The Northern Poetry Review
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Poetry Review
Primer on the Hereafter
by Steve McOrmond
Steve McOrmond opens his second collection Primer on the Hereafter with an epigraph from John Ashbery’s poem “Posture of Unease.” Ashbery says: “For all you I/Have neglected, ignored,/Left to stew in your own juices,/Not been like a friend that is approaching,/I ask forgiveness, a song like new rain./Please sing it to me.” Ashbery has made a career out of unease, from the early psychic distances of poems like “The Instruction Manual,” to the reflective masterpiece “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror,” to the enigmatically-titled “Your Name Here,” with its clever play on presence and absence, order and discontinuity.Though Ashbery has retained the status of éminence grise in American letters, his poetic legacy has been at best a mixed one. He has taught us a great deal about psychology and the unfettered thoughts of a moving mind, but has also, especially in recent years, surrendered logic and communication in favor of a hermetically opaque private language.
Fortunately, Mr. McOrmond does not do the same. Though McOrmond takes from Ashbery an interest in outsider status—they are both observers—McOrmond, unlike the Ashbery of recent years, prefers to observe others. If Ashbery is a psychologist, McOrmond could plausibly be called a journalist. Though the psychologist may look at others, he does so in an intimately private way—the confines of an office. The journalist, on the other hand, lives of necessity out in the world. She or he is forced to find a language that others can relate to; to use, as Wordsworth once declared, “a selection of language really used by men.”The promise of Primer on the Hereafter lies in the simple and unaffected narrative voice in which McOrmond recounts his best poems. In pulling away from himself into that posture of unease that characterizes so many good writers, McOrmond finds in this collection, occasional moments of sublimity.
Poetry, like its sister arts of drama and the novel, is fundamentally about humanity: its sole interest, despite the frequent distraction of birds and flowers is an analysis of who and why we are. When McOrmond sticks to this simple aim the results can be striking, as in the quasi-historical poem “Lolly.” In this work about an imaginary survivor of an actual 1855 shipwreck off the coast of Nova-Scotia, McOrmond gathers the details and the mood of men made helpless by the elements. “Mr. Haszard had a little spaniel./On the morning of the third day,/I held it down and Smith/slit its throat with my bone-handled knife./We drank its blood, consumed/the flesh before it could freeze.” Though the line-breaks at moments display the carelessness of a prose writer, this same narrative impulse conveys the terse diction of a wounded man dictating a letter to a wife he loves. While McOrmond may not listen as closely as one might like to the music of the words, he still understands how the limits of the poetic line can be used to strong effect. McOrmond’s impassioned restraint gives “Lolly” a power to move that a looser narrative flow would have lost.
He accomplishes something similar in “Ötzi,” a verse response to the exhibit of the prehistoric man found frozen in the Alps a dozen or so years ago. Instead of assuming the voice of a character, here McOrmond places himself in the position of a viewer watching yet also turning away from the act of being seen: “I would be your pallbearer, escort you/back to the glacier and bury you deeply/and properly under the ice. For now–/which is not so long–I’ll pay my respects/by not coming during visiting hours.” The final claim seems typical of McOrmond’s style, as it raises the obvious question: if not during visiting hours, then when? Will McOrmond sneak in after dark but look all the same? How is the poet’s language changed if his or her presence is not observed? McOrmond doesn’t address this question directly, but the best poems of Primer struggle with the idea of poetic presence and how that presence affects how poets as writers see the world. The question may seem merely academic, but it has an important effect on what and how poets write, and therefore what audiences are asked to read.
When McOrmond veers away, either from precise human observation or occasionally into the too-treacherous world of the prose poem, the results rarely reach the heights of what one might call his “unease” poems. Both forms seem to seduce McOrmond into abandoning two central tenets of the successful poem—the poetic line, and the logic of narrative. When McOrmond is anchored (nautical metaphors abound in this book) to a real human situation he writes beautifully. Unfortunately his freer and more naturalistic work is often incoherent. In the first stanza of a poem called “Flittermouse” McOrmond writes: “High frequency peeps and pops,/telemetry from the twilight zone,/and a soft thwup, thwup, thwup,/part pterodactyl, part Bela/Lugosi in a playful mood,/snapping a wet dishtowel.” Presumably this is supposed to describe a flittermouse, (an archaic term for a bat) and none of what McOrmond writes is factually wrong, but this description without narrative, without a concrete sense of motion or of recounted action prompts this poet into presenting a series of random images that are left for the reader to integrate.The two examples of prose poems also show this tendency towards illogic. Here is the second stanza (paragraph?) from “Haulage”: “At times you feel like freight. Someone’s lost the waybill, you’re waiting to be delivered. Oh, there are drugs. A leather armchair that fits exactly the slouch of your spine. And there are The Goldberg Variations, succinct, austere, in the half-light. The hammer when it strikes the string is not in contact with anything touching the finger.” Aside from the comma-splice in the second sentence ( ! ) how is the reader to make sense of a paragraph that jumps from freight, to drugs, to The Goldberg Variations? Is it unfair to ask just what this moment of prose really means?
When McOrmond sticks to the telling details of narrative history, and his (and perhaps our culture’s) posture of unease he shows himself to be a poet of real and memorable ability. When he drops his refreshing tendency to look at the world askance, and conceeds to what is fasionable, he merely rides with the masses. At such moments one wishes, that like so many others, he hadn’t fallen so far under the long shadow of Ashbery, whose status atop the pyramid of contemporary English-language poets has made his work largely immune to criticism. As McOrmond has shown clearly in Primer on the Hereafter he is quite able to shine by his own light.
Published in The Northern Poetry Review
Posted in Poetry | Tagged Canadian Poetry, Steve McOrmond | Comments Off
Film Review
The Lives of Others
The recent film “The Lives of Others” is one of the best films I’ve seen in a long, long, time. So often my experience with films that have “buzz” is that all the praise being heaped upon the film is so much flim-flam. I remember a number of years ago hearing all about Quentin Tarrantino’s films. Each time one came out, much of the movie-viewing public always went wild. The films were always so entertaining and clever everyone said. When I finally decided to get around to seeing Mr. Tarrantino’s movies, I always came away with the feeling that what everyone had been saying was right—his movies were just that—clever. They were also pretentious and insecure in the worst way—they used violence, juvenile humor, and oblique references to make a kind of pastiche. In the end Tarrantino’s movies, like the worst of Woody Allen’s, are all about himself. Oooh…Tarrantino is so cool.
“The Lives of Others” is nothing like this. I don’t remember the name of the director or the star. Few or none of the actors are brand names. It’s a German movie! No one in North America sees foreign movies anymore. And Americans are allergic to learning anything about life from elsewhere. So all the more reason why “The Lives of Others” is so important. In crossing the boundaries of the expected “The Lives of Others” accomplishes that which is most difficult in art–it reminds us how and why we are human.
In recounting the conversion of an East Berlin Stasi (The East German secret police) agent from obedient functionary to romantic rebel the film shows the extraordinary power of art to change our lives. Captain Wiesler is an interrogator in the Stasi assigned by his superior to bug the home of a theater director suspected of dissident tendencies. Wiesler sets up an elaborate bugging system in the attic of the director’s apartment building that records all the conversations going on below in the director’s apartment. Wiesler listens in on lovemaking, birthdays, get-togethers, and yes, dissident conversations. At first Wiesler is the consummate spy, the perfect observer, always objective and always committed to his duty to root out disloyalty.
But in a move that can only be described as the power of art itself to move us, the conversations and lives unfolding below become a piece of theater and Wiesler, the watcher, is slowly pulled out of his objectivity to fall in love with the characters whose lives are unreeling beneath him. Their own terrors and fears and sadnesses finally begin to affect Wiesler’s own outlook, and we begin to see his own terrible loneliness and the emptiness that marks his life. As Wiesler watches those below him, we watch him, sharing in the powerful drama.
Posted in Film | Tagged Quentin Tarrantino | Leave a Comment »
Poetry Review
The Human Cannonball
by Halli Villegas
At its best the despair of others reminds us of the persistence of happiness. When we watch or hear of suffering we may be lucky enough to recognize that for most of us life isn’t so bad. If it’s successful, the sadness artists express soothes our nerves by reminding us that pain is universal. As Elton John put it so succinctly: “Sad songs say so much.” Halli Villegas, in her latest book (believe your own press, 2005) The Human Cannonball, uses this phenomenon to build a short but affecting collection told in the voice of some of our greatest sufferers—circus performers.
Villegas’ collection recalls the once great but now mostly forgotten poetic masterpiece, Edgar Lee Master’s Spoon River Anthology. Like that work Villegas’ book creates a microcosmic society (for Masters’ the imaginary Spoon River, Illinois) and through the interplay of poetic voices shows the foibles and falsities we all participate in. The power of such writing, whether by Masters or Villegas, is that it doesn’t take long for us to recognize in these poetic voices some aspect of ourselves. When Villegas writes: “I saw the hesitation./He held the pose for a heartbeat longer than usual/his arm went a little higher/his hand trembled a bit,” in the poem “The Knife Thrower’s Wife,” she subtly evokes the double-edge of true passion, the terrible proximity of love and hate.
Villegas calls these “narrative poems,” and she is right to do so; they tell intimate and affecting stories. However, while Villegas gains from her narratives much of the power of fiction to make complete worlds for us, her poems correspondingly suffer from the curse of prosodists—indifference to the poetic line. Since the disappearance of rhyme and/or meter as essential structures of verse, the question of what constitutes a vital poetic line has been thrown wide open. Being a prescriptivist about this is consequently a good way of displeasing all the people all of the time. Still, in several places: “with misdirection while passing a juicy bit,” from “The Shell Game” or “uncontrollable” and “The trick is,” from “The Lion Tamer,” one wishes Villegas had wrestled a little more with that unruly beast of poetry—the line.
C. Durning Carroll
Word Magazine–March/April 2006
Posted in Poetry | Tagged Canadian Poetry, Halli Villegas | Leave a Comment »
Idea Review
The Need for Moral Relativism
Lorenzo Albacete, a Roman Catholic priest writing in The New York Times, has put forth a fascinating if flawed defense of Pope Benedict XVIth’s encyclical “God is Love”. His commentary correctly states that the resistance of many non-believers to religion centers around the idea of the intolerance of Christianity and other religions. “For them,” Albacete writes:
what makes Christianity potentially dangerous as a source of conflict and intolerance in a pluralistic society is its insistence that faith is reasonable — that is, that it is the source of knowledge about this world and that, therefore, its teaching should apply to all, believers and nonbelievers alike.
We non-believers feel this point acutely. So much of life in the 21st century seems dominated by religion that those of us who are concerned about preserving the democracy of truth are voices crying in the wilderness. Albacete’s point cannot be overemphasized.
The problem comes about when Albacete offers his (Benedict’s) solution to this problem–just ignore it. “In a world where the name of God is sometimes associated with vengeance or even a duty of hatred, this message is both timely and significant,” Benedict writes. “For this reason I wish in my first encyclical to speak of the love which God lavishes upon us, and which we in turn must share with others.”
The article goes on to suggest that the way to respond to these charges is to show that God’s love is truth. The spirit behind such an assertion is noble and well meaning but also ineffective and frankly dangerous, for as long as religions make truth claims their believers will permit themselves all sorts of violent and despicable acts (see my earlier post on the Muhammad cartoons) because they claim to know the truth.
The only way religion can cease being the instigator of violence is to stop being the fount of truth. Only when religions assume a smaller and less important role in our lives will the killing and burning stop. One cannot but believe that it was religion and only religion that allowed the murder of abortion clinic doctors or the horrors of September 11th. The burning of western embassies across the Middle East and the death and destruction in Israel and Palestine are the result of a blind and foolish faith, a conviction that religion equals truth. How ironic that the God that brings comfort to believers should bring so much suffering to the rest of us. Every act of violence committed in the name of religion gives us non-believers a greater determination to harden our hearts to its tyranny.
Perhaps instead of being intolerant of non-believers religions should start being intolerant of the evils that result from belief. How much more effective religions would be if those who feel anger and intolerance directed such anger and intolerance against the source of such intolerance–religion itself. To put it bluntly: why can’t religion put up or shut up? In other words, why can’t religion stop preaching about the sins of others, and start focusing on really making a concrete difference in human lives? Where are those who give up wealth and power for service among the poor? Where are bridges built, the schools renovated, the meals made in silent humility before the wonders of God? What happened to turning the other cheek? Why are those of us skeptical of the claims of religion always drowned in its empty rhetoric?
Religion today is showing itself to be merely an ideology, as full of the arrogance and hypocrisy of other passing fads that grab the mind and give it delusions of grandeur. Why does religion claim so much but do so little? Better I think if religion claimed less, if it had the courage to understand that until it proves itself worthy of the name of truth it is simply one way among others. Since it clearly does much harm it must do relatively more good to be worthy of anything more than disdain.
Posted in Essays | Tagged free speech, moral relativism, Religion | 5 Comments »
Idea Review
(Photo courtesy of the BBC news website)
Recently several newspapers in Europe published cartoons that criticized the prophet Muhammad. Islam prohibits depictions of the Prophet. These papers have been accused of blasphemy and incitement to violence. Such accusations may well be true, but it’s unclear whether that makes the publishers guilty of anything. As several papers have indicated in their editorials, blasphemy in their view is not a crime.
Indeed, one could argue that blasphemy is a responsibilty for any democratic society. As we’ve seen in Egypt with the Muslim Brotherhood and in Palestine with Hamas, Islamic parties are increasingly finding power through the ballot-box. Whether their ultimate aim is to preserve democracy or not is impossible to guess, but there is little doubt that no country can claim to be free or democratically governed by its people unless it allows blasphemy. Religion historically, but today especially, has always thrived on intolerance. Democracy and religion thus exist more or less at cross purposes. Still, many countries in the Middle East and elsewhere are claiming to be democracies while also officially sanctioning intolerance. The calls of such countries for an apology from the papers betrays their totalitarian tendencies. As the Prime Minister of Denmark said when several countries in the Middle East called for an official apology, “I can’t call a newspaper and tell them what to put in it. That’s not how our society works.” Sadly, however, in some of those countries, that is how society works.
This brings me to the second accusation–the incitement to violence. It is true that in the United States and much of the west “hate speech” is not protected. When the sole aim of one’s speaking is incitement, when free speech becomes invidious, then the balance between what is fair and what is right disappears. When free speech violates civil rights then and only then is its restriction permissible in a democratic society—note that I said “permissible,” not mandated or required in any way. Ideally, democratic societies should be strong enough to endure the free exchange of ideas whatever their content. Those who promote hate speech should not be silenced by law but shamed by their societies. Better still, they and all of us, could learn how to express our opinions in a less offensive way.
Could the Muhammad cartoons be considered hate speech? Unlikely. If the scrawny kid on the playground hurls insults at the bully it is not hate speech. Such invective may be foolish but could never be considered immoral. Islam, to put it mildly, is now a bully. Muslims will respond, with great justice, that the West too is a bully. True, the sympathy towards Israel of most Western governments cannot be doubted. But Middle Eastern governments (and tragically many Western muslims as well) fail to see that the western media are NOT organs of their governments; we are not propaganda machines, despite what the Bush administration may desire. Media represent the very essence of freedom in the West—the right to criticize and through criticism, to bring about improvement. So indeed, the call by Islamist governments in the Middle East to stop the criticism is in fact the best sign of why such criticism should continue; they are calling out, begging for criticism. And for any of us to succumb to such threats is to submit to totalitarianism and to yield to tyranny.
See further discussion about this idea here.
Posted in Essays | Tagged free speech, Muhammad Cartoons, Religion | Leave a Comment »
An Essay on the Power of Poetry
For a long time we have believed that the arts are mere accessories in the project of knowledge. Though art may enrich and glorify our lives, many still feel only science can reveal truth. This equivalence of science with truth has existed for so long because science itself has been so vital in shaping modern life. All the infrastructure that surrounds us, from roads and buildings to satellites and mobile phones is the result of our science. From the moment our ancestors sat down to wonder, to figure out their world, they were practicing science. The arts were for leisure time; they were pleasant, perhaps even important, but certainly not necessary. But modern history has changed these conditions. Science has brought comfort, but also death and destruction. Even as it has made our lives better it has also made them more complex. Yet our perception of science as the exclusive progenitor of truth has remained. Among respectable intellectual circles, art is still seen as a profession for neer-do-wells and muddle heads, and art itself as a topic for after dinner conversation, as if it were a sport or a species of politics. Science, on the other hand, is viewed as serious work—profitable, useful, and most of all true. But seeing science as the wellspring of truth, as many are still wont to do, excuses its more parlous aspects.
I am not proposing to get rid of science or indeed to deny its importance in our lives. Rather, I want to show that art, and in particular poetry, deserves serious consideration as being important in revealing truth. Such a change in mindset can help us to deal with a world whose physical and social aspects are constantly changing, and pull us out of the rigid intellectual conformity that scientific thinking demands. For by associating truth exclusively with science we form a world-view that blinds us to science’s limitations. All that is good in the world comes to be associated with this world-view, while evil becomes assoicated with every other.
The primary guardians of the scientific world-view are philosophers. To most of us, these people are terribly remote academics scribbling obsure treatises on irrelvant subjects. Certainly, there is some truth to this perception—most of don’t read monographs on Schopenhauer along with our morning paper. Nevertheless, how we form our view of the world determines much of how we behave, and the nature of philosophy, its tendency to take all of knowledge as its object of study, gives it an influence far beyond what one might expect. Indeed, because philosophy takes as its central concern questions of language, specifically with how we understand the world through the medium of language, it is the quintessential subject for determining world-views. It is widely, indeed almost universally, accepted that to understand the world we must understand how we use language.
The Scientific World View
The scientific world-view has a rather inflexible view of language. In its perspective language is a tool which serves to convey human requests, commands, or practical information; language has no expressive function. Determining the meaning of a sentence is equivalent to understanding the logical form of the sentence. A sentence whose logical form can be deciphered e.g. “A chair is for sitting,” is meaningful, whereas one whose logic is contradictory e.g. “The floor is over my head,” is considered meaningless, and therefore not worth talking about. Even in the most flexible interpretations, language still is seen by these analytic philosophers as essentially functional (designed to do something) and governed by precise rules. The task of philosophy, according to their interpretation, is to elucidate the ways in which we are misled by linguistic and grammatical ambiguities into misunderstanding the true logical form of a sentence. Once this is done, so the theory goes, all philosophical problems go away.
Analytic philosophy is the handmaiden of science. It justifies and defends the methodology of science against its detractors. Accordingly analytic philosophy supports a scientific world-view that sees sentences as very similar to equations, and that views the world as a series of problems suceptible to a solution. After all, science has been hugely successful in improving our lives; its predictive power has been demonstrated in case after case. It is therefore normal that it would have a considerable influence on our world-views and on philosophy. But any system of thought can be pushed too far, can be asked to explain matters that are beyond its scope. This is what has happened with science. Its method of reasoning is extremely useful for a wide variety of problems dealing with the physical world. From a strictly philosophical point of view, analytic philosophy is useful for providing a conceptual underpinning for the discoveries of modern science.
But many scientists and practitioners of this philosophy, understandably delighted at the influence of their disciplines, have gone overboard in their exuberance. They have tried to apply analytic concepts of language to all aspects of human relations. Though some statements, such as those that require the performance of an action or a concrete response can validly be dealt with through logical analysis, there is a whole range of what might be called emotive statements— sentences that express emotion, whose intention makes proper logical analysis impossible. Analytic philosophers, in their presumption, assume either that such statements have no philosophical importance, or that they in fact are or contain analytic satements and thus can be dealt with rationally.
Groundwork for a Poetic Metaphysics
Emotive statements are important, however, because emotions clearly affect how we percieve and interact with the world. Nevertheless, they absolutely cannot be dealt with analytically. Indeed, much trouble is caused by the false claim of rationalists that such irrational statements don’t really say anything. It leads to the false conclusion that expressive language is incapable of expressing anything worthy of a solution. This kind of attitude only makes the problem worse. Emotive statements understandably perplex traditional philosophers for philosophers have always been wedded to rationality. If a philosophical problem has no obviouly rational solutions, philosophers feel that their only option is to deny that there is any problem. They seem totally incapable of accepting the importance of the non-rational in human life.
But is there room for a non-rational component in our search for truth? Most philosophical analyses would begin by searching for what we have in common in our perception. If you and I stare at a box, we can probably come to some sort of agreement about size, color, shape, and other purely physical attributes. Most philosophical analyses assume that you and I are perceiving the same thing. There is, however, no particular reason to believe this assumption, for beyond the purely physical attributes, our indiviudal experience of a box may be totally different. Perhaps at some time in your past, you were locked in a box similar to the one we are discussing, and so for you boxes are an unpleasant reminder of that former experience, while for me boxes remain merely containers. When you see a box you begin to shiver, your knees shake, and you turn away in disgust. Since our experience of the object is totally different, the way in which we interact with this object will also be different. Though functionally you and I may use the box for identical purposes—storing things—our actual experience of the box remains colored by our individual experience with this object.
What applies to objects here also applies to persons and situations, i.e. to all lived life. There is absolutely no reason to believe that any two people who are exposed to identical phenomena will experience the same phenomena. The histories of the two people will be different and so the meaning of the experience, whatever it may be, will also be different. The individuals may not be able to express this difference; they may not even be aware of the difference, but because of different histories, it will be there. Granted, there will be some overlap in how the experience is described; common sense argues for common ground and is necessary for scientific analysis, but it is false to automatically assume, as science and analytic philosophy do, that similarity equals equivalence.
Language
Language is the mirror of our experience. We learn the word table by being exposed to the thing; we learn happiness and sadness by being exposed to them. But again, while you and I may be able to agree on a thing called table, and about many of its attributes, our actual experience of tables will be quite different. So though we may have the same dictionary meaning for the word table, there will be elements of meaning we have as individuals, that won’t be part of any dictionary meaning. And though the dictionary meaning may be close enough to communicate and to do scientific work, it is manifestly false to say that such a definition is in any way true.
The way in which we use the word truth is the key to understanding how we use language. If we use truth in a merely analytical and objective sense then all the things that conform to truth, and all the meanings of words will also be analytical and objective. Conversely, if we take truth to be individual or subjective, then conformity to truth will have that character instead. A commonsense evaluation of truth, however, should lead us to an intermediate position—most phenomena have some obejctive level of truth and some subjective level of truth. It is true that we can agree that the table is black, but it isn’t black at all times or from all angles. As a practical matter the table may appear black, but subjectively it sometimes isn’t. And the character of the word truth here is the character of all other words as well—they contain both an obejctive and a subjective part. Of course, philosophy has long paid attention only to the objective part while assuming the subjective part either doesn’t exist or isn’t important. But we see now that philosophy has been in error for a long time.
If the meaning of words is partly subjectively determined, then all larger syntactical structures will also have some subjective component. Since words are the foundation of sentences, subjective words make for subjective sentences which make for subjective writing. The fact that people interpret texts in different ways is the surest sign of this phenomenon. What we must break is the old habit that sees truth only as what is common between people. Truth is really composed of a considerable level of agreement about our perceptions with some essential element of disagreement.
Poetry in the Service of Truth
The function of art is simple enough—to remind us that truth is always partially subjective. Art does do this, and if it did this alone, it would still have enormous value in a society subjected to the juggernaut of scientfic thinking, but art does more by actually creating or manifesting subjective truth. What we see and know objectively is often obvious, whereas the subjective is equally vital, but often unknown or hidden. It is the function of art, and in particular of poetry, to bring to our consciousness that which is hidden, the element of truth that is forgotten in our passion for analysis. Poetry keeps the mind awake because it forces us to examine our linguistic presuppositions. It is the art of language par excellence because it focuses its effects less on individuals or on action than on how we construe meaning. It takes the philosopher’s analytic project and turns it on its head—philosophical problems are not the result of a failure to perceive the correct logical structure, but are rather a result of the failure to see the limits of analysis. The poem then, forces us to confront the reality that not all statements can be logically analyzed, and in so doing, it brings forth the truth, which had been hidden or mistakenly assumed to be found by the analytic philosophers.
Poetry is uniquely suited to the exposition of truth. If we communicate about and understand our world in a primarily linguistic fashion, then poetry automatically becomes an important means to achieve this end. The poem takes the language and logic of the analysts and twists them around so that sentences retain meaning but cease to be amenable to logical analysis. To take just one example well known to philosophers: Silent green dreams sleep furiously. Logically of course, this sentence has no meaning since dreams do not sleep. Yet it would be equally false to say that the sentence is meaningless; rather it has a meaning whose meaning cannot be explained logically. But it is indubitably false to say that if this sentence can’t be explained logically then it has no meaning; that itself is illogical. When a sentence cannot be explained logically then that is all that can be concluded. The genius of the poem is that it opens up our notions of what “makes sense” to something beyond the merely analytical. Logic is confining and restricting; it deals well with those parts of the world where we agree, but it is incapable of explaining our sudden wild flights of fancy, our inspirations, our loves. The poem as a work of art is free to throw out the conventions of logic, or at least to reinterpret them in the service of truth.
Poetry completes our true picture of the world. Science is there to sketch the broad outlines, to show us what the world is like in general for most people most of the time. But poetry gives us the proper picture, brings the world into focus, and lets us see that what we thought was the absolute truth was in fact just the merest outline, the shadow of the real. A true picture of our world includes both science and poetry. One, science, sketches the figure, the other, poetry, gives it mass, shape and presence. Only together do they form truth.
Posted in Essays | Tagged philosophy of literature, Poetry, truth | Leave a Comment »
But great poets often produce mediocre work, bad poets can be surprisingly good, and very good poets are frequently no better than consistently above average – all of which is to say that it’s far more difficult to isolate “great poetry” than Kleinzahler (and most critics) might like to believe. We’re forced to live with a chaos of styles and a muddle of best guesses.
From David Orr: New York Times 11/13/2005
Posted in Poetry | Tagged philosophy, Poetry | Leave a Comment »
Idea Review
David Horowitz and The Academic Bill of Rights
David Horowitz, who’s become infamous in academic circles for his so-called “Academic Bill of Rights” repeats more nonsense in a recent piece in The LA Times. I have several responses to “Ideologues at the Lectern.” The first part of my response, as I’ve stated before, is to wonder whether Horowitz’s Academic Bill of Rights applies to specifically religious instituions like Wheaton College that claim Christianity as incontrovertible truth. (And incidentally make faculty members to take a pledge that they agree with such a view.) Of course Wheaton and these other institutions are private, and one could argue that the fact that students pay tuition exempts them from Horowitz’s ideological diversity requirements. But in fact, as many students attending private colleges recieve some form of governmental aid, even if only in the form of a subsidized loan, the distinction between private and public institutions is rendered somewhat moot. Yet Horowitz’s failure to cite examples of bias at obviously right-wing institutions makes him look like a hypocrite.
Secondly, Horowitz’s article, and indeed the whole thrust of his argument, is predicated on the idea of some sort of liberal conspiracy in academia that operates to keep conservatives out. While it can’t be denied that liberals populate academia in considerable numbers, Horowitz doesn’t convincingly show that this is anything but the result of faculties trying to hire the best person for the job. Either academia is a free market and the result obtained (many liberals) is the correct result of this market’s invisible hand, or it isn’t a free market, and then institutions like tenure, teacher’s unions, and other conservative bêtes-noirs, aren’t really a problem. However you look at it, the intervention of the Academic Bill of Rights is unjustified. Horowitz wants to have it both ways–because academia delivers a result he finds displeasing he uses the rhetorical red-herring of free markets to engage in a very non free market intervention.
Third, one could argue that the situation of being a liberal in the United States today is analogous to being a conservative student at a liberal university. The unfortunate student who has to listen to anti-Bush professors is not very different from the liberal who has to listen to (and live under laws made by) conservatives. Now that all three branches of government are clearly in conservative hands do we need a Citizen’s Bill of Rights that mandates a certain number of liberals to offset this conservative juggernaut? Of course not. Horowitz could trot out the old saw of students paying for their education and therefore having rights to have their views represented, but I pay taxes too.
Posted in Ideas | Tagged David Horowitz, education, free speech | Leave a Comment »
Idea Review
Michiko Kakutani’s: “Bending the Truth in A Million Little Ways”
The New York Times has a very interesting article on the Million Little Pieces brouhaha by the inimitable Michiko Kakutani. Her article, called “Bending The Truth in a Million Little Ways” talks about a lot of issues that interest me–truth, lies, objectivity, the status of literature, etc. Ms. Kakutani is no fool and is certainly widely read, but her training as a journalist (despite a degree in English from Yale) leads her to leave us with the impression that the end of objectivity is a recent phenomenon stemming from something rotten in the kingdom, e.g. reality t.v., navel gazing, the “me” generation, psychoanalysis, academia, etc. In point of fact, memoirs were never about objectivity and the blurring of fact and fiction is probably as old as storytelling itself. I’ve been reading and thinking about Rousseau’s Confessions as some of you know, and am at the moment also reading Wordsworth’s The Prelude, or The Growth of a Poet’s Mind.
What strikes me about these autobiographical works (essentially memoirs–or maybe indeed an autobiography is somehow not a “memoir”) is that they are both attempts at self-justification. I would argue that there is a straight line to be traced between Augustine’s Confessions and A Million Little Pieces. I haven’t read the latter and read the former so many years ago it’s now all blurred in my memory, but if these fit the pattern of Rousseau’s Confessions and The Prelude then they are extended excuses for various forms of illicit behavior. What they all do (I say this of course without having them fresh in my mind) is create a subjective ground for morality and then invent various means for redemption–the church, nature, confession itself, etc. Wordsworth even reminds us of how little he has fallen! The purpose of the memoir, I would argue against Ms. Kakutani, is not about the recounting of facts but rather a tool for forgiveness and social re-integration. Ms. Kakutani’s article suggests in a misleading way that if only we all stopped lying something called “objective truth” would suddenly shine out from under the grime of rhetoric.
Truth—and nobody really wants to say this—is hard work. Whether in science—supposedly the preserve of objective truth, but once again shown to be quite subjective by the Korean experimenter who suceeded in passing a fabrication to the normally sedulous Science—or in literature, a serious dose of humility and an iterative process that works and works again to call into question what is passed for “truth” is vitally important. Political liberals, poets, and many academics get skewered for supposedly making truth subjective and relative, but I think this is to misunderstand what they/we are saying. I recall Kurosawa’s movie Rashomon and its seven different versions of reality. Somewhere behind all those scenes there’s something vital called truth, but you’d be a fool to claim that one version or the other is in fact the truth.
Posted in Ideas | Tagged Autobiography, truth | Leave a Comment »
Poetry Review
Dan Chiasson
Natural History
Note, for example, the recent success of Dan Chiasson whose recent book Natural History is being lauded in poetry circles. Dan first “broke out” with a selection of poems in The New Yorker on “emerging poets.” His first book–well reviewed–was published by a good university press–University of Chicago. Natural History is from Knopf, perhaps the best commercial poetry press in North America.
Now Dan writes a good line, even quite a good line, but I’m not convinced that he’s a Wallace Stevens, for example. What Dan does seem to have (and forgive me if I’m letting my jealousy show just a tad) is simplicity. I mean by this that the poem easily gives up its meaning and emotion. Dan’s poems are never hard. They are great value-for-your-money poems. They are rarely long, generally unpretentious, and often clever–important qualities for readers who don’t generally like poetry.
Posted in Poetry | Tagged Dan Chiasson, Natural History, Poetry, review | Leave a Comment »
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