I'm quite interested in the way concepts from mystical belief systems persist in post-Enlightenment discourses of reason. I pointed out in a previous post what I saw as a coincidence between the neo-Platonic mysticism of Nicholas of Cusa and the Romantic aesthetic expounded by the likes of Keats. No surprises there, I suppose, given that the Romantic project was self-consciously anti-Enlightenment and retrogressive.
Even after the necessary failure of Romanticism, theorists and philosophers in the Western-Cartesian tradition often cite mystical or occult sources for concepts, but almost always in dismissive fashion, as if a concept can only have life once it has been brought fully into the light of reason.
The irony of this is striking, since the dominant metaphor of the post-Enlightenment project is, of course, light. So how can night reassert itself as a positively-valorized metaphor within this structure, without (apparently) disrupting the balance? This is not a case of yin-yang dualism, natural harmony, all that jazz; but of the strange persistence of a concept that by rights ought to have been sublated into a dominant discourse with which it is wholly incompatible.
Maybe this is simply a case of the natural tendency for an idea to reassert itself in its opposite (whether on the model of Heraclitus or Hegel). Hence the need to reappropriate discourses that challenge our own model of the history of thought, and seem to have no place in the narrative of this development -- occult mysticism to modern eyes being seen as an anomaly in the Renaissance world, a throwback to Dark-Ages unreason and barbarism. I'm sure this is not a new insight, or even one particularly worth dwelling upon. But I certainly would be interested to dig deeper into the subject.
Anyway, in this vein, the casting of night/darkness as a positive concept that goes beyond the conventional dualist valorization, seems to chart this continuity quite well. So I thought I'd note down a few instances of this metaphor I've come across in my reading. My interest in this is purely intellectual, which is to say: I do not buy into any of this stuff; but, some of these scraps make for great poetry.
Hegel, whose thought was of course influenced in no small measure by Hermetic mysticism, has this, of human subjectivity:
The human being is this night, this empty nothing, that contains everything in its simplicity—an unending wealth of many presentations, images, of which none happens to occur to him—or which are not present. This night, the inner of nature, that exists here— pure self—in phantasmagorical presentations, is night all around it, here shoots a bloody head—there another white shape, suddenly here before it, and just so disappears. One catches sight of this night when one looks human beings in the eye—into a night that becomes awful, it suspends the night of the world here in an opposition. In this night being has returned.
(from the Realphilosophie manuscript of 1805–06)
Blanchot, whose thought was of course influenced in no small measure by Hegel, has this, of the space of literature:
I discover my being in the vertiginous abyss where it is not, an absence, an absence where it sets itself like a god, I am not and I endure. An inexorable future stretches forth infinitely for this suppressed being. …Here is the night. The darkness hides nothing. My first perception is that this night is not a provisional absence of light. Far from being a possible locus of images, it is composed of all that which is not seen and is not heard, and, listening to it, even a man would know that, if he were not a man, he would hear nothing. In true night, then, the unheard, the invisible are lacking, all those things that make the night habitable. It does not allow anything other than itself to be attributed to it; it is impenetrable.
(Thomas the Obscure, 1941)
Slavoj Zizek reads Hegel's 'night of the world' in terms of the overwhelming excess or madness at the moment of Cartesian doubt that is at the origin of the self: 'there is no subjectivity without this gesture of withdrawal'; it is the 'undeniable component of the subject's most radical self-experience', located in the gap between natural and symbolic orders. On another topic (deep focus and lighting in the films of Orson Welles), he has this:
A further point to be made about the Wellesian use of the depth of field, is that it confers a kind of positive ontological density on darkness and shades: when, in an "expressionistic" shot, we perceive in the background an overilluminated object, surrounded on both sides by the impenetrable dark shades, this darkness is no longer simply the negative of the positively existing things, but in a way "more real than real objects themselves" -- it stands for the dimension of primordial density of matter, out of which definite objects (temporarily) emerge.
(Cogito and the Unconscious, 1998)
George Chapman (y'know, the one Keats admired for being good at baseball), went at it in his Hymnus in noctem:
Great Goddesse to whose throne in Cynthian fires,
This earthlie Alter endlesse fumes exspires,
Therefore, in fumes of sighes and fires of griefe,
To fearefull chances thou sendst bold reliefe,
Happie, thrise happie Type, and nurse of death;
Who breathlesse, feedes on nothing but our breath,
In whom must vertue and her issue liue,
Or dye for euer, now let humor giue
Seas to mine eyes, that I may quicklie weepe
The shipwracke of the world: or let soft sleepe
(Binding my sences) lose my working soule,
That in her highest pitch, she may controule
The court of skill, compact of misterie,
Wanting but franchisement and memorie
To reach all secrets.
(The Shadow of Night, 1594)
For Chapman, Night stands for melancholy inspiration (Frances Yates established this in her book on The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age, with a brilliant reading of the poem in conjunction with Dürer's Melancholia I engraving).
Incidentally, Novalis -- Romantic, of course, but a Thoroughly Modern polymath of a man -- was quite clearly (to my mind) influenced by Chapman's poem when he wrote his Hymns to the Night:
Once when I was shedding bitter tears, when, dissolved in pain, my hope was melting away, and I stood alone by the barren mound which in its narrow dark bosom hid the vanished form of my life -- lonely as never yet was lonely man, driven by anxiety unspeakable -- powerless, and no longer anything but a conscious misery. -- As there I looked about me for help, unable to go on or to turn back, and clung to the fleeting, extinguished life with an endless longing: -- then, out of the blue distances -- from the hills of my ancient bliss, came a shiver of twilight -- and at once snapt the bond of birth -- the chains of the Light. Away fled the glory of the world, and with it my mourning -- the sadness flowed together into a new, unfathomable world -- Thou, Night-inspiration, heavenly Slumber, didst come upon me -- the region gently upheaved itself; over it hovered my unbound, newborn spirit.
(Auf Krautspiel)
Back in the day, thinkers steeped in negative theology were always quite keen on 'darkness above reason', equivalent to the nox of Orphic mysticism.
Trinity! Higher than any being,
any divinity, any goodness!
Guide of Christians
in the wisdom of heaven!
Lead us up beyond unknowing and light,
up to the farthest, highest peak
of mystic scripture,
where the mysteries of God's Word
lie simple, absolute and unchangeable
in the brilliant darkness of a hidden silence.
Amid the deepest shadow
they pour overwhelming light
on what is most manifest.
Amid the wholly unsensed and unseen
they completely fill our sightless minds
with treasures beyond all beauty.
[...]
I pray we could come to this darkness so far above light! If only we lacked sight and knowledge so as to see, so as to know, unseeing and unknowing, that which lies beyond all vision and knowledge.
(Pseudo-Dionysius, The Mystical Theology, 5th century).
Interesting enough, I suppose. But 'tis strange: and oftentimes, to win us to our harm, the instruments of darkness tell us truths, win us with honest trifles, to betray us in deepest consequence...
May 26, 2006
May 23, 2006
Photo of Marilyn Monroe reading Ulysses
Here is a photograph of Marilyn Monroe reading Ulysses:
"Marilyn on Long Island (New York) Reading James Joyce's Ulysses" by Eve Arnold (1955)
"Marilyn on Long Island (New York) Reading James Joyce's Ulysses" by Eve Arnold (1955)
May 19, 2006
In praise of Pygmalion's frenzy
Here, therefore, is the first distemper of learning, when men study words and not matter; whereof, though I have represented an example of late times, yet it hath been and will be SECUNDUM MAJUS ET MINUS in all time. And how is it possible but this should have an operation to discredit learning, even with vulgar capacities, when they see learned men's works like the first letter of a patent, or limned book; which though it hath large flourishes, yet is but a letter? It seems to me that Pygmalion's frenzy is a good emblem or portraiture of this vanity: for words are but the images of matter; and except they have life of reason and invention, to fall in love with them is all one as to fall in love with a picture.
Thus far Francis Bacon, in The Advancement of Learning (1605).
Bacon slyly calls Pygmalion's frenzy 'a good emblem or portraiture of this vanity', thus making his own example take on the character of a vain surface representation of the thing itself, making of his own writing a trompe-l'oeil that trips the reader into a dizzying downward spiral. To pursue the thought is to play out the very fall of thought he warns against. He ushers the reader away from the Pygmalion myth itself and towards what is signified, as if to say: do not attend too closely to the fitness of the figure here, do not -be distracted by the story: it is but an emblem; the thing signified is what matters.
I've always thought that the best method for getting at what a writer is really saying is to look to his qualifying clauses. And here we have a good one: falling in love with words is vanity, except they have life of reason and invention. But don't words always have that life beyond our reason and invention? We must attend to the surface of language. By that I don't necessarily mean the material character of the word, which is Bacon's problem with the art of limning (manuscript illumination) – although that, undeniably, is part of it, and not to be overlooked – but the semblances of language, its textures and contours.
The moral and aesthetic implications of sexual relations with artworks I recently had occasion to discuss on fearful_syzygy's blog. Those who attend only to surface appearance risk being deceived (or being listed on the sex offenders register), from Pygmalion to Narcissus to the birds that peck at the painted grapes of Apelles (or was it Zeuxis?). And of course, sexual desire of the more conventional sort is just as deceptive, for as Lucretius put it, the lover cannot penetrate the surface of things, and is frustrated in the attempt to 'rub off' atoms from the body of the beloved: 'Venus deludes with idol-images / The lovers. Nor they cannot sate their lust / By merely gazing on the bodies, nor / They cannot with their palms and fingers rub / Aught from each tender limb, the while they stray / Uncertain over all the body' (sic in amore Venus simulacris ludit amantis, / nec satiare queunt spectando corpora coram / nec manibus quicquam teneris abradere membris / possunt errantes incerti corpore toto). Ay, there's the rub.
But they also might meet with success, and staying on the surface might allow us to go further and deeper than forcible penetration.
Here I am not talking about the Romantic view of the natural world, the demand that we contemplate the face of nature as a kind of moral imperative, as opposed to the natural philosophers who 'murder to dissect'. No, it will not be enough to range over the surface merely watching and receiving, without disturbing the ground, without 'misshaping the beauteous form of things' at least a bit.
To get back to the Pygmalion story itself, or rather Ovid's account of it, from which Bacon was so keen to deflect attention: this is the story of an artist whose skill was so great that he himself could not distinguish between the semblance of a form and the form itself (happily, in Latin, form is beauty, forma). His art went so far as to conceal itself behind his art (ars adeo latet arte sua). The agent of the change from ivory to flesh is apparently Venus (aurea Venus – golden Venus – perhaps a semblance of a form, a statue, herself), to whom Pygmalion prayed at the feast of the goddess. But Ovid's description of the transformation suggests that the artist himself is the one to effect the change: the ivory grows soft to his touch, just as Hymettian wax becomes workable at the thumb of the artisan. By attending to form, semblance, the beauty of the surface, Pygmalion has succeeded in making art real, and profound.
So Bacon’s account of Pygmalion’s frenzy, of an excess of attention paid to the surface over the depth, to signifier over signified or sign over referent, is compromised. The point of Ovid’s Pygmalion story is precisely that there is no depth to the representation, there is no referent beyond this work of art, so it would be impossible to penetrate beneath the surface to the ‘meaning’ that gives it form. Pygmalion’s statue is modelled upon no real woman – indeed, no woman this beautiful could be born (qua femina nasci nulla potest) – so it is in the world by no other agency and with no other referential support than that of the creative consciousness (read: desire) of the artist.
So often in Ovid, the visual and plastic arts stand for poetry, and here in particular, the substitution is easily made. It is language that can deal in pure reflexive representation better than all the other arts. Claims like this are the kind of thing Bacon was – rightly – suspicious of, the 'vermiculate questions' of the Schoolmen, who could spin flimsy cobwebs of substanceless words. But language is vermiculate and cobwebby, by its very nature. To attempt to attain to its substance, to grasp at the silvery threads of the dew-soaked cobweb as it catches the moonlight, is to destroy it. Better to make webs of our own, living texts into whose surfaces we may read an energic, generative potentiality.
Thus far Francis Bacon, in The Advancement of Learning (1605).
Bacon slyly calls Pygmalion's frenzy 'a good emblem or portraiture of this vanity', thus making his own example take on the character of a vain surface representation of the thing itself, making of his own writing a trompe-l'oeil that trips the reader into a dizzying downward spiral. To pursue the thought is to play out the very fall of thought he warns against. He ushers the reader away from the Pygmalion myth itself and towards what is signified, as if to say: do not attend too closely to the fitness of the figure here, do not -be distracted by the story: it is but an emblem; the thing signified is what matters.
I've always thought that the best method for getting at what a writer is really saying is to look to his qualifying clauses. And here we have a good one: falling in love with words is vanity, except they have life of reason and invention. But don't words always have that life beyond our reason and invention? We must attend to the surface of language. By that I don't necessarily mean the material character of the word, which is Bacon's problem with the art of limning (manuscript illumination) – although that, undeniably, is part of it, and not to be overlooked – but the semblances of language, its textures and contours.
The moral and aesthetic implications of sexual relations with artworks I recently had occasion to discuss on fearful_syzygy's blog. Those who attend only to surface appearance risk being deceived (or being listed on the sex offenders register), from Pygmalion to Narcissus to the birds that peck at the painted grapes of Apelles (or was it Zeuxis?). And of course, sexual desire of the more conventional sort is just as deceptive, for as Lucretius put it, the lover cannot penetrate the surface of things, and is frustrated in the attempt to 'rub off' atoms from the body of the beloved: 'Venus deludes with idol-images / The lovers. Nor they cannot sate their lust / By merely gazing on the bodies, nor / They cannot with their palms and fingers rub / Aught from each tender limb, the while they stray / Uncertain over all the body' (sic in amore Venus simulacris ludit amantis, / nec satiare queunt spectando corpora coram / nec manibus quicquam teneris abradere membris / possunt errantes incerti corpore toto). Ay, there's the rub.
But they also might meet with success, and staying on the surface might allow us to go further and deeper than forcible penetration.
Here I am not talking about the Romantic view of the natural world, the demand that we contemplate the face of nature as a kind of moral imperative, as opposed to the natural philosophers who 'murder to dissect'. No, it will not be enough to range over the surface merely watching and receiving, without disturbing the ground, without 'misshaping the beauteous form of things' at least a bit.
To get back to the Pygmalion story itself, or rather Ovid's account of it, from which Bacon was so keen to deflect attention: this is the story of an artist whose skill was so great that he himself could not distinguish between the semblance of a form and the form itself (happily, in Latin, form is beauty, forma). His art went so far as to conceal itself behind his art (ars adeo latet arte sua). The agent of the change from ivory to flesh is apparently Venus (aurea Venus – golden Venus – perhaps a semblance of a form, a statue, herself), to whom Pygmalion prayed at the feast of the goddess. But Ovid's description of the transformation suggests that the artist himself is the one to effect the change: the ivory grows soft to his touch, just as Hymettian wax becomes workable at the thumb of the artisan. By attending to form, semblance, the beauty of the surface, Pygmalion has succeeded in making art real, and profound.
So Bacon’s account of Pygmalion’s frenzy, of an excess of attention paid to the surface over the depth, to signifier over signified or sign over referent, is compromised. The point of Ovid’s Pygmalion story is precisely that there is no depth to the representation, there is no referent beyond this work of art, so it would be impossible to penetrate beneath the surface to the ‘meaning’ that gives it form. Pygmalion’s statue is modelled upon no real woman – indeed, no woman this beautiful could be born (qua femina nasci nulla potest) – so it is in the world by no other agency and with no other referential support than that of the creative consciousness (read: desire) of the artist.
So often in Ovid, the visual and plastic arts stand for poetry, and here in particular, the substitution is easily made. It is language that can deal in pure reflexive representation better than all the other arts. Claims like this are the kind of thing Bacon was – rightly – suspicious of, the 'vermiculate questions' of the Schoolmen, who could spin flimsy cobwebs of substanceless words. But language is vermiculate and cobwebby, by its very nature. To attempt to attain to its substance, to grasp at the silvery threads of the dew-soaked cobweb as it catches the moonlight, is to destroy it. Better to make webs of our own, living texts into whose surfaces we may read an energic, generative potentiality.
May 13, 2006
The somehow may be thishow
Over the last week or so I've been reading Browning's great epic, The Ring and the Book, a remarkable work about guilt, interpretation, the role of Art, and the fullness of a truth that might emerge from the emptiness of words.
There are two dialectical processes at work in The Ring and the Book: at the outermost level of the narrative, there is the interaction of the bare fact of the story (the gold) and the creative consciousness of the poet (the working of the alloyed gold), which synthesizes into the 'truth' of the book (the ring); and, at the intradiegetic level, the inter-metastasis of the one extreme of public opinion with the other, which resolves into the (perhaps unsatisfactory) conclusion of the legal case. It is important not to lose sight of this doubleness in our reading of the book.
At the level of the murder case, the 'plot' of the story if you like, the possibility of a final resolution seems to be undermined from the very start, as we know we are to be presented with several contradictory and inconsistent versions of the same events. Is the only way free of the bind to pronounce such 'double verdicts' as were favoured, apparently, in the Roman courts? To side with the speaker of the Tertium quid, who can only argue in utramque partem, who can only deal in on-the-other-hands and neither-and-boths? To hope to get by with 'a word and a wink', to dismiss with supercilious mockery any possibility of resolution, and to say, with him, that:
Law’s a machine from which, to please the mob,
Truth the divinity must needs descend
And clear things at the play’s fifth act—aha!
Perhaps not.
After all, the fact of the case is not in doubt: the accused is guilty, the victim innocent. Browning does not lead the reader down the blind alley of relativistic subjectivism. Whence, then, the conclusion that is drawn at the second dialectical level, the 'lesson, that our human speech is naught, / Our human testimony false, our fame / And human estimation words and wind'? Truth takes many forms, and very often the truth of the matter is in the matter's distortion: it ends up being 'the same and not the same'. The 'fullness' of the truth can be too full, as 'Too vast, too close it clangs in the ear, perhaps; / You’d stand back just to comprehend it more.'
Browning frames the ring metaphor in the first book of the poem. The alloyed gold is fashioned into the shape of a ring by the artisan, and:
[...]self- sufficient now, the shape remains,
The rondure brave, the lilied loveliness,
Gold as it was, is, shall be evermore:
Prime nature with an added artistry—
No carat lost, and you have gained a ring.
What of it? ’Tis a figure, a symbol, say;
A thing’s sign: now for the thing signified.
And what is the thing signified? Poetic truth, no less. 'That Art remains the one way possible / Of speaking truth'. Setting in motion the process of interpretation and counter-interpretation, the poetic word emerges as something in excess of the truth, as something 'more true than truth itself': a gain without a loss.
But the written word, we know, is not a transparent window on the truth: Guido, the murderer, composed incriminating letters for his wife to trace in ink — she was illiterate, and did not know she was writing her own death warrant. And gold itself is not incorruptible, since it also stands for greed (the case itself turns on the mercantile motives of two parties brokering a marriage). The truth of writing is compromised in the very act of writing: as soon as we write, we begin to lie. Some of the most insightful comments on the nature of human truth come in the tenth chapter, the judgement of Pope Innocent:
But when man walks the garden of this world
For his own solace, and, unchecked by law,
Speaks or keeps silence as himself sees fit,
Without the least incumbency to lie,
—Why, can he tell you what a rose is like,
Or how the birds fly, and not slip to false
Though truth serve better?
No, man cannot begin to communicate truths about the world without 'slipping to false'. No deposition, no statement of fact, can tell the truth about human motives and passions; but art, by a process of accretion, in the way it layers language, can say something about the complexity of experience.
Art may tell a truth
Obliquely, do the thing shall breed the thought,
Nor wrong the thought, missing the mediate word.
So may you paint your picture, twice show truth,
Beyond mere imagery on the wall.
What does it mean to 'twice show truth'? I read this to mean that the artistic formulation of a question might enact its own truth, consubstantial with the truth of its conclusions. The truth consists as much in the process of being persuaded as in our persuasions, and meaning is as much in the performance of meaning as it is in itself.
And it is the 'layering of language' as I call it, that gives the poetic word its transfigurative power: not only in the conventional sense that the telling of events from multiple perspectives necessarily gives a fuller, more complex and more adequate version of the facts; but in the sense that the setting of words against one another, the recasting of words in unthought-of contexts, from unseen perspectives, and the continual reconfigurations of the elements of meaning (and even its shadings into falsehood), can structure our readings in new and surprising ways.
Well, now; there’s nothing in nor out o’ the world
Good except truth: yet this, the something else,
What’s this then, which proves good yet seems untrue?
[…] what’s your name for this?
Well, my name for this something else is the layeredness of language, the transfigurative power of the poetic word.
Are means to the end, themselves in part the end?
Is fiction which makes fact alive, fact too?
The somehow may be thishow.
There are two dialectical processes at work in The Ring and the Book: at the outermost level of the narrative, there is the interaction of the bare fact of the story (the gold) and the creative consciousness of the poet (the working of the alloyed gold), which synthesizes into the 'truth' of the book (the ring); and, at the intradiegetic level, the inter-metastasis of the one extreme of public opinion with the other, which resolves into the (perhaps unsatisfactory) conclusion of the legal case. It is important not to lose sight of this doubleness in our reading of the book.
At the level of the murder case, the 'plot' of the story if you like, the possibility of a final resolution seems to be undermined from the very start, as we know we are to be presented with several contradictory and inconsistent versions of the same events. Is the only way free of the bind to pronounce such 'double verdicts' as were favoured, apparently, in the Roman courts? To side with the speaker of the Tertium quid, who can only argue in utramque partem, who can only deal in on-the-other-hands and neither-and-boths? To hope to get by with 'a word and a wink', to dismiss with supercilious mockery any possibility of resolution, and to say, with him, that:
Law’s a machine from which, to please the mob,
Truth the divinity must needs descend
And clear things at the play’s fifth act—aha!
Perhaps not.
After all, the fact of the case is not in doubt: the accused is guilty, the victim innocent. Browning does not lead the reader down the blind alley of relativistic subjectivism. Whence, then, the conclusion that is drawn at the second dialectical level, the 'lesson, that our human speech is naught, / Our human testimony false, our fame / And human estimation words and wind'? Truth takes many forms, and very often the truth of the matter is in the matter's distortion: it ends up being 'the same and not the same'. The 'fullness' of the truth can be too full, as 'Too vast, too close it clangs in the ear, perhaps; / You’d stand back just to comprehend it more.'
Browning frames the ring metaphor in the first book of the poem. The alloyed gold is fashioned into the shape of a ring by the artisan, and:
[...]self- sufficient now, the shape remains,
The rondure brave, the lilied loveliness,
Gold as it was, is, shall be evermore:
Prime nature with an added artistry—
No carat lost, and you have gained a ring.
What of it? ’Tis a figure, a symbol, say;
A thing’s sign: now for the thing signified.
And what is the thing signified? Poetic truth, no less. 'That Art remains the one way possible / Of speaking truth'. Setting in motion the process of interpretation and counter-interpretation, the poetic word emerges as something in excess of the truth, as something 'more true than truth itself': a gain without a loss.
But the written word, we know, is not a transparent window on the truth: Guido, the murderer, composed incriminating letters for his wife to trace in ink — she was illiterate, and did not know she was writing her own death warrant. And gold itself is not incorruptible, since it also stands for greed (the case itself turns on the mercantile motives of two parties brokering a marriage). The truth of writing is compromised in the very act of writing: as soon as we write, we begin to lie. Some of the most insightful comments on the nature of human truth come in the tenth chapter, the judgement of Pope Innocent:
But when man walks the garden of this world
For his own solace, and, unchecked by law,
Speaks or keeps silence as himself sees fit,
Without the least incumbency to lie,
—Why, can he tell you what a rose is like,
Or how the birds fly, and not slip to false
Though truth serve better?
No, man cannot begin to communicate truths about the world without 'slipping to false'. No deposition, no statement of fact, can tell the truth about human motives and passions; but art, by a process of accretion, in the way it layers language, can say something about the complexity of experience.
Art may tell a truth
Obliquely, do the thing shall breed the thought,
Nor wrong the thought, missing the mediate word.
So may you paint your picture, twice show truth,
Beyond mere imagery on the wall.
What does it mean to 'twice show truth'? I read this to mean that the artistic formulation of a question might enact its own truth, consubstantial with the truth of its conclusions. The truth consists as much in the process of being persuaded as in our persuasions, and meaning is as much in the performance of meaning as it is in itself.
And it is the 'layering of language' as I call it, that gives the poetic word its transfigurative power: not only in the conventional sense that the telling of events from multiple perspectives necessarily gives a fuller, more complex and more adequate version of the facts; but in the sense that the setting of words against one another, the recasting of words in unthought-of contexts, from unseen perspectives, and the continual reconfigurations of the elements of meaning (and even its shadings into falsehood), can structure our readings in new and surprising ways.
Well, now; there’s nothing in nor out o’ the world
Good except truth: yet this, the something else,
What’s this then, which proves good yet seems untrue?
[…] what’s your name for this?
Well, my name for this something else is the layeredness of language, the transfigurative power of the poetic word.
Are means to the end, themselves in part the end?
Is fiction which makes fact alive, fact too?
The somehow may be thishow.
May 01, 2006
How to Read Poetry (I)
It is well sometimes to half understand a poem in the same manner that we half understand the world. One of the deepest and strangest of all human moods is the mood which will suddenly strike us perhaps in a garden at night, or deep in sloping meadows, the feeling that every flower and leaf has just uttered something stupendously direct and important, and that we have by a prodigy of imbecility not heard or understood it. There is a certain poetic value, and that a genuine one, in this sense of having missed the full meaning of things. There is beauty, not only in wisdom, but in this dazed and dramatic ignorance.
— G. K. Chesterton (on Robert Browning)
— G. K. Chesterton (on Robert Browning)
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