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A couple of days ago, while delving in the dusty obscurity of the university archives, I came across a 1965 Encyclopedia Britannica reprint entitled, The Year’s Developments in the Arts and Sciences – Literature, authored by Stephen Spender. As 1965 was a watershed year for me—the year I graduated high school and entered the University of Michigan as an English literature major, I brought the little volume back to my desk to read it, and remember.
Stephen Spender’s name, but not really his work, was well known to me. He is described in the front of the booklet as “poet, critic, editor, translator, and lecturer.” That covers a lot of ground. He first provides the reader with a survey of some of the notable novels published in 1964, and then moves on to poetry. Of the novelists covered, I had read at least one novel by several (Saul Bellow, William S. Burroughs, William Golding, Christopher Isherwood, Jack Kerouac, Norman Mailer). Of the rest, I knew the names of some, although I’ve never read any of their works (Louis Auchincloss, John Braine, Anthony Powell, Angus Wilson), while I’d never heard of the others (John Stewart Carter, Elizabeth Taylor, Keith Waterhouse.)
I was sailing right along, enjoying Spender’s insights into the works he was discussing, until I got to Spender's exposition of Jack Kerouac’s Desolation Angels. This happens to be my favorite Kerouac novel. Spender has a few nice things to say about the beginning part of the book, in which Kerouac writes of his alter ego’s stint as a lookout atop a fire tower on Desolation Peak in northwestern Washington. But then Spender, in my humble opinion, loses it:
After 120 pages, however, Kerouac, thinly disguised as a character called Jack Duluoz, descends from the heights to San Francisco, and now we are among the beatniks with their beards and blue jeans; their stage properties of the bed and bottle in the pad; their ritualistic parties; their cult of an incommunicable witless slang with which they wish to communicate with everybody; their resort to alcohol, drugs, and sex, which they regard as Aladdin lamps supposed, after rubbing, to produce the genie of spontaneous utterance; their pretentious anti-intellectual streams of ideas; their name-dropping acquaintance with God, Christ, Buddha; their air of superiority over everyone who is disciplined, intelligent, industrious, humble; their total incapacity to enter into any real interchange of conversation; the tendency of all their activities toward the brawl, the prayer meeting, or the sexual orgy (all and any of which they regard as interchangeable); their lives forever verging on a nonstop party where everyone is proving to everyone else (down to stripping off the last inch of clothing) how natural he is and how spontaneous. Everyone here is a genius, but no one say anything interesting.
[...]
So “uncontrollable involuntary thoughts” become the criterion by which everything is judged. This is so unreliable a standard that Kerouac’s world is one in which people are totally lost, unable to do anything except try to live up to the act of self-conscious spontaneity which is the common pretense of the group.
Spender totally decompensates when faced with that which he cannot understand, and of which he cannot, therefore, approve. Kerouac and his hip friends are not playing the game; they are flouting the rules; and to make the whole thing worse—it works! (Kerouac lives on. But John Stewart Carter?)
Moving on to poetry, Spender laments the recent death of T.S. Eliot. Now Eliot is a man of whom Spender can most certainly and vehemently approve. This, even though Eliot, like Kerouac, has had visions of his world as a “wasteland”:
Eliot, as it were, built critical awareness into his poetry. The reader discovers in the poem the values which support its culture. In T.S. Eliot, critical consciousness of the problem of writing poetry in a fragmented society is inseparable from the act of writing the poem. The conflict between a tragic awareness of the destructive forces and an intellectual determination to construct something affirmative upon their denial is the basic drama of his work, both poetry and prose. [...] What was new in the early Eliot was not the aestheticism but the intensity of his disgust at modern life and his intelligent transfusion of a Baudelarian sensibility into English poetry.
Apparently Kerouac transfused too much Rimbaudian Drunken Boat and too few Flowers of Evil. Tsk. In Spender’s world, the arbitrary must dominate the spontaneous, lest all hell break loose and Saint Stephen be unsure of what’s real. It’s either balls or brains; but never both. Choose one, won't you, please?
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Showing posts with label T.S. Eliot. Show all posts
Showing posts with label T.S. Eliot. Show all posts
Monday, June 21, 2010
Saturday, November 29, 2008
Readings: Connecting Some Dots
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In an afterword to Jane Kenyon’s posthumously published book of poems, Otherwise, her husband, poet Donald Hall, wrote of her poetic development:
During junior high school she began to write poems. Witter Bynner’s translations from the Chinese were an early model.
A bit further on, Hall writes:
Her poetry gathered resonance and beauty as she studied the art of the luminous particular. “The natural object”—she liked to quote Pound—“is always the adequate symbol.”
It is no coincidence that Ezra Pound, like Witter Bynner, did translations of Chinese poetry. It is the craft of the gifted, but hard-working, poet that adds to the natural object that “luminous” quality, transforming it into a universally received symbol. This is analogous to T.S. Eliot’s concept of the objective correlative. It is also that which is the Zen essence of the art of Japanese haiku, of which I have written previously. And this is precisely the quality that has inspired my new-found love of the poetry of Jane Kenyon.
In contemplating these ideas, I was reminded of Walter Pater’s ideal of the “hard, gem like flame,” which has been characterized as “his pursuit of the "highest quality" in "moments as they pass." This state of mind, born of attention, is simultaneously a mode of existence and a mode of expression. Pater, like Donald Hall, was known as an indefatiguable revisionist. The apparent stark simplicity of Jane Kenyon’s poetry is likewise the result of many drafts and revisions. While the idea may come out of nowhere—facilitated by what Kenyon favorite, John Keats, called “negative capability”—in a flash of inspiration, the poem that is finally constructed as a vehicle for that gift of the muse (or Holy Ghost) is the result of hard-earned craft.
Once the mind begins to contemplate such things as “the luminous particular” and the “objective correlative,” examples begin to pop up like mushrooms. Yesterday, for instance, I read Paul Auster’s short novel, Man In the Dark. In this novel there is a character who is (as was often the case with Jane Kenyon) trapped in deep psychological depression. As a coping mechanism she has begun watching movies for hours at a time on DVD. While it is noted by her grandfather that she is using film to self-medicate, he also realizes that she has made a valid observation concerning cinema as an art form when she says:
Inanimate objects as a means of expressing human emotions. That’s the language of film. Only good directors understand how to do it, but Renoir, De Sica, and Ray are three of the best, aren’t they?
There we have “it” as related to film.
Just this morning I drove to the public library to return a book. While there, I was able to borrow Marilynne Robinson’s novel, Home, which I had been waiting for the opportunity to read. On only the second page of the narrative [p.4], I found this excellent example of the natural object as luminous particular:
And there was an oak tree in front of the house, much older than the neighborhood or the town, which made rubble of the pavement at its foot and flung it imponderable branches out over the raod and across the yard, branches whose girths were greater than the trunk of any ordinary tree. There was a torsion in its body that made it look like a giant dervish to them. Their father said if they could see as God can, in geological time, they would see it leap out of the ground and turn in the sun and spread its arms and bask in the joys of being an oak tree in Iowa.
Beautiful. Such writing kinda puts Marilynne Robinson in the same league with Keats, Pound, Eliot, De Sica—and Jane Kenyon—doesn’t it?
_________________________
NOTE: In googling “luminous particular” among the first hits were this and this.
X
In an afterword to Jane Kenyon’s posthumously published book of poems, Otherwise, her husband, poet Donald Hall, wrote of her poetic development:
During junior high school she began to write poems. Witter Bynner’s translations from the Chinese were an early model.
A bit further on, Hall writes:
Her poetry gathered resonance and beauty as she studied the art of the luminous particular. “The natural object”—she liked to quote Pound—“is always the adequate symbol.”
It is no coincidence that Ezra Pound, like Witter Bynner, did translations of Chinese poetry. It is the craft of the gifted, but hard-working, poet that adds to the natural object that “luminous” quality, transforming it into a universally received symbol. This is analogous to T.S. Eliot’s concept of the objective correlative. It is also that which is the Zen essence of the art of Japanese haiku, of which I have written previously. And this is precisely the quality that has inspired my new-found love of the poetry of Jane Kenyon.
In contemplating these ideas, I was reminded of Walter Pater’s ideal of the “hard, gem like flame,” which has been characterized as “his pursuit of the "highest quality" in "moments as they pass." This state of mind, born of attention, is simultaneously a mode of existence and a mode of expression. Pater, like Donald Hall, was known as an indefatiguable revisionist. The apparent stark simplicity of Jane Kenyon’s poetry is likewise the result of many drafts and revisions. While the idea may come out of nowhere—facilitated by what Kenyon favorite, John Keats, called “negative capability”—in a flash of inspiration, the poem that is finally constructed as a vehicle for that gift of the muse (or Holy Ghost) is the result of hard-earned craft.
Once the mind begins to contemplate such things as “the luminous particular” and the “objective correlative,” examples begin to pop up like mushrooms. Yesterday, for instance, I read Paul Auster’s short novel, Man In the Dark. In this novel there is a character who is (as was often the case with Jane Kenyon) trapped in deep psychological depression. As a coping mechanism she has begun watching movies for hours at a time on DVD. While it is noted by her grandfather that she is using film to self-medicate, he also realizes that she has made a valid observation concerning cinema as an art form when she says:
Inanimate objects as a means of expressing human emotions. That’s the language of film. Only good directors understand how to do it, but Renoir, De Sica, and Ray are three of the best, aren’t they?
There we have “it” as related to film.
Just this morning I drove to the public library to return a book. While there, I was able to borrow Marilynne Robinson’s novel, Home, which I had been waiting for the opportunity to read. On only the second page of the narrative [p.4], I found this excellent example of the natural object as luminous particular:
And there was an oak tree in front of the house, much older than the neighborhood or the town, which made rubble of the pavement at its foot and flung it imponderable branches out over the raod and across the yard, branches whose girths were greater than the trunk of any ordinary tree. There was a torsion in its body that made it look like a giant dervish to them. Their father said if they could see as God can, in geological time, they would see it leap out of the ground and turn in the sun and spread its arms and bask in the joys of being an oak tree in Iowa.
Beautiful. Such writing kinda puts Marilynne Robinson in the same league with Keats, Pound, Eliot, De Sica—and Jane Kenyon—doesn’t it?
_________________________
NOTE: In googling “luminous particular” among the first hits were this and this.
X
Monday, April 21, 2008
Reflections: Like Mailer, Like Weil
I have lately been neglecting my devotions to Simone Weil, whom I consider to be the patron saint of this blog. Perhaps, then, it was subconscious guilt over such neglect that caused me, when I read the sentence from Christopher Hitchens’ introduction to his interview with Norman Mailer which I quote below, to have the thought that it might be applied with equal insight to Simone Weil:
His deliberately paradoxical stance of ‘left conservatism’ is offered semi-belligerently as a challenge to those who remain fixed in orthodoxy or correctness.
In musing upon what I might have at hand that would provide authoritative support of this hypothesis, it occurred to me that no lesser conservative saint than T. S. Eliot had written a preface to Weil’s brilliant but disturbing book, The Need for Roots, and that this would be excellent ground to mine for corroboration of my notion. The second sentence of Eliot’s preface seemed to fit the bill:
The reader of her work finds himself confronted by a difficult, violent, and complex personality...
Certainly, this is a statement which could be applied with equal accuracy to Norman Mailer.
A bit further on, Eliot informs us that Fr. Perrin, the Catholic priest who served as Simone Weil’s intimate and sounding-board in her on-going interior disputation with orthodox Catholicism, had opined: Je crois que son âme est incomparablement plus haute que son génie. [I believe that her soul is incomparably superior to her genius.]
This is saying much, as Simone Weil’s genius is vast. But if I might, by way of comparison, interject my own opinion of Mailer here, I would say that transferring this concept from the sphere of religious philosophy to that of creative and expository writing, it can be said of Mailer that his genius was incomparably superior to his talent. In reading Mailer, one has the feeling that through his fiction, and even through his most excellent non-fiction, such as The Armies of the Night, he never quite got it all out. This inexpressible thing that he harbored inside comes through, perhaps, more directly in conversations such as this one with Christopher Hitchens, than it does in his worked and reworked published writings.
Hitchens having commented on the paradox embodied in the thought of Norman Mailer, compare this observation of Eliot's on Weil:
In the work of such a writer we must expect to encounter paradox. …And in her political thinking she appears as a stern critic of both Right and Left; at the same time more truly a lover of order and hierarchy than most of those who call themselves Conservative, and more truly a lover of the people than most of those who call themselves Socialist.
That seems like a pretty fair characterization of a ‘left conservative’ to me. A bit further on, Eliot says:
As a political thinker, as in everything else, Simone Weil is not to be classified. The paradoxicality of her sympathies is a contributing cause of the equilibrium. On the one hand she was a passionate champion of the common people and especially of the oppressed – those oppressed by the wickedness and selfishness of men and those oppressed by the anonymous forces of modern society. ...One the other hand, she was by nature a solitary and an individualist, with a profound horror of what she called the collectivity – the monster created by modern totalitarianism.
Consider the similarity between Eliot’s comprehension of the paradoxical nature of Simone Weil’s philosophy, and this exchange between Christopher Hitchens and Normal Mailer:
Hitchens: I remember you once saying to me that you’d refined your dissidence, you could give it a name, you were now a fully paid up left conservative. Elaborate on that.
Mailer: Well, as you can guess, it’s almost impossible to elaborate on it, because one of the laws of rhetoric is that you cannot elaborate on an oxymoron. And being a left conservative hits most people absolutely that way, they just stop thinking and they look at you aghast.
This is, I think, much the way most people, confronted with the thought of Simone Weil – her person, as well as her philosophy – will react. She is almost too much for us process – intellectually , or emotionally. But if one can only suspend this cognitive disability and immerse oneself in her biography, as well as in her writings, she will repay that act of intellectual charity again and again and again.
[On a personal note, these musings on the supreme exemplars, Weil and Mailer, serve to strengthen my disdain for that orthodox school of culturally conservative thought which understands culture to have reached a peak in some Golden Age prior to the hatching of the poisonous egg containing that monster raptor, Liberalism, which, once hatched, rampages through our world, devouring any and all values in its path. Could they but obtain the means, these intellectual totalitarians would go back, Amish-like, to that pre-Liberal age; they would arrest and bind culture at that point, avoiding all future risk by pinching off the all intellectual evolution in the bud. Stasis is death, not life.]
His deliberately paradoxical stance of ‘left conservatism’ is offered semi-belligerently as a challenge to those who remain fixed in orthodoxy or correctness.
In musing upon what I might have at hand that would provide authoritative support of this hypothesis, it occurred to me that no lesser conservative saint than T. S. Eliot had written a preface to Weil’s brilliant but disturbing book, The Need for Roots, and that this would be excellent ground to mine for corroboration of my notion. The second sentence of Eliot’s preface seemed to fit the bill:
The reader of her work finds himself confronted by a difficult, violent, and complex personality...
Certainly, this is a statement which could be applied with equal accuracy to Norman Mailer.
A bit further on, Eliot informs us that Fr. Perrin, the Catholic priest who served as Simone Weil’s intimate and sounding-board in her on-going interior disputation with orthodox Catholicism, had opined: Je crois que son âme est incomparablement plus haute que son génie. [I believe that her soul is incomparably superior to her genius.]
This is saying much, as Simone Weil’s genius is vast. But if I might, by way of comparison, interject my own opinion of Mailer here, I would say that transferring this concept from the sphere of religious philosophy to that of creative and expository writing, it can be said of Mailer that his genius was incomparably superior to his talent. In reading Mailer, one has the feeling that through his fiction, and even through his most excellent non-fiction, such as The Armies of the Night, he never quite got it all out. This inexpressible thing that he harbored inside comes through, perhaps, more directly in conversations such as this one with Christopher Hitchens, than it does in his worked and reworked published writings.
Hitchens having commented on the paradox embodied in the thought of Norman Mailer, compare this observation of Eliot's on Weil:
In the work of such a writer we must expect to encounter paradox. …And in her political thinking she appears as a stern critic of both Right and Left; at the same time more truly a lover of order and hierarchy than most of those who call themselves Conservative, and more truly a lover of the people than most of those who call themselves Socialist.
That seems like a pretty fair characterization of a ‘left conservative’ to me. A bit further on, Eliot says:
As a political thinker, as in everything else, Simone Weil is not to be classified. The paradoxicality of her sympathies is a contributing cause of the equilibrium. On the one hand she was a passionate champion of the common people and especially of the oppressed – those oppressed by the wickedness and selfishness of men and those oppressed by the anonymous forces of modern society. ...One the other hand, she was by nature a solitary and an individualist, with a profound horror of what she called the collectivity – the monster created by modern totalitarianism.
Consider the similarity between Eliot’s comprehension of the paradoxical nature of Simone Weil’s philosophy, and this exchange between Christopher Hitchens and Normal Mailer:
Hitchens: I remember you once saying to me that you’d refined your dissidence, you could give it a name, you were now a fully paid up left conservative. Elaborate on that.
Mailer: Well, as you can guess, it’s almost impossible to elaborate on it, because one of the laws of rhetoric is that you cannot elaborate on an oxymoron. And being a left conservative hits most people absolutely that way, they just stop thinking and they look at you aghast.
This is, I think, much the way most people, confronted with the thought of Simone Weil – her person, as well as her philosophy – will react. She is almost too much for us process – intellectually , or emotionally. But if one can only suspend this cognitive disability and immerse oneself in her biography, as well as in her writings, she will repay that act of intellectual charity again and again and again.
[On a personal note, these musings on the supreme exemplars, Weil and Mailer, serve to strengthen my disdain for that orthodox school of culturally conservative thought which understands culture to have reached a peak in some Golden Age prior to the hatching of the poisonous egg containing that monster raptor, Liberalism, which, once hatched, rampages through our world, devouring any and all values in its path. Could they but obtain the means, these intellectual totalitarians would go back, Amish-like, to that pre-Liberal age; they would arrest and bind culture at that point, avoiding all future risk by pinching off the all intellectual evolution in the bud. Stasis is death, not life.]
Friday, November 23, 2007
Readings: Visual Versification
UPDATE: Unfortunately, the owners of the graphic referred to below seem to have made it unavailable. Too bad, as it was beautiful.
_______________________________________________
Having today off work, I was surfing around the blogosphere in a casual manner when, just now, I came across the graphic composition to which I will link below. It is an artifact, not an image of the "real world"; yet, it's just God-awful beautiful. It is, in fact, a poem in visual images. First read these lines from T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land:
What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water.
[dead link removed here]
Does it not recall these other lines of Eliot's, from the first of the Four Quartets, "Burnt Norton"?:
Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
Which is to say:
The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be;
and that which is done is that which shall be done;
And there is no new thing under the sun.
~the Preacher
Ask not for whom the bell tolls, yo...
_______________________________________________
Having today off work, I was surfing around the blogosphere in a casual manner when, just now, I came across the graphic composition to which I will link below. It is an artifact, not an image of the "real world"; yet, it's just God-awful beautiful. It is, in fact, a poem in visual images. First read these lines from T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land:
What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water.
[dead link removed here]
Does it not recall these other lines of Eliot's, from the first of the Four Quartets, "Burnt Norton"?:
Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
Which is to say:
The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be;
and that which is done is that which shall be done;
And there is no new thing under the sun.
~the Preacher
Ask not for whom the bell tolls, yo...
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