On Feelings and Magic

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It is not in his personal emotions, the emotions provoked by particular events in his life, that the poet is in any way remarkable or interesting.  His particular emotions may be simple, or crude, or flat.  The emotion in his poetry will be a very complex thing, but not with the complexity of the emotions of people who have very complex or unusual emotions in life.  One error, in fact, of eccentricity in poetry is to seek for new human emotions to express; and in this search for novelty in the wrong place it discovers the perverse.  The business of the poet is not to find new emotions, but to use the ordinary ones and, in working them up into poetry, to express feelings which are not in actual emotions at all.  And emotions which he has never experienced will serve his turn as well as those familiar to him.  Consequently, we must believe that "emotion recollected in tranquility" is an inexact formula.  For it is neither emotion, nor recollection, nor, without distortion of meaning, tranquility.  It is a concentration, and a new thing resulting from the concentration, of a very great number of experiences which to the practical and active person would not seem to be experiences at all; it is a concentration which does not happen consciously or of deliberation.  These experiences are not 'recollected,' and they finally unite in an atmosphere which is 'tranquil' only in that it is a passive attending upon the event. Of course this is not quite the whole story.  There is a great deal, in the writing of poetry, which must be conscious and deliberate.  In fact, the bad poet is usually unconscious where he ought to be conscious, and conscious where he ought to be unconscious.  Both errors tend to make him 'personal.'   Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.

This passage from T.S. Eliot's "The Sacred Wood: Tradition and the Individual Talent" put me in a mind of Charles Williams' novel, Shadows of Ecstasy.  (Eliot, as it happens, was a great champion of Williams' work).  Shadows of Ecstasy is a puzzling novel.  It would be easy to spend a lifetime determining where one stands in relation to its characters.  As Thomas Howard points out in his Novels of Charles Williams, it is as if Williams sympathized a little too much with the antagonist for the comfort of most readers.  The antagonist, Nigel Considine, is a man of extraordinary self-discipline who, because he feels things deeply, requires little to satisfy him.  His aesthetic sensibilities are sharp and drawn from deep within himself and, because of this, he is able to use them to develop what one could call a science of the aesthetic as opposed to a science based in analytic knowing.  He, then, applies what he has learned in a kind of technology with which he hopes to attain everlasting life and impose his will upon the world.

The good guys abound in this novel.  There is a devout priest who embodies faith, an African king who embodies royalty, a cheerful humanist who embodies the practical and an adoring wife who embodies, well, the feminine, or Williams' feminine ideal of heartfelt abundant generosity that wants nothing for itself—the nurturing universe.  The husband of this peerless female is a professor of poetry who finds enough in a single energetic line of Milton, "And thus the Filial Godhead answering spake," to point his whole being beyond itself, leaving him restless and dissatisfied with his mundane life.   It stands to reason that it is the professor who is most drawn to Considine.  Here, he contemplates what might be possible if Considine's world were to come to pass.

Who could tell what wonders waited then, when emotions were full and strong and sufficient, no longer greedy and grasping, when the senses could take in colour and essence and respond to all the delicate vibrations which now their clumsy dullness missed, when deprivation itself should be an intense means of experiencing both the deprived self and the thing of which it was deprived, when...

This vision leads him almost to the point of following the antagonist to his inevitable (if ambiguous) end but, if we return to Eliot's passage above, we can begin to see why there were some places that our professor could not ultimately allow himself to go.

Perhaps the greatest virtue of the scientific mind is its commitment to consistently apply rigor to experience.  For the mainstream scientist, this means, among other things, excluding whole categories of experience such as the sensuous and emotional because these seem irretrievably resistant to discipline. Emotions exist within us, the scientist would claim, and we project them onto the world.  There is nothing verifiable, nothing reliable in what one feels on the inside, nothing that tells us anything about anything other than our own fallible selves.  In Eliot's understanding, however, there are emotions that are not personal.  There are "feelings which are not in actual emotions at all."  The key to understanding this lies in what Eliot calls "passive attending."

Most of us understand the world always, or almost always, in terms of our smallest selves, in terms of what we could call the ego.  Our egos are possessive entities and use emotions to appropriate all that they survey. Tolkien remarks on this fact in "On Fairy-Stories" and points out that, when we appropriate everything we see, we hardly see anything at all.  As soon as we have made up our minds about something, whether we like or dislike it, desire or fear it, we need give it little more of our attention for itself.  I know that I like the taste of mushrooms so it is a delicious (or disgusting) dish of mushrooms, indeed, or perhaps an extraordinary hunger that causes me to bother with truly tasting the particular mushrooms on the plate before me. Instead, I recapitulate a generalized mushroom experience, one that I have been through many times.  I do not have the experience; it plays in me like an old recording.  In doing this, I have, not only deprived myself of the subtleties of all the mushrooms that will ever be presented to me, but I have tricked myself into thinking that I have learned something about mushrooms when, in fact, I have only discovered something, and not a particularly riveting something, about myself.

There are emotions, or as Eliot would have it "feelings," that are proper to each phenomenon but these feelings do not come from us; they come through us.   It is our job to get ourselves, our "greedy and grasping" selves, out of the way. These feelings, the exuberance of the sunrise, for instance, and the quiet reflectiveness of the sunset, are "full and strong and sufficient."  They are so full and strong that they may frighten us and they are sufficient because they tell us everything that we could ever need to know about the world and about ourselves.  When we truly understand a "thing," we understand our relationship to it and because nothing exists except in relationship—there would be no differentiated phenomena, otherwise—we see ourselves as we are, only when we see the world as it is.  It is appropriate to call this seeing, this knowing, aesthetic.  It knows things as they fit together.  It would disdain to take them apart because that would render them meaningless, broken examples of what they were meant to be.   (Gandalf's rebuke to Saruman in The Fellowship of the Ring: "He who breaks a thing to find out what it is has left the path of wisdom." )

The example of Nigel Considine teaches us, however, that even aesthetic knowing can be disgracefully misapplied.  In a letter to his publisher in which Tolkien takes on the mammoth task of communicating the gist of his great creative works, he explains that there are two kinds of Magic.  The destructive kind, the kind that seeks to shape the world to the will of its user, can also be called The Machine. The productive kind is the Magic of the Elves.  It is a subcreative magic.  It is a Magic that seeks to know a thing for itself then to allow the thing to go on expressing itself through the craft of the subcreator.  This is the Magic of true art.  It is also the Magic of true science.  It is, if we value our souls and the soul of the world, the only kind of Magic in which we should allow ourselves to partake.

Poem of the Week: "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer" by John Keats

From The Guardian Books Blog: "Keats was bantering, perhaps, when he asserted at Haydon's gathering that Newton had spoiled the rainbow by reducing it to a prism. But again in his poem Lamia he alludes to the power of "cold philosophy" to "unweave the rainbow". There's no doubt that his death-shadowed early life provided an additional impulse to his devotion to literature: he needed an escape route into enchantment. And yet, Keats's openness to experience and his powerful impulse towards self-education are hardly the qualities of an opponent of science. That famously stated willingness to remain "in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts" is surely proof enough of an essentially scientific temperament. He was medically trained, and, as all biographical accounts make clear, he confronted his own mortality to the very end with courageous, pitiless realism."

On First Looking into Chapman's Homer

Much have I travelled in the realms of gold,
    And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;
    Round many western islands have I been
Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.
Oft of one wide expanse had I been told
    That deep-browed Homer ruled as his demesne;
    Yet did I never breathe its pure serene
Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
    When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortes when with eagle eyes
    He stared at the Pacific – and all his men
Looked at each other with a wild surmise –
    Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

--John Keats

Marcus Aurelius on the Individual and the Whole

"Either an ordered universe, or a stew of mixed ingredients, yet still coherent order.  Otherwise, how could a sort of private order subsist within you, if there is disorder in the Whole?"


--Meditations, 4:27



"Suppose you had made yourself an outcast from the unity of nature—you were born a part of it, but now you have cut yourself off. Yet here lies the paradox—that it is open to you to rejoin that unity. No other part has that privilege from god, to come together again once it has been separated and cut away. Just consider the grace of god's favor to man. He has put it in man's power not to be broken off from the Whole in the first place, and also, if he has broken off, to return and grow back again, resuming his role as a member."


--Meditations, 8:34

Ugly Uprisings

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I have often maligned the idea that art should be defined as anything someone puts a frame around, claiming, as I did in a previous post, that the relationship between humanity and art is not manufactured but ordained.  In light of this belief, which I still maintain, I have been trying to understand the phenomenon of "found poetry," poetry in which words are lifted just as they are from their mundane context so that the poem functions as a frame, revealing the beauty of the words or endowing them with a beauty that was not there to begin with (that is the question).  I know of few pure and excellent examples of found poetry.  William Carlos Williams' "This is Just to Say" is often cited, though it is not clear how much of it is found and how much constructed.  My favorite found poem is, perhaps ironically, lost to me. It consists of an eighteenth or nineteenth century American recipe for pitch, the black stickiness of the tar evoking the resilience of those who knew no life other than hard, claustrophobic labor. (I believe that I came across this poem six or seven years ago at least, in an issue of Ploughshares that I no longer possess. If anyone knows where I could find this found poem, I would be grateful for the information). 

What takes place in the mind of the poet who finds a poem, a poet who knows just where to place her frame, and is this framing different from submitting a urinal to an important exhibit and, by virtue of its submission, calling it art?   I imagine that the words, when first encountered, must seem to shimmer a little in the midst of their duller surroundings or maybe it is more gradual than that.   Maybe the poet finds himself singing the words in his mind the way a child will chant something he has heard and likes the sound of.  (I once knew a four-year-old who spent several afternoons skipping around the playground to the beat of "Sex-sex-sexy/Sex-sex-sexy," apparently with no idea of what the words meant but enamored with their sibilance). 

This brings to mind Tolkien's famous declaration in his lecture "English and Welsh" that "most English-speaking people…will admit that [the phrase] cellar door is beautiful especially if dissociated from its sense (and from its spelling.)"  This remark is usually paraphrased as the unverifiable claim that the syllables that make up "cellar door" form the most beautiful succession of sounds in the English language and I have yet to see a reference to it that includes the latter half of the statement—"especially if dissociated from its sense (and its spelling)."  (When dissociated from its "sense," there is, I have to admit, something pleasing even about the curved porcelain lines of a urinal).  Tolkien goes on to say that, though the sound of cellar door is "more beautiful than sky and certainly more beautiful than beautiful," there is a "higher dimension" of words in which "the contemplation of the association of form and sense" is naturally encouraged.  (I have taken liberty with Tolkien's phrasing because his primary purpose was, not to describe his experience of the English language, but to express how this higher dimension was particularly accessible to him in Welsh).


By his own account, Tolkien's experience of writing the works that make up The Lord of the Rings and its accompanying mythology was one of writing down what was already there.  If we accept this receptivity as typical of the author or poet then perhaps there is no real difference between finding poetry and "composing" it.  The beauty of art is of a different order than the beauty of nature but art, like the human consciousness that delivers it to the world, is itself of nature. As Caillois put it, "…art constitutes a particular instance of nature: that which occurs when the aesthetic act undergoes the additional process of design and execution."  The poet, the painter or the photographer possesses the burden and the gift of guiding our sometimes mulish minds to the shift in consciousness that allows us to see the beauty that was always available but might have otherwise remained unregarded.  The remarkable thing is that, sometimes, this beauty is not a primary expression of the necessary and harmonious relationships of the qualities of nature but comes to us as the result of the irrepressibility of such necessity and harmony, even in the face of human efforts to distort natural relationships in the service of human ends.


I suggested in another post that there is a particularly human brand of ugliness that I call "the meretricious" that occurs when certain features of what is portrayed are exaggerated in an effort to stimulate the baser instincts of the user.  The depictions we see in advertising are a case in point.  Another related kind of manufactured ugliness comes into the world when an attempt is made to imitate the living tendencies of nature by reducing those tendencies to a formula then producing objects based on the formula, leaving the life behind.   Objects produced in this way are ugly because they are empty, brought to us via the reduction of quality to quantity followed by a naïve attempt to bring the quality back to life.  Ratio is substituted for relationship.  For such ugliness to exist, there is no need to distort the ratio of the qualities, though doing so adds a dimension of repulsiveness to the coldness of the object. (The arrogant, heartless architecture of Le Corbusier strikes me as an example of a product that is lifeless but not otherwise particularly vulgar).  There is nothing, however, that cannot be rescued from ugliness. Nature, as it expresses itself in the materials of manufacture, in the mind of the manufacturer, in the way the elements play with even our most self-important monuments, and in the mind of the observer, will have its way.


Beauty is the experience of a vital order and, because order is not what we see but how we see, a certain amount of order is necessary for human consciousness to perceive even the meretricious.  Without it, there would be no substance to perceive but, in the way the world reveals itself to us, there are degrees of necessity among the relationships of the qualities.  We can think of ugly artifacts as speaking the language of nature but speaking it so clumsily that they are almost grunting where others might sing.  (In making use of this metaphor, we should as always be careful not to forget that nature is language and language is nature).  Sometimes, by some miracle, however, we manage to grunt something that, with only a little application of aesthetic consciousness, can be understood as beautiful.


Have you ever seen a power plant lit up at night and thought that it looked, not like a dark, Satanic mill, but like a castle with signal fires lit along its parapets—or, better yet, have you ever driven above a Wal-Mart store on an elevated freeway at night?  For some reason that is unknown to me, the roof of every Wal-Mart that I have seen from this perspective has been a neatly rowed farm of plastic skylights. When the interior lights of the store shine into the darkness through the plastic, I get the sense that I am looking down through clear, dark waters at large, luminescent mushrooms on the deepest ocean floor. Beauty—voilà! Beauty, where all the odds and all our efforts stood against it. 

The work of a friend recently helped me to see that, in articulating an aesthetic, we are articulating a cosmology.  If as Tolkien contends, "we make…in the law in which we're made," then understanding what makes something ugly, beautiful or merely pretty, can take us all the way to understanding what makes a thing a thing.   In Tolkien's creation myth, a legion of gods, the Valar, sing the world into being (though not into full-fledged life) at the command of the One God, Ilúvatar.  When one of the number of Valar rebels and attempts to introduce his own refrain into the symphony, Ilúvatar shows him that this has, in no way, subverted the theme.  "You will see..." he tells his wayward child "that no theme may be played that hath not its uttermost source in me, nor can any alter the music in my despite"

   
No less than the consciousness of the gods, our consciousness, and the world in which it participates, is alive and, as a living thing, it has a certain temperament, a disposition to behave in a certain way that is as much a part of it as my eye color is a part of my body.  As living consciousness in a living world, we can choose to rebel but, in the spirit of Kierkegaard, we must concede that we cannot choose not to be.   As beings made of and naturally making order, we can never wholly rob ourselves of at least some measure of access to truth and beauty.  That is one freedom that even the Divine has no power to bestow.

New Tuesday Feature: Poem of the Week

You Begin

You begin this way:
this is your hand,
this is your eye,
that is a fish, blue and flat
on the paper, almost
the shape of an eye.
This is your mouth, this is an O
or a moon, whichever
you like. This is yellow.

Outside the window
is the rain, green
because it is summer, and beyond that
the trees and then the world,
which is round and has only 
the colors of these nine crayons.

This is the world, which is fuller
and more difficult to learn than I have said.
You are right to smudge it that way
with the red and then
the orange: the world burns.

Once you have learned these words
you will learn that there are more
words than you can ever learn.
The word hand floats above your hand
like a small cloud over a lake.
The word hand anchors
your hand to this table,
your hand is a warm stone
I hold between two words.

This is your hand, these are my hands, this is the world,
which is round but not flat and has more colors
than we can see.

It begins, it has an end,
this is what you will
come back to, this is your hand.

--Margaret Atwood 

Unique William Blake Etchings at Tate Britain

Link to News Article

On the Poet and the Logician

As users of language, the poet and the logician stand at opposite poles.  To the logician, the sound of a word means nothing at all, while to the poet it is of the utmost importance.  To the logician, those words are of most value which change their meaning as little as possible when they are used in different contexts; the poet likes the meanings which change most, and is always trying to change them further himself.  The logician tries for statement, the poet for suggestion.

--Owen Barfield, from "Speech, Reason and Imagination" in Romanticism Comes of Age

Thoughts for the New Year

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"For beauty is nothing but the beginning of a terror that we are still just unable to endure..."

--Ranier Maria Rilke, from Duino Elegies

"Who could tell what wonders waited then, when emotions were full and strong and sufficient, no longer greedy and grasping, when the senses could take in colour and essence and respond to all the delicate vibrations which now their clumsy dullness missed, when deprivation itself should be an intense means of experiencing both the deprived self and the thing of which it was deprived, when..."

--Charles Williams, from Shadows of Ecstasy

"But someone must say in general what's been unsaid among you this many a year:  that love, as mortals understand the word, isn't enough.  Every natural love will rise again and live forever in this country: but none will rise again until it has been buried."

--C.S. Lewis, from The Great Divorce