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First things first
Jul. 4th, 2019 01:01 am
As you might imagine I've been meaning for a long time to write something about what's up with all the poetry. (Which, in case you've wondered, is all original to me. I mean, for conventional values of "original".) Last month I was thinking of posting something under the subject "First Things", because, for one first thing, there was a to-do going on in the American conservative blogosphere, which came across the bows of both the sites that my phone suggests when I type "thea", touched off by a piece in the conservative Catholic journal First Things, about how the trouble with American conservatives is they're too civil and so those nasty liberals, who only care about winning and not playing nice, walk all over them ... or, at least, that's how it was until Donald Trump, who may not be perfect but at least is willing to fight goddammit. This is one of those things where it's dismaying how you see people on every which side saying pretty much the same things about themselves vs. their enemies over and over forever, which you might boil down to: our puny logic is no match for their massive rhetoric.[1] Speaking of Donald Trump and liberals, there's a piece on one of those "thea" sites about Donald Trump's bullshitting, mainly focussing on his saying that a very great new plan on "bussing" will be announced in four weeks, because a reporter asked him what he thought about "bussing" and he has no idea what that is, but also touching on his saying stuff about crazy West Coast liberals in response to a question about Vladimir Putin saying that liberalism is dead. I got to thinking about that--yeah, Donald Trump doesn't know what Putin and Europeans and political theorists mean by "liberalism", but who does? Does the average reader of The Atlantic even? But then I thought, well, Obama sure does ... and Clinton, and Gore, and Clinton ... but, uh, not Bush II, but maybe Bush I (seeing as he was director of the CIA and stuff, so maybe he knew some things), but not Reagan I don't think. Which seems to me to cast a certain light on the question of which side really is suckers for reason (and is at least, in theory, an easier question to demonstrably decide than the truly dismal question whether the Clintons, let alone Barack Obama, are actually at least as horrible human beings as Donald Trump is[0.5]). Anyway, on the other of those "thea" sites it's Rod Dreher, of course, who's been all worked up about the First Things piece. I pretty much quit reading Dreher months ago when he shifted from talking about forming intentional communities devoted to preserving Christian culture to talking about needing to vote for Trump to save the children from drag queen storytime hour at the public library--because what I was there for in the first place was mostly the surprisingly informed and refined conversation on the nature and possibility of Christian life in the comments, and because the idea of strategically voting for Trump just seems to me so utterly at odds with any kind of thoughtful Christianity (and in that way is kind of the last straw for me with Dreher, because while he is a thoughtful Christian, and he will no doubt think his way out of his current positions as he has thought himself out of multiple past ones, his adamant adherence to the old orthodox dogmas on sexuality has always been, while interesting,[4] maddeningly and saddeningly obtuse. And he pretty much lost me when he started mocking the idea of asking "What Would Jesus Do?" about the border with Mexico[5]--though the fact that it is often hard to tell with him whether his politics or his religion is foundational to the other is part of what makes him interesting.) You'd like to think that people have got to know whether or not their president is an asshole, and you'd like to think that they've got to know that because they won't have an asshole for their president. But it has become a respectable position to take that what our side needs is an asshole for a president, because winning is more important than decency.
So, speaking of reason and its apparent contraries: it would seem I have hopped back off Mt. Philosophy to the adjacent mountain Poetry, where I started all those moons ago, although I'm not much impressed by that opposition. Of course Heidegger's point with the metaphor is that while it's a long trip between philosophy and poetry, they are also as close as can be to each other. Heidegger is a guy who, like Nietzsche, has to fend off charges that he's a poet and not a philosopher, so he might want to exaggerate the difference, or at least the extent to which he believes there to be a difference. (You might also imagine, like I have suspected about Al with Margaret, that he wanted to respect the dignity of people who identified with the other label.) But of course it all depends on what you mean by "philosophy". "Poetry", I take it, is more generally understood to be a hopeless case, or at least obviously a family-resemblance case: Socrates would give you the gears for thinking you can distinguish between good and bad poetry when you can't say what poetry, generally, is--but you can say what different kinds of poetry are, and what one might and ought to be trying to do in writing some particular kind. Some departments have that attitude about "philosophy", though in them there's always an argument waiting to be had about whether some kinds of philosophy are better than others, if not philosophier than others ... and then the question is better for what, and then eventually, if you keep at it, you find, as you always do if you keep at it, that Socrates is there waiting for you. But if you hang with Socrates long enough you end up composing hymns to Apollo, because the point of philosophy and poetry and prophesy is one and the same, is aletheia, the saying of the mystery that is the lighting of being. And insofar as it's not that, then the point of whatever else is the point is that.
Anyway. For another first thing: the thing that's got me posting all these poems (which the obsessively attentive reader may have noticed have settled into a pattern of being posted on approximately the first Wednesday of every month) is a monthly poetry reading night in Tweed, going by the name First Tuesday Muse, which B. and I happened to hit for the first time just when I happened to have a couple of fresh poems for the first time in a long time, last October. Since then it's served as a deadline for me every month, and so for the first time in over twenty years I've been steadily writing poetry. And though I know that how things look in the rearview mirror now may well be how now looks in the rearview mirror down the road, I feel like I've been getting someplace with it that I certainly wasn't in my twenties and maybe was just starting to approach the last time I gave the can a good kick back around what seems to be the beginning of the present.[6] Last week I found out I won a local-ish contest (with the camel poem) and will be interviewed on the local-ish radio, which is maybe unduly pleasing. And I have been reading more and more (I mean of other people's stuff), and listening to poets talk about what they do and how they do it, and feeling about myself juxtaposed to that like this is the thing that I can do, and wondering a bit at how I've never really felt that way about anything else,[7] and at how I didn't really feel like that back when "poet" was pretty much the first thing I identified myself as, and at how, you know, you might as well--I mean, I might as well--feel that way about something, anyway (so why not this), because, have you seen who feels that way about what?
It is, at least, compared to everything else I've been doing, a really cheap hobby.
So you may be wondering why all this blah blah blah tonight rather than just the usual poem or two, and the reason is that for the first time, and against my better old internet feelings, I'm going to be friends-locking stuff, namely my poems, here, because I have become sufficiently pretentious about em that I think I want to try to publish em. Back in the late stages of my undergrad I read Richard Rorty somewhere saying that when he was a student in the '50s, getting a piece in (I think) the Partisan Review was "the end of desire" (which I'm pretty sure was the first I ever heard of that phrase). Actually, looking it up now, I see he said that in a piece in Dissent, which is a thing that I as a late-stage undergrad might have thought publishing in was the end of desire, but I would more sensibly have thought that (and like to think that I did think that) about Philosophy and Social Criticism, which was the one journal that caught my attention as a thing that lived close to home for me when I started to become familiar with the journals, and I did after all end up (still closer to now than to then) publishing what is, really, my best paper in Philosophy and Social Criticism. And so desire ended! But desire rekindles, and sets its heart on Poetry magazine. To be the poem of the day! For once, then, something.
[0.5] The funny thing is, while I am fairly confident that Donald Trump is a rapist, I am not all that confident that Bill Clinton is not a rapist.[0.75] But Bill Clinton seems to be basically nice to everyone in public, which, while it may not make him a nicer human being, sure as hell makes him a nicer president.
[0.75] I mean, I'm sure they're both not rapists anymore. Probably.[0.875]
[0.875] This shit is definitely not worth renumbering my footnotes for.
[1] For years I've thought it was John Everett who said "your puny reason is no match for my massive rhetoric", but the record seems to indicate that it was me (and it was "logic", for some reason), spoofing on him.[2] Originally, I mean.
[2] And scrolling down a ways I see that this is the thread wherein Everett demonstrates to Zoe S. how to argue, in a structured essay, that Leviticus, from which I happened to read at poetry night last night--remember poetry night? it's a post about poetry night--is boring. And then another ways down Zoe S. says: "Leviticus does not actually have damnation, thank goodness. It does, however, have pancakes. God likes them. He also likes grits. When you think how worked up some people get over blood sacrifices and sexual perversions in a book that also has pancakes, you really get to see where their priorities are. It is sad."[3] After which the thread peters out in a discussion of the meaning of "corn".
[3] This was, of course, long before calling something "sad" meant you were Donald Trump, a fan of Donald Trump, or mocking Donald Trump.
[4] I mean, it's interesting insofar as it's interesting to see a thoughtful person try to defend these things, and to see how they try to go about doing it. But it's interesting only so far, as I found out when I went looking for good Thomist stuff on sexuality when I was going to teach the gender and sexuality course years ago. I can't willingly teach anything the logic of which I can't defend, and though I can defend the logics of all kinds of seemingly contradictory things, the conclusions of many of which I certainly wouldn't vote for, I couldn't find any Thomist sexuality stuff I could teach.
[5] I don't mean by this that I think Jesus would obviously be in favour of open borders--render unto Caesar and all that.
[6] Though we're going to be deep in solar minimum through 2019, last week there was a brief spurt of sunspots belonging to the coming cycle--which I've learned means that their magnetic polarity is the opposite of those in the departing cycle, though I don't yet know what that means.
[7] For thus matters stand among the three of us: Deeply I love only life--and verily, most of all when I hate life.[8] But that I am well disposed toward wisdom, and often too well, that is because she reminds me so much of life.... And when life once asked me, "Who is this wisdom?" I answered fervently, "Oh yes, wisdom! One thirsts after her and is never satisfied; one looks through veils, one grabs through nets. Is she beautiful? How should I know? But even the oldest carps are baited with her." The poet sings of the philosopher's beautiful, delirious frustration.
[8] I almost elided[9] that last phrase, because it's never rung true to me, except it struck me now that it does, if it speaks to the "only", and then it rings very true: when everything about life is hateful then deeply I love only life.
[9] Finally just looked it up: "elide" is not etymologically related to "ellipsis".
--
Currently under my porch: 20.5. Currently at Havelock: 18. High today at Peterborough: 29.6. Could break 30 there tomorrow for the first time this year; Pearson hasn't quite hit 30 yet either.
So, speaking of reason and its apparent contraries: it would seem I have hopped back off Mt. Philosophy to the adjacent mountain Poetry, where I started all those moons ago, although I'm not much impressed by that opposition. Of course Heidegger's point with the metaphor is that while it's a long trip between philosophy and poetry, they are also as close as can be to each other. Heidegger is a guy who, like Nietzsche, has to fend off charges that he's a poet and not a philosopher, so he might want to exaggerate the difference, or at least the extent to which he believes there to be a difference. (You might also imagine, like I have suspected about Al with Margaret, that he wanted to respect the dignity of people who identified with the other label.) But of course it all depends on what you mean by "philosophy". "Poetry", I take it, is more generally understood to be a hopeless case, or at least obviously a family-resemblance case: Socrates would give you the gears for thinking you can distinguish between good and bad poetry when you can't say what poetry, generally, is--but you can say what different kinds of poetry are, and what one might and ought to be trying to do in writing some particular kind. Some departments have that attitude about "philosophy", though in them there's always an argument waiting to be had about whether some kinds of philosophy are better than others, if not philosophier than others ... and then the question is better for what, and then eventually, if you keep at it, you find, as you always do if you keep at it, that Socrates is there waiting for you. But if you hang with Socrates long enough you end up composing hymns to Apollo, because the point of philosophy and poetry and prophesy is one and the same, is aletheia, the saying of the mystery that is the lighting of being. And insofar as it's not that, then the point of whatever else is the point is that.
Anyway. For another first thing: the thing that's got me posting all these poems (which the obsessively attentive reader may have noticed have settled into a pattern of being posted on approximately the first Wednesday of every month) is a monthly poetry reading night in Tweed, going by the name First Tuesday Muse, which B. and I happened to hit for the first time just when I happened to have a couple of fresh poems for the first time in a long time, last October. Since then it's served as a deadline for me every month, and so for the first time in over twenty years I've been steadily writing poetry. And though I know that how things look in the rearview mirror now may well be how now looks in the rearview mirror down the road, I feel like I've been getting someplace with it that I certainly wasn't in my twenties and maybe was just starting to approach the last time I gave the can a good kick back around what seems to be the beginning of the present.[6] Last week I found out I won a local-ish contest (with the camel poem) and will be interviewed on the local-ish radio, which is maybe unduly pleasing. And I have been reading more and more (I mean of other people's stuff), and listening to poets talk about what they do and how they do it, and feeling about myself juxtaposed to that like this is the thing that I can do, and wondering a bit at how I've never really felt that way about anything else,[7] and at how I didn't really feel like that back when "poet" was pretty much the first thing I identified myself as, and at how, you know, you might as well--I mean, I might as well--feel that way about something, anyway (so why not this), because, have you seen who feels that way about what?
It is, at least, compared to everything else I've been doing, a really cheap hobby.
So you may be wondering why all this blah blah blah tonight rather than just the usual poem or two, and the reason is that for the first time, and against my better old internet feelings, I'm going to be friends-locking stuff, namely my poems, here, because I have become sufficiently pretentious about em that I think I want to try to publish em. Back in the late stages of my undergrad I read Richard Rorty somewhere saying that when he was a student in the '50s, getting a piece in (I think) the Partisan Review was "the end of desire" (which I'm pretty sure was the first I ever heard of that phrase). Actually, looking it up now, I see he said that in a piece in Dissent, which is a thing that I as a late-stage undergrad might have thought publishing in was the end of desire, but I would more sensibly have thought that (and like to think that I did think that) about Philosophy and Social Criticism, which was the one journal that caught my attention as a thing that lived close to home for me when I started to become familiar with the journals, and I did after all end up (still closer to now than to then) publishing what is, really, my best paper in Philosophy and Social Criticism. And so desire ended! But desire rekindles, and sets its heart on Poetry magazine. To be the poem of the day! For once, then, something.
[0.5] The funny thing is, while I am fairly confident that Donald Trump is a rapist, I am not all that confident that Bill Clinton is not a rapist.[0.75] But Bill Clinton seems to be basically nice to everyone in public, which, while it may not make him a nicer human being, sure as hell makes him a nicer president.
[0.75] I mean, I'm sure they're both not rapists anymore. Probably.[0.875]
[0.875] This shit is definitely not worth renumbering my footnotes for.
[1] For years I've thought it was John Everett who said "your puny reason is no match for my massive rhetoric", but the record seems to indicate that it was me (and it was "logic", for some reason), spoofing on him.[2] Originally, I mean.
[2] And scrolling down a ways I see that this is the thread wherein Everett demonstrates to Zoe S. how to argue, in a structured essay, that Leviticus, from which I happened to read at poetry night last night--remember poetry night? it's a post about poetry night--is boring. And then another ways down Zoe S. says: "Leviticus does not actually have damnation, thank goodness. It does, however, have pancakes. God likes them. He also likes grits. When you think how worked up some people get over blood sacrifices and sexual perversions in a book that also has pancakes, you really get to see where their priorities are. It is sad."[3] After which the thread peters out in a discussion of the meaning of "corn".
[3] This was, of course, long before calling something "sad" meant you were Donald Trump, a fan of Donald Trump, or mocking Donald Trump.
[4] I mean, it's interesting insofar as it's interesting to see a thoughtful person try to defend these things, and to see how they try to go about doing it. But it's interesting only so far, as I found out when I went looking for good Thomist stuff on sexuality when I was going to teach the gender and sexuality course years ago. I can't willingly teach anything the logic of which I can't defend, and though I can defend the logics of all kinds of seemingly contradictory things, the conclusions of many of which I certainly wouldn't vote for, I couldn't find any Thomist sexuality stuff I could teach.
[5] I don't mean by this that I think Jesus would obviously be in favour of open borders--render unto Caesar and all that.
[6] Though we're going to be deep in solar minimum through 2019, last week there was a brief spurt of sunspots belonging to the coming cycle--which I've learned means that their magnetic polarity is the opposite of those in the departing cycle, though I don't yet know what that means.
[7] For thus matters stand among the three of us: Deeply I love only life--and verily, most of all when I hate life.[8] But that I am well disposed toward wisdom, and often too well, that is because she reminds me so much of life.... And when life once asked me, "Who is this wisdom?" I answered fervently, "Oh yes, wisdom! One thirsts after her and is never satisfied; one looks through veils, one grabs through nets. Is she beautiful? How should I know? But even the oldest carps are baited with her." The poet sings of the philosopher's beautiful, delirious frustration.
[8] I almost elided[9] that last phrase, because it's never rung true to me, except it struck me now that it does, if it speaks to the "only", and then it rings very true: when everything about life is hateful then deeply I love only life.
[9] Finally just looked it up: "elide" is not etymologically related to "ellipsis".
--
Currently under my porch: 20.5. Currently at Havelock: 18. High today at Peterborough: 29.6. Could break 30 there tomorrow for the first time this year; Pearson hasn't quite hit 30 yet either.
