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A Quiet Human Music

January 1, 2008 by Hazlit

Poetry Review

Two Or Three Guitars: Selected Poems

by John Terpstra

Two or Three Guitars is John Terpstra’s seventh book of poems. The Governor-General nominated writer has moved far along enough in his career for this latest book to be a “selected poems” that lets his readers look back on a twenty-five year career that began with Scrabbling for Repose back in 1982. These poems show an abiding interest in certain themes: travel, religion, history, and nature.Travels, both of the ordinary sort and of the kind driven by the need for emigration are featured here.

In Terpstra’s poems journeying often appears as a sign of dislocation. “If we were at Niagara now/we could see where this business begins,” he proclaims in the opening poem “Blondin on a Tightrope.” Much of the difficulty and interest in these poems lies in the fact that we are never quite at Niagara. In the separation between what the physical body can do and what the imagination can experience comes the source of much of Terpstra’s versifying.

Endings in Terpstra’s poems arrive with much the same sentiment as beginnings. In the last poem of the collection, “How It All Goes Around” Terpstra dreams that “I would ride the single drop on the windshield, in the/downspout,/jump the last few inches/and slip between the particles of earth.” Though in both works Terpstra is driving along a road, he would prefer “the highway blasted through,” as a way to get to authentic existence. Travel, like existence itself, is endlessly cyclical; one goes somewhere only to return to one’s starting point.

Immigration too is a form of travel, but one driven by powerful economic circumstances. Even as this kind of journeying remains consciously chosen, its dislocations are far more powerful than those made by ordinary travel. In “Forty Days and Forty Nights” Terpstra assumes the voice of a Dutch immigrant coming to Quebec and he narrates that character’s frustrations upon discovering that Canada is not the promised land he had hoped for: “…two days later I drove/the coal truck from my second job, and dumped/a one-ton load down the basement chute/of the wrong house/and the next week/wasn’t paid, but shovelled those lumps of black/back through the window, until I couldn’t breathe.” Terpstra finds rich veins of material in the gritty realities of physical work and the ways backbreaking labor shows up the gap between real life and the world of dreams.

God and the angels are forces that for Terpstra constitute holiness not only because of the miracles they do, but because they can witness multiple events simultaneously, something we limited humans cannot hope to achieve. In “The Little Towns of Bethlehem” the poet imagines a nativity scene un-folding in dozens of little towns across northern Canada. The poem, with its crazy quilt of place names like Aklavik, Tignish, Esther, Picture Butte, and Pickle Lake becomes a mental travelogue of those small and usually forgotten places where people still live and miracles, like the birth of chil-dren, can still happen. One lovely thing about all these works is that Terptstra’s sentiments always seem authentic; his are poems of genuine feeling and real tenderness.

In the poem “Hypotheses” Terpstra moves in a potentially rich direction by connecting his observations about nature with a grander idea about how we think and see the world. “The location and number of stars is determined by/the trajectory of individual branch tips, each of which bears/responsibility for a single pin-prick of light.” A few lines later he admits: “These are, of course, preposterous hypotheses, and it is/likely that only those willing to admit to an uncommon/empathy with trees would ever admit them.” Perhaps so, but in giving an intentionality to na-ture Terpstra puts forward the very powerful idea that feeling the natural world as beautiful proves something. Terpstra’s point here is that maybe spirit and science are not as different as we tend to believe. Poetry, despite its poor current reputation in popular culture, can provide us with a way of synthesizing two of the most powerful forces of contemporary society—religion and science. In “Hypotheses” Terpstra’s language comes tantalizingly close to achieving this.

Lest we take this idea of the connected universe too far, however, Terpstra reminds us that risk is everywhere, both from people and from the forces of the natural world. In a fashion typical for him, “The Devil’s Punch Bowl” combines these physical and emotional dangers as a way of trying to keep us alive to the idea that a feeling of total connection also opens us to threats from everywhere. “How cold the wind feels/on all our open wounds,” he reminds us. “I know what rocks awake/and men can do, now/There is no true protection./Forgive me.” In this awareness of the harm we do and have done to us, Terpstra performs one the basic jobs of the good writer—promoting sympathy for the world, whether that world is natural or of human. His final wish for forgiveness shows a poignant sense that we humans are inevitably responsible both for the pain we can’t seem to help causing others, and the ways in which we harm nature by not seeing the harm we do. If being human means having the power both to love and to hurt, then asking for forgiveness is the clearest testament of our humanity, for it externalizes the fact that we have hurt and been hurt by causing pain.

Two or Three Guitars provides a rich selection of the poetry of a peculiarly Canadian writer—one who takes what is best in this country: tolerance, sympathy, a powerful sense of humanity, and combines these qualities with a deep appreciation for the natural world to make a music that seems to rise from a hidden place, but that we nonetheless recognize as a tune we have long known and understood.

C. Durning Carroll

Published in The Northern Poetry Review

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Posture of Unease

November 19, 2007 by Hazlit

Poetry Review

Primer on the Hereafter

by Steve McOrmond

Steve McOrmond opens his second collection Primer on the Hereafter with an epigraph from John Ashbery’s poem “Posture of Unease.” Ashbery says: “For all you I/Have neglected, ignored,/Left to stew in your own juices,/Not been like a friend that is approaching,/I ask forgiveness, a song like new rain./Please sing it to me.” Ashbery has made a career out of unease, from the early psychic distances of poems like “The Instruction Manual,” to the reflective masterpiece “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror,” to the enigmatically-titled “Your Name Here,” with its clever play on presence and absence, order and discontinuity.Though Ashbery has retained the status of éminence grise in American letters, his poetic legacy has been at best a mixed one. He has taught us a great deal about psychology and the unfettered thoughts of a moving mind, but has also, especially in recent years, surrendered logic and communication in favor of a hermetically opaque private language.

Fortunately, Mr. McOrmond does not do the same. Though McOrmond takes from Ashbery an interest in outsider status—they are both observers—McOrmond, unlike the Ashbery of recent years, prefers to observe others. If Ashbery is a psychologist, McOrmond could plausibly be called a journalist. Though the psychologist may look at others, he does so in an intimately private way—the confines of an office. The journalist, on the other hand, lives of necessity out in the world. She or he is forced to find a language that others can relate to; to use, as Wordsworth once declared, “a selection of language really used by men.”The promise of Primer on the Hereafter lies in the simple and unaffected narrative voice in which McOrmond recounts his best poems. In pulling away from himself into that posture of unease that characterizes so many good writers, McOrmond finds in this collection, occasional moments of sublimity.

Poetry, like its sister arts of drama and the novel, is fundamentally about humanity: its sole interest, despite the frequent distraction of birds and flowers is an analysis of who and why we are. When McOrmond sticks to this simple aim the results can be striking, as in the quasi-historical poem “Lolly.” In this work about an imaginary survivor of an actual 1855 shipwreck off the coast of Nova-Scotia, McOrmond gathers the details and the mood of men made helpless by the elements. “Mr. Haszard had a little spaniel./On the morning of the third day,/I held it down and Smith/slit its throat with my bone-handled knife./We drank its blood, consumed/the flesh before it could freeze.” Though the line-breaks at moments display the carelessness of a prose writer, this same narrative impulse conveys the terse diction of a wounded man dictating a letter to a wife he loves. While McOrmond may not listen as closely as one might like to the music of the words, he still understands how the limits of the poetic line can be used to strong effect. McOrmond’s impassioned restraint gives “Lolly” a power to move that a looser narrative flow would have lost.

He accomplishes something similar in “Ötzi,” a verse response to the exhibit of the prehistoric man found frozen in the Alps a dozen or so years ago. Instead of assuming the voice of a character, here McOrmond places himself in the position of a viewer watching yet also turning away from the act of being seen: “I would be your pallbearer, escort you/back to the glacier and bury you deeply/and properly under the ice. For now–/which is not so long–I’ll pay my respects/by not coming during visiting hours.” The final claim seems typical of McOrmond’s style, as it raises the obvious question: if not during visiting hours, then when? Will McOrmond sneak in after dark but look all the same? How is the poet’s language changed if his or her presence is not observed? McOrmond doesn’t address this question directly, but the best poems of Primer struggle with the idea of poetic presence and how that presence affects how poets as writers see the world. The question may seem merely academic, but it has an important effect on what and how poets write, and therefore what audiences are asked to read.

When McOrmond veers away, either from precise human observation or occasionally into the too-treacherous world of the prose poem, the results rarely reach the heights of what one might call his “unease” poems. Both forms seem to seduce McOrmond into abandoning two central tenets of the successful poem—the poetic line, and the logic of narrative. When McOrmond is anchored (nautical metaphors abound in this book) to a real human situation he writes beautifully. Unfortunately his freer and more naturalistic work is often incoherent. In the first stanza of a poem called “Flittermouse” McOrmond writes: “High frequency peeps and pops,/telemetry from the twilight zone,/and a soft thwup, thwup, thwup,/part pterodactyl, part Bela/Lugosi in a playful mood,/snapping a wet dishtowel.” Presumably this is supposed to describe a flittermouse, (an archaic term for a bat) and none of what McOrmond writes is factually wrong, but this description without narrative, without a concrete sense of motion or of recounted action prompts this poet into presenting a series of random images that are left for the reader to integrate.The two examples of prose poems also show this tendency towards illogic. Here is the second stanza (paragraph?) from “Haulage”: “At times you feel like freight. Someone’s lost the waybill, you’re waiting to be delivered. Oh, there are drugs. A leather armchair that fits exactly the slouch of your spine. And there are The Goldberg Variations, succinct, austere, in the half-light. The hammer when it strikes the string is not in contact with anything touching the finger.” Aside from the comma-splice in the second sentence ( ! ) how is the reader to make sense of a paragraph that jumps from freight, to drugs, to The Goldberg Variations? Is it unfair to ask just what this moment of prose really means?

When McOrmond sticks to the telling details of narrative history, and his (and perhaps our culture’s) posture of unease he shows himself to be a poet of real and memorable ability. When he drops his refreshing tendency to look at the world askance, and conceeds to what is fasionable, he merely rides with the masses. At such moments one wishes, that like so many others, he hadn’t fallen so far under the long shadow of Ashbery, whose status atop the pyramid of contemporary English-language poets has made his work largely immune to criticism. As McOrmond has shown clearly in Primer on the Hereafter he is quite able to shine by his own light.

Published in The Northern Poetry Review

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The Lives of Others

October 18, 2007 by Hazlit

Film Review

The Lives of Others

The recent film “The Lives of Others” is one of the best films I’ve seen in a long, long, time. So often my experience with films that have “buzz” is that all the praise being heaped upon the film is so much flim-flam. I remember a number of years ago hearing all about Quentin Tarrantino’s films. Each time one came out, much of the movie-viewing public always went wild. The films were always so entertaining and clever everyone said. When I finally decided to get around to seeing Mr. Tarrantino’s movies, I always came away with the feeling that what everyone had been saying was right—his movies were just that—clever. They were also pretentious and insecure in the worst way—they used violence, juvenile humor, and oblique references to make a kind of pastiche. In the end Tarrantino’s movies, like the worst of Woody Allen’s are all about himself. Oooh…Tarrantino is so cool.

“The Lives of Others” is nothing like this. I don’t remember the name of the director or the star. Few or none of the actors are brand names. It’s a German movie! No one in North America sees foreign movies anymore. And Americans are allergic to learning anything about life from elsewhere. So all the more reason why “The Lives of Others,” is so important. The movie is finally a love story of the highest order.

In recounting the conversion of an East Berlin Stasi (The East German secret police) agent from obedient functionary to romantic rebel the film shows the extraordinary power of art to change our lives. Captain Wiesler is an interrogator in the Stasi assigned by his superior to bug the home of a theater director suspected of dissident tendencies. Wiesler sets up an elaborate bugging system that records all the conversations of Christa-Maria Sieland and

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The Sadness of Life

October 11, 2006 by Hazlit

Poetry Review

The Human Cannonball

by Halli Villegas

At its best the despair of others reminds us of the persistence of happiness. When we watch or hear of suffering we may be lucky enough to recognize that for most of us life isn’t so bad. If it’s successful, the sadness artists express soothes our nerves by reminding us that pain is universal. As Elton John put it so succinctly: “Sad songs say so much.” Halli Villegas, in her latest book (believe your own press, 2005) The Human Cannonball, uses this phenomenon to build a short but affecting collection told in the voice of some of our greatest sufferers—circus performers.

Villegas’ collection recalls the once great but now mostly forgotten poetic masterpiece, Edgar Lee Master’s Spoon River Anthology. Like that work Villegas’ book creates a microcosmic society (for Masters’ the imaginary Spoon River, Illinois) and through the interplay of poetic voices shows the foibles and falsities we all participate in. The power of such writing, whether by Masters or Villegas, is that it doesn’t take long for us to recognize in these poetic voices some aspect of ourselves. When Villegas writes: “I saw the hesitation./He held the pose for a heartbeat longer than usual/his arm went a little higher/his hand trembled a bit,” in the poem “The Knife Thrower’s Wife,” she subtly evokes the double-edge of true passion, the terrible proximity of love and hate.

Villegas calls these “narrative poems,” and she is right to do so; they tell intimate and affecting stories. However, while Villegas gains from her narratives much of the power of fiction to make complete worlds for us, her poems correspondingly suffer from the curse of prosodists—indifference to the poetic line. Since the disappearance of rhyme and/or meter as essential structures of verse, the question of what constitutes a vital poetic line has been thrown wide open. Being a prescriptivist about this is consequently a good way of displeasing all the people all of the time. Still, in several places: “with misdirection while passing a juicy bit,” from “The Shell Game” or “uncontrollable” and “The trick is,” from “The Lion Tamer,” one wishes Villegas had wrestled a little more with that unruly beast of poetry—the line.

C. Durning Carroll

Word Magazine–March/April 2006

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Religion and Intolerance

February 6, 2006 by Hazlit

Idea Review

The Need for Moral Relativism

Lorenzo Albacete, a Roman Catholic priest writing in The New York Times, has put forth a fascinating if flawed defense of Pope Benedict XVIth’s encyclical “God is Love”. His commentary correctly states that the resistance of many non-believers to religion centers around the idea of the intolerance of Christianity and other religions. “For them,” Albacete writes:

what makes Christianity potentially dangerous as a source of conflict and intolerance in a pluralistic society is its insistence that faith is reasonable — that is, that it is the source of knowledge about this world and that, therefore, its teaching should apply to all, believers and nonbelievers alike.

We non-believers feel this point acutely. So much of life in the 21st century seems dominated by religion that those of us who are concerned about preserving the democracy of truth are voices crying in the wilderness. Albacete’s point cannot be overemphasized.

The problem comes about when Albacete offers his (Benedict’s) solution to this problem–just ignore it. “In a world where the name of God is sometimes associated with vengeance or even a duty of hatred, this message is both timely and significant,” Benedict writes. “For this reason I wish in my first encyclical to speak of the love which God lavishes upon us, and which we in turn must share with others.”

The article goes on to suggest that the way to respond to these charges is to show that God’s love is truth. The spirit behind such an assertion is noble and well meaning but also ineffective and frankly dangerous, for as long as religions make truth claims their believers will permit themselves all sorts of violent and despicable acts (see my earlier post on the Muhammad cartoons) because they claim to know the truth.

The only way religion can cease being the instigator of violence is to stop being the fount of truth. Only when religions assume a smaller and less important role in our lives will the killing and burning stop. One cannot but believe that it was religion and only religion that allowed the murder of abortion clinic doctors or the horrors of September 11th. The burning of western embassies across the Middle East and the death and destruction in Israel and Palestine are the result of a blind and foolish faith, a conviction that religion equals truth. How ironic that the God that brings comfort to believers should bring so much suffering to the rest of us. Every act of violence committed in the name of religion gives us non-believers a greater determination to harden our hearts to its tyranny.

Perhaps instead of being intolerant of non-believers religions should start being intolerant of the evils that result from belief. How much more effective religions would be if those who feel anger and intolerance directed such anger and intolerance against the source of such intolerance–religion itself. To put it bluntly: why can’t religion put up or shut up? In other words, why can’t religion stop preaching about the sins of others, and start focusing on really making a concrete difference in human lives? Where are those who give up wealth and power for service among the poor? Where are bridges built, the schools renovated, the meals made in silent humility before the wonders of God? What happened to turning the other cheek? Why are those of us skeptical of the claims of religion always drowned in its empty rhetoric?

Religion today is showing itself to be merely an ideology, as full of the arrogance and hypocrisy of other passing fads that grab the mind and give it delusions of grandeur. Why does religion claim so much but do so little? Better I think if religion claimed less, if it had the courage to understand that until it proves itself worthy of the name of truth it is simply one way among others. Since it clearly does much harm it must do relatively more good to be worthy of anything more than disdain.

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Muhammad Cartoons, Democracy and A Free Press

February 2, 2006 by Hazlit

 

Idea Review

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(Photo courtesy of the BBC news website)

Recently several newspapers in Europe published cartoons that criticized the prophet Muhammad. Islam prohibits depictions of the Prophet. These papers have been accused of blasphemy and incitement to violence. Such accusations may well be true, but it’s unclear whether that makes the publishers guilty of anything. As several papers have indicated in their editorials, blasphemy in their view is not a crime.

Indeed, one could argue that blasphemy is a responsibilty for any democratic society. As we’ve seen in Egypt with the Muslim Brotherhood and in Palestine with Hamas, Islamic parties are increasingly finding power through the ballot-box. Whether their ultimate aim is to preserve democracy or not is impossible to guess, but there is little doubt that no country can claim to be free or democratically governed by its people unless it allows blasphemy. Religion historically, but today especially, has always thrived on intolerance. Democracy and religion thus exist more or less at cross purposes. Still, many countries in the Middle East and elsewhere are claiming to be democracies while also officially sanctioning intolerance. The calls of such countries for an apology from the papers betrays their totalitarian tendencies. As the Prime Minister of Denmark said when several countries in the Middle East called for an official apology, “I can’t call a newspaper and tell them what to put in it. That’s not how our society works.” Sadly, however, in some of those countries, that is how society works.

This brings me to the second accusation–the incitement to violence. It is true that in the United States and much of the west “hate speech” is not protected. When the sole aim of one’s speaking is incitement, when free speech becomes invidious, then the balance between what is fair and what is right disappears. When free speech violates civil rights then and only then is its restriction permissible in a democratic society—note that I said “permissible,” not mandated or required in any way. Ideally, democratic societies should be strong enough to endure the free exchange of ideas whatever their content. Those who promote hate speech should not be silenced by law but shamed by their societies. Better still, they and all of us, could learn how to express our opinions in a less offensive way.

Could the Muhammad cartoons be considered hate speech? Unlikely. If the scrawny kid on the playground hurls insults at the bully it is not hate speech. Such invective may be foolish but could never be considered immoral. Islam, to put it mildly, is now a bully. Muslims will respond, with great justice, that the West too is a bully. True, the sympathy towards Israel of most Western governments cannot be doubted. But Middle Eastern governments (and tragically many Western muslims as well) fail to see that the western media are NOT organs of their governments; we are not propaganda machines, despite what the Bush administration may desire. Media represent the very essence of freedom in the West—the right to criticize and through criticism, to bring about improvement. So indeed, the call by Islamist governments in the Middle East to stop the criticism is in fact the best sign of why such criticism should continue; they are calling out, begging for criticism. And for any of us to succumb to such threats is to submit to totalitarianism and to yield to tyranny.

See further discussion about this idea here.

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Poetry and Truth

February 2, 2006 by Hazlit

An Essay on the Power of Poetry

For a long time we have believed that the arts are mere accessories in the project of knowledge. Though art may enrich and glorify our lives, many still feel only science can reveal truth. This equivalence of science with truth has existed for so long because science itself has been so vital in shaping modern life. All the infrastructure that surrounds us, from roads and buildings to satellites and mobile phones is the result of our science.  From the moment our ancestors sat down to wonder, to figure out their world, they were practicing science. The arts were for leisure time; they were pleasant, perhaps even important, but certainly not necessary. But modern history has changed these conditions. Science has brought comfort, but also death and destruction. Even as it has made our lives better it has also made them more complex. Yet our perception of science as the exclusive progenitor of truth has remained. Among respectable intellectual circles, art is still seen as a profession for neer-do-wells and muddle heads, and art itself as a topic for after dinner conversation, as if it were a sport or a species of politics. Science, on the other hand, is viewed as serious work—profitable, useful, and most of all true. But seeing science as the wellspring of truth, as many are still wont to do, excuses its more parlous aspects.

I am not proposing to get rid of science or indeed to deny its importance in our lives. Rather, I want to show that art, and in particular poetry, deserves serious consideration as being important in revealing truth. Such a change in mindset can help us to deal with a world whose physical and social aspects are constantly changing, and pull us out of the rigid intellectual conformity that scientific thinking demands. For by associating truth exclusively with science we form a world-view that blinds us to science’s limitations. All that is good in the world comes to be associated with this world-view, while evil becomes assoicated with every other.

The primary guardians of the scientific world-view are philosophers. To most of us, these people are terribly remote academics scribbling obsure treatises on irrelvant subjects. Certainly, there is some truth to this perception—most of don’t read monographs on Schopenhauer along with our morning paper. Nevertheless, how we form our view of the world determines much of how we behave, and the nature of philosophy, its tendency to take all of knowledge as its object of study, gives it an influence far beyond what one might expect. Indeed, because philosophy takes as its central concern questions of language, specifically with how we understand the world through the medium of language, it is the quintessential subject for determining world-views. It is widely, indeed almost universally, accepted that to understand the world we must understand how we use language.

The Scientific World View

The scientific world-view has a rather inflexible view of language. In its perspective language is a tool which serves to convey human requests, commands, or practical information; language has no expressive function. Determining the meaning of a sentence is equivalent to understanding the logical form of the sentence. A sentence whose logical form can be deciphered e.g. “A chair is for sitting,” is meaningful, whereas one whose logic is contradictory e.g. “The floor is over my head,” is considered meaningless, and therefore not worth talking about. Even in the most flexible interpretations, language still is seen by these analytic philosophers as essentially functional (designed to do something) and governed by precise rules. The task of philosophy, according to their interpretation, is to elucidate the ways in which we are misled by linguistic and grammatical ambiguities into misunderstanding the true logical form of a sentence. Once this is done, so the theory goes, all philosophical problems go away.

Analytic philosophy is the handmaiden of science. It justifies and defends the methodology of science against its detractors. Accordingly analytic philosophy supports a scientific world-view that sees sentences as very similar to equations, and that views the world as a series of problems suceptible to a solution.  After all, science has been hugely successful in improving our lives; its predictive power has been demonstrated in case after case. It is therefore normal that it would have a considerable influence on our world-views and on philosophy. But any system of thought can be pushed too far, can be asked to explain matters that are beyond its scope. This is what has happened with science. Its method of reasoning is extremely useful for a wide variety of problems dealing with the physical world. From a strictly philosophical point of view, analytic philosophy is useful for providing a conceptual underpinning for the discoveries of modern science.

But many scientists and practitioners of this philosophy, understandably delighted at the influence of their disciplines, have gone overboard in their exuberance. They have tried to apply analytic concepts of language to all aspects of human relations. Though some statements, such as those that require the performance of an action or a concrete response can validly be dealt with through logical analysis, there is a whole range of what might be called emotive statements— sentences that express emotion, whose intention makes proper logical analysis impossible. Analytic philosophers, in their presumption, assume either that such statements have no philosophical importance, or that they in fact are or contain analytic satements and thus can be dealt with rationally.

Groundwork for a Poetic Metaphysics

Emotive statements are important, however, because emotions clearly affect how we percieve and interact with the world. Nevertheless, they absolutely cannot be dealt with analytically. Indeed, much trouble is caused by the false claim of rationalists that such irrational statements don’t really say anything. It leads to the false conclusion that expressive language is incapable of expressing anything worthy of a solution. This kind of attitude only makes the problem worse. Emotive statements understandably perplex traditional philosophers for philosophers have always been wedded to rationality. If a philosophical problem has no obviouly rational solutions, philosophers feel that their only option is to deny that there is any problem. They seem totally incapable of accepting the importance of the non-rational in human life.

But is there room for a non-rational component in our search for truth? Most philosophical analyses would begin by searching for what we have in common in our perception. If you and I stare at a box, we can probably come to some sort of agreement about size, color, shape, and other purely physical attributes. Most philosophical analyses assume that you and I are perceiving the same thing. There is, however, no particular reason to believe this assumption, for beyond the purely physical attributes, our indiviudal experience of a box may be totally different. Perhaps at some time in your past, you were locked in a box similar to the one we are discussing, and so for you boxes are an unpleasant reminder of that former experience, while for me boxes remain merely containers. When you see a box you begin to shiver, your knees shake, and you turn away in disgust. Since our experience of the object is totally different, the way in which we interact with this object will also be different. Though functionally you and I may use the box for identical purposes—storing things—our actual experience of the box remains colored by our individual experience with this object.

What applies to objects here also applies to persons and situations, i.e. to all lived life. There is absolutely no reason to believe that any two people who are exposed to identical phenomena will experience the same phenomena. The histories of the two people will be different and so the meaning of the experience, whatever it may be, will also be different. The individuals may not be able to express this difference; they may not even be aware of the difference, but because of different histories, it will be there. Granted, there will be some overlap in how the experience is described; common sense argues for common ground and is necessary for scientific analysis, but it is false to automatically assume, as science and analytic philosophy do, that similarity equals equivalence.

Language

Language is the mirror of our experience. We learn the word table by being exposed to the thing; we learn happiness and sadness by being exposed to them. But again, while you and I may be able to agree on a thing called table, and about many of its attributes, our actual experience of tables will be quite different. So though we may have the same dictionary meaning for the word table, there will be elements of meaning we have as individuals, that won’t be part of any dictionary meaning. And though the dictionary meaning may be close enough to communicate and to do scientific work, it is manifestly false to say that such a definition is in any way true.

The way in which we use the word truth is the key to understanding how we use language. If we use truth in a merely analytical and objective sense then all the things that conform to truth, and all the meanings of words will also be analytical and objective. Conversely, if we take truth to be individual or subjective, then conformity to truth will have that character instead. A commonsense evaluation of truth, however, should lead us to an intermediate position—most phenomena have some obejctive level of truth and some subjective level of truth.  It is true that we can agree that the table is black, but it isn’t black at all times or from all angles. As a practical matter the table may appear black, but subjectively it sometimes isn’t. And the character of the word truth here is the character of all other words as well—they contain both an obejctive and a subjective part. Of course, philosophy has long paid attention only to the objective part while assuming the subjective part either doesn’t exist or isn’t important. But we see now that philosophy has been in error for a long time.

If the meaning of words is partly subjectively determined, then all larger syntactical structures will also have some subjective component. Since words are the foundation of sentences, subjective words make for subjective sentences which make for subjective writing. The fact that people interpret texts in different ways is the surest sign of this phenomenon. What we must break is the old habit that sees truth only as what is common between people. Truth is really composed of a considerable level of agreement about our perceptions with some essential element of disagreement.

Poetry in the Service of Truth

The function of art is simple enough—to remind us that truth is always partially subjective. Art does do this, and if it did this alone, it would still have enormous value in a society subjected to the juggernaut of scientfic thinking, but art does more by actually creating or manifesting subjective truth. What we see and know objectively is often obvious, whereas the subjective is equally vital, but often unknown or hidden. It is the function of art, and in particular of poetry, to bring to our consciousness that which is hidden, the element of truth that is forgotten in our passion for analysis. Poetry keeps the mind awake because it forces us to examine our linguistic presuppositions. It is the art of language par excellence because it focuses its effects less on individuals or on action than on how we construe meaning. It takes the philosopher’s analytic project and turns it on its head—philosophical problems are not the result of a failure to perceive the correct logical structure, but are rather a result of the failure to see the limits of analysis. The poem then, forces us to confront the reality that not all statements can be logically analyzed, and in so doing, it brings forth the truth, which had been hidden or mistakenly assumed to be found by the analytic philosophers.

Poetry is uniquely suited to the exposition of truth. If we communicate about and understand our world in a primarily linguistic fashion, then poetry automatically becomes an important means to achieve this end. The poem takes the language and logic of the analysts and twists them around so that sentences retain meaning but cease to be amenable to logical analysis. To take just one example well known to philosophers: Silent green dreams sleep furiously. Logically of course, this sentence has no meaning since dreams do not sleep. Yet it would be equally false to say that the sentence is meaningless; rather it has a meaning whose meaning cannot be explained logically. But it is indubitably false to say that if this sentence can’t be explained logically then it has no meaning; that itself is illogical. When a sentence cannot be explained logically then that is all that can be concluded. The genius of the poem is that it opens up our notions of what “makes sense” to something beyond the merely analytical.  Logic is confining and restricting; it deals well with those parts of the world where we agree, but it is incapable of explaining  our sudden wild flights of fancy, our inspirations, our loves. The poem as a work of art is free to throw out the conventions of logic, or at least to reinterpret them in the service of truth.

Poetry completes our true picture of the world. Science is there to sketch the broad outlines, to show us what the world is like in general for most people most of the time. But poetry gives us the proper picture, brings the world into focus, and lets us see that what we thought was the absolute truth was in fact just the merest outline, the shadow of the real. A true picture of our world includes both science and poetry. One, science, sketches the figure, the other, poetry, gives it mass, shape and presence. Only together do they form truth.

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About Poetry

February 2, 2006 by Hazlit

But great poets often produce mediocre work, bad poets can be surprisingly good, and very good poets are frequently no better than consistently above average - all of which is to say that it’s far more difficult to isolate “great poetry” than Kleinzahler (and most critics) might like to believe. We’re forced to live with a chaos of styles and a muddle of best guesses.

From David Orr: New York Times 11/13/2005

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Ideologues at the Lectern

January 28, 2006 by Hazlit

Idea Review

David Horowitz and The Academic Bill of Rights

David Horowitz, who’s become infamous in academic circles for his so-called “Academic Bill of Rights” repeats more nonsense in a recent piece in The LA Times. I have several responses to “Ideologues at the Lectern.” The first part of my response, as I’ve stated before, is to wonder whether Horowitz’s Academic Bill of Rights applies to specifically religious instituions like Wheaton College that claim Christianity as incontrovertible truth. (And incidentally make faculty members to take a pledge that they agree with such a view.) Of course Wheaton and these other institutions are private, and one could argue that the fact that students pay tuition exempts them from Horowitz’s ideological diversity requirements. But in fact, as many students attending private colleges recieve some form of governmental aid, even if only in the form of a subsidized loan, the distinction between private and public institutions is rendered somewhat moot. Yet Horowitz’s failure to cite examples of bias at obviously right-wing institutions makes him look like a hypocrite.

Secondly, Horowitz’s article, and indeed the whole thrust of his argument, is predicated on the idea of some sort of liberal conspiracy in academia that operates to keep conservatives out. While it can’t be denied that liberals populate academia in considerable numbers, Horowitz doesn’t convincingly show that this is anything but the result of faculties trying to hire the best person for the job. Either academia is a free market and the result obtained (many liberals) is the correct result of this market’s invisible hand, or it isn’t a free market, and then institutions like tenure, teacher’s unions, and other conservative bêtes-noirs, aren’t really a problem. However you look at it, the intervention of the Academic Bill of Rights is unjustified. Horowitz wants to have it both ways–because academia delivers a result he finds displeasing he uses the rhetorical red-herring of free markets to engage in a very non free market intervention.

Third, one could argue that the situation of being a liberal in the United States today is analogous to being a conservative student at a liberal university. The unfortunate student who has to listen to anti-Bush professors is not very different from the liberal who has to listen to (and live under laws made by) conservatives. Now that all three branches of government are clearly in conservative hands do we need a Citizen’s Bill of Rights that mandates a certain number of liberals to offset this conservative juggernaut? Of course not. Horowitz could trot out the old saw of students paying for their education and therefore having rights to have their views represented, but I pay taxes too.

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Bending the Truth

January 26, 2006 by Hazlit

Idea Review

Michiko Kakutani’s: “Bending the Truth in A Million Little Ways”

The New York Times has a very interesting article on the Million Little Pieces brouhaha by the inimitable Michiko Kakutani. Her article, called “Bending The Truth in a Million Little Ways” talks about a lot of issues that interest me–truth, lies, objectivity, the status of literature, etc. Ms. Kakutani is no fool and is certainly widely read, but her training as a journalist (despite a degree in English from Yale) leads her to leave us with the impression that the end of objectivity is a recent phenomenon stemming from something rotten in the kingdom, e.g. reality t.v., navel gazing, the “me” generation, psychoanalysis, academia, etc. In point of fact, memoirs were never about objectivity and the blurring of fact and fiction is probably as old as storytelling itself. I’ve been reading and thinking about Rousseau’s Confessions as some of you know, and am at the moment also reading Wordsworth’s The Prelude, or The Growth of a Poet’s Mind.

What strikes me about these autobiographical works (essentially memoirs–or maybe indeed an autobiography is somehow not a “memoir”) is that they are both attempts at self-justification. I would argue that there is a straight line to be traced between Augustine’s Confessions and A Million Little Pieces. I haven’t read the latter and read the former so many years ago it’s now all blurred in my memory, but if these fit the pattern of Rousseau’s Confessions and The Prelude then they are extended excuses for various forms of illicit behavior. What they all do (I say this of course without having them fresh in my mind) is create a subjective ground for morality and then invent various means for redemption–the church, nature, confession itself, etc. Wordsworth even reminds us of how little he has fallen! The purpose of the memoir, I would argue against Ms. Kakutani, is not about the recounting of facts but rather a tool for forgiveness and social re-integration. Ms. Kakutani’s article suggests in a misleading way that if only we all stopped lying something called “objective truth” would suddenly shine out from under the grime of rhetoric.

Truth—and nobody really wants to say this—is hard work. Whether in science—supposedly the preserve of objective truth, but once again shown to be quite subjective by the Korean experimenter who suceeded in passing a fabrication to the normally sedulous Science—or in literature, a serious dose of humility and an iterative process that works and works again to call into question what is passed for “truth” is vitally important. Political liberals, poets, and many academics get skewered for supposedly making truth subjective and relative, but I think this is to misunderstand what they/we are saying. I recall Kurosawa’s movie Rashomon and its seven different versions of reality. Somewhere behind all those scenes there’s something vital called truth, but you’d be a fool to claim that one version or the other is in fact the truth.

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Poetry Trends and Easy Answers

November 11, 2005 by Hazlit

Poetry Review

Dan Chiasson

Natural History 

Note, for example, the recent success of Dan Chiasson whose recent book Natural History is being lauded in poetry circles. Dan first “broke out” with a selection of poems in The New Yorker on “emerging poets.” His first book–well reviewed–was published by a good university press–University of Chicago. Natural History is from Knopf, perhaps the best commercial poetry press in North America.

Now Dan writes a good line, even quite a good line, but I’m not convinced that he’s a Wallace Stevens, for example. What Dan does seem to have (and forgive me if I’m letting my jealousy show just a tad) is simplicity. I mean by this that the poem easily gives up its meaning and emotion. Dan’s poems are never hard. They are great value-for-your-money poems. They are rarely long, generally unpretentious, and often clever–important qualities for readers who don’t generally like poetry.

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An Assignment from the Poobah

October 24, 2005 by Hazlit

Poetry Review

Budget Travel Through Space and Time

by Albert Goldbarth

The latest book by the American poet Albert Goldbarth is called Budget Travel Through Space and Time. Let’s imagine then for a moment that you are a traveler come on some cheap spaceflight to the planet earth, and you happen to have learned English on your faraway habitation. Your assignment from the poobah of your homeworld is to return with one relic that represents the state of mind on Earth. At a loss at first at the complexity of your assignment, you ultimately decide to sample the literature of English-speaking North America to understand what these aliens are thinking and feeling. Imagine further that you don’t know anything about North American literary history; you understand language well but not recent culture, and in the bookstore you’ve discreetly entered you come across Goldbarth’s book. Intrigued by the coincidence of the title you begin to read. What observations would you draw? What would your colleagues think of your choice?

Preoccupied, as you no doubt would be, with language, the first thing you would notice would be the very different levels of diction in Goldbarth’s book. When you saw words like “jiffy,” “gumption,” and “crackerjack,” you might wonder how they could easily co-exist in the same poem with other bits of more literary language. Later, when you ran into “vomit” and “upchuck” only a few lines apart you might begin to wonder who this fellow was, and whether he was choosing his words carefully or was simply throwing them at you in a random fashion, hoping one or two might stick in your memory or in your craw. And the variety of words would not be limited to their diction—there would be made up words: “telecyberfiber,” or “fooming, ” intentional misspellings such as “schpritzer,” or “dishabille,” and words from various disciplines like “leukemia,” “zero-gees,” and “REM,” all occurring in the same poem. Goldbarth, you would quickly conclude, is an intellectual omnivore. Anyone who in a poem called “Tuvalu,” could manage to insert epigraphs from the 15th century French poet François Villon and a contemporary periodical like USA Today was bound to be someone interested in how language and ideas, high culture and low culture interact. And essentially all of the other poems in Budget Travel you would discover follow a similar pattern.

The poems often have little to do with their titles, for they quickly veer off into other concerns. So a poem with a great title like “A Gesture Made in the Martian Wastes” ends up being about the history of sci-fi, the power of imagination, the difficulty of being sixteen, and a story a Vietnam veteran told Goldbarth the night before he wrote the poem, and not very much at all about Mars or gesturing or wastes. So if you thought that a poem had to be about something particular, a Goldbarth poem would leave you speechless. “What are his poems about?” the poobah might ask. “Well, er, uh, everything” you’d have to reply. And thereby perhaps also nothing. A Goldbarth poem can contain: a footnote consisting of an eighty-eight digit number, a check off list of items with permission to add to the list, a dash nearly an inch-and-a-half long, and several pages of prose on the English painter JMW Turner. Admittedly there is no mathematics or html code in Budget Travel, but if the book had been longer…

Goldbarth, you might well think to yourself, is entertaining. Where else after all, but in a poem called “Washington’s Ovens, Adames’ Letters,” might you read about “the favored dish of the emperor Vitellius,” that “combined such delicacies as pheasant brains, pike livers, peacock hearts, flamingo tongues, and lamprey milt.” While such information won’t make you a million in the stock market, who knows whether the question of the Emperor’s favorite dish might not appear in the next edition of Trivial Pursuit? (Yes, that bit of North American culture has gotten to your homeworld!)

Though Goldbarth is clearly smart and has evidently spent at least as much time in a library poring over fraying leather tomes as he has watching TV, the question nagging at your consciousness might well be—“but is he moving? Does his poetry make my heart race or my pulse skip a beat?” There’s no accounting for taste, of course, but if you were me, the answer would be no. Clever? Yes. Innovative? Perhaps. Moving? Not a bit of it. Now if you were coming from far, far away you might be severely disappointed at mere cleverness. If, however, you kept wandering around the poetry section of the bookstore (assuming of course they had one) and you read other poetry books you could very well begin to hit your head in exasperation. For many other poets you would discover were neither moving nor clever. Goldbarth, at least was not one of those…Maybe the poobah would be pleased.

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Lost In Translation

October 11, 2004 by Hazlit

Film Review

Lost In Translation

America has always had a myth of itself as large and unruly. In this myth men are always cowboys or Jedi knights who ride off into the sunset or whiz across the sky at supersonic speeds. Alternatively the male hero is an entrepreneur or mad scientist who uses his ruthless business acumen or technological wizardry and not a small amount of dumb luck to gain power. Mostly, the women of our American imagination are pretty and demure, but when they rebel they do so like the men, with noise and bravado, like ever so many clones of Princess Leia shooting her way out of a tight spot.

American film has long fed and nurtured these fantasies of power. Our film icons are rough and tumble men like those played by John Wayne or Clint Eastwood, hard-bitten tough guys who administer the American way of justice at the point of a gun. The nerds among us are force fed our American role models through the likes of Christopher Lloyd, who plays Doc Brown, the crazy scientist in “Back to the Future,” and is able to make everything come out right in the end. Either way, in the American myth that Hollywood so loves, the American is nearly always the winner. Even when he fails, the American fails spectacularly, on a grand stage.

For many American and mostly male critics the greatest of all American movies is Francis Ford Coppola’s “The Godfather” trilogy, a cinematic stage-play that wraps up all the elements of American fantasies of power, violence, and tragedy into a single epic-length package. The extraordinary success of these movies, both with critics and audiences, speaks volumes about the predominant values of our society. Thus it is a surprise and almost a shock to see the daughter of Francis Ford Coppola, Sophia Coppola, make a movie for American audiences that in so many ways challenges these predominant values, and indeed neatly flips them on their head.

Her latest movie Lost in Translation is everything her father’s films are not. Where he spoke of power, anger, and violence his daughter speaks of equality, love and unexpected tenderness. Where he drove home his points with the force of bullet into the brain, she quietly opens a page on human life and lets us draw our own conclusions. While his focus was always on the overtly dramatic, she chooses moments of quotidian life and embues them with a gentle poignancy. As a storyteller of domestic discord and the subtle pangs of love she reminds one more of Eric Rohmer, an avowedely European (gasp!) director, than anyone we’ve ever produced in America.

Bill Murray, who’s never gotten the credit he deserves for being able to be both dramatic and wryly comic at the same time, plays Bob Harris, a washed-up, down-on-his-luck actor who arrives in Tokyo to shoot a series of whiskey commercials. While there, he develops a friendship with Charlotte, (Scarlett Johansson) a young American woman who spots him sitting alone in the hotel bar. Together they walk the streets of Tokyo, with all its frenetic lights, noisy pachinko parlors, and incomprehensible street signs. And from a plot standpoint, that’s really all that happens. But no plot summary can begin to communicate the emotional nuances that are the real substance of this film.

In fact, it almost seems pointless to talk about the movie at all, for although Bob and Charlotte do speak, words here are far less important than actions and their meaning. Johansson, who gives a luminous yet astonishingly understated performance, conveys more of the fierce intensity of her evolving sentiments for Bob through gesture and body language, than she does by anything she says. And this may well be Ms. Coppola’s point, that when it comes to matters of the heart, what we say in words is nearly always lost in translation. What really matters is feeling.

In her willingness to confront head-on the problems of loss, disorientation and misunderstanding Ms. Coppola is doing something largely unheard of in American film. For true powerlessness, the sense that all of what you’ve done up to this point may be wrong, and that the future you planned may not turn out to be any better, and may quite likely be worse, is the very opposite of Americans’ hegemonic dreams of glory. In her placement of two Americans trying to negotiate and navigate in a strange and foreign land she is also, perhaps unwittingly, creating a metaphor for American behavior in a world after September 11th—a world that seems not to make sense, but that we had better try to understand, for that is all we have.

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Beauty Rejoined

November 14, 2001 by Hazlit

Poetry Review

Mercury

by Phillis Levin

Damn the reviewer’s objectivity; Phillis Levin is a friend of mine. As so often in these situations, it turned out we had someone in common—a Canadian expatriate photographer living in Italy. Last summer, as I lay naked soaking up the sun in Sardinia, this photographer said that she knew a poet called Phillis Levin, who was living in Rome for a year. Somehow I knew the name, and as I racked my sun-addled brain, I recalled that a year earlier I had heard her read at KGB Bar. She was tall and slim, with skin white as a new tooth. She quoted philosophers and as I remember had some knowledge of the classics. But quoting is not a sign of anything; any moron can quote. Still, I had thought her poetry quite good; she was interested in ideas, always an auspicious sign. I met her in Rome. She swept down the stairs like a winged Greek goddess, and I was sure at the time I was in love. Still, as I spent time with her, I found something very nineteenth-century about her. She seemed gaunt yet oddly sensual; she reminded me of how one might imagine Emily Dickinson, with the same austerity; though with a quite different kind of poetry.

My life at that time was at a critical juncture. I was in love with an Italian woman and I wondered why I was so attracted to Europe and to this woman. Phillis urged me to write about my conundrum. I did it, and felt better. On my last day in Rome we went to see a fabulous Sebastiano Salgado photography show. We saw so many suffering faces in those pictures, so many lives unlike our own silly, privileged ones. I found Phillis remarkable that day. Of course, I returned to New York and left Phillis behind. She was working on an anthology, about sonnets I believe. That was in August. Now it’s April, and Phillis’s new book Mercury has just come out from Penguin. It’s a deceptive book: many of the poems seem light, almost frail. Often they speak quietly. Yet like a silk curtain, what they reveal is often shadowy. The whole substance of the poems is often discovered only by parting the curtain, by carefully penetrating the surface of the words.

I like poems about ideas. There’s a reason for this. Most poems for me are too personal or too sweet; they’re rehashings of bad nature poems or transcribed sessions from a visit with the therapist. Sometimes, as with Ashbery and a few others, the poems can avoid ideas yet still be terrific, as if some light were shining through them. But most poets throw words around with little sense of direction or of purpose. They want to discuss an experience, but they structure that experience in an entirely personal way and fail to create any shared elements. Phillis’s work is altogether different. Don’t get me wrong; I don’t like everything she does. But Mercury is definitely a buy and hold. Her work here is as clear as winter rain puddles, and as quiet as breakfast with a hermit.

One of the nice qualities of her work, is that it bears rereading. A poem which at first blush has one meaning, turns out to also have another meaning. It is these multiple levels of signifying that makes Mercury interesting. Take for example, the opening poem “Part.” On the surface this appears to be essentially a definitional poem. Phillis looks at the multitude of things the word part means. It would seem at first that this poem is a purely analytical study of a word. Yet note the word she has chosen: part. Phillis says: Also a piece, a section, as in/Part of me is here, part of me/Is missing, an essential portion… Now the poem begins to look like either an examination of the poet’s psychology, or a love poem. The very fact that both are possible is a testament to the poem’s complexity. Perhaps they are equally true: her lover has left her because some essential part of her is missing; she misses love, yet cannot love because she is somehow incomplete.

This conflict between intimacy and closeness on one hand and analytical distance on the other seems to be a recurring part of Mercury. In the poem “Conversation in an Empty Room” she sets forth an imaginary dialogue, but without quotations or any obvious sign that the speaker has changed. We might assume it’s a true dialogue, but it may also be the internal dialogue we all carry on inside our heads. Again, it’s important to look at the title: logically speaking a room remains empty until someone enters it. So logically, if anything is happening in an empty room, it is no longer empty. The conversation then, it at once there and not there, in the room and not. This kind of contradiction again plays with the idea of a connection with an other that is somehow faulty, or fatally flawed, so that the conversation that should have taken place, never quite does.“Mercury,” the title poem of the collection, seems equally concerned with parting and joining. Mercury, as anyone knows who has seen it rolling about a surface has, because of its relatively high specific gravity, a tendency to form little balls like liquid ball-bearings. Beyond this, mercury can split and rejoin almost infinitely without any external signs of disturbance; it simply reforms into its liquid ball-bearing shape. Unlike the human heart, it can merge and be sundered without damage or effect. Though Phillis’s poem here is rather more personal, and so to my mind less powerful than other poems in the collection, still she finds in the experience of disturbing the element a powerful metaphor for the contradictions of her own condition.

The last poem “A Meditation on A and The” though perhaps not directly about her, still carries forth the duality she has established between distance and closeness. Phillis shows how our use of articles influences how we think. A she notes is only used for singulars whereas the is used both for singulars and plurals. She also deftly notes how intimacy is bound up with the; we talk about “a chair,” in the abstract, but a particular chair that we sit in becomes “the chair.” Even more intimate she slyly suggests, and “the chair” becomes “thee chair”. These to my mind are the most elegant poems in the collection: they push me to reconsider my world view; they alter, even if slightly, my perspective on the world. Unfortunately, many of the poems in the middle seem like filler. They are the kind of sweet personal history poems that everyone writes and many seem to love. But the purpose of a poem is not to reveal the poet’s soul, but to push the mind to light. When Phillis holds strongly to ideas and to abstract principles she can work wonders.

At the launch party for the book, a very beautiful woman said to me: “If you have to question whether something is beautiful, then it is beautiful.” And what if I’m sure it is beautiful, like Phillis’s book; what then?

C. Durning Carroll

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