After my ineptitude with respect to my recent attempt at relaxation (otherwise known as ending the futz), the next day I returned Ludlum to the library, his masculine melodrama unplumbed, and picked up Poetics of Imagining Modern to Post-modern by Richard Kearney. I just seem to be in a space where the novel cannot participate. Poetry works, and non-fiction of a specific sort, but not the novel.

All I really did for the evening of the futzing post is drift along on a undercurrent of ennui, went to bed, slept, woke snuffling, then spent the next day (yesterday, after the doctor’s visit) drifting, less futzily (nice word don’t you think), on a mixture of poems read and reread, snoozing at the beach in the shade, drinking iced coffee, and beginning Kearney. Sometimes bad moods just have to be let alone to blossom – even if what you get is a milk vetch, dandelion or morning glory vine.

Today has been much of the same. I had a meeting this morning that went rather well, but after that I went to my favourite Greek Taverna for a take-away breakfast (fava beans in a tomatoe-garlic sauce, tabouli and a little black olive tapenade) mixed with some bread and iced espresso (sweet) from the pâtisserie a few doors down – oh my the wonders of being human, having a little money and living in Vancouver. I zoomed off to the beach with my food, sat in the shade, ate, drank and (re)read Sylvia Legris’ iridium seeds (gorgeous!).

After that, I went to another coffee shop, tea this time and Kearney. Hours worth of a lovely breeze, mixed sun and shade, pleasant, mostly smiling faces, an interesting book and no obligation to speak.

The wondrous world of a several-day futz.

Normally this has not been an issue for me. Not really. I am pretty focused about some things and I like to work, but usually I can find a novel, or a shady patch near the river on a warm day and just drift. Usually at night too, on nights near the full moon, I can just pretend the human world is not as nastily mundane as it often is, but of late, well, no.

I got a Ludlum spy book from the library today in an effort to find something simply entertaining and remove myself from my query of “thing” and “imagination” but so far it is a no go. Talk about nasty and mundane – perhaps the world of spies was not the best choice of light reading material. What I really was waiting for was a novel called Starter for 10 by David Nicholls but although it is in transit to my library it has not yet arrived.  Oh well.

I have a god-daughter that believes in fairies so perhaps a trip to the bookstore for a gardening primer on butterfly plants? Did you know that fairies happen to like the same plants as humming birds and butterflies? Who knew?

I could go to a place where I know I’ll get into a silly “philosophical” argument with someone so that I can see them retreat into some form of “well I have the right to my opinion” stance. But that’s kind of mundane and mean so maybe that wouldn’t be any better than Ludlum is proving to be.

I could go see The Expendables and watch all the destructo-boys do their thing on the big screen. (Just thinking about it causes a suspicious tightening in my jaw so maybe not.)

I could just hang out and wait for TrueBlood to come on.

I could go outside and bead.

Too bad I’m not a drunk or a prescription addict. This wouldn’t be a problem.

Meh.

Maybe I’ll just go back to thinking about imagination. Funny that thinking about it in an abstract way is having a deleterious effect on its functioning. Would one consider that irony?

Wallace Stevens’ essay “The Noble Rider” is really about rehabilitating the concept of nobility and resiting it as “a force and not the manifestations of which it is composed.”

It (nobility) is not an artifice that the mind has added to human nature.The mind has added nothing to human nature. It is a violence from within that protects us from a violence without. It is the imagination pressing back against the pressure of reality. It seems, in the last analysis, to have something to do with our self-preservation; and that, no doubt, is why the expression of it, the sound of its words, helps us to live our lives.

What really interests me in the essay is the assumptions Stevens’ makes about imagination. He has a poem “Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour” in which he says

Within its vital boundary, in the mind.
We say God and the imagination are one…
How high that highest candle lights the dark.

I want to be careful here because, despite Stevens’ apparent conversion to Catholicism on his death bed, I suspect what he was agreeing to and what the attending Priest thought he was agreeing to was rather different.  For one thing, the fact that there was a realm in which Stevens could equate imagination with a divine entity seems a little different from the divine entity postulated by Pope Benedict XVI and probably quite different from the Pope that was reigning at the time of Stevens’ dust-up with cancer. In fact the equation of imagination with the divine sounds a lot more like Carl Jung than Joseph Ratzinger.

Regardless, this idea of what imagination is lets us know it was of critical importance to Stevens.  In “The Noble Rider” he says that

the imagination adheres to reality, but, also, that reality adheres to the imagination and that the interdependence is essential.

This posits imagination and reality as mutually necessary but disparate forces/entities. The idea that imagination is a force independent of the world (reality) is a common enough assumption in the West. It underpins much of what we think we know about the world and our place within it. Stevens’ narrative that results from the assumption is to posit a place for the poet that is most certainly at least semi-divine, which is why he is so interested in rehabilitating the concept of nobility. The struggle between imagination and reality is the engine (the force) which makes art transformative and changes society.

In the first quote above, this force, which he identifies in the essay as “nobility” manifests as the pressure imagination exerts as it “adheres” to reality, as it narrates the nature of nature.  Nobility of person is the individual’s part of the more universal or general Mind/Imagination (supreme fiction). It is this general Mind that reminds me so much of Jung’s Collective Unconscious and what I think Stevens’ meant when he said “god.”

Imagination, for Stevens, is both a thing and a force. This seems to be the case throughout the essay and, although not as thoroughly thought out as many of the Phenomenologists who also write about imagination, it seems to follow the same basic line. A “thing” is not an object contained within the concept that is its name, but a more of a thing-in-itself, a force that forever escapes our attempts to contain it.

There is a line near the end of “The Noble Rider:” “A poet’s words are of things that do not exist without the words.” I am not at all saying that Stevens’ was a Phenomenologist but rather that the focus on forces in Stevens’ thinking led to some of the same places that the focus on events led Phenomenologists. If imagination is a force that contends with reality, that posits at least two basic “substances” and creates duality narratives of the white/black, raw/cooked sort. It also makes possible a third world, which mediates the two forces. This is the world of words, or art. This is the world of things in the Phenomenological sense. It is the words that attach us to reality but in such a way as to also attach reality to the imagination.

Albeit, Stevens never saw either imagination nor reality as possible without the other (at least in a world without humans or other imagining beings in it), but it is still a world riven and eternally struggling. In this he was very much of his time and place. For me though, I cannot help but wonder how the narrative would work if imagination and reality are not two but one force. One materially driven force, at least at the level of organization that can support human life. I keep coming back to photons and waves. I know it seems like two but it isn’t. It’s one. Then, there is only reality and imagination is a part of it. So it couldn’t be narrated as a battle, but could be narrated as something akin to fetal development, or perhaps the odd and curious development of the first “cell” wall – something entirely unprecedented but nevertheless a function of known forces.

Anyway, the point is just that if imagination is taken out of the dual world of a soul’s battle with reality, then how will the narrative go? That is my question.

Years ago I knew a woman who told me a story about a Salish woman we both knew. Briefly, the Salish woman would say “track bear” when she was pointing (or referring) to a bear track. She was a Salish speaker and the underlying sense of reality that was instilled in her early years (and was recorded in the rhythms and syntax of her first language) stayed with her. She explained (to the woman I once knew) when asked, that to say “track bear” is obvious since you see the track first and then you see the bear.

Little bits of knowledge like this are like prisms. Turned this way and that they break up what we thought was a singular modality. The relationship between what our bodies receive from the world and what we perceive, and then communicate to ourselves (let alone others) is like white light. It isn’t singular.

For humans there isn’t a case where the world is either about objects and subjects or about events. Demonstrably it is about both. The decision about what to make central (either the subject/objects or the events – the space between) is a cultural decision made in the development of a group of people in space over time. What interests me is the movement a mind can make between bear track and track bear. This is the world of the liminal, the cultural translator, the mind that slips on its own (un)certainties.

I’ve been rather sick for several days. Bad, bad headache and since my daughter is also sick, it’s been frustrating. Can’t think, but still have to operate. Can’t even read much because it ratchets up the pain after not very long. Still, I did read “The Noble Rider” which is an essay by Wallace Stevens from his collection of essays called The Necessary Angel.

I mentioned this book in the August 17 post on Phenomenology, poetry and sense when I felt a connection between the “thing” and what Stevens’ thinks about poetry, imagination and reality. Mind slippage of the sort that track bear track represents is what happens (or what enables) when the certainties of event/or/subject-object are fractured. The slivers left, the “questioning” I talk about in the last thing-post is like the rainbow the prism enables us to see. It is important to remember that the prism doesn’t create it, by the way, it just makes visible to us the constituent frequencies of what normally appears as “white.”

This is why I think that the rock is just as real as the thing-in-itself (last paragraph of that Aug 17 post). White light is not unreal. Neither are the constituent frequencies the “really real” light. They are just as much a product of our visual equipment and our resultant interpretation as is white light. What seems critical to me is that our visual equipment obviously includes eyes, nerves, cerebral processing modules as well as the world of electro-magnetic frequencies and photons: what we perceive is a result of the relationship between what we have evolved to be and what we have evolved within. What I question is where does track bear track come into it? Where does this cultural imagination – the various cultures’ certainty of correct and obvious interpretation of what is seen – obtain? I suppose it must be in the “processing” that imagination has its abode.

All this has led me to question imagination. What is it? I mean there are the Romantics who are sure they know, and Stevens (and other poets/artists of course) has things to say about its relationship to reality and to the mind, as do the Philosophers and Cognitive Scientists. So that’s what I’m exploring.

For me, all of it is still tethered to the idea of “thing”/”thing-in-itself” and in my head “thing”/”thing-in-itself” and “imagination” relate, but how? No idea yet. Just a feeling. It’s a bit like a Tarot card I’m not quite sure where to place relative to others already chosen, and if you read symbols of any sort, you know that position is critical. A new card can seriously derange what one thought was (finally) understood.

While this is a political/environmental message, it is really well done. The narrator’s voice, for example, is perfect.

via Wimp

Requiem for the Plantagenet Kings

For whom the possessed sea littered, on both shores,
Ruinous arms; being fired, and for good,
To sound the constitution of just wards,
Men, in their eloquent fashion, understood.

Relieved of soul, the dropping-back of dust,
Their usage, pride, admitted within doors;
At home, under caved chantries, set in trust,
With well-dressed alabaster and proved spurs
They lie; they lie; secure in the decay
Of blood, blood-marks, crowns hacked and coveted,
Before the scouring fires of trial-day
Alight on men; before sleeked groin, gored head,
Budge through the clay and gravel, and the sea
Across daubed rock evacuates its dead.

Geoffrey Hill here, here and here

In part 4 I ended with this:

So what is the thing itself? A question of course. That’s why it isn’t either a subject or an object. A thing is the foundation which allows concepts to take form and so, of course, is pre-conceptual and why, at best, poetry can only aim its letters and hope to illuminate the invisible door by the sparks contact ignites.

I’ve been bothered by that since shortly after I wrote it (I was trying to go to sleep when the “botheration” surfaced). It is both true and not-true and the not-true bit worries me like a terrier at a towel. Even in my dreams that night, growl, growl, growl.

Then yesterday I was reading The Necessary Angel by Wallace Stevens.

Only recently I spoke of certain poetic acts as subtilizing experience and varying appearance: “The real is constantly being engulfed in the unreal…[Poetry] is an illumination of a surface, the movement of a self in the rock.”

I put the book down because it made me think of what a “thing” is and how an understanding of poetry contributes to our understanding of the nature and content of “thingness.”

A “thing” is a question in the sense that by orienting to the world in the questioning mode one makes possible Stevens’ subtilizing as well as the illumination of Stevens’ surface (or the door I referenced in the final paragraph of section 4 quoted above). A thing is not the words of the question, not the verbal question. A thing-in-itself, at least as far as a human being (also a thing-in-itself) can communicate the pre-linguistically experienced world, is a questioning stance. It is a way of experiencing the world that is, evolutionarily, our main way of assessing the world (including the world of our selves). Reason and language are late-comers.

The thing-in-itself that I experience during my morning walk is a questioning of many things: boundaries, kinship, danger, usefulness, pleasure potential. The thing-in-itself becomes a “rock” when I create an answer, and especially when I communicate that answer to myself (think about it) or others (talk/write about it). Poetry can undermine the current “answer” and re-open the “questioning.” This is why a thing-in-itself escapes the subject-object dichotomy, because for that decision to have been made, the thing-in-itself must have disappeared into the concept “rock.” As Stevens puts it, the real disappears into the unreal.

I would argue that a rock is just as real as the thing-in-itself, but not today. All I want to say today is that the rock and the thing-in-itself that I experience pre-linguistically are separate “things” despite their obvious relationship. That is, words are also “things” in the phenomenological sense. But, like I said, not today.

The nastiness around Proposition 8 has generated quite a few public displays from the more mean and venal people in the US. This guy Perkins (from the Family Research Council) seems to be a typical conservative Christian right-wing political and cultural activist. He opposes the standard things – homosexuality, abortions, sexual education for youth, etc, etc. According to the wiki site he also seems comfortable utilizing the Klu Klux Klan’s support base. No surprises there.

It’s also no surprise that he can’t actually argue and that the attorney David Boies (since he can argue) makes Mr Perkins look the fool. So when I went to Dispatches From the Culture Wars on Science Blogs and started to watch the clip, I wasn’t surprised to find myself shaking my head at the foolishness of it all. What I do find continually surprising (surprisingly so) is the deep painfulness of it. I can never watch video like this straight through.

For example, at 1:15 when Perkins cites abortion as a legislative parallel (Roe vs. Wade) and he says “abortion was no where near the political issue that it is today when the court interjected itself in 1973 to this issue.” “Interjected itself?”  Excuse me! (I paused the clip there, and went to clean the bathroom.) Ms McCorvey (she who was named Jane Roe) wanted to make a decision about her pregnancy and Texas’ anti-abortion laws denied her that right. She took it to court. The court reviewed the case (and reviewed it, and reviewed it). It went all the way to the Supreme Court. The Justices made a decision.

That decision is the whole point of the presence of the court system in the US. Its purpose is to be there to adjudicate arguments in a reasonable manner in line with the laws of the nation. The use of the word “interjected” in Perkins speech implies that the court insinuated itself into a place it had no authority or standing and that is exactly what it does have. Anyway, this is an example of why I find stuff like this so very painful.  It is also when Mr Perkins lost any chance of swaying me to see his side of things. I respond to patently emotional manipulation with irreversible scepticism.

So when (at 2:55) Mr Boies is asked to respond, you see that head-titled wide smile, and I understood that smile to say (what an idiot, this is like shooting fish in a barrel). I felt included and a part of the coming judgement upon Mr Perkins in part because Mr Boies never said anything like that. He relied upon his smile, his mild gesture, upon understatement. He acted as if he trusted me to make a sensible decision. Mr Boies’ strategy is much more effective than Mr Perkins’. Both are emotional, but at this point Mr Boises has not made himself look like a fool so I am at least willing to listen.

Then Mr Boies goes on to list the problems with the speech of Mr Perkins. One particularly interesting bit: in response to the claim that the judge ignored social science data Mr Boies says (3:02) “cite studies that either don’t exist or don’t say what you say they do.” Nice. And a normal response to unsubstantiated claims – produce the evidence. “There weren’t any of those studies. There weren’t any empirical studies. That’s just made up. That’s junk science.” There are a few really good lines in there. One of them was “The witness stand is a lonely place to lie.” and “We put fear and prejudice on trial and fear and prejudice lost.”

The transcripts (or as much of them as I have read – and checking the site today it doesn’t seem to be loading) bear out the contention that there is no evidence of harm to society offered by same sex marriage. There’s also a wikipedia article on Perry v. Schwarzenegger that lists “findings of fact” and the supporting evidence (with references so you can go check it out). Those findings (and facts) are pretty interesting. You can read the complete list of facts here (starts on page 54, ends at page 109 – there are 80 0f them).

After defining what marriage is and isn’t, the section “Whether any evidence shows California has an interest in differentiating between same-sex and opposite-sex unions” (starts with fact 42), decimates the idea that same sex marriage will harm society. In fact the facts show the opposite.  Despite this, I have no illusions that Mr Perkins (or the people he represents) will change their minds. I mean there are still people that think allowing interracial marriage was a mistake.

At 4:22 the host asks Perkins to give “us some evidence as to the harm that would be created by allowing same sex marriages.” Mr Perkins goes immediately to the harm done to children raised in a same-sex household. He then conflates no-fault divorce with dangers to children and implies that same-sex households offer the same dangers to children. (Pause button – my kitchen counters and cupboard doors got a good soapy wipe-down.) That seems to me to be an argument for promoting marriage amongst same sex people. If marriage (and the commitments it fosters) support healthy children, then any state should want to make marriage a viable option for those couples who want to (or are) raising children together.

Boies responds at 5:29. Same smile but here he is gesturing more emphatically, at least at the beginning. It’s as if he is responding to the tension created by Perkins’ reference to the stereotypical fears of those it does not understand or want to include in the concept “our nation.”)  He points out the fallacy of the no-fault divorce aspect of Prop 8′s proponents’ arguments. He then cites the existence of studies in other countries (Canada being one) and other states that demonstrate that there is no harm to society by allowing same sex marriage. He ends with the contrary, that empirical studies of the last 20 years show that allowing same sex marriage promotes stability and reduces harm.  By the end of his speech his arm gestures have calmed, and of course so has his audience. It was really nicely done, whether conscious or not. Take the irritation and upset caused by Perkins and undermine it (and him) by both fact and gestural calming.

How does Perkins respond? At 8:25 he uses the “interjecting” technique again and ties his idea of traditional marriage to “the history of the human race.” (Walked the dog.) Jeez. Fail, dude. Fail.

My final comment on this is about Brayton, the blogger responsible for “Dispatches From the Culture Wars.” He says “Boise absolutely destroys Perkins. It’s not a close call who wins.” While no where near as silly as Perkins’ attempt at emotional appeal, it does situate the dialog between Boies, Perkins and the commentator as a skirmish with a clear victor. That isn’t actually true because Perkins’ appeal at the end hoping for a “sane” decision from the Supreme Court and his concept of what it means to be human (and the non-empirical history of the species that was woven to support it) will not change. The “win” will not stop the cultural civil war ongoing in the US. Brayton’s comment is a fist pump celebration for a nice move on that part of one of his team’s members. It has no more relevance to the actual state of the war than a football fan’s yahoooooooo when one of the opposing team reveals his momentary clumsiness.  I get the rush, but the thing is when Prop 8 first passed in California, it was exactly the same feeling that the proponents (e.g. Tam) felt in their “victory.” I got that too. The sense of victory Brayton felt is also, just about as meaningful.

Reason can never win in a contest against emotion. At best reason can be used to foster one set of feelings (self-preservation and economic desire are good ones) that are in opposition to another set of feelings (fear and stereotyping, for example – a constant for mean and venal people). Boies’ masterful use of non-verbal emotional signals along with the constant verbal reference to reason and fact is a good model. There was no fist pumping in evidence.

By the way, it took me almost two hours to be able to watch the whole 8 or so minutes. That’s how painful I find this. Still, my bathroom is now much cleaner. So are my kitchen counters. And the dog is walked and the garden watered.

via Dispatches From the Culture Wars

I’ve seen this a couple of times now and I still can’t get over how amazing these fellows’ movements are.

via Wimp

[So it turned out there is a 5th part - I can't seem to let this stuff drop. Anyway it is here.]

Imagine things freeing themselves from the meaningful, becoming, not meaningless, but anarchic and non-identical.

(Gadamer on Celan Introduction by Gerald L. Bruns)

In thinking about this sentence, I have really only started to come to grips with the term “things.” My purpose is to understand what the sentence means, to interpret it given the rather odd (from my point of view) relationship between concepts such as “thing” and “freeing themselves” and later the terms “anarchic and non-identical.” How can a thing be anarchic? What does it mean for something to be non-identical when there is no suggestion as to what it is non-identical with?

Summary: a thing in the phenomenological sense is not simply an object in a the universe of either-or. It is not the subject either. These terms are categories that can point to something in the world through language but the resultant word or concept cannot capture the totality of the thing itself.

What is it to be meaningful? Meaning is not inherent in the words but in the context in which the words are used. Can anything be meaningful? Yes. Probably. But what of it? What good is the meaning of the black sun if no other also knows it. Something has both meaning and value if it can be shared and form the basis of narrative development. That is, the shared meaning forms the basis of some other meaning. The value of the letter “e” is in the fact that it extends the envelope of erudition. “Thing” as the Phenomenologists mean it was once a lone “e” but it is not any longer. “Thing” has left its home in base matter and taken on a new conceptual life. Deleuze would be proud!

M. Bruns said “Imagine things freeing themselves” and of course “thing” did just that. But how?

“Thing” had an origin. It came with a much larger, largely unconscious, belief system. It was embedded in a world where “things” were “material object(s) without life or consciousness.” What happened was those tethers were called into question. Is a thing without consciousness? Is it without life? What does it mean to have a “life?” Can “life” be defined? Can consciousness? Isn’t it more a continuum than a black-and-white situation? If that’s the case then isn’t a human being as much a “thing” as a boulder?

Once those kinds of questions get asked the foundational belief system has already begun to restructure. Different kinds of connections get made. It’s not that the whole system goes down. It doesn’t shatter. We need foundational assumptions to achieve meaning out of inherent meaninglessness so we can’t eject conceptual frameworks wholesale but we can make it look as if we have.

Here’s an example: God is the center of the universe for most people in Medieval Europe. Then perspective comes in with the Renaissance. It didn’t make us get rid of the “center of the universe” concept but it did make us look at what we thought “center” actually meant. This new art made us see that the universe that we occupy actually extends from our point of sight and we ended up replacing god in the center with ourselves. Of course to some people it looks as if we destroyed the Medieval belief system but we didn’t really, we just changed some key factors within it.

Imagine what that must have been like at the time. The difficulty some faced in understanding the concept that the universe was to be measured by man’s measure! I’m not saying that Phenomenology is the equivalent of booting god from the center of the universe. Just that the immensity of the difficulty in reorienting our concept of “thing” is as difficult as the pre-Renaissnace man’s task.

For us this is thinking outside the duality of subject/object. Remember W A T E R M – E L O Π ? (See part 2, link at the end of the post.) If we refuse the transparency of “watermelon,” problematize the word and make ourselves question its existence then we stand a chance of opening a doorway into the sub-basement of the conceptual network which supports its meaningfulness in society. If the history of our capacity for insight (and the methods by which we achieve it) is to be taken as a future likelihood, then one way that we can help ourselves meet the challenge of this “new” concept is through linguistic play. That’s what poetry does, and why so many Phenomenologists seem obsessed by it.

In part two I asked what was outside the concept of subject/object and suggested that the way to grapple with this is through embodied cognition. The reason for this is that subject/object is likely to be a linguistic convention grounded on a long-established embodied understanding of the world. My suggestion is that the embodied “knowing” could have resulted in other linguistic orientations that were not subject/object. That it is the case that our physical presence in the world led to the development of these linguistic formulations was not necessarily so. In other words, our biological systems could have led us elsewhere just as the perceptual developments of the Renaissance could have replaced the concept of “center” with the concept of “there.” (Wouldn’t that have been fun! Instead of religions seeking the god-within, we’d have been hunting the god-over-there.)

In part three:

For me the real question is: Does language conscribe reality any more or less than the organization of our senses? I suspect not but since I also suspect that language is a development grounded in sensory structures, I think the question of what’s outside subject and object might be a misdirection at its heart.

So if it isn’t the right question what is? This is the right question. This question is how things “free themselves from the meaningful, becoming, not meaningless, but anarchic and non-identical.” It is by unmooring a concept from the question that originated it and the point of Deleuze’s and Guattari’s book What is Philosophy. How change of the Medieval-Renaissance magnitude takes place is that significant questions die and new ones force elemental reconnection. The new conceptual framework that we know as the Renaissance took hold when we found an answer and stopped asking the question.

So what is the thing itself? A question of course. That’s why it isn’t either a subject or an object. A thing is the foundation which allows concepts to take form and so, of course, is pre-conceptual and why, at best, poetry can only aim its letters and hope to illuminate the invisible door by the sparks contact ignites.

Part 1 http://tailfeather.ca/2010/07/phenomenology-poetry-and-sense/

Part 2 http://tailfeather.ca/2010/07/phenomenology-poetry-and-sense-–-part-2/

Part 3 http://tailfeather.ca/2010/07/phenomenology-poetry-and-sense-–-part-3/