SubscribeMarch 25th, 2012
space into place, part 2
When Egeria is speaking about the “city of Rameses” and how it is now a level site, part of what catches me about the passage (quoted in part 1 of this post) is the rarity of such description in the part of her letter that still exists. This, I think, is intentional. In other parts of the text you’ll find the burning bush still living even though biologically that is highly unlikely. That is the point. The “actual” bush is a message from Egeria’s god – what god wants stays. And since the city of Ramses, an apparently hugely powerful empire, is just a ruin, this is a direct visual message saying something about the “true” god.
In this reading of the environment Egeria shows that place for her is space made meaningful by direct reference to a historical state matching biblical reference. It also seems to show she reads land as text, which is what supports the allegorical structuring of her travels. She isn’t a tourist in the way we think of tourism, but she’s moving through a materialized bible. Hence, everything that isn’t directly part of the biblical narrative is either “empty space” or its ruins proves god’s power.
I find such life-by-narrative interesting. I get the joy and power she finds in the “proof” she sees everywhere of her religion’s “correct” reading of reality, but I also am blown away by the work that must go into “vanishing” all evidence of its incorrectness. I know Egeria is unlikely to have heard of Hathor, and her link to the sycamore, but even if she had, the reference would have been turned to something Christian, as the “tree of truth” moment shows.
So much wonder gets missed when we do that to history.
Anyway, reading the land as materialized text is a powerful way to convert space into place but it is also a powerful way to temporalize. That is, this textual reading of space and time, refuses time and tries to keep things in the historical moment when meaning is at its origin. A bit like creating a snow globe but with real land.
I can’t help but think that it’s one thing to do this with someplace like Disneyland but a whole other thing to do it with people actually living there. I mean what? Going to pretend they aren’t really there? Good way to get into war. Oh. The Crusades! (Face Palm)
March 24th, 2012
space into place, part 1
I’ve recently reread Egeria’s Travels (Peregrinatio Etheriae). (The version I have is Wilkinson (1971) and so doesn’t exactly match the online translation linked.)
Here’s the section I found myself captured by – been thinking about it for about a week now.
Four miles from the City of Arabia is Rameses, and on our way to stay in “Arabia” we travelled right through it. The city Rameses is now a level site without a single dwelling, but it is still visible, and once it had many buildings and covered a huge area. Even through it is ruined, its remains are still vast. The only thing there now is a great Theban stone, a single piece out of which rise two huge statues. They are said to represent holy men, Moses and Aaron, and the people tell you that the children of Israel set them up in their honour. There is also a sycamore tree there, which is said to have been planted by the patriarchs. Though it is now extremely old, and thus small, it still bears fruit, and people who have something wrong with them pick its twigs, which do them good. We learned this from the holy Bishop of Arabia, and it was he who told us that the Greek name for this tree is Dendros Aletheias or, in our language, “The Tree of Truth”. This holy bishop was kind enough to meet us at Rameses. He is now a man of some age, of a godly life since the time he became a monk, and an approachable man, who is very good at welcoming pilgrims and also very knowledgeable about God’s Scriptures. He very kindly took the trouble to meet us there, showed us everything, and told us about the statues of which I have told you, and the sycamore tree. And this holy bishop told us that, when Pharaoh saw that the children of Israel had deserted him, he went to Rameses and burned it all down before he set out in pursuit.
There are still marginal notes on the printed text. In pencil they represent my reaction to the passage the first time I read it. There are bits like “magic held in life/plant” and lines linking “sycamore” with “Tree of Truth” and my text saying “re legend of Materia and holy family and earlier legend of Hathor” and finally “is this any different than seeing land as spiritually healing / renewing?”
That’s the question that caught my attention this time around as well, although now I have a different answer. The notion that the story behind the story of why Zacchaeus climbed the sycamore in Jericho references Hathor’s after-life nourishment and the easing of souls into the next world no longer compels me as it did those decades ago. I take it as a certainty of meme-life that such stories simple adapt to new cultural environments and move between “hosts” rather like virus do.
The thing that catches me now is the notion of “place” that Egeria constructs out of the space which is “Rameses”. And it’s this that makes me answer my own question differently.
Let me just define things a bit before I move on. “Space” in this context is the environment we live in without overt narrative structure giving it meaning. (There is always covert structure of course, but that’s for another time.) Space is the landscape you travel through without really seeing it, without remembering it, saying later “there was nothing there.” Of course that’s not true, but for you nothing “caught” on the horns of your narrative impulse. Further, whatever it was you were looking to find (probably unconsciously), that space did not have it, so it never became a “place” for you.
Home sites are always places. They may not be wanted places but they are filled with the narratives of memory and value. That’s what makes space place. Those narratives are tied deeply with our emotions and habits. For Egeria, the space that is Rameses only takes on reality (i.e. place-ness) in the spots where the land is invested with Biblical locus. So travelling with Egeria is not like travelling with Bruce Chatwin when he goes to Patagonia, but like watching the biblical narrative actualize on the planet.
March 6th, 2012
looking for value in weird-assed ideas
I found a book called Onto-Ethologies: The Animal Environments of Uexküll, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Deleuze by Brett Buchanan. I mean, oooooooooh. So right up my alley. For those of you that want to read Uexküll, you can find Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans: With a Theory of Meaning as a digital book. I’ve got a copy through one of my local universities so I can’t post a link (since you’d need a library login to get to it).
For this post I just want to speak a bit about Jakob von Uexküll and some of his weird-assed ideas.
To begin, please remember that Jakob was born in 1864, Darwin’s Origin was published in 1859 and the core of classical genetics wasn’t in place until 1915.
Weird-assed idea number 1: natural selection is inadequate to explain “the orientation of present features and behaviours toward future ends–purposefulness.” (Dorion Sagan, from Unwelt After Uexküll (introduction, page 3).
Weird-assed idea number 2: “nonhuman perceptions must be accounted for in any biology worthy of the name” (same set of Sagan passages)
Weird-assed idea number 3: Meaning has priority in all living beings.
Weird-assed idea number 4: There’s a master plan somewhere outside of individual form that guides “purpose.”
Weird-assed idea number 5: All living beings are subjects, and not mere objects.
Weird-assed idea number 6: “When a dog runs, the animal moves its feet, i.e., the harmony of the footsteps is centrally controlled. But in the case of a starfish we say: ‘When a starfish moves, the legs move the animal.’ That is, the harmony of the movement is in the legs themselves. It is like an orchestra that can play without a conductor.” The starfish’s legs take the starfish along, whereas you decide where you want your feet to go.” (Dorion Sagan again)
There are other weird ideas but that’s enough to go on with.
Pick them apart. To say “meaning has priority in all living beings” implies that context and environment takes priority because meaning is only found in the relationship between one form and another. That’s actually quite a radical suggestion even today, but to understand what the author was really doing one has to understand, or at least be familiar with, the fight over the concept of life form as subject or object, the fight over the concept of bio-mechanism.
Animals are mere machines: If you could go back in time would you kill Descartes?
I get the concern to pull back from any idea that the non-human living world is mechanistic in the same way my blender is mechanistic but a basic grounding in science today should have already blown that idea apart. But remember Jakob isn’t today’s scientist. He’s still immersed in the idea of vitalism.
Here’s how Jakob shows that particular fight: “We ask a simple question: Is the tick a machine or a machine operator? Is it a mere object or a subject?”
And there you go: down the rabbit hole of assumed shit.
In today’s parlance the machine and the operator are one. To separate them is to miss the point of the wonders of complex chemical signalling and information processing that occur in the inanimate world, and of which the animate (living) world make use.
So here’s the thing…can we still make use of the weird-assed ideas given vitalism’s influence in Jakob’s work?
Oh yes, I think so. In fact it’s a good thing to do so because we get more practice in pulling apart insight and interpretation. The idea that purpose is a hall-mark of life forms is an insight. Attributing that fact to some “master-plan” is interpretation.
Once purpose is divorced from teleology one can generate new interpretations based on the wealth of fact we’ve gained in recent decades.
And then in a few more decades we’ll do the same with today’s interpretations.
And so science, and thinking, proceed.
December 29th, 2011
wording and communication
I love looking in over at Ursula K. Le Guin’s blog. She writes an interesting mix of things – literature of course, politics, commentary on things like the Chilean miners and their ordeal last Fall. She’s no daily blogger but everything she does post is well thought out, fun to read.
Here is one thing that really caught my eye today:
Post 40: She talks about the Top 5 FOX Myths post from November 22. Compare the wording.
Le Guin’s post of Myth #1:
MYTH #1: The congressional Super Committee failed because both sides refused to compromise.
REALITY: It failed because the Republicans in Congress, following the Party Line, now refuse ANY compromise on ANY issue offered by the Democrats.
Reaganist Republicanism has become a rigid ideology, as Stalinism was.
To be a Republican politician now, you must be, literally, politically correct.
If you don’t correctly parrot the Party Line, you will be exiled to (shudder!) Liberal Siberia.
MoveOn’s post
MYTH #1: The congressional Super Committee failed because both sides refuse to compromise.
REALITY: The Super Committee failed because Republicans’ number one, non-negotiable priority is to protect millionaires and billionaires from paying even one more penny in taxes. Democrats repeatedly offered deep spending cuts (far deeper than most progressives would like) in exchange for raising taxes on the wealthy and closing corporate loopholes, only to be refused again and again. So even though the vast majority of Americans say they want to protect Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid benefits, and raise taxes on the rich and corporations, that won’t happen until Republicans put aside their extremist stance
Of the last part MoveOn says “until Republicans put aside their extremist stance”.
Le Guin says “you will be exiled to (shudder!) Liberal Siberia”.
By using “Siberia” Le Guin gives us an image which by which we can understand current political behaviour in the US by referencing our own knowledge of USSR totalitarianism and human rights abuses that came under the guise of politics. It’s so much better than the “extremist stance” thing.
December 27th, 2011
poetry and What does “meaning” actually mean?
I’ve been trying to read Poetry and the Fate of the Senses by Susan Stewart and frankly I’m having trouble getting past the introductory chapters which, amongst other things, lay out the assumptions that are likely to underpin all further argument.
Here’s the fundamental question it makes me ask: What does “meaning” actually mean?
And yes I get that it is somewhat of a meaningless question – a tautology, as it were. But you see that’s, what the book feels like.
For this post, let me back up for a minute and give you a very basic image that I use to imagine abstraction and how it works. It is my hope that the image will make explaining my problem with this book’s set-up more obvious.
Image a black screen. On the screen near the lower center is a white globe. That white globe is the human body and all its doings, including the apprehension of the world, its assessment and consequent behavioural modification – those things we normally call a mind. Now imagine that the black screen is full of energy packets zooming around. Each of those packets has a very specific shape – triangles, cubes, rhomboids, etc. The white ball has a number of openings that conform to some of the shapes but not to others.
Here is the first layer of meaning. The shapes of energy packets in the black screen beyond the white ball that are not matched by the shapes in the white ball are meaningless. They are invisible, untouchable, silent, tasteless, etc. This layer of meaning is shared by all forms that endure for any length. Complex chemicals “recognize” some other chemicals and not others. Those ones are meaningful to the complex chemical because it can recognize them. This is not self awareness, but it is recognition.
In human beings this layer of meaning is ever present. In this sense there is no moment in the life of a human being in which the universe is meaningless since there is never a time when the basic chemical and sensual recognitions and processes are not ongoing. This has a good deal of impact on Stewart’s fundamental image of darkness and night as formless, with no boundary and therefore not allowing any intersubjectivity or an ongoing dialectic.
Second image: Along with the white sphere there is now a smaller blue sphere. The two spheres are connected; the blue sphere is dependent upon the white one. At the level of mind that starts to create self-aware abstractions (that is meaningful recognitions that endure long enough for those recognitions to be called aware, and be manipulable by the imagination), mini “worlds” are created. A mentally constituted mini world is a blue sphere. The first order meanings that are always ongoing go through a further process if they are neurologically active enough (firing time crosses a time threshold). This later process is founded on the earlier processes but are projected onto a screen of their own – and a mini world is created to rotate, grasp, assess, manipulate the few “recognitions” that are part of the being’s current concern.
What the body does is posit a smaller “body”, limiting the “variables” so that a specific concern can be addressed in a simplified, but still recognizable “field”. This is an abstraction and the blue sphere.
The thing is that once inside the world of the blue sphere the same process can be accomplished and a new tertiary set of spheres be postulated and manipulated. By their nature, these imitation “bodies” – which are abstractions and simplifications – feel like a total world in themselves. But these small blue worlds cannot function as whole worlds, anymore than a virgin can know what sex is like by reading the Kama Sutra. The risk is that the blue sphere “forgets” its connection (and dependency) on the the white sphere. This is when abstractions take on a life of their own and often get completely outside the bounds of reality – and, often, polite society. (Think about the abstraction – women are the source of trouble in men’s lives – when you create a world out of that, you can easily forget that women are also the source of new men (baby boys), the source of much pleasure, and posit a world in which women don’t need to exist – e.g. monasticism. Look at the trouble that has got the Catholic Church into.)
Here is a real world example: Ask yourself the question, How can I live a meaningful life? An abstract-generating question. You might think about ethics, or pleasure, or narrative, or a number of other areas in human life, but in an attempt to answer such a question you are unlikely to include questions like what shall I cook for dinner tonight or I wonder who’s scratching at the door. These last two are concerns of the white sphere, but not of this particular blue sphere generated by my question.
But imagine now that you get caught up in this particular blue sphere and your connection is something deep and profound. Then your tummy rumbles. The concern for supper becomes not a concern temporarily set aside, but an intrusion, even a threat to the integrity of the small blue “world”. If you cannot “remember” that the abstract blue world you created to deal with this question of meaning is just an abstracted small portion of the larger real world (the white sphere), then any “foreign” thoughts threaten the new world. In that moment, the unknown presenting itself becomes an act of war.
So back to Stewart: Her abstract world – her blue sphere – is language devoid of bodily sources of meaning.
But I disagree. Night is not formless. The unconscious is merely unaware, not empty. Language is not “a counter to the oblivion of darkness”. I doubt whether language (or poetry) counters anything at all – that is, it isn’t in a combative relationship with the body from which it originates. What combat is created, what need to counter the unseen, comes from this abstraction taking its role as a “world” literally and forgetting to dissolve in the face of the larger needs of the originating body.
December 21st, 2011
a fish swimming, part 2
The idea that we have become fish out of water, that we are somehow outside life, outside “the world” is Giegerich’s way of explaining why we can suddenly (since the 19th century) ask questions like “is life meaningful”.
Man had to have stepped out of his previous absolute containment in life, so that he now was both enabled and forced to view life as if from outside, because only in this way could the whole of life become thematic in the first place. Now, with the question about its meaning and worth, existence as such had become a vis-à-vis, as it were, which is the opposite of in-ness. Man now for the first time had a position to the world per se. The question of meaning is the mark of the modern period after the conclusion of the age of metaphysics at the beginning of the 19th century. (page 3)
My question is whether or not this is the best way (most accurate with respect to actual human history) to explain the apparent changes in human psychology. For one thing, such a metaphor – to view life from outside – implies a place that is outside our lives. Where would that be? To require a place outside the forces that generate our living for our consciousness to view those same forces necessarily divorces consciousness from its ground of origin. Not only is it probably not empirically possible for such a divorce to occur, but such a view generates a dualistic metaphor that can’t be undone later.
I also have to question the in-ness he assumes in “pre-modern” minds. He’s talking about the minds that so questioned what they had as to paint the cave walls in France, those same pre-modern minds that came up with the wheel, atl-atls, hide boats, figured out how to domesticate dogs, horses, barley, corn, and everything else that made modern minds what they are. I’m sorry, but those minds sure seem as if they could think outside the in-ness for long stretches at a time.
I think part of the problem is that thinkers about myth and the unconscious seem to take for granted that we have a mind. A mind. We don’t you know. We have many minds and a kind of floating flash-light of an awareness that only makes it seem like we have “a” mind.
As we evolved different abilities, we also developed different brain-body bits to control those developing skills. When the “control movements and coordinate with visual sensations” is needed the spot-light is there and not on the “continually assess smells but only make “us” aware of ones that indicate possible dangers or potential treasures” skill that we still possess (ever suddenly smelt a hint of acrid smoke when you were driving and notice how your attention shoots over there?). Each of those abilities is the hub of a “mind”; they run simultaneously; most of them are unaware and constitute the manifold territory we know as the unconscious.
If we view mind like a cell, with many interlocking bits that make the thing function as a whole, with no in-ness in any time of human (Homo sapiens) history, then what to make of the loss of meaning?
I’m not done yet so there will be a part 3.
December 19th, 2011
Image: a fish swimming everywhere looking for water
Cathy sent me a copy of Giegerich’s paper “End of Meaning” which I hadn’t read, nor even heard of. (Thanks Cathy!) It’s long and I’m still on the road so I’m reading it a few pages at a time when I stop and have a walk-break.
Here’s the abstract:
“Meaning” as in “the meaning of life” is not (“semantically”) a belief system, but (“syntactically”) the sense of “in-ness.” A comparison of the logic of animal existence with that of human existence reveals that man, despite having been biologically born, remained psychologically unborn, language, myth, metaphysics having served as a secondary psychological “uterus” for him. With the dramatic changes in the human situation since around 1800 (the closure of Western metaphysics, the industrial revolution), the previous in-ness was no more. This fundamental change can be seen as the eventual birth of man, astrologically expressed as the emergence of consciousness from the status of “fish in the water” to that of “Aquarius,” the lord of the waters. In this sense, the “loss” of meaning must not be interpreted negatively as a loss.
C. G. Jung’s personal need to nevertheless regain a new sense of meaning necessitated his becoming a psychologist. Only through the logical interiorization of former contents of myth and metaphysics, only through the displacement of the arena of essential questions from the public world to the so-called unconscious “inside” the private individual, was it possible to simulate a situation where the former sense of meaning could become true once more. This interiorization is comparable to Kronos’ swallowing of his just-born children.
This idea that man has lost the exterior meaning function, that is, we have lost the capacity to live inside myth because we have become individuals, seems a little sideways to me. Nevertheless there are some brilliant moments in just the small amount I have read so far. For example, the idea that meaning is not semantic is frakking brilliant. Of course it can’t be because otherwise any non-linguistic human being is incapable of meaningful moments, relationships etc, and what little is known of normal adults with no language shows that this is not the case. So meaning is pre-linguistic.
What gets me is that Giegerich then goes on to say as his “therefore”
Meaning, where it indeed exists, is first of all an implicit fact of existence, its a priori.
and this is a problem because it shoots us right back into Kant’s lap and that simply will not do. Now, perhaps that’s not what he intended so I’ll keep reading and see what happens.
So here’s what I am going to do. I’m going to do one of those post-as-you-read/react things.
The next installment will be titled: a fish swimming, part 2
November 23rd, 2011
shape, space and meaning in poetry
This post responds to Qunqun’s query in the comments on an earlier post (obsess a lot? November 21).
The class talks about white space and its impact on meaning. One of the things about white space is that it can be a passive space, its shape completely determined by the text. In this example the white space is determined by the characters. The space, as the text says, makes meaning possible but it doesn’t actively provide meaning in and of itself.
Imagine “30 spokes” presented differently – in some way that would create white space that represents the insight of the poem.
As for my bitty, the exercise in the class asked us to create a poem in which the white space was considered as important as the text. There are many ways to do that of course but this is the one that I took to class.
This kind of poetry is not my natural metier but there is much to be learnt from attention to what is not normally seen.
June 2nd, 2011
words
Do you ever think about what words are?
They must be constructs, based ultimately on meaning structured by our bodies, but what does that really say?
Seamus Heaney seems to have believed (don’t know if he still does) that words are somehow objects, or arise from objects in the world. Words are things that can fly, shelter, stream.
The Loaning (from Station Island) As I went down the loaning the wind shifting in the hedge was like an old one's whistling speech. And I knew I was in the limbo of lost words. They had flown there from raftered sheds and crossroads, from the shelter of gabled ends and turned-up carts. I saw them streaming out of birch white throats and fluttering above iron bedsteads until the soul would leave the body. Then on a day as close as a stranger's breath they rose in smoky clouds on the summer sky and settled on the uvulae of stones and the soft lungs of the hawthorne. Then I knew why from the beginning the loaning breathed on me, breathed even now in a shiver of beaded gossamers and the spit blood of a last few haws and rose-hips.
There’s more to this poem, but you get the idea of what words mean to Heaney. In some way words seem to be the soul. They inhabit the “uvulae of stones and the soft lungs of the hawthorne.” Words are a connecting force somehow linking man to land.
So very beautiful, yet I find it really disturbing. There is a sense that the words are independent of the speaker, that the world grows the words as it grows the haw and rose-hip. If this is true then there is no distance between the thing in itself and the word that signals it. So either things are symbols or words are things; I’m not sure which is worse.
Yet there is the medial image. The loaning (space between cultivated fields) strikes me as the place one occupies when one is bi-cultural in some profound way. It is a kind of limbo because one can never really be at home, not in a consuming way, not to find that place of rest which is assumed in any ultimate destination.
And there are lost words. For Heaney those words like “loaning” and for me words in Salish which I will never know, and never be able to adequately pronounce. But it isn’t really the word itself for me, and I suspect it is for Heaney. He seems to locate the power of the earth in the word itself, and in this he seems really to see words as objects whereas I see them as constructs.
In Heaney’s world a word lost is like an extinction – the death of some lineage of butterfly. Using the words is an act of rebellion against death. And like some mythological spiritual traveller, from his place between cultures Heaney the poet can access the dark grey of limbo and lure back into the air lost souls, lost words.
There sure is literary precedent for such a view. But I can’t go there, because words are not really things despite their apparent power. The idea of words as things is endemic because in our embodied existence we know power through things. We hit our brother with our teddy bear and “bam” a reaction. That’s power. Later we call brother some nasty, nasty word and “bam” a reaction. Words are power; so words are things: lived logic.
I think of words like the blue in a blueberry. Put a blueberry in a fire. Where’d the blue go? Words are the “blue” in a blueberry. Not the thing itself; not existent independent of the thing; not something that can flutter up on Limbo’s winds. Words are moments of our embodied relationship to things in the world. They are the humming unconscious network of our senses, energy vibrating in ways sensible to our bodies, the awareness of difference, the desire to categorize. Words are the first green shoot to pierce the earth’s skin in an unthought drive for sky.
Even more I think of words as distilled human movement, a gestural structuring of a learned physical concept. They must be really, since as a species we first had movement, then learning and communication, then oral or gestural language, then writing – specifically words. These abilities aren’t independent species’ acquisitions. They are built one on top of the other using the structures and limitations of the preceding stage to form the foundation of the next. In other words, our capacities to learn and communicate were built on the structures and functions of human movement and physical capability.
It’s that evolutionary basis in movement that makes me say words are not things but distilled human doings. So when we lose a word, like some now lost Salish concepts, we have lost a history of someone living, some person doing in his or her world, what his or her people did. There is no limbo for that. That death is just death. Resurrection can only come if some other person, some future group relearns and re-does what the lost once knew. And that? I don’t know if that is really possible.
May 3rd, 2011
the question “what is poetry”, part 1
I’m not sure the question “What is poetry?” is sensible. That is, I’m not sure it really has an answer, or that it has anything to do with the world. It’s more a question that creates a world, and which answers that creation’s questioning with its own image.
If you read poets on poetry, there appear to be many things of which poetry is capable. I want to argue that all of these things are possible—to empower feeling, to lift imagination, to redress cultural/political/economic/aesthetic wrongs, to free the soul, to free the self—because of certain assumptions about words, things and change.
In Philosophy in the Flesh, one of Lakoff’s and Johnson’s (L&J) contributions to embodied cognition, there is a chapter on metaphysics and the metaphors that underlie such philosophical pursuits. They show that in order for us to ask questions about the nature of Being, we must first assume certain things. These assumptions, as always with human beings, are based ultimately on our embodied nature and take their cue from things of which we are capable physically, operating as physical creatures in a physical world. L&J list four basic folk theories that need to be in place to support the question, for a description of Being to be possible.
1) “The world makes systematic sense, and we can gain knowledge of it.” This is the folk theory of “the Intelligibility of the World.”
2) “Every particular thing is a kind of thing.” Folk theory: There are general kinds of things.
3) “Every entity has an “essence” or “nature,” that is, a collection of properties that makes it the kind of thing it is and is the causal source of its natural behavior.” Folk theory: Essences exist.
4) “There is a category of all things that exist.” Theory: There is an all-inclusive category.
Being is a kind of thing. It has an essence (or is an essence). Specific beings are instances of the general category Being.
These are assumptions, not truths. An appalling thought really, given it’s the basis of all (?) Western thought. Certainly these assumptions are the basis of religious thought and, I think, the basis of the question “What is poetry?”.
Seamus Heaney, in his book The Redress of Poetry gives poetry at least two distinct defining properties. The first has poetry as “the imagination pressing back against the pressure of reality.” The second follows Simone Weil’s Christian metaphysics and gives poetry the power of redress. Poetry acts from the imagination (and imagination’s access to Being) to balance justice (in reality) as it swings in the gale winds of human religious, political and economic fervor. But there is an addition here, to the basic four assumptions. Heaney quotes Weil: “Obedience to the force of gravity. The greatest sin.” If you take the four folk theories above and add the idea of moral balance and its required patterned-change-as-god (i.e. the good will prevail), then you have the assumptive basis of Heaney’s question. When he asks “What is poetry?” Heaney has been created by the world of those five assumptions, and so, of course, the question he asks and the answer he finds—poetry’s power of redress—necessarily comes.
Does this make the question or answer wrong? No. Is either therefore correct? No.
Before I close part one of this post, I want to mention Heraclitus. L&J bring him into the Pre-Socratics chapter in the metaphysics section. They quote him:
Everything flows and nothing abides; everything gives way and nothing stays fixed. You cannot step twice into the same river, for other waters and yet others go ever flowing on.
Sounds so new-agey, don’t you think? That impediment aside, the point of this is to show that the basic assumptions can be utilized to address Being as Change or Pattern. Being doesn’t have to be a Thing, it can be a Way all without giving up the four basic assumptions.
Can the assumptions be forgone? And if not “what is poetry?” then how to query to experience of reading Heaney’s The Haw Lantern?
More later: Earle Birney and the idea that poetry is a magic spell.