Philosophy issues from a delineating motion, and poetry from a hermeneutic motion. Philosophical writings make use of words for the communication of ideas; poetry is words, words given the power of creation, invocation, heavy with magic. Philosophy records, much of it with a certain blankness. Poetry is a sounding of things, a pulling out of their reverberations. They can be made in all sort of styles. They are both thick with desire.
Where does it begin, their relationship? They are both human things, jars put upon the hillside for the taming of a wilderness. This fact is what makes them the same in the end. They are made of words, because this is what our jar is made of. They are at a remove from what they speak of. They are the agglomerations of the ages. They are a silly farce and they are lovely. They can be invested with my self. They have not given humanity a definitive answer. They cannot give humanity a definitive answer. They make me tired. Hungry too. Sometimes medieval monks (Ubi sunt?), when transcribing manuscripts, would throw a thought or two of their own into the parchment: My feet are cold. I wish they would put another log in the fire. Jars upon the wilderness of your body. Sophie dear, where have you gone? Suddenly I have a feeling, how do I say it- to have you in my mind would make my mind nothing more than it already is, a series of impressions, thin and frail, without form.
I feel like what I'm going to say is elementary, but things you have said were rolling around in my head- one is the question about why Gertrude Stein uses words that would really only be understood by a small audience. In James and Pierce they strive to take ideas and feelings and put clear words to them, and yes I agree with you that at times it takes the life out of what they are dissecting. But their purpose in writing is to try and convey their wisdom to a large majority of people. Whereas in Poetry I think this is one of the biggest differences. Why describe ideas with words that don't mean the same thing to a large majority of people? Why write in a way that makes people draw conclusions from your writing that may be completely different from what you meant? It is like my reading of the blackbird in Stevens' poem: I read it differently than you. Is that a weakness of poetry? or of the reader? Or is it part of the purpose? With the use of 'cow' in Stein I said I like to think she is just a bad person screwing with her heads, but that may have just been me trying to close my circle too soon. Is it an inside joke to screw with our heads? Does it matter if a reader thinks the poem means something completely different? Who does the poem belong to? Who's Stein's audience? What if Joyce was the only one who giggled at night reading his work? And completely less drastic, but what about your use of Sophie? Are you writing for your own sake? People read your writing, and yet not everyone knows what you are talking about when you write about Sophie, unless you are just taking for granted that we do. I guess the questions on my mind that sum up all other questions are 'Are the poems supposed to be universally understood and learned from?' (And if that were the case then why the vagueness?) And 'Are poems meant to be understood by only higher thinkers?'
ReplyDeleteThis is a damn good question, one I’ve been on the verge of asking for a little while, what with Ulysses looming. So I might prattle on a bit.
ReplyDeleteFirst, if we are to continue comparing philosophy and poetry, I want to say that James and Peirce write with much more simplicity than a lot of other philosophers, and that their simplicity oughtn't be taken as representative of all philosophical writing in that manner. A lot of philosophical writing was written to an elite and can itself be thick with allusion. That said, I do see what you're getting at.
The short answer is that every writer and reader works in a different framework of meaning and belief, and that those last two questions are too general to be answered fully.
I would make a distinction between two kinds of allusion: Gertie’s kind, which, at its fiercest, is an allusion that no one save her and Alice can get; and the kind which is an allusion to a thing of history. I am still uneasy with Gertie’s kind but I like the second kind very much.
Why? It’s fun, for one thing. One gets to feel as though one is part of a mysterious and special club speaking in a mysterious and special language. But there must be more, right? That’s why I am uneasy with Gertie’s kind. It sounds like it’s just be a wank, a meanhearted one, like it’s just Gertie feeling special and a little superior and maybe just having a laugh at the absurdity of things. So what more?
I’ve got a couple of answers, they’re a little confused. The second kind is a playing upon the reverberations of words and phrases and systems of meaning. It is a play with the way words work. Humans continually invest words with meaning, they build up systems of thought and touch them with emotion along the way. In The Book of Disquiet Bernardo Soares writes this: “The grand, tarnished panorama of History amounts, as I see it, to a flow of interpretations, a confused consensus of unreliable eyewitness accounts. The novelist is all of us, and we narrate whenever we see, because seeing is complex like everything.” It is easy to forget that the definitions of words are only the suppression of a confused consensus into a bare synthesis by the writer(s) of the definition. All of this is simple enough.
A good writer will recognise and will attempt to speak to the human discourse, to speak to words as things heavy with the breath of hundreds of years, will play with them as things whose shapes are constantly shifting (a rose is a rose is a rose) but which are enwrapped with certain established layers of meaning. Good writing can come without the weight of history, but those layers of meaning can do much to thicken the stew. I thought that the one allusion I made in this post and the phrase I didn’t explain could be easily researched. Really, I was tired that night, and didn’t much care whether I made sense, and sort of threw those in in a sort of defiance.
And a lot of literature and philosophy can be taken as a game, and great fun. Details can be fun to search for and mazes can be fun to extract yourself from. Joyce is not the only man who has giggled reading the puns in the Wake. Anthony Burgess once said something about it being one of the only books in the language which can make you laugh out loud with each page. It's a joyous puzzle. People do, of course, tend to enjoy puzzles so much and to want answers so badly that they can do a lot of silly things when occupied with them. Joyce once said, "I've put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that's the only way of insuring one's immortality."
Sorry that this is so jumbled.