|
In an essay "Will the Humanities Save Us?" (available on the New York Times website) Stanley Fish asks himself "of what use are the humanities?" and concludes "the only honest answer is none whatsoever." Now Fish, who attained academic superstardom by being entertaining and provocative, would not be appearing in a general publication like the New York Times were he not willing to become all the more entertaining and provocative. His motives and authentic opinions are, however, irrelevant to the value of his challenge to the profession of letters either as poet or critic. Poets, even more than professors, are sufficiently embattled in twenty-first century America that they rarely feel the need to justify their pursuits, even to thmselves. Artists, elevated and adversarial in spirit after two centuries of contempt for bourgeois philistines, have made grandiose if largely unreasoned claims. It is salutary now and then to glance at the foundation on which one stands. The question "Why read poetry?" is a serious one. To the ancients, there was general consensus about the supreme value of poetry. The evidence is that ever since the earliest times, long before Aristotle's Poetics made the celebrated claim that poetry is "higher" than history, poets have been thought to possess a privileged access to Truth. How could poets "teach and delight" in the Horatian formula used also by Sir Philip Sydney and by vulgar Marxists among a host of others, had they not greater knowledge than their readers." In the 16th century, Sydney argued that poetry leads to virtue. In the Romantic era, Percy Shelley, though widely considered a libertine and revolutionary, insisted that poets are the source not only of moral and civil laws but also of science. Both Sydney and Shelley cited what they knew of the historical and anthropological data in their defenses. According to Sydney all learning was originally couched in verse so poets are "Fathers in learning" possessing "heart-ravishing knowledge". He correctly noted that "no learned nation doth despise [poetry], nor barbarous nation is without it." Shelley likewise finds poetry's origins no later than the origins of humankind. "In the infancy of society every author is necessarily a poet, because language itself is poetry." In his view poetry "comprehends all science...It is at the same time the root and blossom of all other systems of thought." If poets are such pillars of wisdom, one might wonder about centuries of churchly distrust of artists, or about the ever-popular anecdotes of poets with lives less tidy than the average. Devotees of poetry in higher education have struck Fish as no more moral or more sagacious than other mortals; rather he sensibly asserts that their only special skill is in the understanding of texts. The fact is that poetry betrays a deep internal vein of contradiction concerning its truth value, a dialectic absent from history or science or business records. In a very real sense, every imaginative work is a work of fiction and therefore, in a sense, a lie. Black marks on a white page can have only a highly-codified symbolic relationship to trees and stars and flesh. Poets themselves have often discounted truth and reason. Thus Hesiod said the muses told him they could lie, and they could also speak the truth. Sydney subtly provides the inverse formula, saying "the poet, he nothing affirms, and therefore never lieth." For Shelley poetry is allied with "imagination" in a polar opposition to reason. He observes that poetry and religion are "allegorical, or susceptible of allegory, and , like Janus, have a double face of false and true." Poetry is often associated with magic or intoxication or madness, when it does produce "truth", that truth, though sublime and lofty, is often said to be ineffable or unreachable by reason |
To determine the truth value of poetry it would be useful to be able to discern truth values in general. The poet qua poet is a natural skeptic, a doubter like Zhuangzi and Nagarjuna, Hume and Bishop Berkeley (not to mention the schools of post-structuralists who make a reflex of deflating received ideas). Gorgias the sophist was one of the greatest speakers in classical Athens, a man whose listeners were said to be moved as by "magic incantations." To him words were "a great thing," divine, universal, the source of love for humankind, "potent like a drug." He maintained that nothing exists, second, that should anything exist, it could not be known by human perception: and third, that were anything known to one person, it could not be communicated to another. Though such self-doubt might seem to lead nowhere, both intellectually and pragmatically, for later skeptics it was the starting point for an active questioning, considering, "looking at" in the mind that results finally in a provisional truth based on experience, ready to yield whenever a more likely answer rustles in the underbrush. This practical strategy resembles the method not only of meditation, but also of science, of much Buddhist thought, and, I think, of poetry. While from later antiquity until the Renaissance, the Christian thought police limited the philosophers' options, making true skepticism unavailable for over a thousand years, in Asia certain Buddhist thinkers (following an early Hindu tradition) insisted on questioning the reality of observed phenomena and at the same time of the perceiving subject. Nagarjuna's "middle way," for instance, rejects both a conviction of the reality of everyday experience and likewise their dogmatic rejection. A tangled forest of speculative commentary rose with roots in the Heart Sutra's insistence "Form is emptiness, emptiness is form," as a broad consensus developed among Mahayana philosophers that, though reality can be neither affirmed nor denied, the thinker may find in this conclusion no cul-de-sac but the initial step toward enlightenment. The process remained free of both supernaturalism and positivism. In a koan asserting the uses of the useless, "Ti ts'ang Kuei-ch'in asked, 'What is the purpose of your wandering?' and Fa-yen said, 'I don't know.' (This stupor, this stupidity is utterly fruitful.)." Specifically, the lack of knowledge, the "stupidity," brings one closer to the liberating truth. Poetry is a similar kind of mental "wandering." As long as Ultimate Reality cannot be put into words, all language is metaphorical. In a fascinating passage, Sydney says that, if a man is to be praised as wise, he might be called a "Cyrus." This refers to a "real" king, but as Sydney says, we know the "real" Cyrus only from other texts. Even if one were to have been acquainted with Cyrus himself, one would gather from him no more than from the texts influenced by his existence, certain symbolic, perhaps misleading clues, a whiff in the air, what might be truth's tail disappearing around a distant corner... The "lie," then, would arise from the literal-mindedness of those who take appearances for reality and miss the point by seeking to eliminate the humanity of consciousness: our proclivity for pleasure, irrationality, and affect, our absorption in sense impressions, our tolerance for ambiguity, contradiction, and paradox; our obsession with certain mysteries (which may in shorthand be labeled god, sex, death, etc.) As "objectivity" is impossible (and is, in fact, simply another pose), to accomodate such distortions renders art the more precise register encoding more accurate data, not less. The poet constructs algorithms of mind as concrete exhibits based inevitably on his own consciousness, which then elicit a sympathetic response from the consumer. ____________________________________ |
Donne's "Busy old fool, unruly sun," seems to reflect the experience of a particular morning, waking with a lover, though it may be wholly "fictional." Historicity is not at issue, just as the historicity of Troy or Jesus or Madame Bovary is irrelevant. The text is "truer than true;" universality arises not because it expresses some dogma, but because the mood of a Briton four hundred years ago belongs as well to me and to all readers with sufficient imagination. One responds to the poem's joyful rhythms, its clashing phonemes, and the passions of author and reader for the dance of both intellectual and sexual desire. The poet asserts the primacy of subjectivity, saying he could extinguish the sun with a blink and insisting "nothing else is" except for his love-bed. Who can say he is wrong? In this way poetry does not deign to attempt what the classroom calls "great truth" Art is enabled less by didacticism than by Keats' Negative Capability, "when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact & reason." Shelley, though hostile to Christianity, praises its symbolic restructuring of the world as a creative triumph. Claiming that the Christian trinity is a second-hand appropriation of Plato, he is nonetheless enthusiastic: "But mark how beautiful an order has sprung from the dust and blood of this fierce chaos! how the world, as from a resurrection...has reassumed its yet unwearied flight into the heaven of time." The resurrection here is not the mere physical magic-act of the fundamentalist imagination, but a redemptive work in words, a work the effects of which are altogether real, though stimulated by a fiction. Both the "fierceness" of life, the "iron gates" of which Marvell wrote, and the "chaos," its frightening unintelligibility, are inevitable. Unable to alter the conditions of existence, the mind may yet influence itself by images and stories and outbursts of song. To many thoughtful people the claims of revealed religion are obsolete. Even secular philosophers must rely on slippery words, never quite up to the task. In general, logic as social consensus gets us through the day. No consensus can be sufficient to answer the skeptic's questioning the only human means of perception, cognition, and expression. Archimedes was famous for having said, "Give me a place to stand and I will move the earth." We have no psychic equivalent of a place to stand outside the human consciousness. Readily conceding this impossibility, poetry has found a way to concede the vulnerability yet make it a virtue. It is as if Orpheus, instead of singing to trees and touring the underworld of the subconscious, adopted the guise (one of the thousands available to that old confidence man) of a film noir detective tailing Ultimate Reality through a district of poorly lit warehouses, each dark and misty street of experience leading to others, never quite making the collar, but never on that account ceasing the restless ardent pursuit. That he is sometimes plugged or drugged or blackjacked and is often dead wrong shows only that he is human, all-too-human, and for this reason the viewer or reader or listener can accompany him and redeem the "fierce chaos" of the world with words. ?<> _________________________________________ |
Created on ... September 27, 2007