A Vast World of Poetry

“One of the things about this time that is really hard on me is that temperamentally I really only like the quotidian and the small and I really dislike history making events.  I would have hated to live during the French Revolution or the American Civil War. I’m thankful in a way that I missed 1967 and ’68 because I was just born. Now nothing against ‘67 and “68 if that “the whole world is watching” time is your kind of thing, but I’ve always liked the opposite of all that because I like to burrow and make something into what I want it to mean rather than an enforced consensus.” Mitch Hampton in 2022, from A Kaleidoscope Of Souls

“One of the big problems in American life is that we are more plural than our institutions are. And what you want are institutions that are at least as plural was the people they are serving.”Steve Teles

“Religion in its purest form is a vast world of Poetry.” John P Carse

A lot of who each one of us is can be akin to whether one likes chocolate or vanilla ice cream more.

I hate to put the matter so bluntly but there we are.

All of the posts that appear every month on our podcast show page are written by me by each I mean they are written in barely legible - even to me - passages by pen in a physical notebook and eventually typed into their final, digital form. They are never the consequence of AI assisted research - neither the resultant paragraphs that constitute the posts themselves nor any any of the texts or moving images that form the entirety of the research that are invariably the foundation of post such as this.

(The AI systems that are forced upon us by all platforms as well as the very internet itself in our current era, not only writing ones such as the one I use to create this post, are of course ubiquitous and unavoidable.  I spend more of my time fighting its recommendations than having any gratitude whatsoever for corrected spelling or grammar. How long I can continue to indulge what can only be described as my semi-Luddism remains an open question. There are numerous potential posts, even episodes, on this  subject, but I am loath to remark any further upon this at this moment).

Thus if the direct work of our evolved human being has any special attraction for you (and I realize that it might not, especially if you flirt with the idea that computerized robots or entities are equal to or even superior in some way to us) said attraction might be a predominant reason for even reading this post.

November’s post and this month’s post both have as among their subjects the two big ones that in earlier eras were prohibited from mentioning, never mind discussing, in many public spaces and on many occasions. G B Shaw’s quip that they are the only two worth mentioning at all notwithstanding, both are the most integral to art and human creation.

As I write these words I have just come from Interlochen Center For The Arts for a high school reunion as I attended Interlochen Arts Academy in the 1980s.

In famed Kresge Auditorium, a staple of Summer events and concerts in the region, there is the bold lettered mission:  Dedicated To The Promotion Of World Friendship Through The Universal Language Of The Arts. That one clause, representing the purpose of one particular place in Michigan, reflects of course a goal, possibly one that is always already deferred. It happens to be one of the purposes of this podcast.

John Carse is among the many potential or dream guests who passed before I was able to approach them. He was many things, among them an historian of religion and author of both a book on what he called Finite and Infinite Games as well as one called The Religious Case Against Belief. Taking seriously his concept might mean a rethinking or, more accurately, a reimagining, of both poetry and religion of course.

Having just finished one of the most arduous journeys I have ever experienced - one from Michigan to North Carolina - if only because it was on the ground and not in a car, I encountered a mysterious young man - age thirty from his account - who endeavored to read the ‘sacred” texts of many of the world’s major regions and, thankfully for me as the listener to his disquisition, said he treated all of this as one would a cafeteria in the pre-Pandemic days. Much of it he regarded as not “literally real” (his words) and a good part of it possessed “ethical wisdom” and all of it reflecting the greatest diversity of human culture and expression over many millennia (in my formulation). He did say he tried to “pick the best and left behind the rest”.

Thus the question of how literally to take Carse’s metaphor (perhaps the greatest irony since we are discussing poetry) is a question above all about the power of individual and collective actors over History. I do want to emphasize that I would enlarge Carse’s word choice of Poetry to Art in its entirety, to all works of imagination, however compromised, ignoble or commercial, or however integrative, noble or elevated.

Consider the following passage from the opening of Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, by Shunryu Suzuki, from 1972:

“After some years we will die. If we just think that it is the end of our life, this will be the wrong understanding. But, on the other hand, if we think that we do not die, this is also wrong.  We die, and we do not die. This is the right understanding. Some people may say that our mind or solecists forever, and it is only our physical body which dies. But this is not exactly right, because both and and body have their end. But at the same time it is also true that they exist eternally. And even though we say mind and body, they are actually two sides of one coin This is the right understanding.”

Now this is from a talk by a Japanese man in the United States, speaking in English as a second language. It is one of the earliest things I had read of its kind, at roughly the age of twelve or thirteen. You could say that it does have an assertive and propositional quality. This is a quality we do find in religions around the world: it is the very quality that influences us to see texts like this one as essentially not anything like poetry but something closer to advice, teaching and instruction etc. Poetry, we think is in part an imagined thing. But what if we treated Milton’s Paradise Lost as essentially not of a different order than the Bible (upon which that poem was based) itself? And if you read Suzuki Roshi’s talk out loud, you can hear that it has a poetic character, a  function of its special kind of syntax one found found in sacred writings and religious texts more generally. That is, you could read it as a beautiful piece of oration that we could, and my view should, regard as a work of art alongside a an Abraham Lincoln address or any of Christ’s sermons.

Here are two quite famous poems from the twentieth century, one from Philip Larkin and one from Sylvia Plath. I choose these because they involve, in a most superficial similarity, the subjects of less than desirable family life. Both poems happen to be among my favorite poems of the 20th century and also occupy most canons of the “best” poems of that century.

Here is Larkin’s This Be The Verse:

This Be The Verse

BY PHILIP LARKIN

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.   

    They may not mean to, but they do.   

They fill you with the faults they had

    And add some extra, just for you.

But they were fucked up in their turn

    By fools in old-style hats and coats,   

Who half the time were soppy-stern

    And half at one another’s throats.

Man hands on misery to man.

    It deepens like a coastal shelf.

Get out as early as you can,

    And don’t have any kids yourself.

Of course that poem, as clever and crowd pleasing as it is, is nothing compared to the emotional complexity and majesty that is Sylvia Plath’s Daddy:

Daddy

BY SYLVIA PLATH

You do not do, you do not do   

Any more, black shoe

In which I have lived like a foot   

For thirty years, poor and white,   

Barely daring to breathe or Achoo.

Daddy, I have had to kill you.   

You died before I had time——

Marble-heavy, a bag full of God,   

Ghastly statue with one gray toe   

Big as a Frisco seal

And a head in the freakish Atlantic   

Where it pours bean green over blue   

In the waters off beautiful Nauset.   

I used to pray to recover you.

Ach, du.

In the German tongue, in the Polish town   

Scraped flat by the roller

Of wars, wars, wars.

But the name of the town is common.   

My Polack friend

Says there are a dozen or two.   

So I never could tell where you   

Put your foot, your root,

I never could talk to you.

The tongue stuck in my jaw.

It stuck in a barb wire snare.   

Ich, ich, ich, ich,

I could hardly speak.

I thought every German was you.   

And the language obscene

An engine, an engine

Chuffing me off like a Jew.

A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen.   

I began to talk like a Jew.

I think I may well be a Jew.

The snows of the Tyrol, the clear beer of Vienna   

Are not very pure or true.

With my gipsy ancestress and my weird luck   

And my Taroc pack and my Taroc pack

I may be a bit of a Jew.

I have always been scared of you,

With your Luftwaffe, your gobbledygoo.   

And your neat mustache

And your Aryan eye, bright blue.

Panzer-man, panzer-man, O You——

Not God but a swastika

So black no sky could squeak through.   

Every woman adores a Fascist,   

The boot in the face, the brute   

Brute heart of a brute like you.

You stand at the blackboard, daddy,   

In the picture I have of you,

A cleft in your chin instead of your foot   

But no less a devil for that, no not   

Any less the black man who

Bit my pretty red heart in two.

I was ten when they buried you.   

At twenty I tried to die

And get back, back, back to you.

I thought even the bones would do.

But they pulled me out of the sack,   

And they stuck me together with glue.   

And then I knew what to do.

I made a model of you,

A man in black with a Meinkampf look

And a love of the rack and the screw.   

And I said I do, I do.

So daddy, I’m finally through.

The black telephone’s off at the root,   

The voices just can’t worm through.

If I’ve killed one man, I’ve killed two——

The vampire who said he was you   

And drank my blood for a year,

Seven years, if you want to know.

Daddy, you can lie back now.

There’s a stake in your fat black heart   

And the villagers never liked you.

They are dancing and stamping on you.   

They always knew it was you.

Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through.

(From Ariel, 1965)

Thankfully I will not do close readings of these, dear reader. (Aren’t you glad?) Here is Sylvia Plath herself reading Daddy:

The first thing I want to ask outright is what kinds of things are these two written texts? 

What sorts of objects are they?

One clue to any kind of answer can be found inside the main bodies of both: these are the many references to common cultural names and concepts like parents and family or the black show or Nazism and the Holocaust and Judaism and Christianity as well as concepts like to fuck somebody else up and not being able to help doing so. Indeed this too short a list of items from the poems is in fact the very tissue out of which the poems are made. To appreciate both properly it is far away from the case that one needs to have has ay, an unhappy childhood, though one must have some idea of the differences between what goes under categories like happy or unhappy childhoods.

One must have some semblance of a notion of what any family is.

Objects like these poems are never really telling any of us what do to; they are not instruction manuals of any kind but rather documents of feelings, of inner states.  We are, in Poetry, in the realm of the following kinds of questions: "what it is like to be a certain kind of person?” and “what it is like to live in one’s time?” And most of all “What is it like to undergo experience itself?” A discussion of such matters may or may not entail what you could call solutions of one kind or another but solutions - answers - will always be quite secondary considerations,

And that is precisely why I choose these two particular poems.

One can possibly imagine being a person who had a quite unhappy childhood and felt some kind of relatability in the poems and was moved by these poems to enter Therapy or join a Women’s Liberation sect but it would be the greatest mistake to think that either activity were behaviors that the poems were intended to cause. Or the reason the poems were written. This is what filmmaker Fassbinder meant when he said that “the revolution does not belong on the screen.”

Growing up in the 1970s and 1980s, I was exposed  to two distinct and opposite cultures - the culture of New York City with its rich performing arts and voluminous letters, and the culture of Tampa, Florida which alongside what historians call the sunbelt more generally was dominated then by a form of Christianity that I actively disliked and/or hated when it was first brought to my attention. It was relentlessly repeated to me as a boy that what I disliked was something called evangelicalism or “born again” Christianity and this was supposed to be distinct from and better than what was called fundamentalism, but I could see no such difference. I have always felt these to be essentially one wayward sect that hijacked historical Christianity beginning in the 1950s and 60s and continuing to the present day. The technical term for what unites these type of believers is a doctrine called Dispensationalism which was the invention of an early 19th century theologian and preacher named John Nelson Darby.

The one reason for the immense and continuing popularity of such beliefs are the stakes involved: the final destiny of a person’s soul must be a fairly great consequence indeed  But I am reading all of this as varieties of a single sensibility, one founded on notions of the included and the excluded and hierarchies of ranking of  individual and collective lives. It is because I am reading worldviews like these for sensibility that I can and do say that you see the same problem in the secular world too, for example  on both the far Left and the far Right and which often goes by the name of accelerationism.

One image sticks in my mind that is representative of the forms of Christianity that appeared to surround and suffocate me in those years - that of one pastor in particular inveighing against the sinfulness of The Mary Tyler Moore Show, in particular the secular falseness of that iconic 1970s image of her throwing her hat into the air., and, quite shockingly to my ears in 1978, all of Feminism, since, as he reminded us , “nobody can make it on their own after all.” It matters not in the slightest that there is a possibility that the character of Mary Tyler Moore might spend some time each day in quiet prayer before she threw her hat into the air as much as she might be living as a committed atheist. If the t.v. show tells us anything at all it is that women as persons can and should do anything they so choose and that their lives matter. But beyond this  quite basic proposition it has nothing else in particular to say other than to make us laugh and entertain us with the spectacle of the human condition.

Of course all works of Art express points of view and no points of view are more powerful and intractable than those elicited by those works of Art, perhaps especially network television shows from the Analog Age.

I really cannot begin to express how this takedown of a show and an actress, both of whom  I have always loved, has haunted me in all the four decades since I encountered it. it explains my absolute terror of the censoriousness of such a worldview, and what appears to me its disregard  for and alienation from the worlds of modern comedy and entertainment as those have been understood.

As I have said before this podcast is in part a response to a situation.

Having been brought up in no religion whatsoever, this memory comes from but one school I attended for one year. (I changed schools a lot then). I encountered all of this stimuli and information if I am going to be polite about it, from a position of complete independence of thought and sensibility. I never tire of repeating Immanuel Kant’s dictum to “dare to use your own reason.” Because of all of these influences - both of my innate and persistent character as much as the contingent circumstance of my background and its environment - I remain in certain respects  a profoundly irreligious man: I have to struggle every day to see the good in most religions, and I have to continually work at toleration of them. I am always more interested in expression and in documentation of any expression than I am in solutions which is probably why art is so important to me. And since I read Zen Mind Beginners Mind before I had read completely the Bible or the Torah, say, Suzuki’s sensibility will always form a great deal of my own.

There is an inevitable tension in how we think of poetry (in my formulation something like a synonym with Art itself and not just poetry as a medium). The claims of documentation and description will clash with the claims of goals and even Progress. Expression of feelings (or ideas which might not be so distinct from feelings) might be one way we will be able to distinguish ourselves from AI, that is if we are to live in a world in which such a distinction is even salient for enough of us. I would never have thought that one of the most common cries of the middle to late 20th century - the cry to preserve one’s humanity - would ever be  a real question for us.

But here we are.

Links to our monhtly blog post archive to enjoy:

https://www.jouneyofanaesthetepodcast.com/blog

Link to Carse's Finite and Infinite Games:

https://wtf.tw/ref/carse.pdf

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