Auden on Montaigne

Montaigne

Outside his library window he could see
A gentle landscape terrified of grammar,
Cities where lisping was compulsory,
And provinces where it was death to stammer.

The hefty sprawled, too tired to care: it took
This donnish undersexed conservative
To start a revolution and to give
The Flesh its weapons to defeat the Book.

When devils drive the reasonable wild,
They strip their adult century so bare,
Love must be re-grown from the sensual child,

To doubt becomes a way of definition,
Even belles lettres legitimate as prayer,
And laziness a movement of contrition.

On the Impossibility of Repetition

In her editor's preface to M.M. Bakhtin's Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, Caryl Emerson writes regarding translating Bakhtin:

On the issue of repetition, Bakhtin is his own best counsel. His understanding fo the word, and of the specificity of the utterance, invalidates the very concept of repetition. Nothing "recurs"; the same word over again might accumulate, reinforce, perhaps parody what came before it, but it cannot be the same word if it is in a different place.

Professor Socrates

From PhDComics.

No Time

It seems that I am now in the habit of giving not a quote per day, but a poem per day. I am working through the collected works of W.H. Auden, sometimes proceeding in the order of the book, but sometimes jumping around to titles that catch my eye. My interest in time led me to this one:

No Time

Clocks cannot tell our time of day
For what event to pray,
Because we have no time, because
We have no time until
We know what time we fill,
Why time is other than time was.

Nor can our question satisfy
The answer in the statue's eye.
Only the living may ask whose brow
May wear the Roman laurel now:
The dead say only how.

What happens to the living when they die?
Death is not understood by death: nor you, nor I.

The Sabbath

Since I study the intersections of sacred space (Sanctuary) and sacred time (Sabbath) in ancient Jewish and Christian literature, I am often attracted to their invocations in modern literature as well. Paul Celan, for example, often talks about the Sabbath in his poetry. Here is a meditation by W.H. Auden:

The Sabbath

Waking on the Seventh Day of Creation,
They cautiously sniffed the air:
The most fastidious nostril among them admitted
That fellow was no longer there.

Herbivore, parasite, predator scouted,
Migrants flew fast and far--
Not a trace of his presence: holes in the earth,
Beaches covered with tar,

Ruins and metallic rubbish in plenty
Were all that was left of him
Whose birth on the Sixth had made of that day
An unnecessary interim.

Well, that fellow had never really smelled
Like a creature who would survive:
No grace, address or faculty like those
Born on the First Five.

Back, then, at last on a natural economy,
Now His Impudence was gone,
Looking exactly like what it was,
The Seventh Day went on,

Beautiful, happy, perfectly pointless....
A rifle's ringing crack
Split their Arcadia wide open, cut
Their Sabbath nonsense short.

For whom did they think they had been created?
That fellow was back,
More bloody-minded than they remembered,
More god-like than they thought.

The Art of Poetic Anamnesis

Memorization is something that is quickly flying out the window. Growing up, we were encouraged to memorize swaths of the Bible, something I should probably do more of (but now in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek). If that's not your ticket, how about modern poetry?

An article in the NYTimes talks about reasons for and gives tips how to memorize some Auden, Yeats, Chaucer, Shakespeare, etc., in tiny increments each day. With just a few lines each day, over time you'll have a vast collection of poems at your memory's disposal. There have been a few times I have pulled a few lines out of Shakespeare when relevant for my class (and not just when I was teaching Shakespeare). And I've actually been wanting to read some W.H. Auden, but haven't had the chance. The best reason beyond any cultural literacy, etc., is just for your own pleasure. Why not give a short poem a shot?

Here is a poem by W.H. Auden:

The Fall of Rome


The piers are pummelled by the waves;
In a lonely field the rain
Lashes an abandoned train;
Outlaws fill the mountain caves.

Fantastic grow the evening gowns;
Agents of the Fisc pursue
Absconding tax-defaulters through
The sewers of provincial towns.

Private rites of magic send
The temple prostitutes to sleep;
All the literati keep
An imaginary friend.

Cerebrotonic Cato may
Extol the Ancient Disciplines,
But the muscle-bound Marines
Mutiny for food and pay.

Caesar's double-bed is warm
As an unimportant clerk
Writes I DO NOT LIKE MY WORK
On a pink official form.

Unendowed with wealth or pity,
Little birds with scarlet legs,
Sitting on their speckled eggs,
Eye each flu-infected city.

Altogether elsewhere, vast
Herds of reindeer move across
Miles and miles of golden moss,
Silently and very fast.

Everything I do...

You know...someone needs to collect all the musical numbers from family guy--a lot of them are surprisingly good!

Brevity is the Soul of Wit

The NYTimes has a nice piece on the American Short Story. Short Stories don't get as much press, as much attention, as much respectability as the long prose fiction (i.e., novels). But all the great long prose fiction writers (e.g., Melville) were masters of the short form as well. For anyone who reads this blog with regularity, I obviously love the Argentinian short story writer, Jorge Luis Borges. But, for those who wish to stick closer to home, I have three words: Edgar Allen Poe! The short form perhaps reached its highest respectability, at least in European and subsequently American trajectories, in an ironically huge volume: Boccaccio's Decameron, which is a collection of 100 short stories in a larger narrative frame (it is actually 101 stories for those who are paying close attention). We could go back even further to One Thousand and One Nights, etc. The short form has been with us for a long time, in fact, and according to the NYTimes article, is poised for a resurgence.

On the Soul

From an unusual source for a discussion on the soul (or, at least, for me/this site):

This is the historical reality of this soul, which, unlike the soul represented by Christian theology, is not born in sin and subject to punishment, but is born rather out of methods of punishment, supervision and constraint. This real, non-corporal soul is not a substance; it is the element in which are articulated the effects of a certain type of power and the reference of a certain type of knowledge, the machinery by which the power relations give rise to a possible corpus of knowledge, and knowledge extends and reinforces the effects of this power. On this reality-reference, various concepts have been constructed and domains of analysis carved out: psyche, subjectivity, personality, consciousness, etc.; on it have been built scientific techniques and discourses, and the moral claims of humanism. But let there be no misunderstanding: it is not that a real man, the object of knowledge, philosophical reflection or technical invention, has been substituted for teh soul, the illusion of theologians. The man described for us, whom we are invited to free, is already in himself the effect of a subjection more profound than himself. A 'soul' inhabits him and brings him to existence, which is itself a factor in the master that power exercises over the body. The soul is the effect and instrument of political anatomy; the soul is the prison of the body. (Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison; trans. Alan Sheridan)

Quote of the Day: Pride and Prejudice

I am obviously very far afield from my own little sandbox of antiquity; yet, alas, I teach Pride and Prejudice next week, and I am finding so many a bon mot to put Oscar Wilde to shame (ok...maybe not that many). Nonetheless, it is a very witty book. Here are some arresting lines of love that caught my passing eye (both spoken by Elizabeth Bennet):

I wonder who first discovered the efficacy of poetry in driving away love. (1.9)

Is not general incivility the very essence of love? (2.2)

What makes the latter funny to me is that its tone in context seems quite serious, whereas the first quote is in a series of witty banter.

Diogenes in the News

It isn't everyday that the most famous ancient (2,300 year old) Cynic philosopher, Diogenes, makes the news, but there is an Op-Ed piece in the NYTimes about him:

April 1, 2009

Op-Ed Contributor

Cynicism We Can Believe In

By SIMON CRITCHLEY

SOME 2,300 years after his death, Diogenes the Cynic dramatically interrupted a recent New York State Senate committee meeting. Wearing a long, white beard and carrying his trademark lamp in broad daylight, the ancient philosopher — who once described himself as “a Socrates gone mad” — claimed to be looking for an honest man in politics. Considering the never-ending allegations of financial corruption that flow from the sump of Albany, it’s no surprise that he was unsuccessful.

This resurrected Diogenes was, in fact, Randy Credico, a comedian who says he is considering challenging Senator Charles Schumer in the 2010 Democratic primary. Whatever boost Mr. Credico’s prank provides his campaign, it might also cause us to reflect a little on the meaning of cynicism — and how greatly we still need Diogenes.

Cynicism is actually not at all cynical in the modern sense of the word. It bears no real resemblance to that attitude of negativity and jaded scornfulness that sees the worst of intentions behind the apparent good motives of others.

True cynicism is not a debasement of others but a debasement of oneself — and in that purposeful self-debasement, a protest against corruption, luxury and insincerity. Diogenes, the story goes, was called a “downright dog,” and this so pleased him that the figure of a dog was carved in stone to mark his final resting place. From that epithet, kunikos (“dog-like”), cynicism was born.

Diogenes credited his teacher Antisthenes with introducing him to a life of poverty and happiness — of poverty as happiness. The cynic’s every word and action was dedicated to the belief that the path to individual freedom required absolute honesty and complete material austerity.

So Diogenes threw away his cup when he saw people drinking from their hands. He lived in a barrel, rolling in it over hot sand in the summer. He inured himself to cold by embracing statues blanketed with snow. He ate raw squid to avoid the trouble of cooking. He mocked the auctioneer while being sold into slavery.

When asked by Lysias the pharmacist if he believed in the gods, he replied, “How can I help believing in them when I see a god-forsaken wretch like you?” When he was asked what was the right time to marry, he said, “For a young man not yet, for an old man never at all.” When asked what was the most beautiful thing in the world, Diogenes replied, “Freedom of speech.” Sadly, it remains one of the most dangerous.

And when asked where he came from, this native of Sinope, in what is now Turkey, replied that he was a “citizen of the world,” or kosmopolites. If only today’s self-styled cosmopolitans drank water from their hands, hugged statues and lived in barrels, one might ponder. Truth be told, Diogenes’ “cosmopolitanism” is much more of an anti-political stance than the sort of banal internationalism that people associate with the word today.

Cynicism is basically a moral protest against hypocrisy and cant in politics and excess and thoughtless self-indulgence in the conduct of life. In a world like ours, which is slowly trying to rouse itself from the dogmatic slumbers of boundless self-interest, corruption, lazy cronyism and greed, it is Diogenes’ lamp that we need to light our path. Perhaps this recession will make cynics of us all.

Simon Critchley, the chairman of the philosophy department at the New School, is the author of “The Book of Dead Philosophers.”

Amish Meet Hasidic Jews

According to the Gothamist, Amish from Pennsylvania visited Hasidic Jews in Crown Heights (on the walking tour I took a couple years ago):

Yesterday dozens of Amish residents from Lancaster County, Pennsylvania caused plenty of confusion as they toured a predominantly Hasidic neighborhood in Brooklyn's Crown Heights; the Amish beards and black hats had workers in a matzoh factory convinced they were Jews visiting from Uzbekistan. Amish visitors John and Priscilla Lapp explained to the AP that, "In some things we are alike, like our clothing and our traditional beliefs. And in some things we are not. The biggest thing is that Jesus is our savior." (That, and the Lubavitchers have yet to be immortalized by Randy Quaid.)

Rabbi Beryl Epstein, who has been leading tours of Hasidic life since 1982, explained that the visit was intended to give each group a glimpse into the other's devout culture. He tells the Post, "They don't have too many places they can visit where they can be reassured their beliefs will be respected. If they go to Times Square, that's not gonna work." Yisroel Ber Kaplan of the Chassidic Discovery Center also emphasized the visit's spirit of tolerance, "It's reinforcing to the Amish community to see us Jews living the way the Bible says Jews are supposed to live, and have lived since the time of Moses and Abraham. The Amish are also living their lives as the Bible speaks to them."

After touring a synagogue and a library, the group stopped to eat at Esther's Deli on Albany Avenue; Jacob Blank, an Amish father of five, deemed the shawarma on laffa "very good." And before getting back on the bus home, he told the Post what impressed him most: "Watching people cross into the street. People were just walking into traffic."

They actually really do fit in quite well. Click the link above and see the pictures.

Reading Absences, Silences

In the strictest sense, all the contents of consciousness are ineffable. Even the simplest sensation is, in its totality, indescribable. Every work of art, therefore, needs to be understood not only as something rendered, but also as a certain handling of the ineffable. In the greatest art, one is always aware of things that cannot be said (rules of "decorum"), of the contradiction between expression and the presence of the inexpressible. Stylistic devices are also techniques of avoidance. The most potent elements in a work of art are, often, its silences. (Susan Sontag, "On Style")

How often are we careful enough in our art of reading to read silences in the text?

On the Importance of Repetition

Repetition reverberates throughout world literatures. Repetition, repeating, sometimes verbatim, as often can be found in the Epic of Gilgamesh, or with slight variation in the retelling that gives subtle hints of shifting perspectives, which I would argue happens in the Iliad (e.g., when Achilles retells what happened in his argument with Agamemnon to his mother), is often one of the most illuminating aspects of literature. You can find it in biblical literature, near eastern literature, greek and roman literature, all the way to the present (Dadaism, anyone?). Repetition keeps track of time, creates rhythm, denotes emphasis, and provides ever-new perspective and, in fact, allows a text to comment on itself. So, I felt a certain resonance in my own experience of repetition when i read...

...if one does not perceive how a work repeats itself, the work is, almost literally, not perceptible and therefore, at the same time, not intelligible. It is the perception of repetitions that makes a work of art intelligible. (Susan Sontag, "On Style")

Repeat. Reread. Very fittingly, Sontag creates repetition in her statement about repetition as intelligibility.

Quote of the Day: Susan Sontag's "On style"

...the greatest art seems secreted, not constructed. (Susan Sontag, "On style")

What Would Jane [Austen] Blog?

Next week in my class we will be reading Jane Austen's masterpiece, Pride and Prejudice. In preparation, I came across this site, the Republic of Pemberley, named after Mr. Darcy's estate in P&P. If you go to their shoppe, you will find the true meaning to WWJD: What Would Jane Do? As can be found here.

The Plutocratic University

The University world is often viewed as a meritocracy on all levels, whether faculty advancement or student marks. And while some realize that (in the past) it has been really the wealthiest who tend to go to the most prestigious institutions (just due to the price tag), the trend will become more pronounced with next year's incoming class at universities around the country. Indeed, the cost of university education has been increasing at an alarming rate for a long time now, but the economic crisis will now exacerbate the divide between the haves and have nots in terms of university admissions policies. As the NYTimes reports, universities with shrinking endowments are taking the ability of a student to pay fully in cash into admissions considerations, turning the meritocracy increasingly into a plutocracy. Socio-economic diversity will be reduced, and, since unfortunately so often socio-economic diversity is linked with ethnicity, ethnic diversity is likely to decrease in private universities. The universities claim that by doing this, by focusing on wealthier students, they will be able to afford to offer scholarships to the less economically fortunate...but student aid, as a whole, will be down next year.

Some universities are traditionally "need blind," meaning that they admit students without regard for wealth. At the moment, only the wealthiest universities can afford to do so. At the same time, "need blind" universities DO look at wealth for international students, wait-listed students, and transfer students (this is the case at Brandeis), and, interestingly enough, international admittance is up at need-blind universities. Many private institutions, however, are openly aware of wealth and have been and will take even added consideration of wealth and background (including using your ZIP code as a possible indicator of economic background!).

In sum, if you are a weaker student, but from a wealthy background, you have a better chance of getting into a good school than usual, because those who are bright but cannot pay the rising costs of education without a scholarship or aid are out of the running this year. And god forbid you live in the wrong neighborhood (ZIP code)!

Erotics, Not Hermeneutics

In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art. (Susan Sontag, "Against Interpretation")

This is to give a conclusion before the premise. Part of the problem for Sontage is the artificial, illusory separation of form and content, especially the privileging of content over form:

And it is the defense of art which gives birth to the odd vision by which something we have learend to call "form" is separated off from something we have learned to call "content," and to the well-intentioned move which makes content essential and form accessory. (ibid.)

This illusory separation of form and content seems to be an act of violence whereby the critic creates a fissure in the work of art. It is in this violent tearing apart that space is made for interpretation, itself an act that sustains the illusion that makes it possible:

...it is the habit of approaching works of art in order to interpret them that sustains the fancy that there really is such a thing as the content of a work of art. (ibid.)

...interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art. Even more. It is the revenge of the intellect upon the world. To interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world--in order to set up a shadow world of "meanings." It is to turn the world into this world. ("This world"! As if there were any other.) The world, our world, is depleted, impoverished enough. Away with all duplicates of it, until we again experience more immediately what we have. (ibid.)

Such sentiments recall Montaigne in "On Experience," in which he is also extraordinarily against interpretation and doubts any ability to make any meaning through interpretation as well as any ability to know a text in itself: both are impossibilities.

Interpretation turns to the text, or work of art, into something it is not--if it did not, it would not be interpretation, but merely restatement. As it opens one fissure, it attempts to close another: the gap between text and ourselves as interpretation generates "meanings," which Sontag sees as dissatisfaction with the text, a desire to transmute it into something else.

How to resist, then, this violence of meaning? This violence of tearing apart the text to tame it? Partially, one might emphasize formal analysis, express the importance of its shape. As the Montaigne allusion (from me, not Sontag) suggests, to experience a text rather than interpret it, feel it rather than explain it:

Ours is a culture based on excess, on overproduction; the result is a steady loss of sharpness in our sensory experience. All the conditions of modern life-its material plenitude, its sheer crowdedness-conjoin to dull our sensory faculties.... What is important now is to recover our senses. We must learn to see more, to hear more, to feel more.

Seeing, hearing, feeling, experiencing, rather than interpreting, explaining, or, really, explaining away:

The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means.

In a sense, as Sontag starts her essay, it is to recover the magic of the word, phrase, text, that precedes any mimesis.

It is such a thing, such a difficult, evanescent quality of a work of art that Roland Barthes feels toward and touches in The Pleasure of the Text, an erotics of reading.