Mayakovsky, Mandelstam and Barnes

Two interesting poetry events.

1. Whale & Star's recent publication of “Mandelstam: Modernist Archaist.” The book's editor, Kevin M. F. Platt, assembled new translations by notable contemporary poets combined with an exceptional selection of previous translations. You can buy it here.

2. Thomas tells me that one night in the winter of 1978 Clifford Barnes was holding fort at the White Horse Tavern, where from time to time Cliff lowered his voice, looked at one of his admirers in the eyes and delivered a bit of wisdom. He wielded his softness like a flamethrower and that annoyed Vladimir Mayakovsky, who was drinking quietly nearby. Mayakovsky told Cliff to shut up but the bard, not used to people like the Georgian, smirked, which cost him a beating.

Unreasonable Pursuits: Moby-Dick

The reasonableness of most pursuits is arguable, especially pursuits carried, consciously or unconsciously, as affronts to reasonableness. In the arts, but not just in the arts, these reasonableness-challenging pursuits tend to lead far from certainty. The mighty and the ones who like to appear mighty or who don’t know any better, suggest trusting, an advise that has kept many in foolish voyages from which they never returned. The prudent and the cowards suggest retreating and the results of this advise are plain to see.

It is not easy to be a good judge of time and circumstance, which is what is called for here. The following are excerpts from contemporary reviews of Moby-Dick and from a note on Melville’s death (from www.melville.org, a useful website). I find it interesting to read these from a distance of 150 years, which we don’t (usually) have in our own pursuits.

The more careful, therefore, should he [Herman Melville] be to maintain the fame he so rapidly acquired, and not waste his strength on such purposeless and unequal doings as these rambling volumes about spermaceti whales. —London Literary Gazette, December 6, 1851

In all other aspects, the book is sad stuff, dull and dreary, or ridiculous. Mr. Melville's Quakers are the wretchedest dolts and drivellers, and his Mad Captain ... is a monstrous bore. —Charleston Southern Quarterly Review, January 1852

We have no intention of quoting any passages just now from Moby Dick…But if there are any of our readers who wish to find examples of bad rhetoric, involved syntax, stilted sentiment and incoherent English, we will take the liberty of recommending to them this precious volume of Mr. Melville's. —New York United States Magazine and Democratic Review, January 1852

It is strange how he persists—and has persisted ever since I knew him, and probably long before—in wondering to-and-fro over these deserts, as dismal and monotonous as the sand hills amid which we were sitting. He can neither believe, nor be comfortable in his unbelief; and he is too honest and courageous not to try to do one or the other. If he were a religious man, he would be one of the most truly religious and reverential; he has a very high and noble nature, and better worth immortality than most of us.— Nathaniel Hawthorne, Notebook Entry, November 20, 1856

The sum and substance of our fault-finding with Herman Melville is this. He has indulged himself in a trick of metaphysical and morbid meditations until he has almost perverted his fine mind from its healthy productive tendencies.—Fitz-James O’Brien: Our Authors and Authorship, Melville and Curtis. In Putnam’s Monthly Magazine (New York), April 1857

Herman Melville, one of the most original and virile of American literary men, died at his home on Twenty-sixth street, New York, a few days ago, at the age of 72. He had long been forgotten, and was no doubt unknown to the most of those who are reading the magazine literature and the novels of the day. Nevertheless, it is probable that no work of imagination more powerful and often poetic has been written by an American than Melville's romance of Moby Dick; or the Whale, published just 40 years ago […] Certainly it is hard to find a more wonderful book than this Moby Dick, and it ought to be read by this generation, amid whose feeble mental food, furnished by the small realists and fantasts of the day, it would appear as Hercules among the pygmies, or as Moby Dick himself among a school of minnows.—Springfield, Massachusetts Republican, October 4, 1891

On T.S. Eliot's Birthday

Let’s celebrate T.S. Eliot’s birthday. Here is Section I of “Ash Wednesday." The entire poem is available online.

Because I do not hope to turn again
Because I do not hope
Because I do not hope to turn
Desiring this man's gift and that man's scope
I no longer strive to strive towards such things
(Why should the aged eagle stretch its wings?)
Why should I mourn
The vanished power of the usual reign?

Because I do not hope to know
The infirm glory of the positive hour
Because I do not think
Because I know I shall not know
The one veritable transitory power
Because I cannot drink
There, where trees flower, and springs flow, for there is nothing again

Because I know that time is always time
And place is always and only place
And what is actual is actual only for one time
And only for one place
I rejoice that things are as they are and
I renounce the blessed face
And renounce the voice
Because I cannot hope to turn again
Consequently I rejoice, having to construct something
Upon which to rejoice

And pray to God to have mercy upon us
And pray that I may forget
These matters that with myself I too much discuss
Too much explain
Because I do not hope to turn again
Let these words answer
For what is done, not to be done again
May the judgement not be too heavy upon us

Because these wings are no longer wings to fly
But merely vans to beat the air
The air which is now thoroughly small and dry
Smaller and dryer than the will
Teach us to care and not to care Teach us to sit still.

Pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death
Pray for us now and at the hour of our death.

The Freedom to Be

In the essay “The Wisdom of Life” Schopenhauer writes,

"Everyone believes himself a priori to be perfectly free, even in his
individual actions, and thinks that at every moment he can commence
another manner of life. ... But a posteriori, through experience, he
finds to his astonishment that he is not free, but subjected to
necessity, that in spite of all his resolutions and reflections he
does not change his conduct, and that from the beginning of his life
to the end of it, he must carry out the very character which he
himself condemns...."

The Scholar

The following quotes are from E.M. Forster’s “Aspects of the Novel.”


The scholar, like the philosopher, can contemplate the river of time. He contemplates it not as a whole, but he can see the facts, the personalities, floating past him, and estimate the relations between them, and if his conclusions could be as valuable to us as they are to himself he would long ago have civilized the human race. As you know, he has failed. True scholarship is incommunicable, true scholars rare. There are a few scholars, actual or potential, in the audience today, but only a few, and there is certainly none on the platform. Most of us are pseudo-scholars, and I want to consider our characteristics with sympathy and respect, for we are a very large and quite a powerful class, eminent in Church and State, we control the education of the Empire, we lend to the Press such distinction as it consents to receive, and we are a welcome asset at dinner-parties.

Pseudo-scholarship is, on its good side, the homage paid by ignorance to learning.

*

Everything he says may be accurate but all is useless, because he is moving round books instead of through them, he either has not read them or cannot read them properly. Books have to be read (worse luck, for it takes a long time); it is the only way of discovering what they may contain. [...] The reader must sit down alone and struggle with the writer, and this the pseudo-scholar will not do. He would rather relate a book to the history of its time, to events in the life of its author, to the events it describes, above all to some tendency. As soon as he can use the word “tendency” his spirits rise, and though those of his audience may sink, they often pull out their pencils at this point and make a note, under the belief that a tendency is portable.

On Looking at the Work Done

“I find it an impossible book: I consider it badly written, ponderous, embarrassing, image-mad and image-confused, sentimental, in places saccharine to the point of effeminacy, uneven in tempo, without the will to logical cleanliness, very convinced and therefore disdainful of proof, mistrustful even of the propriety of proof, a book for initiates, "music" for those dedicated to music, those who are closely related to begin with on the basis of common and rare aesthetic experiences, "music" meant as a sign of recognition for close relatives in arbitus [In the arts]–an arrogant and rhapsodic book that ought to exclude right from the beginning the profanum vulgus [The profane crowd] of "the educated" even more than "the mass" or "folk,"” wrote Nietzsche in regards to his book “The Birth of Tragedy.”

But despite his accusations and reservations Nietzsche found value in his book because he trusted the intent and the merits of its subject (the history of Greek tragedy and the psychological/philosophical distinction between the Dionysian and Apollonian spirits), and also because Nietzsche had an ability (coming from clarity, arrogance or both) to see his own personal enterprise in a historical perspective: “this audacious book dared to tackle for the first time: to look at science in the perspective of the artist, but at art in that of life.”

For two years my studio has been working on a series of books documenting the work I have done since my days as an apprentice. It is not a work for publication. Nonetheless, seeing it in the world, even in its limited visibility, makes me consider the value of much of what I have done, and in turn, much of what I am doing. Looking at these books I have feelings not unlike the ones Nietzsche had in regards to “The Birth of Tragedy,” with the exception of his conviction of the work’s importance.

There is one argument the books make very convincingly: some things won’t be again.

Kierkegaard and The Present Age

An excerpt from Søren Kierkegaard, The Present Age and of the Difference Between a Genius and an Apostle, trans. Alexander Dru (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1962)

If a precious jewel, which all desired, lay out on a frozen lake, where the ice was perilously thin, where death threatened one who went out too far while the ice near the shore was safe, in a passionate age the crowds would cheer the courage of the man who went out on the ice; they would fear for him and with him in his resolute action; they would sorrow over him if he went under; they would consider him divine if he returned with the jewel. In this passionless, reflective age, things would be different. People would think themselves very intelligent in figuring out the foolishness and worthlessness of going out on the ice, indeed, that it would be incomprehensible and laughable; and thereby they would transform passionate daring into a display of skill…The people would go and watch from safety and the connoisseurs with their discerning tastes would carefully judge the skilled skater, who would go almost to the edge (that is, as far as the ice was safe, and would not go beyond this point) and then swing back. The most skilled skaters would go out the furthest and venture most dangerously, in order to make the crowds gasp and say: "Gods! He is insane, he will kill himself!" But you will see that his skill is so perfected that he will at the right moment swing around while the ice is still safe and his life is not endangered…

Men, then, only desire money, and money is an abstraction, a form of reflection…Men do not envy the gifts of others, their skill, or the love of their women; they only envy each others' money…These men would die with nothing to repent of, believing that if only they had the money, they might have truly lived and truly achieved something.

The established order continues, but our reflection and passionlessness finds its satisfaction in ambiguity. No person wishes to destroy the power of the king, but if little by little it can be reduced to nothing but a fiction, then everyone would cheer the king. No person wishes to pull down the pre-eminent, but if at the same time pre-eminence could be demonstrated to be a fiction, then everyone would be happy. No person wishes to abandon Christian terminology, but they can secretly change it so that it doesn't require decision or action. And so they are unrepentant, since they have not pulled down anything. People do not desire any more to have a strong king than they do a hero-liberator than they do religious authority, for they innocently wish the established order to continue, but in a reflective way they more or less know that the established order no longer continues…

The reflective tension this creates constitutes itself into a new principle, and just as in an age of passion enthusiasm is the unifying principle, so in a passionless age of reflection envy is the negative-unifying principle. This must not be understood as a moral term, but rather, the idea of reflection, as it were, is envy, and envy is therefore twofold: it is selfish in the individual and in the society around him. The envy of reflection in the individual hinders any passionate decision he might make; and if he wishes to free himself from reflection, the reflection of society around him re-captures him…

Envy constitutes the principle of characterlessness, which from its misery sneaks up until it arrives at some position, and it protects itself with the concession that it is nothing. The envy of characterlessness never understands that distinction is really a distinction, nor does it understand itself in recognizing distinction negatively, but rather reduces it so that it is no longer distinction; and envy defends itself not only from distinction, but against that distinction which is to come.

Golden Ratio

I understand the desire for ideal proportions, but the cult of the Golden Ratio seems puzzling to me. For all its divine attributions, the hope for a perfect ratio seems very human, and nowhere are the characteristic limitations, distortions and tenderness of humanity more apparent than in the need to find clues of the definite importance of the Golden Ratio—Fibonacci numbers, pyramids, ideal buildings. In the case of paintings, for instance, it might not make sense to decide shape independently of “content,” and once content has been taken into account, other criteria will reveal the secondary importance of an a priori proportion.

Darling of Exhuberance

I am now writing from the Santa Monica studio. We have been working at it for some time and it will be some time still until it is finished.

A rainbow-colored butterfly flies over Dante, Milton, Swedenborg, Blake, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Freud, Jung, Heidegger: the flowers of beauty and death. Here is some pollen from Blake.

You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough.

Exuberance is Beauty.

The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.

Prudence is a rich ugly old maid courted by Incapacity.

He who desires but acts not, breeds pestilence.

The cut worm forgives the plow.

The Road

Bolle, the main character of Harry Martinson’s The Road, wanders through the Swedish countryside. Here is one passage,

"So I went, and all that summer I tramped round the country, heard the birds sing, bathed in quiet streams and lakes and roamed through glens and valleys where the grass was dewy and clean. Clouds drifted, winds moved in the woods, flowers bowed and gleamed, bumble-bees buzzed in the clover, girls sang in the hay-fields."

Bolle’s aim is the wandering itself. It is a lifestyle for which he pays in fear and detachment, but for him it is a worthwhile trade: as a tramp, he gains nature, he resists the externally imposed and he finds hope in what might be around the next turn of the road.

Many times I have fancied myself a Bolle, someone who chooses the road however unknown. But it is a fancy. Like Ungaretti, I am always ready for departures but, unlike Bolle, it is “ready” as in “expectant” nor as in “prepared.”

Maybe no one can be prepared and maybe the road is not so much a choice. Maybe it is a reaction, which sometimes ends well and sometimes does not. When does it end well? Maybe as often as the settled life ends well, which is not often. But probably not even that much. What the road opens (irreversibly) is more sensible to keep close.

Martinson’s book points at the limitations on freedom imposed by social arrangements, the oppression of machines and the tyranny of those who hand down the rules, but it makes less of an issue of the challenge posed by the past. Maybe his approach was to tackle an idea akin to “practical freedom,” but it seems to me that the most intriguing questions come in search of “pure freedom,” even if such a concept proves silly upon further analysis—and it does, I think.

Every event, good or bad, narrows what’s possible and enslaves us in ways we often don’t want to give up; ways the road won’t always release. I have events, Bolle had events and Martinson as well—and Martinson, the beautiful tramp, was ultimately disheartened by his.

And yet, who, at least sometimes, wouldn’t want to wander or perhaps, to walk a mile without hypocrisy, without attachments?

The Road is too simple; one reason why it is touching.

Adorno as Cliché

The frequent reference to Adorno’s pronouncement, “to write a poem after Auschwitz is barbaric,” is problematic for at least four reasons:

1. The phrase is customarily presented outside of the context in which it appeared: “The critique of culture is confronted with the last stage in the dialectic of culture and barbarism: to write a poem after Auschwitz is barbaric, and that corrodes also the knowledge which expresses why it has become impossible to write poetry today."

2. The reference frequently comes with—particularly in academic contexts—a pompous undercurrent, as if seeking “ahhh” as a follow up.

3. It is rarely acknowledged that Adorno reconsidered his words: "Perennial suffering has as much right to expression as the tortured have to scream... hence it may have been wrong to say that no poem could be written after Auschwitz."

4. If Auschwitz invalidates anything is poetry whose nature or quality does not measure up. Auschwitz didn’t draw a line on the landscape of art that was not already there.