a little more on Plato

I know there's been a lot on this blog in the past about Plato's metaphysics and their implications for the arts. But I'm taking a class now in which we read snippets of Plato and Aristotle and wrote a tiny response. So, here's my response, to remind us of the ongoing struggle between the earthly and the divine -- and th pressure both put on the poet.

Response to selections from Plato & Aristotle


Plato and Aristotle, two foundational philosophers in the history of “Western” thought, are a bit of an odd couple. Their minds work similarly, by means of investigation and logical progression, but their assumptions, conclusions, and practical applications are extremely dissimilar. I find this comparison/contrast fascinating, because I am (in theory) a Neoplatonist, but resonate more sympathetically with Aristotle’s literary conclusions.

The introduction to our reading selection from Aristotle’s Poetics gives a convenient comparison between this writer and his teacher, which I paraphrase here.


Plato

considers poetry in comparison to forms/ideals
thinks art is propaganda
says that poets are skillful LIARS
thinks analogically
considers poetry as a general category
stresses the similarities among all arts
focuses on content/subject matter
all art is COPYING
writes poetically, eloquently, dramatically

Aristotle

considers poetry itself
thinks art is…art
says poets are SKILLFUL liars
thinks analytically
considers generic categories
stresses the differences between works of art
focuses on artistic form
all art is CREATING
writes dryly, technically

To this list I add some observations of my own.

Plato

likes, but condemns, Homer
wants to dry up emotions
considers art in the ideal world
poets have no access to the Good
relevant only for philosophers and great men

Aristotle

praises Homer as a great example
wants to evoke fear and pity
considers art in the real world
poets communicate Universal Goodness
relevant for everybody

It might not be an exaggeration to summarize these differences thus: Aristotle is actually interested in poetry (he loves the gritty metrical details of it, the rhythm and swing and sway of it); Plato is not (he looks beyond it, with a vague look of distraction in his eyes, to the shapeless invisible Forms in the eternal world). Plato, of course, banishes almost all art from his Republic. But then, he does feel great regret over this action, and gives poetry a chance to defend herself. And Aristotle does rather analyze poor poetry to death, dissecting it, sorting the severed limbs into neat little piles and labeling with a Sharpie in clear, stubby capitals. So this dichotomy is not, perhaps, as neat as I might like it to be.

Which makes sense, given my own artistic and theological struggles. I’ve written a lot about the pleasures and pains of my own Platonism. I’ve rejoiced in how it provides artistic motivation—always striving to express the true Form, knowing that all failure here is only a weak copy of some success in the other world, longing for the multi-dimensional reality that will be that much more beautiful than even this achingly lovely terrestrial existence. I’ve been relieved to find how it helps make theological sense of suffering and imperfection by the promise of the Ideal, Incarnate, finally ruling in a complete kingdom without spatial or temporal boundaries. Indeed, that’s how I’ve reworked Platonism to fill in some of the holes in the Allegory of the Cave etc.: by reinterpreting the Realm of Pure Forms into (now) the Mind of God and (future) the final Kingdom of God (heaven/new earth). This is all very C. S. Lewisian, of course, and Charles Williamsian. No wonder: I was raised on the Inklings as well as Augustine, Luther, and Calvin. They were my baby food, my childhood meats, my mature sweet wine of the soul.

But then there’s the other side: the terrible body-soul dichotomy that arose throughout Christendom as a result of widespread misapplication of Hellenization. If the body is only a copy of an Ideal one, and a poor sickly shadowy copy at that, and (furthermore) if the “flesh” is the residence of sin, then the body must be the house of evil. Hence all kinds of abuses in the historical Church, both of oneself and of others.

And this has artistic consequences, too. The simplest to relate came up in a workshop just a month ago. My fellow poets chided me thus: “Nothing ever actually happens in your poems. It’s always going to happen, or speculation about what might happen, or what could or should, but it’s never actually happening in the poem. You never feel or experience anything in the poem itself.” Indeed. That is the problem. But I suffer from an overdose of Plato, which Yoda expressed so well: “Never his [/her]mind on where [s]he is, what [s]he is doing.” Precisely. This is the result of Plato’s moratorium on creation, his denial of true invention.

So Aristotle is kind of a breath of fresh air, for all my love of the Ideal. Even though he is dry enough to put anybody to sleep at any time of day (hurrah! a cure for insomnia!), he’s kind of bracing compared to Plato. There’s something there to chew on. Lots of nice earthy, solid, papery examples to analyze. I tried last night to write a poem in which something actually happened and in which the narrative persona actually felt something. It ended up being mostly a list of anatomical terms for the physical sensations of climbing a mountain. But maybe that’s a start. At least my narrator made it to the top of the mountain. If the mountain was really there!

Turn on your television

(for only certain, specific shows)

The lady who lives in the apartment below mine turns on her television everyday at 7:00 a.m. and turns it off at 11:00 p.m. She is hard of hearing, so the volume is very high for the entirety of those 16 hours. Now, this is usually not a problem for me, because I generally have music playing. In the hiatus between two pieces of music, or the switch from the radio to iTunes, however, I can tell what show she’s watching and sometimes even pick out bits of the conversation. There’s one commercial that employs the first four notes of Beethoven’s Fifth, which plays at least once every commercial break.

Now, this is not going to be a tirade against my neighbor (she’s elderly and lives alone; I imagine the TV is just a substitute for companions, a noise to block the terrors of solitude). Instead, I want to talk about the negative artistic effect of too much of one medium. I want to discuss how watching TV all day, listening to the same radio station all the time, playing your iTunes library on shuffle indiscriminately, and so on, can deaden our sensory and intellectual experience of art.

Let’s start with the TV example. I was brought up completely without television; we rented videos occasionally. I still don’t have TV. We have rabbit ears; we bought a converter box, but we don’t have it set up right now. Even with it, we only get one PBS station, two local Christian channels, and two Spanish broadcasts. So, I never watch TV. We rent movies, and it’s a special treat. So, here’s what happens to my senses. I am completely and totally distracted by television. When there’s one playing in a room anywhere (doctor’s office, friend’s house, electronics section of Walmart [dozens of huge ones! All playing the same film clips, over and over!]), I am mesmerized. I can’t pay attention to what anybody says, if the TV’s on. Now, although this can have negative affects on, say, my shopping or my social life, from an artistic point of view I think it’s a good thing. I am still sensitively aware of the art form of the television. I critique cinematography; I listen to the musical score; I analyze the screenplay; I am drawn into the lives of the characters and can’t bear to be torn away from even the most trite drama. That’s really, in a sense, one reason I don’t watch television; from the little I see, it’s not great quality. It’s basically the visual equivalent of the cheap-paperback-romance-novel. So I watch movies, selectively, rarely, and enjoy them as a beautiful, extravagant indulgence in art as well as entertainment. I would love recommendations here of films whose artistic value far surpasses that of the sloppy chick-flick forgettable series knock-off.

I’m sure if I watched more—movies or television—I would become inured. Immune to the magical spell of the screen. I don’t watch anything on a tiny screen (iPod, etc.); that takes away the awe of immersion. I love the big screen, and try to plan ahead to see anything important in the theatre. The darkness, the size of the image, and the power of surround sound enhance what is still a powerful experience for my emotions and my mind.

This is one reason I encourage my students not to listen to music or to have the TV on while they’re studying. Not necessarily because it detracts from the quality of their studies—which it might—but because it detracts from full enjoyment of the music or the TV show. One of my sisters always sews while watching TV; I can’t do that! I don’t want to miss a frame.

So then, let’s talk about music. I’m not pleased with what I’ve been doing to music recently. I used to be a selective and intentional about music as I am about films. But for the past few years, ever since I got my iPod, I’ve been less and less thoughtful. Now I generally just pull up iTunes and let it shuffle through everything I’ve got. This makes for some funny juxtapositions; Arabic pop gives way to a movement from a Beethoven sonata, which fades into a U2 song, then Glenn Gould playing his austere and precise Bach sinfonias, then a piece of Celtic folk music, then a Chopin etude, then a Wagner prelude, then an impressionistic piano composition by one of my former students, then something by Janacek, maybe a track from a Lord of the Rings score, and finally Domingo singing his heart out in a Puccini aria. It’s weird. And my iTunes library is small enough I’ve listened to every number dozens of times. The result is that I don’t actually listen to anything anymore. It’s all blurred together. The sharp distinctions between those genres and pieces I listed above have faded. New recordings temporarily revive my listening attention (have you heard the new U2 CD, “No Line on the Horizon” yet? It’s great). But it isn’t too many times through before it jumbles into the old stuff and loses its edge. I rarely listen to a piece of Classical music all the way through, movements in order, focusing on its architecture and structural development. I’m working to correct this: last week I loaded only Mahler symphonies (and podcasts, but that’s a different story) on my iPod, and listed intentionally to numbers 1 and 2 while working on Charles Williams research in a quiet library. Tomorrow, it will be symphony #4 (I don’t have #3; I guess I should purchase it right away). The point here is that I believe one should be thoughtful and intentional about music consumption, just as one should be limited and selective in film/TV watching.

The same can be true of the [static] visual arts, but is not usually a problem for us middle-class Americans. Have you experienced sensory overload in an art museum? There comes a point that you just can’t look at one more sculpture, no matter how sensuously pure and thrilling, nor one more painting, no matter how lush or verdant or celestial. Your eyes just get dazzled, your mind cluttered with images. This is rarely a problem at home: who has an art gallery in their hallways anymore? Having just one great work of art on the walls, though; hum. Does that create insensibility to the work, or greater sensitivity to its complex charms? I have two lovely paintings on my walls: “The Artist's Honeymoon” and “Windflower”. You know, I never stop to really look at them. I will try to be intentional about that, soon, too.

In the words of Susan Sontag, “We must learn to seemore, to hear more, to feel more”—by looking at less, listening to less, and touching less, or fewer, works, in order to see, hear, and feel BETTER.

I saw the PA Shakespeare Festival's production of A Midsummer Night's Dream three times this summer!!! It was fantastic, unforgettable -- but seeing it three times did dull the sharp tang a bit. Twice would have been perfect.

So, tomorrow, chose one piece of music to listen to straight through, uninterrupted, and one poem to read out load three times. Find a quiet room. And see what happens! Let me know.

The Aural Aesthetic

Today I read, in my French textbook, this lovely little poem by Paul Verlaine. I apologize to any French readers/speakers for the lack of accents in this transcription.

Il pleure dans mon coeur

Il pleure dans mon coeur
Comme il pleut sur la ville,
Quelle est cette langueur
Qui penetre mon ceour?

O bruit doux de la pluie
Par terre et sur les toits!
Pour un coeur qui s'ennuie
O le chant de la pluie!

Il pleure sans raison
Dans ce coeur qui s'ecoeure.
Quoi! nulle trahison?
Ce deuil est sans raison.

C'est bien la pire peine
De ne savoir pourquoi,
Sans amour et sans haine,
Mon coeur a tant de peine.

Now, reading this poetry brought to mind some old questions about the nature of art, in response to the lovely sounds of the words. I found I was compelled to read it out loud to myself, enjoying the many rhymes, assonances, and consonances. My simple, sensory pleasure at the sounds was enhanced by my elementary comprehension of French. I am able to translate this poem, with a little dictionary help, but my first response is to the sounds, not the sense. And that distance, that primal response driven by the ear and not the mind, gives me a fresh perspective on poetry.

This reminds me of the first poetry writing workshop I ever took, to which (on the first or second day) we were each asked to bring in and read a favorite poem. I read Hopkins' "Windhover," a poem packed with auditory pleasures. The teacher asked each of us why we had chosen that particular poem, what we liked about it. I was in the throes of just learning to really read and understand poetry, and I could not have accurately paraphrased every phrase of that dense work with precision. I said, "I just love the sounds. Even when I'm not sure exactly 'what it means,' it moves me as a piece of music does. I believe I would love this poem just as much if I didn't know English." And now, here I am barely knowing French, and being musically moved by the sounds of these verses.

I do not have the knowledge to make a literary critique of the Verlaine poem. For all I know, it might be bad poetry. It kind of strikes me that way -- very simple, rather cliched, kind of emo. But my ignorance holds me at a distance, to the point that the individual dots (like those in a Monet) blur and render the entirety that much more beautiful.

I will probably always participate in some way or other in the debates about "What is art?" and "How do we measure artistic quality?" Those debates are valid, perennial, and important. But tonight I was reminded that simple pleasure is one measure of artistic quality. And pleasure of the ear is as important as pleasure of the mind.

September poem of the month

This is the third section of a poem whose first section I posted in July and whose second section I posted as the August poem of the month. There should be one more section forthcoming.


III. A Storm is Coming

Eyes can see a sizable swathe, and the mind can take
spectrum and miscellany, the gamut, with ease. Why then
is the brain astounded and confounded by the diachromatic scheme
of this simple scene? Only the brown of a catastrophe of rock
backed by the pale of a terrible sky. Between annihilation and me
a crumble of granite, pebbles stacked by a laughing titan,
sloping up into exclusion, complete and indifferent.
Give me more complexity!
I cannot stand the stark, the tranquil, horror of it,
nor the endless stretch of bread-sized rocks, piled, mile-high, silent,
wild in a way no beast can be, set as a quest in solidity.

But the spirit can, and the body does. It sets its teeth
and its feet, in all their acrophobia, for the heights.
This is virtue, or something palpable that deeds
of less tactile goodness can only adumbrate. There is no afterlife
for embodied acts of topographic goodness:
defy gravity, encounter vertigo, drown paranoia in sweat, strain tendons
past the point of hesitation, bend knees to climb, and the act lives on.
Eternally. The immaterial self, inseparable from plain materiality,
takes each step and knows each strain, and all is paid
in performing. No double recompense.
The aching thighs, the listening for an avalanche, the thinner air
clearing the fog inside and out the skull, the alert tension
in pectorals abs and calves, the Achilles taut and strong:
all delight in terror and tread down the fear.

Whatever the spirit does, does something to the flesh.
This touchable meat of me and the glorious intangibility
both suffered and endured: both ache as the summit nears,
and both will be stiff with victory tomorrow.
The mind fought panic, the body fought shakes;
the mind won over fear of heights, the body won
from fear of heights. I see no separation, no divide.
No Purgatory: all is purged.

The Necessity of Mediocrity: A Satire

Mediocrity is good for art.
More specifically, mediocrity is good for artists.
It is especially good for Christian artists.

There are many reasons that every artistic group needs at least one representative bad poet (or novelist, painter, etc.). Now, he or she can’t be TOO bad. For example, it can’t be the work ethic that’s bad: if s/he never produces a work, that’s not useful. It might be best if the Mediocrity is the most prolific member of the group. So when you all get together to share, s/he always has something—maybe two or three somethings—to read or display. Maybe the really good members get writer’s block, or are their own worst critics and refuse to show any work below their own nearly impossible standards. But the Mediocrity will always pull out that piece of work. And it’s never a poor display, either. The Shakespeares in the group drag out creased, smudge, dog-eared papers from obscure pockets. The Picassos have their paintings stuffed indifferently between random pages of cheap sketchpads. The Austens print their insightful prose double-sided, or on the backsides of their father’s used sales records. But the Mediocrity: s/he always goes to Staples and has the awful stuff bound up in a lovely cover, framed in gilt, laminated, copyrighted, signed, sealed, delivered. As if the cover can make up for the book; as if the matting can improve the art.

But I haven’t yet told you how useful these fellows are. You see, we can practice kind white lies and secretly indulge righteous hatred, simultaneously. It’s very helpful. We artistic types need somewhere to vent our sense of insecurity and inferiority. We can better maintain our precarious sense of self-righteousness if there’s somebody else it’s easy to tear to shreds. And those kinds of criticism come easily, and sound quite erudite. If we’re talented, we can even do it to his or her face, framed in polysyllabic technical terms and surrounded by appeals to the common opinion. A real master of verbal analysis will use the same terms used for praise, but just but a little shortness of tone to show the Mediocrity is not in favor. That’s why the work can’t be totally awful. If it were, it would be easy to dismiss and/or criticize outright. But then we wouldn’t get the chance to hone our skill of esoteric, hermetic, elitist jargon: the kinds of speeches made in a stage whisper in a gallery full of strangers with the sneaking hope that someone will overhear and think how intelligent, how cultured, we are. We need our own home mediocrities to practice on.

But a Mediocrity never gets it. Whenever you plan a session, that’s the one person you know will come. S/he is unfailingly faithful. And criticism never hits home. All the other members of the group, who understand your nuances so well, chuckle into their sleeves. But the Mediocrity goes serenely on, sharing work after lousy work, never improving, blissfully unaware of the low quality s/he is imposing on the group, ignorant of the concurrent psychological suffering and comfort eddying around the piece as it is passed, or rippling from the reading into silence. How nice, that we know we’ll always feel good. Righteous anger is a cleansing flame. Self-satisfaction is an addictive drug.

It’s also handy to have somebody on whom you can always count to share a piece of work worse than yours. In fact, if you’re tired one day at your desk or in your studio, it’s good to know you really don’t have to push yourself to the next level, you really don’t have to revise that clumsy line, because s/he is sure to share a piece so much worse than yours that yours will look quite a bit better than it is. You’ll just have to manipulate the sharing time so s/he goes after you. Or maybe right before. Yes, maybe that’s even better: if the lame poem is read just before yours, the assembled members will be that much more amazed by yours and won’t notice the lack of structure, the inevitable repetition, the occasional amateurish prosody. If those poor cardboard characters strut their two-dimensional stuff before you read, well, your slightly caricatured dramatis personae will maybe come to life. If those watery, Pollock-could-do-better-when-he-was-five blots of paint circulate with yours on their heels, no one will notice that you painted over mistakes instead of beginning again. In fact, if you rehearse the right mental tricks, you can almost become a Mediocrity yourself, but just never quite as bad as the official one. If you enter your workspace or worktime chanting mantras about how awful s/he is and how much better your work will look, why, you might not even need to produce any new work after a while. Your one epic masterpiece, the one that’s not finished but really works better as a Romantic fragment anyway, so much more suggestive, will serve to circulate and reciculate many times. There are always new members of the group anyway, or ones who haven’t been there for a while, so if you just tweak it or show it in bits and pieces you can stretch it over a good half-a-dozen meetings at least, tuck it away, and sit in smug ease while the Mediocrity proves to your associates that if you can’t produce anything new, well, at least your one piece was so good that maybe you needn’t bother. As long as there’s such rot in the world, your piece can stand as a monument to Excellence. Or at least Excellent in Comparison. Isn’t that convenient?

It's kind of like sin. I can feel virtuous as long as I have at least one immoral friend around, to make me feel good about myself.

August Poem of the Month

This is the second section of the poem I posted last month. I hope that a few more sections are forthcoming.


II.

Up a dried-out river bed, along an almost panoramic ridge,
sudden burst of rain and hail. Temperatures turned.
And rounding a turn, the cone loomed bare: doom in the very rocks.
Nothing else so sheer, nothing so spare
with no trip to spare, no mercy between a slip and the air.
A crumbling peak was the only material reality against the intolerable sky.
A force of will the only wall against the mental fall.
Every step of my foot took one more foot of its steppes.
Whatever the body does, does something to the soul.
The enormous pressure of the empty space behind
nearly broke my little mind.
I panted to hold the panic back,
thought by not thinking, progressed by repression
and ignorance.
And I can see my body arc, out, curved like the rainbow through which it falls,
glorious in suspension. A waterfall of raven hair against the clouds, the color
of flesh in contrast to the Irish green and blue, a masterpiece
and a disaster. The crash of bones on distant stones, the spatter of blood
in penitence for insuccess. Whatever the body does…

But it did not. The mind must be enormous, to enclose in one ignored corner
such a massive swathe of space, undusted. If I can pack
a sidereal fear and my idea
of the entire size of the universe,
not ending with the atmosphere, on past planets, out past galaxies,
(all pressing, more than the heaviest pack, on my unstopping back)
into some tiny corner of my mind and hide it there
(just a nagging, unacknowledged noise: a dust feather in a draft),
then how huge is my mind!
Whatever the psyche does….

The things these students say!

This is not really a post, not really; just a compilation of some pretty hilarious answers from or exchanges with students over the last year or two. No insult is intended to any students quoted herein (and they shall remain anonymous, to protect the guilty). Enjoy!




“What event in 1660 restored drama in England and allowed female actors on the stage?”: Charles II put in throne.

What meter does Shakespeare use?: The rhythm of Shakespeare’s poem is five beats per a line with ten synonyms.

In her research paper about Jane Austen’s life, one young lady wrote that Jane made a new acquaintance, an Irishman named Tom Lefroy: Tom was a law student in London, wanting to work at an Irish bar.

Me, to a student who just received the lowest possible grade on his research paper: So, what did you think of this paper you wrote?
Him: I thought it was OK.
Me: What did you think was OK about it?

Student: Mrs. Higgins, can you define “Romanticism”?
Me: Wow, you want me to define “Romanticism”? There are more books on how to define “Romanticism” than there are books of Romantic literature! Let’s see…. How about “A literary and artistic movement in Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries characterized by emotionalism and individuality.”
Then we looked it up in NTC’s Dictionary of Literary Terms
Me: [reading] “A literary and artistic movement in Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries characterized by…dzzzzzzzzzz, dzzzzzzzzzz [as I skimmed over irrelevant bits] emotionalism and individuality.” See, that’s just what I said!
Student: Yeah, except for the dzzzzzzzzzz, dzzzzzzzzzz!

Me: I’m canceling one of your assignments for next week. You do not have to give an oral report.
Student: Thank God! –wait, did I just take the Lord’s name in vain?
Me: Not if you meant it!
Student: Oh, I meant it.
Me: And isn’t there somebody else you should be thanking?
Everyone: Thank you, Mrs. Higgins!
Anther student: Wait, did we just take your name in vain?

Fill in the blank:
Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your hearts.
Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your swords.
Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your hand.

To you our swords have leaden edges, Mark Antony.
To you our swords have leaden tips, Mark Antony.
To you our swords have leaden hearts, Mark Antony.
To you our swords have leaden blood, Mark Antony.
To you our swords have leaden dull, Mark Antony.

Marley’s ghost: I wear the clothes I forged in life.
Belle: Another Christmas has displaced me; and if it can cheer
and comfort you in time to come, as I would have tried to do, I have no just cause to grieve.
Ebenezer Scrooge: What Christmas has displaced you?
Belle: A golden one.



"What kind of diction does Donald Hall use?"
He starts at the beginning and goes to the end.

"What country is Seamus Heaney from?"
Europe

"Define Protagonist": Someone who agrees with a lot of writings
"Define Antagonist": Someone who goes against everyone’s writing

"Name one historical event that was important to Charles Dickens and his writing": His Life.


"What is the moral of 'La Belle Dame Sans Merci' by Keats?": Don’t date with sloppy person.

“How did Antigone die?” She went into a cave and hung up herself.

One student, in an essay on Beowulf, claims that Beowulf wrestled with knickers. I still haven’t figured that one out!