If A is B then C.
But A is never B.
A is always A
if names mean anything.
The morning star is the
evening star is
Venus. No.
The morning star is the morning star
The evening star the evening
Venus Venus.
If words mean anything.
If A were B
and A and B were C
they would earn only one
name. And nothing earns
only one name.
Given all the times he tried
To laugh when he should have cried
(And all that he did
Not to show what he hid)
Are you really that surprised to hear that he died?
Once upon a
time there was a goat
Who spied delicious tin down in a moat.
He jumped right in.
He could not swim.
And even worse for him, he could not float.
And then there was the time another goat
Got pearls of wisdom stuck inside her throat.
She baaaa’d and brayed
But there they stayed.
She never should have dinnered on a quote.
Noun is a noun
and verb is a noun.
Verb is a noun till you verb it.
Verbing a word makes it a verb.
Verb is a verb when you verb it.
We invited Nietzsche and Kafka and Dickinson and Van Gogh to a meeting of all the people who died without knowing the huge cultural significance their lives and works would have.
Nietzsche couldn’t figure out why he’d been invited.
Kafka was pissed off.
Dickinson snickered. She understood why she’d been invited
but was confused as to why the meeting was happening.
Van Gogh alone was gratified.
There are two ways to say this.
You can say that, reading a poem, you use the object,
the words, their sounds, their appearance on the page or screen (or in the air
if you’re listening, if listening is a form of reading), to create meaning.
That meaning exists in your consciousness and nowhere else in the universe. Only
God, in voyeur mode, has any access to it other than you. Or you can say the
poem uses you to create meaning. The poem does not “have” a meaning. The poem
is just an object, physical or aural. It has no more meaning than a rock or
twig. But like a rock or twig it can become a meaning, or, more specifically,
it can be the material from which meaning is created. If you don’t like the
idea here of creating meaning, I could say that the rock or the poem is the
object via which meaning accrues in your consciousness. There is something in
the middle here between actively creating, like God, ex nihilo and passively receiving,
like a Calvinist, salvation. You can’t be entirely passive. You can’t be entirely
active, or you would need the object (or work in a language). Any object can
become meaningful, can become no longer, for you in your mind, just a rock, or
a thing. This second way of thinking is closer to the truth than the first, I
think.
But this is how a poem (or any intentionally made
human object) differs from a rock. The poem transmits, imperfectly, a meaning that
was formerly in the consciousness of the poet.
It’s useful to think through the simplistic communications
model we all learned at some point in school. Meaning transferred from one consciousness
to another via language like the voice through a telephone wire, starting
whole, ending whole.
The poet creates in words; the words manifest the poet’s
intention. This is what I wanted to say, and how I wanted to say it, or
comes as close as I can, close enough for you, when you read it to share my
intention or meaning. Or experience. It would be beside the point to
quibble about that vocabulary here. The point is this: rocks are different from
poems in that rocks don’t sit in streams so that they can become metaphors, let
alone metaphors tied to a specific meaning. But the poet turns the rock in the
stream into a metaphor, seeing a possibility of meaning that the poet can use
to make a poem, to transmit to your consciousness.
I understand the inadequacy of the model. But the
point I hope is clear: that meaning exists not in the rock, not in the poem,
but in the mind of the reader who reads the poem or interprets the rock. The
difference is that the poem has behind its creating an intention to mean that
the rock does not, and that intention informs the reading, making the poem more
than sound or the imitation of sound, and print, and visual object. Meaning does
not exist in the poem, it does not reside there. Meaning exists in the consciousness
of the reader and only during the act of reading or thinking about the poem.
Only in the moment of active consciousness. It fades like the light of an old
TV screen until or unless it is turned back on.
That’s step one. There are now two ways to take this
thought, two roads we might travel from this point. The first is the road of
how limited this notion of mind is. It’s the road to the after effects of the
processing of meaning, the road of how the poem comes not merely from the
conscious attempt to embody fully-conscious meaning on the part of the poet and
how the processed meaning in the reader seeps down into the body of the reader,
of how the poem is processed not like a math equation (though I suspect math
equations are processed more like poems than we usually think, especially good
ones, that math equations are also poems) but like nutrients: stomach : brain ::
body : psyche.
That road is pretty well trampled. I won’t go any further
down it now.
The second road is more interesting to me today. It is
the one that understands that this meaning, which I now need to broaden from
that inadequate concept into the concept of experience, of which meaning
is a major part, in the consciousness of the reader, existing only now, when consciousness
is on guard and alert, always uses, as its meaning-producing tools, the
circumstances of the reading, as understood by the reader. In other words I’m reading
the poem today, in this context, this class, this leisure, within my highly
flawed notion of what poems are and what language is and what meaning is and
what interpretation is and what poems are for and what they do. And all these
things both enable and interfere with my reading, with my experience, with my
attempt to convert the artifact into an experience.
So the better the model I have for how poems work and
what situation I’m in when I read, the better, the richer, the more rewarding, more
unimpeded will be my experience not just of poems but of everything, every
human artifact, every natural object—like air through the vocal cords, the
unimpeded vowel, the partly blocked consonants.
The now of understanding. So let’s return to this
fact. The meaning of a poem exists only in the consciousness of the reader. It
is important to note here that the poet, the writer, is, as far as interpretation
goes, just another reader; this is exactly true; the reader and the writer are
on the same side of the poem; there is literally no difference. If one reader
is different from another, if one reader can become, in fact must become,
different from herself over successive readings, or even from beginning to end
of a single reading, if indeed this process of reading is the process of
becoming different, then the poet differs from the reader in exactly the same
way that one reader differs from another or one reader differs from herself
over time.
The meaning goes away when it is no longer present in
consciousness, when I am no longer thinking about it. But the having-read, the
experience of the meaning, the memory of the experience, does not go away.
Where it goes cannot be determined beforehand. Am I overstating the case?
Possibly. There is the possibility of forgetting, of utterly losing not just in
the mind but in the body, in the consciousness and the unconscious, the
experience. This is a corollary of any experience. I may learn what poison ivy
is and then become wary of the plant and then, having perhaps moved to where
the plant doesn’t grow, forget what it looks like, utterly lose my wariness of it
and absently touch it when I return for a summer. And I may even at that point
still not be aware that I had ever learned to identify the plant or that I have
ever felt the itch of it. Losing the effect of a poem in the body so utterly may
be possible, losing it beyond the zero, deeper than any dream or hypnotism
could recover because it’s just no longer there. But it’s as unlikely as that. If the body ever
knew it, the body is likely to retain some vestige of it, like a forgotten
language.
The now of meaning. The most productive, satisfying
(oddly truest even) way of approaching a poem is to treat it as a potential
experience. And then as an experience. Don’t search for a meaning. Have an
experience. Meaning will be part of that experience. Analysis may come later;
analysis will tell you why you had that experience of the poem, you in
particular, at that moment of your life, on that day, in that context in which
you read the poem; sanity requires that your reading not be entirely your own. A
community readers will have experiences of the poem that overlap with yours.
But analysis comes later, if it comes at all. We don’t have to read poems in
order to analyze them. And even if we do, experience and analysis are two
distinct activities.
I have in the back of my mind still the experience I
imagine we all have of reading at least some poems, or even some part of all
poems, particularly of difficult poems, the experience I have with any number
of poems by T.S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, Charles Simic and once had with poems
that now seem to me without mystery, the works of Keats for example. I can’t
have this experience when, despite concerted effort, the words just wash over
my mind as sounds or as words unconnected to the other words in their sentence.
Likely, the words are trying to do something in this context that these words
have never done before. I have to come up with a new way of processing these
words in order to make sense of the poem (to “make sense” is both to create
meaning and to have an experience). I struggle with a poem that may or may not
want me to struggle.
Meaning happens now. In my easy chair, picking up a
book of poems I may have lying around, reading because I am in a mood to read,
I can struggle with the poem, or I can turn the page or I can close the book
for now or forever. No meaning happened for me and the experience I had was the
experience of not knowing. I am guaranteed to forget the poem I tried to read.
I probably won’t forget the experience of not understanding it, the experience
that may lead me to give up on poetry or to take a class that teaches me how to
read poems. In that class, if I want to succeed, I don’t have that luxury. This
is a different reading context. And now I have to bring to bear all I think I
know about poems and language and meaning (and school and everything else that
for me at this moment might impinge on the process, on the thing I am trying to
do: read a fucking poem).
So I ask myself, why am I trying to read this poem? I
have so many overlapping and nonoverlapping answers. To prove I’m smart. To see
if I can do it. To have the experience others have reported that you have when
you read a poem; to find out what that experience is, to see if I can have it. To
expand my mind, myself. To understand poetry better. And on and on.
If those things are interfering with my experience of
this poem, I should put them aside. Read the poem. If I’m in a college course
on how to read poems, I bring my confusion to the class and seek help. If I’m
alone in my comfy chair I do whatever I need to do. If I don’t close the book,
if I don’t give up on poetry, I get out of my chair and go to reference works
or talk to people who like this stuff and ask them what their experience of
this poem is. I read critics. I join poetry societies. I keep reading the poem.
Or I read a different poem. The only goal I need to have is the goal of feeling
satisfied with my experience of the poem.
Readers tend to become satisfied in one of two ways.
They either use all texts to confirm their preconceptions, rejecting any that don’t
serve that function, or they use or allow the new text, the poem, but also
(though it’s a greater challenge) the rock in the stream to extend their being
(mind, consciousness, self). They become more, closer to their potential, if
that is something they have. More of who a person can be.
Or music.
One of the most misleading and perhaps intellectually damaging legacies of the Enlightenment is the idea that people write music or poems. These things are no more written than equations in math are written. They are put down. There is no right word, no single word anyway, that will adequately name the thing that is done when a poem is put down. It is captured, it is discovered, it corresponds to a being or reality that preexists it and that can be perceived when the conditions are right. All artists attest to this fact. A written poem like a written equation is false. E does not equal MC cubed.
But the Enlightenment needed to create a way of increasing the stock of the commodity "writing." And so it created an author and authorship, a capitalist unit subject to reward an punishment. It's a false equation. Locke's philosophy was written. He can claim it. Whatever is false is written. Whatever is true is found. Locke figured out how to pay people for lying. For making mistakes. For getting it wrong.
The advantage of math over poetry is that math's equations can be demonstrated to a much higher degree. People who understand math and physics can show that E in fact equals MC squared. But is Hope a thing with feathers?
Still, I will not say that math or science establishes objective truth. The facts of math or science correlate to human perception and experience. E doesn't equal MC squared in heaven. If asked, God would say not "that isn't true" but "I wouldn't put it that way."
The two people whose thoughts I'd like to refine are Gervais and deGrasse Tyson. The former says for example "there are 3000 gods, what are the chances you have the right one?" And "I just believe in one less God than you do." I'd like to say, giving God 3000 names does not multiply gods. But I'd also like to say "that doesn't mean there's only one god." The question before this conversation is "does number exist without human brains." And my answer is no. If there are no numbers in reality, no platonic form for number, then the question "how many gods are there" is a nonsense question.
Unless the words were put down in that order in that way it could not do the thing it does to those to whom it does it.
Because the words were put down thus it does nothing to you.
Your move.
In trying to make our lives simpler, computers have made
them hopelessly more complex. What used to be simple, straightforward,
intuitive processes now require us to solve a rubrics cube a day to figure out
how to store, edit, find, save, and retrieve files. Where is that thing I was
working on this morning? I now have ten paths to it, half of which take me
nowhere near it, three of which take me to some alternative universe version of
it, two of which disappear when I try to click on them. I never know if I do
get a file open if this is the one I wanted, the latest version, the best
version. It's one of the versions the computer saved for me without my
permission when I was thinking about options. The lost bits exist still in the
ether. Now I have to train myself in the proper recovery method. I've lost my
actual train of thought because I have to inhabit the amateur computer
scientist section of my brain for twenty minutes and even to the thing that I
dread most in the world: search the HELP menu in a desperate and fruitless
attempt to get help. I put in search terms, carefully using the actual terms
the computer used with me to tell me what my problem was. But the words a
computer uses to talk to you are never the words the computer will allow you to
use to talk to it. “You need to verify your username and password.” Ok. Since there’s
no useful information there, I go to help, “How do I verify my username and
password.” One of two things will happen: “Your query yielded no results.” Or “here
are the 10,239 things you might be asking about, including a recipe for blueberry
anchovy muffins.”
If I ever to get to the old version of the document without the
20 hours of work I’d already added to it but which, starting from, I’ll save at
least 20 hours re-editing that would have been wasted looking for the version I
actually wanted to work on I may start working on it again. But before I can do
that, I have to offer myself up to a Buddhist monastery.
WE know Emily today not because she had great talent
that’s a given
but because she had great luck.
She wrote a letter to the one person who would help her.
We know Kafka today because his best friend betrayed him.
I could go on.
The observation is not that we came so close to not knowing
these visionaries
but that we don’t know the ones who wrote the wrong letter
or had loyal friends.
How very many sages remain unknown to history?
We can’t answer that.
When all is finally over, earth exhausted by its native evil
and God gathers God’s own into God’s kingdom
will you finally get your reward, you great unknowns,
or will there be so many of us that we remain
anonymous?
From the Enlightenment and its science has emerged the
historically crazy idea that religion should be rejected because its stories
aren’t true. To what extent has anyone ever believed the stories of Zeus or
Brahma were true, or in what sense? And what about Moses and Jesus and Mohammed?
Surely people believed that the stories about these figures were true? How can
you worship the Western God revealed via these figures if you don’t believe the
accounts of their lives are true?
But no one asked about the truth of these stories until after
the concept of Enlightenment Truth emerged. Of course the followers of Judaism,
Christianity and Islam believed the stories of their founders and principal
figures. But the claim that those stories were true in our modern sense of true—historically
accurate, recorded and told exactly as they happened—could not be claimed for
them until that concept of truth developed. Once that standard was applied to
stories, the stories of course unraveled. But not because they were not true. They fell apart when held to a
standard was applied to them that was unknown to the people who first told them
or read or heard them.
And now we claim very widely that religion is false because
the stories are false because they don’t conform to this alien standard of
truth. It’s like judging nursery rhymes because they don't conform to the rules of
calculus. And even those who today try to save religion from the Enlightenment
critique generally doom themselves by using the structure of Enlightenment thought. And
they are judged as crazy or confused (which of course they are but no more
confused than those they oppose) because they can’t see the plain fact that
ancient stories don’t stand up to Enlightenment standards of truth. The imperfect and so-so Enlightenment. But what these
well-meaning critics of secular thought are in my view really responding to is something
else. They too only have the Modern vocabulary in which to express themselves,
so they express themselves badly. The sense they have however that the real is
something other than what the critics of religion tell us it is is too strong
to die on the altar of Enlightenment. They know that something is missing in the
Enlightenment critique of pre-Enlightenment thought. But they don’t have any
idea how to say what that is. So they listen to all that science has to say;
they never question the absurdity of going to the scientist to ask questions
about God, and they go away thinking “that must be wrong.” If they only press
the question in the vocabulary of the scientist far enough, they’ll see it fall
apart. We’re just not there yet.
But that will never happen. The whole structure of
Enlightenment thought ultimately excludes God. And simultaneously excludes
religion. God is not an object in the universe, not an object at all. God
therefore does not have objective existence. A structure of thought that claims
only what is objective is real declares God unreal. And at the same time it
declares religion false—which is a radically different step. God does not have
to be objectively real—does not have to “exist”—for religion to be an essential
part of the human experience.
And I mean essential in a collective not an individual
sense, though that may be true as well. It may be that humanity cannot persist
without religion. Enlightenment thought repeatedly argues the evil of religion.
It was Nietzsche who finally tore the lid off this one. Religion is the source
of endless evil, personal and civil, wars and murders and intolerance and prejudice
and oppression. War is the great human evil that we’re finally on the verge of
eradicating; though Nietzsche’s dates may have been overly optimistic, the
trajectory is clear.
The counter argument is easy enough to make, though it would
take me off track to make it here. I will only point out that religion did not create
nuclear war or gas chambers or mustard gas. It is not responsible for global
warming or gun violence or capitalism. Freeing ourselves from religion has not
made us a more peaceful species. The claim that if we just continue to push our
Enlightenment thinking until it truly sticks is like the argument of the gun
lobby that tells us that only way to solve the gun problem is to sell more
guns. The same forces that have always used religion to support violence now
use the Enlightenment. The true priests of the Enlightenment say they are
perverting this thought, that they are illegitimate. Sure. The priests of
religious thought said the same thing. And they were right. But then they
had the regulating power of religion to counterbalance the violence. We lack
that today more than ever before. And it does not appear that the regulating
power of Modernism or Scientism or Enlightenment will ever be sufficient to
stop the train of ignorance, greed, and violence. If the end is near, it’s not
because of religion. It may be because we wouldn’t allow religion to save us
from it.
All the old stories are true according to the standards of
truth set up for them. And that standard of truth is no less valid than the
scientific and quasi-scientific standards that we use today to affirm and
condemn all claims. But what is the claim to truth religions make? What
difference does it make that we have lost this mythic realm of truth?
The germs of our modern, Enlightenment, scientific notion of
truth can be traced far back, as far back as you want to go. They are in Augustine’s
critique of astrology and Manicheism. They are an essential ingredient in the
shift from what we today call paganism to monotheism, even in Islam’s critique
of Christianity as it is manifest in the Qur’an. But that plant grew and the
other was weeded.
Much of the most important thought of the 20th Century supported the notion that the human species exists like any other species. In rural Maine they keep a close eye on the dogs at certain times of year because they know that if they smell deer, they’ll gather from one back yard to another and spontaneously form themselves into a pack and start killing the hunters’ prizes. Humans are like this. Hitler did not rise out of nowhere nor did Donald Trump or the Right Wing populist, nationalist nonsense sweeping the world today. It would be irresponsible to oversimplify the analysis of why and how this happened. I contend that the intellectual rejection of religion is an essential factor.
If you believe that poems
are objects inherent in language
like other kinds of objects inherent
in something something like language--
already there, I mean,
which is a meaning inherent in the word
object that I felt the need to pull out
and place before you
like an object
I pulled out of language—
what other possibilities are created by your image
or metaphor? What translates?
First of all that you could have been the one to write this
poem.
Anyone sufficiently tuned could have grabbed these words out
of language’s net
and arranged them thus. That all the wealth and fame this great
poem will have achieved
before the inevitable end of its life could have been yours
that will now be mine.
And that all the wealth and fame I’ll get that could
have been yours was not
earned, unless you think those stray quarters you pick out
of the dirt that fell from the pockets of people who didn’t deserve them are earned.
And that the library of Alexandria wasn’t really lost.
1
Light diffusing icicles in rain
minor melody dripping in plain sight
mist effusion, this arresting pain
felt-for meaning in an empty rite
incense of memory, forgotten clotted air
in this mockery of spring, this rotten-blossomed pear.
2
O, those days, we thought we were a pair.
Two true gods in love, over love to reign.
Witness this: even true divinity can err.
Consider this: the text of any poem you could cite,
the text of any lines that you could write:
attention getting stones to rock a window pane.
3
And in the silence, nothing but to pay, and
yet if nothing’s left, for what am I the payer?
So is it so that that that is is right?
No would be a hauling on the rein.
So let it go, let yes take you to the site
Of all this dripping sorrow ere
4
brown unbudding branches are the all the heir
gets; the basses of the air groan out in pain
whatever litany of dripping words you may recite—
unless the heated blade of song can pare
the ice of loss into sounding rain
or modulate the melody as would a guilded wright
5
to make the magic of the song that can the wrong aright,
inscribed in drops upon the fabric air.
If all things end, so ends the fleeting reign:
so let the melting music swell a peaon
and let the melting winter blow the pear
with compensatory wisdom, some insight
6
some phrasal consolation in my sight
some recollected truth beyond the rotten rite
like a child’s lost lesson from the dead old pere.
If sorrow is the death of love, the heir’s
Inheritance must be the sensing of the pain.
Then let the dead tree bloom in all this rain.
Envoie
Melting ice’s tears, the smell of blooming pear
within the sigh to know the right of pain:
let go the rein in incense sounding air.
I read the Cecelia Watson's book over spring break—you could get through it in a sitting; it’s pretty short and easy to read—and I came to the conclusion, which was never mentioned or entertained in the book, but for which the book did give evidence, that the paradigm of “rules” is misguided. It’s foreign to how language actually works. It’s clumsy and Occam would have hated it. Instead, I want to promote the idea of “expectations.” Then we don’t ask “whose rules?” but “whose expectations?” We put “am” not “are” after “I” in almost all cases because the people who(m) we expect to read us expect us to do that. We’re not following a rule. We’re meeting an expectation. That means that there literally are no rules. What we call rules are descriptions of the expectations of a certain audience under certain conditions. This frees every act of composition up to be and do what it needs in order to meet or defy those expectations, to manipulate the reader based on their expectations. Exactly how language actually works.
As I understand your infinite God, he knows and sees and has complete power over all and every etc.
Okay, then. What can an infinite imagination imagine? For starters--everything.
And what is it like for an infinite imagination to imagine a thing? How is imagining a thing different from creating that thing? If God imagines a thing, does it therefore thereby exist as a thing? I can't see how it can't. To an infinite and free imagination, I'd be as real as I am whether I existed in myself, outside that imagination, or just in it.
I'd like to set aside the question then of why or whether God actually created me, whether I actually exist as anything other than a thought in the imagination of this God. How could I know? I can't even reasonably speculate--about that.
But I can about this: If I'm right that I am as real to God in his imagination as I could possibly be outside it, some things follow. God knows not just everything I ever did or will do but everything I didn't do and every branch that act would have taken if I'd done it. Every single time any one thing could have gone another way, in God's imagination it went that way, and all the other women I would have married and all the other children I would have had and all their lives.
But this infinite God is much much bigger than that. He knows what lives every stillborn baby would have lived if it had been born alive, and all the paths. And all the aborted babies. And his knowledge is as real to him as if they had lived.
And all the babies that would have been created if each individual sperm that didn't fertilize the egg in that ejaculation had got there first. And all those lives. And all the lives that would have been created if you'd had sex on Tuesday of that week instead of Wednesday, or an hour later or earlier, and all the infinity of possibilities. Remember, this God is infinite beyond the library of Babel.
In God's mind every sperm ever created has joined with every egg ever created and has created every baby that could have been created and all the lives they could have lived and all their forking paths.
And not just that. God knows with equal assurance every sperm that could have been created, every permutation of DNA, even the ones that never lead to live birth, in sperm and egg. Every baby that was never actually possible and how they could have interacted with all the other people in every conceivable permutation.
It would take trillions of universes to play these things out in reality.
There may indeed be trillions of universes.
In fact there are, inside God's imagination or in what we like to call "reality" or "physical reality." The difference is immaterial.
Every heartbreak. Every love. Every time anyone of them was cut from a baseball team.
I think. I think
I think. Am I
thinking? I think
I am. I think I am
thinking, thinking I
am I. Thinking,
I am I. Thinking
I am I? I think. Thinking
I am, I am I, I think.
I think I think. Am I?
