On Death

"When my uncle died I realized—I experienced the truth of—something we’ve all always known: Death is not a consummation. It is an end. Life is a book whose back pages have all been torn out. You get to that last remaining page, that last sentence, which is itself cut off at some unsatisfactory word, and

The Hungry Tiger of Oz

In September

I see the hammock

Snug, where I put it last year,

Or the year before.

Frost as Limerick Sequence

There once were two paths in a wood

And by the two paths there I stood.
And I had to ponder
Down which I would wander
So I stared down as far as I could.
 

But I found both of them just as fair

No difference was there anywhere
So I took the one
And when I was done
I hoped it would bring me back there.

But I  knew that the chances were low.

And that years would make memories go.
One day I would sigh
For what I hadn’t tried:

What I'd done was the the best I could do.

The Spoon Made Me Fat!

How good it would be to put to rest once and for all this analogy, beloved of Sarah Palin and so many others on the right, between guns and spoons? “Blaming a gun for violence it like blaming a spoon for making you fat.”

Well, it’s true that a gun is a tool and a spoon is a tool. A gun is a tool meant for killing people. A spoon is a tool meant to help you eat. (Don’t blame the tool!)  I can’t blame the spoon for making me fat. And yet, if eating were more difficult, I might not be fat. If I didn’t have wonderfully functional tools, if eating were a bit of a chore, I might lose interest in shoving so many calories into my gut so quickly. Spoons make eating easier, and easy access to too much easy food might well lead me to getting fat. Perhaps I'm just not as strong as Sarah Palin. I grant that I could eat with my hands. And I grant that with or without spoons, I am morally responsible for how much I eat. But I may not be strong enough emotionally to stay skinny or I may just not have the incentive to stay skinny. Human nature is weak.  I can’t always control my impulses in the presence of ice cream. I might be better off without spoons! But I have to eat. Think of it. 

I have to eat. But shooting people is optional.

And if I (or you, or that messed up young man from Santa Barbara) did not have such easy access to tools that made it so bloody easy to shoot people, a lot of innocent people who would not otherwise have to die would not have to die. Yes, you can attack people with knives and pillows, and you eat your beans with shovels or fingers. But it’s so much harder. Would that man in Sandy Hook or those boys in Columbine or that guy in Aurora have manufactured so many corpses without guns? Running through a school hallway with a knife would have been so much more work. Planting explosives takes so much more planning and is so much more subject to failure.

The analogy to spoons is not absurd. But it supports the other side of the argument. It’s a gun-control analogy.  If you make it harder to kill people, fewer people will be killed. It’s that simple.

Fast

Swiftly moving
Held tightly in place

The fast river
Pours past
The fast rock.

The hours of my life.
My life.
The meaning of my words.
My words.
 

The way things are

They never are.
 

Holding fast the ever-changing god

Make a wish.
 

I have been here before though here

Has never before been.
 

That’s just the way of it.

Hold fast. I have not eaten
For days.

Eco and the Platypus, post two.

ECO takes for granted “that the world exists independently of our knowledge of it, and that it exists as a population of essences reciprocally governed by laws” (Kant and the Platypus 298).  I will grant the first proposition easily. But I will grant neither part of the second. I don’t know what an essence is or why “things” ought to be recouped as essences in fact. Essences if they exist in any way do not exist as such; they exist, like all conceptual things, but for the purposes of the moment, for the use to which they are put for whatever meaning (in its broadest sense) a person has for a thing at that moment. Things have properties. But in what sense do they have essences? And as for “governed by laws,” how does the expression differ in meaning from “are describable by equations?” Perhaps Eco is thinking of “laws” other than the “laws” of the physical sciences. But I don’t think so. And these physical “laws” since Einstein have been understood to be not the Newtonian regularities, the same everywhere, but the descriptions of facts that obtain under certain conditions. We may be fooled by the fact that these conditions seems to obtain everywhere in the universe into believing that these conditions are the facts themselves, the fixed baseline of conditions as such. But of course that is not true. We believe that the the normal “laws” of physics do not obtain at the event horizon of a black hole. We do not know that they obtain everywhere else in the universe—but only that where they do not obtain we cannot see. And current thinking contents that in other possible universes, which may well exist “elsewhere,” very different laws of operation may obtain.

Science is only one way of thinking and perceiving. It is rigorous and useful. It is also true within the parameters in which it is situated. All scientific questions require scientific answers. And it is one of the neatest discursive formations we humans have ever discovered or constructed. Its only rival is math. But it is still only one way of thinking and perceiving. Its truths are scientific truths; they are not truths as such. Things are as they are, independent of any perceiver. I will grant this. (I can’t prove it, and there is a practical advantage to granting it, but the reason to grant it is that there is no compelling reason not to grant it, and it seems to be essential to grant it in order for anything to follow.) But facts are determined by the discourse and the conditions within that discourse in which the facts must be determined.

But all water is made of H₂0, isn’t it? If it were, I would not have to take my water into the city once a year to have it tested. My water is not composed merely of H₂0. It has all sorts of things in it, including trace levels of arsenic. It’s very hard I think to get any quantity of water that is composed entirely of H₂0 molecules, though if we do have a molecule of H₂0 it is certain, within our definition, that we have a molecule of water. Nonetheless, what counts as water depends on who wants it at a given point in time for a given purpose. What counts as water does not depend on the scientific definition of water.

The Slipperiness of the Signifier

If a word can represent in a sentence any other word in the category of things or concepts to which it belongs or the whole of that category (metonymy), and if a word can represent anything that in anyway can be analogically similar to it (metaphor), or can be arbitrarily substituted for any other word (code), there isn’t anything any word can’t mean. At every level, from individual word up to narrative this holds true: phrase, clause, story, each can be metonymic or metaphoric or coded. Coded narrative we call allegory. It’s easy to see why a poststructuralist would consider literal meaning at best one possible effect among many and not one that is necessarily essential or indeed that has necessarily any part in particular instances of language. In coded utterances literal meanings can be particularly distracting, can function as noise if perceived at all. (To say it has no necessary part is not to say it is ever not potentially present.)

Shadow and Light

You cannot see a shadow more clearly

By stabbing it with light.

The Famous Writer Despairs

The famous writer despairs,

You can’t capture experience in words.
 

You can’t capture experience without words either.

 

You can’t capture experience.

You can’t even have experience.

 

You can only experience experience.

 

And you couldn’t do that without words.

 

Experiences are created by bodies in contact

with being.

Mind and memory and imagination

and language

mixing with things.

 

The unique moment

goes away forever as soon as it arrives.

 

The memory of the moment is always a new experience.

"The Fruitless Fidget of Composition"

Henry James uses this perfect phrase in the second paragraph of his preface to "Portrait of a Lady," one of the great masterpieces of the novel. Nothing makes a writer doubt his talent like that moment. But there is some consolation in realizing that all writers face it. The best may face it constantly.

Progress and Failure

We dream because our daytime perceptions fail to account for our daily experiences.

Knowledge does not adequately represent what it knows.

Knowledge does not know what it knows.

The greater the coherence of our knowledge, the more we have had to exclude.

We write poems because philosophy fails.

We do science because poetry fails.

We theologize because science fails.

We philosophize because theology fails.

We paint because words fail.

We act because representation fails.

All progress is founded on failure.

Thank God for failure. 

Eco, "Kant and the Platypus," preliminary thoughts

It seems to me that most of philosophy, even as practiced today, as far as I understand it (and that would be, admittedly, too little) looks through the wrong end of the telescope. It sees the world (the cosmos) as an order of things preexisting and independent of us which we must catalog, explain, relate to each other as they exist in themselves, as though the universe were a machine, made by an intelligence, which had parts that did work that we could reverse engineer.

                We have to start with the perceiver, in a kind of Cartesian move. Not “I think there I am,” but “I perceive, therefore I misunderstand.”

                Even accepting the Derridian claim that there is no perception, by which he means only that there is no “pure” perception without language, without interpretation, without a system of ways of understanding that predate and predicate the perceiver, in which the perceiver isn't always already caught up, by which he isn't always already determined in advance—even accepting all this, we have to say that knowledge starts with perception. Call it “perception” if you like to get all the caveats written onto it, then forget the quotation marks because 1) they would be tedious to type every time, and 2) once you start using them, you cannot justify ever not using them until all words have them in layers, like the Menelaiad but moreso.

                The animal that has no language sees and interprets—food, potential food, prey, potential prey, enemy, potential enemy, mate, potential mate, safety, potential safety, warmth, cold, light, dark and all that might apply to the senses and to comfort or discomfort. We can’t really call these perceptions conceptual, but these are what we would call the categories of what non-human animals might perceive, some more, some less of course in obvious gradations.  The difference between knowing something and "knowing" it, between recognizing and raising to the level of language--that's where language, explicitly, steps in.

                The point is that all that animals have by way of perceptual “concepts” (which are not, of course concepts at all, but recognitions triggered when some sameness has been re-encountered)  we have too, though ours be contaminated or focused (when it is) via language.  We can talk about our perceptions and talking about them changes them, though I would agree with Scholes that they also put pressure on language. Underneath or alongside of our language the things that we perceive exist, some and perhaps most of the time, particularly when those things are things, objects, and not things more nebulous such as emotions, though even then, though we get the emotion entirely wrong, more often than not there is still a “thing” that we are getting or attempting to get.

                Again, here is the point: what anything is it is to us, for us, insofar as we can perceive it. “Being” itself is a question because those who attempt to define it try to define it via a language that cannot encompass it and a perception that cannot perceive it. We can only infer it from signs—I will not say "its" signs. Signs belong to US; they do not belong to Being.  A sign is not something that exists. It is something that is read. Nor does it exist until it is read. Signs come into existence with the act of reading them. They are neither meaning nor potential meaning.  A sign is always an analogy or metaphor, a seeing as.

                If all humans die but their books survive and some alien race finds them, will they be able to decode them? Very likely yes. This is not because of a potential in the books to be read but a potential in the reader to read. To say the books have a potential to be read is like saying that the ball rolls downhill because balls always want to find the lowest point or because gravity wants to pull all objects toward a center. Gravity and balls are without desire. But we have no better concept than desire with which to describe such things.  

God Explains Himself to Man

I created Heaven because I was going crazy—
alone, outside of time—
and earth because angels are boring.
I left open doors for evil to enter
and made man for my companion—
who now can hardly see me.
 
I cannot say I did not wait too long to light that fuse
or too long once the clock exploded into being
to mold clay into my likeness.
I got distracted by the gasses
all the cool stuff they were doing—
coalescing and firing—
till things got hard.

Or was that you?

You who read this may be the man of clay for all I know, the only one I ever made

all the rest, all history, science, poetry, all you call the universe
or multiverse—the cosmos—all of it your own projection
to save yourself
from my insanity.

We should talk.

 

Sunset by the Abandoned Pool

Why say the sun ends at the horizon
of its surface? Though we give to the infinity of things an edge
to know them by, perhaps the edge of the sun is the reach of its heat
or its light, stretching to the ends of space, easing itself through time
backward and forward
as though in search of instruments sufficiently delicate to find it.
 

All knowing is death.

Again I see these things:

The ridge of your spine as you lean forward
to accept the glass of wine,
the surprise
that rises to your mouth at the sound of my steps
the rose-tinged light pouring in from the mountains
to outline your face
as you turn.

We do not end

at the horizon of our skin
or the heat of our skin
ripples in space time
the ever expanding horizon
of this moment
clouds the universe.

Where Did the Idea that Santa's Reindeer Fly Come From?

All over the internet you can find fanciful explanations of how Santa’s reindeer fly. But nowhere on or off the internet have I come across an historical explanation of how the fanciful notion came arose in history. Those who have glanced at the issue will tell you that the idea comes from the Moore/Livingstone poem, “A Visit from St. Nicholas” (also known as “Twas the Night before Christmas”) and leave it at that. Once, briefly, the truth of the story was revealed on Wikipedia. But my explanation was very quickly taken down (sadly and uncharacteristically before I could make a copy). As I did not have the energy to re-explain, the truth has remained nowhere on earth ever since. But the burden of being the only one who knows has weighed heavily upon me lo these many years. So, I must, to divest myself of it, rebuild the house.

Not that it's really that hard to do. This mystery, like so many others, is open to anyone who cares to look for it.

Here is the reference to flight in the famous poem:

                               As leaves that before the wild hurricane fly,
                               When the meet with an obstacle, mount to the sky;
                               So up to the housetop the coursers they flew
                               With the sleigh full of toys, and St. Nicholas too--

This seems clear enough. At first. But it clearly wasn’t clear to other compilers of the Santa Claus story. (I’d say “myth” but I won’t want to rove into actual controversy here.) The most prominent among these myth makers was perhaps L. Frank Baum, whose competing list of reindeer names did not take. The Moore/Livingstone poem was first published in 1823. But as late as 1902 in Baum’s “The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus” the idea that Santa’s reindeer fly still had not taken off.
It may be that the Moore/Livingstone poem was still not iconic enough for the image to emerge automatically in the mind of the typical American child. And the fact that Baum could ignore the whole poem does suggest that though the poem was already popular, it was not yet quite the central reference point it has become.

But (I think) the most likely reason of all may be—that the poem had not yet been misunderstood. I have not been able to find who first misread this Christmas classic. I suspect it was an illustrator of the Coca-Cola/Thomas Nast variety. Someone made a pretty picture and from then on this crazy idea of reindeer flight was read back onto the poem and has been there ever since. This may have happened around 1902.  

But how can I call this a misreading when I’ve already quoted the clear evidence and labeled it as “clear.” Hmm. Well, first of all, I lied when I called the evidence clear.

Before looking at the lines quoted again, I’d like to recall the rest of the poem. For one, this is not the only reference to flight in the poem. Later in the poem we get  "And away they all flew like the down of a thistle." But we will perpend that reference for the moment while we note that still later in the poem, when popular imagination and occasional rewriting says, “I heard him explain as he flew out of sight,” what the poem actually says is “I heard him exclaim as he drove out of sight.” I wish I could argue this next point from the quality of the poet’s verse, but there remains serious question as to the identity of the poet, and the one poet of the pair whose work we could use as a guide was not particularly good at his craft. Nonetheless, I will assert that poetics would argue that “flew” is the better choice if the poet envisions reindeer that fly.  The vowel of “flew” is light and swift and represents the motion of flying much better than the heavy “o” of “drove.” Say “flew” outloud, then say “drove.” Which one sounds more like flight? Any poet worth his salt would know this.

But Moore may not have been, as I say, worth his salt, and Livingstone gave us nothing but this poem to go by.

Now I’d like to look at one other piece of evidence from the poem itself. The narrator, suddenly awoken by clatter, tears himself to the window and reports what he sees in these words:

                   The moon on the breast of the new-fallen snow,
                   Gave a luster of midday to objects below;
                   When what to my wondering eyes did appear,
                   But a miniature sleigh and eight tiny rein-deer.

We might say that the reindeer are miniature because they are far way. But why are they “below.” Clearly this narrator is looking down, where ground-based reindeer would be traveling. Why else would he mention that the moon gave a luster of midday to objects below?

But that still leaves us with these troublesome lines:

             As leaves that before the wild hurricane fly,
             When they meet with an obstacle, mount to the sky;
             So up to the housetop, his coursers they flew
             With a sleigh full of toys and St. Nicholas too.

Surely the reindeer fly to the roof? How else would they get up there? But do they? The image  here is strained, hard to picture, but it seems we are to think of the reindeer as being blown to the roof like leaves are pushed against an obstacle in a hurricane. The only other instance of the verb “flew” in the poem, we should note, are in the line already noted about the thistle and in this line:  “Away to the window, I flew like a flash.” And the same, I contend, goes for the flight of thistledown. It is an image seen from above of the impression given by the sleigh against the snow. It is not meant or represent actual flight. The poet likes this word for “went fast.”

So what we find in the end is that while the idea that Santa’s reindeer fly probably did come from this poem, it came from a misreading of this poem and began probably a century or so after the first publication of this foundational vision of the story. But if it came from a misreading of the poem, it could not have happened by this alone. Some other later trigger—such as the illustrator I surmised above—must also have been involved.

By the way, what it says about our ability to read poetry today or our familiarity with animal-drawn sleighs I do not know. But it surely says something.

 

The meaning of a work

The impulse, so pronounced in undergraduates, and so obvious in untrained minds, the impulse that was fruitfully brought into question in various ways in the 20th century to appeal to history and biography in order to understand the text itself has a history. And it turns out to be another enlightenment/capitalist incursion. We ask not "what does it mean?" but "what did it mean?"Under the guise that we are understanding it, we encase the text in more texts in order to protect ourselves from it, when it is in fact the freedom from what no longer matters that allows the text to bloom.

Truth

Most people think there are only two options: truth is subjective or truth is objective. These are not the options. Truth is present. By the time you get to the end of the sentence, the moment has shifted.

Are the words eternally true? Perhaps. But the meaning changes while truth stands still. Now is static: it is always now--and yet dynamic; now is always moving, a bead along a string. 

Rage

Does anything in being correspond to our capacity for anger? We all know or have seen animals and children and people of all ages who fall into a rage over nothing, which is to say that the trigger of their rage is something other than the event that is its ostensible cause. The rage is inside—fear the true cause. Fear is unconditioned. We are programmed for self-protection and for this to manifest exaggerated fear. Overproportioned fear is safer. But fear relative (or less than so) to the danger is a necessary condition of knowledge. The extreme of fear is removal from the world. The basis of knowledge is engagement, overcoming fear. But I stray from the point. Pain and death are personal. They are the worst that can happen to us as individuals. But the fear of these is not the source of rage. Rage is characteristic of the fundamentalist of any sect or indeed the fundamentalist of any ism. The Tea Party rage, the Al-Qaida rage, the Klan rage. So much rage. This rage is functions to protect one’s “philosophy,” one’s “discourse” or “world view,” not one’s mere life. It protects one from thinking, re-evaluating—which is an exhausting process. (Nietzsche would relate it to power, but that is an oversimplification.) We have an exhausting catalog of methods for keeping the blinders attached.  What can we say? Rage erupts from weak causes. Rabies. Neither  the psychological cause and the environmental trigger nor the two together buy this effect. Meanwhile, greater causes, truer justifications for rage, rarely raise it: actual injustice, murder, rape, genocide, any sort of violence. Unless one is the victim, unless one’s self is at stake, one is more likely moved to sadness or complacency or cynicism. And if one is moved to rage in these circumstances, it is not because of the injustice, but because one’s self is at stake. One’s self. Not one’s life, not one’s body. Revenge often kills the revenger. Rage is always a danger to the enraged. There is much in being that corresponds to our capacity for anger. But it does not seem that our anger is ever directed toward it.

The Puzzle

It's a really clever puzzle. You can arrange the pieces in countless ways and none of them is right and all of them produce a picture (of some sort) and there's always a piece left over.

"A piece?"

Sometimes two.