On Abstraction

The editor of a Ricoeur collection suggested, I’m sure knowing he was being simplistic, that the author recognized the old equation of fiction with the type and history with the facts. There are any number of reasons ultimately to reject that notion. But the suggestion will not go away, and should not because it’s not entirely false. Fiction is more like the general than it is like the particular and history more like the particular than the general on the whole. At the same time the whole question of the particular and the general—in whatever nuanced pairings these concepts appear—will always remain open, will always be to be explored and never be finalized precisely because, in good Derridian fashion, language itself is thoroughly entangled in the question. One might even wonder whether the very distinction “general/specific” is not itself a dubious metaphor driven by the observation of natural phenomena and the needs of language to abstract facts into classes in order to say something about them. You can’t give every tree its own particular name. And it’s true that in the observable world there are observable groups with an historical and ontological status that obviously justifies classifications—although the criteria of classification is not always and everywhere made by an appeal to history or ontology but are also made with reference to use. So there are trees and there are maple trees and oak trees—with all their subclasses. And every maple may be different from every other maple but any maple is more like any other maple than it is like any oak. And there are men and women. But, as we have more recently seen, the categories of “male” and “female” are far from obvious and can be rigorously maintained only with an great effort, one that in certain circumstances becomes unsustainable or no longer useful. It may also be other abstractions, just as justice, liberty, beauty (etc) take their substance from an analogy to the natural world and are maintained at great cost. We want to believe that beauty exists, and something certainly exists to which humans tend to respond in uniform (if not universal) ways—ways that are taught and maintained but also have to be understood as being to some degree “natural.” It would be hard to set up the experiments that would lead to definitive results, but some work is being done. And we know that although our dogs do not respond to music, some birds do. They have the brain for it. But is beauty just the shape of the brain? Is it those brains that produce these chemicals when faced with these things that create the illusion of beauty? This is not irrelevant even if, as I hope and expect, it’s not going to be the whole truth of the question. If we did not have eyes we could not see. Would landscapes still be beautiful? Perhaps they would, but not to us.

This casts us back to the one great Romantic insight, what Wordsworth refers to when he says, “both what we half create and what we perceive.” “Half” is an imprecise fraction. No one knows the proportion, but the insight is valid: there is no perception without creation. The question of objectivity is irrelevant. It does not exist as such to us or our reckoning, not even quite (I suspect) to our math—though math must come closest to it.

On Knowledge in an extra platonic sense

Preliminary thoughts:

It seems important to bring into question, almost whenever possible, the inherited notion of knowledge as the ability to inscribe into language, the ability to say, to paraphrase, to translate either what is not language into language or what is already into language into more language. This is certainly an indicator of a type of intelligence. An important and indispensable skill. For it is only one way to think about knowledge, advancing the platonic hierarchy of personhood that makes a metaphor of the fact that the head is higher than the heart and the heart higher than the stomach. It is, I believe, the prejudice that leads, eventually to Bertrand Russell’s negative critique of Romanticism that turns to feeling when argument fails.

In general there is no hierarchy of intelligences or knowledges. As with all other things, value depends on the moment, on the particular use to which one wishes to put the thing, on what, on short, one is trying to do.
Any athlete, musician or creative writer understands, in particular and diverse ways, the notion that has pervaded our culture since before the days of Plato and which we call “inspiration.” (What is called “inspiration” in poetry may be called “hot hands” in athletics and by various names in the performance of music. In all cases one is “in the zone,” which may last a minute or stretch on indefinitely.) What each one knows is that if he/she took even a split second to think—to invoke the right-brain centers of language—they would fail. Each has to “let it happen.” I myself have always been an athlete and have never been a particularly good one. Nonetheless, I know that in those moments in which have been good, when I have succeeded spectacularly, I was not, consciously, thinking. Good coaches always tell players to react not to think. Good players show wisdom in their choices. It’s not just that in the heat and smoke of a contest there is no time to think. Rather it’s that thinking—in that platonic sense—is an impediment to doing. But this doing proceeds from knowledge (not something we should brush back by calling it “instinct”). The ball comes to you and you know where everyone is and you know what to do with it and you do it. (Steven Gould notwithstanding.) There is a sense, afterwards, of “I can’t believe I did that.” At least there is with mediocre athletes who slip into the zone. But there is no sense that you didn’t do—that it just happened.

I once thought it would be easy to be a writer. Just study writing. Find out what writers do. Analyze good writing. And do that. And so it baffled me that, after achieving a certain level of intellectual accomplishment, I noticed that there were a number of very good writers who, in my opinion, weren’t any smarter than I was, weren’t even as smart as I was. Who didn’t know as much. Who pronounced, in their conversation, logical absurdities no one of their stature should fall for. I thought.

But writing too is a gift. It does not come from the same muse who gives her gifts to the philosopher. She is not a lesser sister, just a different sister. Even in language, what counts, traditionally, as intelligence is not mere intelligence and what stands as knowledge is not mere knowledge. Jazz would not be possible if music were not a response to knowledge and if playing were not an intelligence. Nor would any music.
Where are we going with this? What are the implications?

We often hear of “emotional intelligence.” Such terms are probably bandied about into nonsense quite often, but behind it is, apparently, something real, valid, something that would be to a significant degree misrepresented if we did not use the word “intelligence,” which comes from an emotional knowledge that I do not want to call “instinctive” but rather “deeply learned” through experience and because of a predilection. I would say there is also a spiritual intelligence. I can’t prove that. But it stirs me to note that spiritual awareness is not quite correlated with intelligence, in the platonically derived sense. Very “intelligent” people are, today, less likely to be “spiritual,” (people like Russell who felt the need to distance himself from Christianity but also much more recently like Dawkins). I think this is more a matter of ego than anything else. People who put all their stock in that platonic version of intelligence can’t possibly subscribe to a knowledge that requires some alternative notion of intelligence for support. Nonetheless when I’ve heard such famous atheists speak I hear so many simplifications, so many faulty premises, so many things that are, by any definition, simply stupid, that I have to wonder why they are talking at all or who they think they are talking to? Because, the point here, faith in fact does not quite correlate with “intelligence.” A lot of smart people are atheists. And a lot of people much smarter (on that scale) than you and I not: philosophers like Paul Ricoeur, and scientists and great thinkers in every academic field who have the capacity of spiritual intelligence and, having it (as perhaps everyone does to some degree, as even I, now and then, can impress far better players on a soccer pitch), don’t feel the urgency to suppress it in favor of what they have been told is the only true measure of intelligence.

My Coffee Grin

I’m rich. I’m filthy stinking goddam rich.
My coffee tastes better than your coffee.
I pay a lot more for it—a lot—
And it tastes a little bit better than yours,
Almost enough to justify the exorbitant cost.
I’m a lot richer than you are,
I have money
I can’t find
anything to do with.
So I buy this filthy caffeine from this specialty
farm the mountains of Columbia
where the sky spills just enough photons every day
and where when it melts
snow drips continuously over the shallow roots
with the regularity of sand
in an hourglass
shaped like a woman's torso.
It makes me happy, happier than you.
Just a little bit happier than you.
Wipe that grin off your face.

Where Meaning Lies

We don’t live at the place where meaning is.
We live in the space where meaning happens,
where meaning vibrates like potato flakes
on a stereo speaker, configuring and re-
configuring, always settling, never
settling, or flakes that would melt
if ever they stopped hopping.

The Fundamental (Mis)conception (DRAFT)

Out of which all problems arise.
Quantum Field Theory and General Relativity.
Particle and Wave.
My, myself, and I.
Same and Different.
Language and Writing.
The two that are two and are one.
What is and what is perceived.
Selfishness and Altruism.
Nature and Nurture.
Versus, and, or, either.
Free will and Determinism.
Truth and fiction.
You and your twin.
Reason and Poetry.
Poetry and Prose.
Men and Women.
Law and Freedom.
Living and Dying.
You and I.
We could go on.
The problems of arrangement.
The problem of the pairings
That encompass as they exclude.
The limits, the borders and boundaries
Without which we cannot think but which
We cannot cross
Because they don’t exist.

The Meaning of Meaning

Probably the seminal moment of my Ph.D. work: I took the conservative position that words have meanings—I called them primary meanings—that writers can play with as they wish but not erase. “No,” I was told. “This is not true. Read Derrida.” I read Derrida, and Barthes, and Lacan, read about the sliding of the signified over the icy surface of the signifier. I understood. Words have no meaning not only because they do not exist (what is a word but the idealized sewing together of signifier and signified) but because what does exist—signifiers on the one hand and signifieds on the other—can never remain bonded. Meanings never quite settle; postcards never quite arrive. This is how meaning is. This is how it works. This is the metaphysical state of meaning. This is not however how words are experienced. Words are experienced as though they exist and as though meaning is something they have. And in any language the meanings experienced by person A are likely to coincide deeply with those of person B. It’s what makes the effect of communication via language possible. This “as if” must be kept in mind whenever one pursues questions of meaning. Words do not have meanings but they have histories. Or rather, "having" being impossible with signifiers, each of us has a history with each word we have encountered, histories of which we are never more than partly aware of. Each word bumps against that history like a steel ball in a pinball game lighting or unlighting all the bumpers.

Once Upon a Time: A Short History of Fairy Tale by Marina Warner

Once Upon a Time: A Short History of Fairy Tale by Marina Warner
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I was curious about how OzHouse would do under the microscope of this author. It offers another modern twist on fairy tales. I'd say it would do okay.

Warner lost a little credibility with me by getting the name of Wizard of Oz author L. Frank Baum wrong (she calls him Frank L. Baum), but as a history of the Fairy tale, the book does a good job. It has to be a selective history, in this case lacking little in breadth but a lot in depth. It skims over everything. It starts slow and obvious, but becomes interesting and even informative about chapter 3. The tone is lighter than one might expect or want, as though the author isn't convinced she's doing serious scholarship, which, really, she isn't.



View all my reviews

Last Night's Dream

Last night’s dream

Was too strange to tell.

Freud would have loved it

But Freud would have been wrong about it

But Freud would have said that my saying so only proved he was right.

What a bastard.

The Day of Sad Consolation

Is the universe alive
and does it know what it’s doing?
 
Are the forces we measure
its brainwaves, its heart beat?

Is expansion a breath?

Are black holes cancer?

And are we a part of it

or do we just look at it?

Can we use our computers to help it to learn what it is?

And why does all poetry require the parts

we say we would like to get rid of

all that death stuff?

 Did the universe wake up one day

and call itself God and only then perceive a nature

bigger than its own that could not be gainsaid

that told it there was no other way

they will have to have the power to kill

and they will have to die

and they will have to love

and lose everything they love

if they are ever to have anything

if they are ever to know anything

 if they are ever to be at all?

Human Arrogance

We are often astonished that our little brains on our little planet evolved for no other purpose than survival could have the capacity to comprehend the universe. I find it more likely that we can’t. That astonishing as it is that we can perceive and deduce as much as we can, we know no more than we have senses for and brain to imagine. The truth about reality more likely requires hundreds of senses we lack. That dark matter is transparent to those who have the senses for it. Those things that are not matter or energy surround us like water to fish. But we lack the apparatus to perceive or imagine it.

Petitionary Prayer

They say that silence is prayer
sometimes, that attention is prayer
or can be, or music, but we grow up believing
that prayer is only asking God for things.
I live in a world in which small children
are torn apart by bombs, burned to nothing
by cigarettes dropped on couches, where
sinkholes open and swallow them whole
before they learn God’s name in any language.
Lost, they freeze to death; they fall
from the sky like rain. People shoot them or
they shoot themselves in play. You can ask
God for anything you wish. I ask only for this:
understanding, calm in the storm of my soul,
a way to believe the rules were set for ample reason, and
for eyes and heart and voice to look
to listen, maybe
someday
to sing.

How He Died

My friend reminded me, as we were having lunch
and I was forking a great big leaf of lettuce
into my awkward mouth on the first pleasant day
of spring after the longest winter on record,
that his brother had died.
“Oh, yes,” I said, “killed himself, wasn’t it?” Just then
 I imagined I saw Patty at another table,
Patty who left me with such longing.
But Patty would have been much older now
than the woman who pulled her hair behind her ear
in precisely the way that Patty always did. And my friend
was still talking. “How did he do it?” I said,
cutting the lettuce with my bread knife
into a more chewable size. Thinking back now
I believe there was some silence I did not notice.
The odor of hyacinths caught me
by surprise, pulling my eyes to the brick plaster planter
deep with soil by the walkway. My friend
decided he’d been secretly troubled for years.
 
Don’t you just hate berries in a salad?
 
                                                                     My friend’s
brother –something about a wife and a daughter
and an impulse too strong to resist but nonetheless
guiltily regretted, he stuttered.  And then
the woman turned around
to look for something in the red leather purse
she’d hung from the back of her chair.
I held up my hand to tell my friend
to pause. But I was right. It wasn’t Patty.
And I raised another spurt of lettuce toward my gaping mouth
and caught my friend’s eyes, staring back at me in pain
at how I’d left him hanging.

Autopoiesis

Poetry and biology, rules and chance, order and freedom, centrifugal and centripetal forces

The DNA passes on mechanically and varies unpredictably the genes (of all history)

The poet uses all language forms and varies programmatically, open to channel the visitations of chance.

The government’s laws. The need for courts. The invention of society and culture against the backdrop of tradition and principles.

This is the fundamental pervasive structure of being. This is the one God wanted.

The chance event in order, the bad poem, the genetic failure. Most poems are bad; most mutations are useless. People are ruined; they die stupidly.

Our lives rest on this principle; it is the principle of death as well as life.

He Said

What is contradiction if not the manifestation

of language's inability to encompass being?

He said

We are on the earth to love,

Whether we have been put here or not .

He said

That is our job.

That is our joy.

There is no contradiction.
The rest is gravy.

I said
What about self-actualization?
What about becoming?

He said
Until you are someone, you cannot love.
You can only need.

 

I

I’m only just starting now

to understand what they meant

when they said I was nothing

but what impinges upon the space

I occupy—the space

you made me

interrupt all twos

are abstractions, all abstractions

unreal

in some sense

of that binary

word

open

New OzHouse Promo Video

Hey Lady, Put Your Tits Away

This ain’t
that kind of place. And so
another slob shames another mother
for giving her breast to the lips of her child
instead of the ogling eyes of a boob. Bombs
are falling again in Iraq and melting icecaps
flood our coastal towns but moms
should have to hide like smokers
if they want to feed their babies.
I, myself, for what it’s worth, love breasts.
I seem to have a natural inclination for them
as though somewhere in my programming
was the command to pay attention when breasts
appear. That, I understand. If it were up to me
any woman could unholster whenever she pleased.
What I don’t understand is why anyone would think
this was a bad idea. I suppose I could ask
the shamers, but I do not believe they could tell me.
I imagine they’d talk about moral degradation and
they’d probably  mention God. And America.
And they might even raise the dignity of the female
form as they inform me of how this is just the sort of thing
that’s destroying
the world
today.

Anti-Science, Anti-Math

isn’t new. Nor will it ever go away. Like war and slavery and frankly everything else that has ever begun it will never end. It is manifest today in so-called creationism, anti-GMO hysteria, fear of vaccines, the denial of global warming. It would be easy to say it comes from fear. No doubt fear is an element—though whether it’s an element in everyone who resists scientific conclusions on scientific issues would be hard to say. Simplistic anti-anti-science thinking does a disservice to everyone. It’s ungenerous, unchristian. More than fear I think ideological blindness drives this perspective. Once one’s view of the world has settled into a clear, definite, circumscribed pattern, one holds on to it tightly. The ossification of ideology is a huge problem, fundamentally human. No one is so open minded she is free from it. I note how quickly I turn the channel with I hear the other side promote their (absurd!) views. The ossification of ideology is the most likely cause of the end of humanity at this point. Not a sexy enough view for a James Bond movie, but so nonetheless.

                The anti-science perspective is always dangerous, but dangerous in different ways depending on the particular bit of science one is against. If you’re anti-GMO you can still eat healthy food. Your personal preference harms no one. If you prevent research into the genetic modification of food, however, you may—with all good intentions—contribute to the unnecessary deaths of millions. From a moral point of view, that is tragic. Anti-evolutionary forces do real harm to the mind, teach false facts and bad thinking to vulnerable people. To hold this view personally won’t kill you. To spread it—to compel teaching about creationism in a high school science class—sets back trust in science in general. There’s the danger. It will lead to or at least provide fertile ground for all the rest of it. If you don’t believe in global warming, even your own excess carbon usage itself won’t matter in light of the whole. But the combined output of all these deniers may have measurable effect. The blockage of real action that could to lead to real solutions—there again is the danger. We see a pattern. As long as my personal belief remains my own and no more, no harm, no foul. As soon as it enters the arena of discourse and becomes taken seriously, even if it only delays good action, it leads to the actual pain and suffering and death of actual people. Sincerity is no defense. Then there is fear of vaccines. I find this particularly troubling though for the world the long term effects of this fear is statistically negligible. It leads to unnecessary suffering and the death of children but on the whole not that many children. Why I find it particularly troubling is that it comes from a process of thinking that is so irrational, so illogical that it goes beyond mere anti-science and into an area of what seems to be pure emotion.

                We can all agree that science can sometimes make mistakes. We can all agree that it is fundamental to the scientific method that further evidence may lead to a rethinking of even the most fundamental beliefs, even the most solidly worked-out conclusions. There is no scientific evidence that vaccines cause any of the problems that those who fear them fear they do. There is hearsay, anecdote, chance correlation, but no hard evidence. And yet, as with all anti-science claims, it’s not certain they are wrong. Vaccines may cause all those things—from ADD to autism—despite the lack of any hard evidence to the contrary. Do they? That’s the right question for a scientist to ask. And scientists have asked it over and over. But it’s the wrong question for a parent to ask. A parent’s question can only be this: Is my child safer if he is vaccinated or if he is not? And that can be answered now. Even if we grant credence to the whole range of want the anti-vaccine crown fear, we can say, categorically, that it is still better to have your children vaccinated than to risk the diseases that the vaccines guard against. One can easily look at the numbers: hundreds of millions of children are protected by vaccines. The percentages of those who come down the conditions that some fear might be reasonably associated with the shots is very small. But the number who come down with the diseases is not. And the danger of those diseases includes paralysis and death. One can certainly sympathize with the parent (however misguided) who is afraid to give her child something that, in her mind, might (however minute the chance) lead to autism. But that risk—even if it were real—would be nothing compared to the very real risk that not vaccinating the child will lead to some combination of mumps, measles, rubella, chicken pox, small pox, or polio.

                There is a vaccination of each of these diseases. There is no vaccination however for fear, or the failure of logic. Very intelligent, well educated, thoughtful people sometimes fall into ideologies that lead them to the dangerous, potentially disastrous resistance to the morally neutral conclusions of good science. This condition will never go away. So we’ll continue to resist it in a struggle that tests our compassion. We continue to struggle and we try to retain our souls, as we pray for the best.

My Perennial Weeding

Echinacea, delphinium, clematis—

unlike marigold, unlike zinnia, annuals

that flame bright and burn quick and die for good—

put no effort into getting noticed

that first season. Small and indistinct

to my inexpert eye,

they dress down like the old Greek gods among the common folk.

You can’t tell them from weeds.

They are slow, patient plants.

I forget where I have planted them.

I don’t buy them in flats like tomatoes, but every February sprinkle their tiny seeds

upon the surface of expensive dirt and lay them under the maternal glow

of electric sunlight.

        Meanwhile in the garden, last year’s survivors,

emerge, unglorious, vulnerable

to the lust of my springtime enthusiasm.

                  Oh, yes. Come April,

when their coddled cousins in the house are two small leaves

that could be any plant at all, and the first grasses

are just pushing up among the crystals of dew,

these promising, mad perennials press up indistinctly like shy

homeless children, hoping I, in my zeal to make the world a better place,

will not see them.

 

OzHouse, a novel

Goodreads reviews for Death in the Funhouse

Reviews from Goodreads.com