TOWARD CRITICISM, 3

A Curated Self (7/2/16)

It’s finally the effort to articulate the self that matters to me, but that would be a self in formation, through the experiences that, from the vantage viewed, seem most prevalent. It’s a curated self, then. As such, the experiences form a sort of syllabus or gallery, a selection that suits as objective correlative of something to which they can only attest. The writing then is the attestation, the signifying of what is otherwise mute experience. Finding the voice for this correlation, then, is the task, shaped by all one needs it to mean, to stand for (and against). Because finally what is at stake is the selection of—militia-wise—one’s “colors.” So all the list-making is only an effort to nudge one’s current self—drowsing in its indifference—back to the moments when it mattered, this self-formation, this education by one’s best lights. And in the scope of those lights everything else—what one does and becomes or fails to do or become—shines or, at least, becomes visible, vocable.

The position as “growth of the critic’s mind”—rather than poet’s or artist’s—structures the tendencies. This is not a discussion of how one becomes a writer, but how one becomes a consciousness that discerns values, that argues worth and meaning. Resisting this in the name of the worth of my own imagination—as to be shown in invented characters, situations, or verse forms/voices—has set me on and off. The point of criticism becomes simply the clarity of seeing and saying. The philosophical benefit is simply enhancement of being, which is to say consciousness, for what else is there? The chosen objects express and establish the speaking subject.

Professing and poeticizing (7/3/16)

To qualify an earlier statement, re: “professor.” One is a professor in the sense of professing certain values, in the experience and in its presentation. What one makes more of—than one might in a lecture or in a position paper—is the fact of the representation. The performance bears remarking on as it is by no means certain what its orientation should be. It’s certainly not only determined by the effort to pass on knowledge or to clarify or instruct. The intention behind those activities is more selfless, whatever their requirements and varieties may be. Who stands before an audience to articulate the self? The poet, perhaps we think, and in that sense I suspect my position to be lyrical, as in based on that intangible state of self-communing that promotes the composition of verse, or may, but the intention is again different. The composition is not a rendering at that level—or at least not at the level I pretend to when writing in verse. The critical element necessitates a different status. I suppose one could write a verse essay and achieve something like, but in such instances I would be more likely struck by artfulness or its lack, though that’s only suppositious. I could only know for certain by doing.

In any case, the purpose is not to assert by means of lyrical intensity primarily but by some element more discursive and arrived at via a process of reflection that, for me anyway, is much more mysterious in verse. The emphasis here requires fidelity to some quality other than lyricism, or music, or the value of putting into speech for the sake of speech. The quality has to be a testimonial, a statement or argument worth entertaining about what the given object means or has meant. The rendering is of the “figure”; the means is the “fiction,” and I’m only able to approximate, in advance, what such fictions might be comprised of. Certainly, as in lyric, a definite element may be the autobiographical, that sense that the speaker must let his own ideas play upon his pulses—to use Keats’ phrase—and certainly the autobiographical impulse—in me—will mean an allusiveness to whatever has left the deepest impressions in that part of life lived, as one once said without irony, inwardly. The irony is all on the side, here, of making clear what might be best left obscure. Why should it be necessary to maintain in language, outwardly, what is best apprehended inwardly? No other reason than death. Speak now, or forever hold your peace, indeed.

It’s not simply a matter of “strange things I have in head which will to hand,” but it is that, if by “strange” we accept “particular” or as one says in an older idiom, “peculiar” to the mind in which they originate. But it is also a matter of—and this is a key distinction from what I would expect from myself in either lecture or verse—following one’s thought where it leads, regardless of whether or not it prove original, poetic, or instructive. It should at least be illuminating because it illumines what otherwise is dark: the relations between distinct occasions and experiences and readings and rememberings. It is the making of the net to catch the sleek fish of one’s imaginary. Those shapes that signify by their motions and colors and rhythms.

A personal geometry (7/4/16)

“Really, universally, relations end nowhere, and the exquisite problem of the artist is eternally but to draw, by a geometry of his own, the circle within which they shall happily appear to do so.”—Henry James

So, to drop my “net” image and accept James’ figure of a personal geometry, the question is how to plot out “the relations” so as to end somewhere for, as he says, the relations don’t really end. And that—knowing that all too well—I could say has stymied me more than once when I felt “prepared” to embark on such criticism as I have in mind. One knows at the outset that much of the geometry is so personal and individual as to be a matter of indifference or unintelligibility to other minds. The eternal question I came back to again and again in writing about Finnegans Wake is: “What is the principle of selection and what is the principle of combination?” These could not be empirically determined and so analysis must ever fall short of a full account. Thus all readings are to a purpose, and that purpose shall be whatever—given “the scene”—the critic deems viable to an audience.

But in these efforts that seem more in the manner of a confession—the revealing of the “I” or the “self”—one’s audience is, as it were, the ages or the god of the ages. One’s accounting becomes a rhetorical performance, maybe even a ritual performance (as prayer and perhaps poetry are both). But also, if one allows it, playful. For the making of a personal geometry is—as I titled an early effort at a long poem—a matter of “trials and errors.” One is on trial for not trying harder and must acquit oneself as one may, mea culpa.  And one must own one’s errors or never learn from them. And how often does such become the matter of “the lecture”? Still, all that rhetoric that derives from one’s “position” must be at the service of whatever one is able to draw with one’s peculiar geometry: that circle—or as I said constellation—that holds the relations together in some kind of composition, as even an abstract painting is composed.

What excites me about this prospect is the sense that I shall discover many relations as I go and that my “schema”—which I have been at pains to develop for about two decades (since grad school)—will alter as I go on. The schema, based on that tripartite division pulled from Mallarmé by way of Rancière, arrived in the winter of this year, but the elements to be impressed, to be related, have been swimming about gaily my entire lifetime with no schematic, geometrical net to ensnare them. Perhaps they’re better so. Why force these relations as reified things, as objects? We know well enough the incentive to “stand back and let it all be.” But, whether as artist or philosopher or critic or poet, one must impose this practiced geometry and make such shapes as one can. So far, in conception, I’ve been working toward an autobiographical ground, the “growth of the critic’s mind” idea, because it helps me distinguish experience from the historical chronology that comes to me not only from the form most biographies assume, but my way of ordering my books and my LPs. Remember the moment in the film Hi-Fidelity when Rob blows Dick’s mind by telling him he’s arranging his LPs not alphabetically, not chronologically, but autobiographically. The autobiographical arrangement blows my professorial mind as well. The key tension in my “take” has been between the fidelity to history that my education expects of me—the history of art and literature and ideas—and the fidelity to my personal experience. The incentive now is to admit the degree to which one’s own lights and the happenstances of one’s own experiences inflect not only the reception of art and ideas but their very meaning. The peculiar logic—or is it dream?—by which we get “from here to there, eventually.”

One thing, I think, that makes this project arrive now is something I referred to in Towards Criticism, 1, when speaking of The Ambassadors: that sense of renouncement and preemption so clear in Strether’s ultimate position. Since I’ve never been the age I am now before, I’ve never had this particular vantage—but having it now means renouncing some claims, at least privately, for the sake of what one would make of the past. From a very young age, I was provoked by Dickens’ indelible opening to David Copperfield: “If I am to emerge as the hero of my own life or if that position is to be attained by someone else, these pages must show” (or words to that effect). To be “the hero of one’s own life” is at once presumptuous but is also essential, if one finds one’s life worth recounting. But what heroism is there in simply choosing to look and read and reflect? James at least understands that our hero might be a hero because of the pains taken in developing a peculiar geometry. Thus any biography of an artist is always a rather flat affair since we never get an account of those two elements I isolated in my question about FW. We never know why and how the artist did what s/he did. We, at best, get a sense of “the scene” in which what was done was achieved, and get maybe some elements of personality to add to “the figure” that we could not get from “the fiction,” or the work. But the defining choices and the decisions made in the act of creation forever elude such scrutiny. And yet, I suppose, the hero has made those choices, from dictates of consciousness.

Since I’ve never written a—to me—convincing poem that wasn’t primarily concerned with delineating, by some peculiar geometry, the relations of the contents of my state of being at that precise instant (all my poems being very much a here and now affair), I’m reticent at trying to understand the process. Reading myself—what has been written in that manner—lets me have glimpses of how my mind works, but I find that some part of me—the lyrical “Ich,” why not?—is leading some other part of me—the critic, the reader—on a merry chase. “Hide, fox, and all after!” has been a slogan of mine for quite some time on that front. And certainly one does not spend years reading the Wake if one is not easily intrigued by all a fox might hide. Along that line of thought, I think, one easily sees the strength of my distinction between verse and essay, as I would practice each. I want to keep to the decisions made when fixed—one’s attention anyway—on an object at hand. The object shall not be, as in poems, the puzzle of my own state of mind, or emotional state, or what have you. Which is not to say that the prose won’t “blow hot and cold.” It’s still a matter of breath, after all.

THE SNOW MAN -- Wallace Stevens

An irresistible choice, I suppose, given that we’ve just experienced what was purported to be an historic storm, here in the New England area. In New Haven, not so much. Still. There is snow out there, and more to come.

Wallace Stevens’ “The Snow Man” is a bit deceptive, as a poem. The title and the first line about “a mind of winter” suggest that this might be one of those American poems that school children learn, so they can go about reciting something every time it snows. The early twentieth-century equivalent of that song from Frozen, perhaps.

Stevens isn’t the kind of poet to write that kind of poem. We can leave that to Frost, I suppose, with “Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening.” The implied end to all activity in the latter poem is more or less the starting place here. The “mind of winter,” the “listener in the snow.” These are “the snow man,” of course—and the idea of giving sentience to a snow man is certainly the kind of thing that would accord with popular entities like “Frosty the Snowman.” But Stevens isn’t after some cutesy idea of “how would a snow man feel.” He’s after something like the thoughts of a man of snow. A man who is part of the landscape (the way we all will be part of the landscape, some day), a landscape of snow.

The opening idea, then, is a supposition: “one must have a mind of winter” in order “to regard the frost and the boughs / Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;”—that semi-colon lets us know the thought is continuing while letting us “regard” what the mind of winter regards, or, rather what having “a mind of winter” would enable us to regard: a frozen landscape. Can we not look at it without a mind of winter? Perhaps we could, and that’s why the thought must continue:

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think

Of any misery in the sound of the wind

We finally, after another semi-colon, arrive at the conclusion of the thought, but not before we are offered a restatement of “a mind of winter”—“cold a long time”—and another statement of the frozen landscape. The lines keep sketching the visual riches of the scene, cold as it might be: “boughs of the pine-trees crusted with snow,” “junipers shagged with ice,” and “spruces rough”—pines, junipers, spruces. There are living things out there in the snow. But our attention is on “one” who is able to regard all this—including, wonderfully, “the distant glitter / Of the January sun,” a palpable presence that is just enough to illuminate and not heat—and “not to think / Of any misery in the sound of the wind.”

Warm in our homes, we tend to hear misery in the sound of the wind. It sounds frightful at times. Out there in the elements, we imagine, such a wind would be doing us a mischief. And so we realize what Stevens is getting at: we must imagine ourselves out there in the cold and the snow as in our natural element (as even the trees might not be) and find no misery in it at all. Now we have some idea of what “a mind of winter” means.

Then Stevens, as is his wont, decides to expatiate a bit on that sound. It isn’t just that “one” doesn’t think of misery in the sound of the wind, but we must also not hear misery: “In the sound of a few leaves, / Which is the sound of the land / Full of the same wind / That is blowing in the same bare place.”

That verse is a definite deflation, to my mind. Its repetitions: “in the sound,” “sound of the land,” “same wind,” “same bare place” seem to retard our progress. We step in place, we walk slowly. That sound, that same wind, continues to blow. The place is haunted by this lack of progress, lack, we should say, of volition. Sentience without volitional movement. A snow man frozen in place. And yet not hearing misery in “the sound of the land.” (Much might be said about what kind of land that is, and why “land” comes in there, but let's keep this short.)

And so that incessant wind, with its “few leaves,” stirs the sense of the living and the dead, makes us ponder what we are—if we aren’t trees or leaves or wind. We are land in a bare place. We are snow. We are replete in this landscape that we share our substance with. But we will not stay long.

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

We may, if we like, think that “one” has been a human listener all along, standing in the snow to observe and to hear what one may hear—much as Frost’s pilgrim does, taking in the snowy woods. But our listener here is also a man of snow, or conscious of himself as a man of snow—“nothing himself.” And so the repetition of “nothing” creates a tripartite sense. He is “nothing himself”—a nobody, anonymous, but even more: a non-entity. Devoid of character, in a void. Or rather perceiving, in the midst of the landscape we’ve already been asked to imagine, a void.

He sees only what is there. This is a stress that Stevens comes back to often: the effort, on the part of our senses, our notions, our ideas, to see only what is there. Our snow man, our mind of winter, does that. It has access to these basic elements, these unavoidable aspects of reality, and yet . . . such a mind, listening with no thought of misery, no sadness, also perceives “the nothing that is (there).” That nothing that is here as well. Wherever you find yourself, on this January day. The nothing that is us, because we are nothing ourselves. The nothing that, being nothing, we are. The nothing to which the snows go, eventually.

Hamlet: That's a fair thought to lie between maids' legs.
Ophelia: What is, my lord?
Hamlet: Nothing.

RESOLVED!

The sixth of January being the Feast of Epiphany, aka “Twelfth Night,” aka “the twelfth day of Christmas,” we’re officially launched, feast-days-wise, into the New Year.

I suppose it’s time for a few resolutions. About the blog anyway.

So . . . what to do now, having done that “song a day” thing? I’d like to maintain a rate of production less frequent than daily. I’ll miss the daily grind, somewhat, but that may make for lengthier posts when they do occur. But about what?

I’ve come up with four possible “topic areas,” which, if all goes well, should more or less translate into once-a-week postings. Today’s post would count in the general area of “other”: posts on posting—so meta!—posts on anything from the weather to the political climate to anything that makes itself grist for the mill.

Another area will be comments on something I read recently, whether a book or an essay or an article or some one else’s posting. The only directive is that it be “text based.”

The other two topics I hope will be recurring: a poem of the month and a film of the month.

For the films, I’ll most likely have recourse to that list of 50 films since 1970 I compiled a few years ago. I posted—in 2012—on the 10 that occurred first alphabetically (under the tag “Whatcha Watchin?”), but feel certain I’ll drop that approach, preferring to post on whichever film strikes my fancy next. I may also depart from the list if I feel moved to post about a recent release or some ancient great that cries out for comment. If I get ambitious I may post about more than one film per month, which also holds for “poem of the month.” Which I guess is a way of saying that I’ll post about at least one film and one poem per month—resolved! More than that will depend on all the variables in life that may arise. Posting about a song for each day in the year was, however irksome it might be now and then, easier than posting about a film or poem. Songs are like the air we breathe, aren’t they?  Poems and films require more attention.

Looking at the year ahead I’ve selected likely candidates, poem and film-wise, for each month. But much of the success of these resolutions will depend upon how well inspiration strikes. Writing about songs was more or less an extension of all the sharing of music that goes on, whether via tapes or mp3s, and that’s long been a preoccupation of mine—a hobby, I suppose. And while viewing films is a nice leisure activity, writing about films is actually a kind of work. Even more so, I’d say, when it’s not a review. A review—and I do lots of theater reviewing—has a fixed purpose and so is pretty straight-forward, rhetorically. Writing about films as a kind of interactive experience, drawing on past viewings and one’s current critical appraisal, assumes a different perspective. It’s personal, and the purpose of the list of 50 was to hand-pick the films I could claim a personal relation to without too much stress and strain. But that shifts, doesn’t it? What’s more, the 50 are all films I enjoy watching over and over (that was a criteria, as discussed at the outset), but it may be more compelling to write about a film that annoyed the shit out of me, just to have recourse to words to combat the movie’s awfulness.

For poems, the selection will be based on my favored poets, trying to work the main ones in, much as I worked in my favorite musical artists last year. But no repeats with poems! And I would hope that the discussion of a poem will leave me out of it more than is the case with films and songs. Poem posts should be all about the words on the page—which is a way of saying that I’ll try to be as New Critical as I can.

Most of the poets chosen, I have no doubt, will be dead. But, even so, I don’t think the theme of ghosts, which kept creeping up on me last year, will apply. In part because, in New Critical fashion, I won’t be concerned very much with the author nor with some time-bound version of myself as listener/appreciator. And that may result in a more notational or elliptical manner of writing. We’ll see.

As usual, there won’t be much gossip. Or many trending topics. If possible, the posts of 2015 may be even further removed from the year in which they occur than last year’s posts. Though not entirely. I expect there will be occasions to take notice of our contemporary situation, if only to situate the here and now.

Happy New Year!