Search This Blog



Planetary Motions
, published by Giant Steps Press, is now available on Amazon for $14.95.



Spoor of Desire: Selected Poems
is available for $16.00 from FootHills Publishing, P.O. Box 68, Kanona NY 14856 or see www.foothillspublishing.com.

Tourist Snapshots was available from Randy Fingland's CC Marimbo, P.O. Box 933, Berkeley CA. CC Marimbo has, unfortunately ceased publishing, though I still have a few copies to spare.

Dada Poetry: An Introduction was published by Nirala Publications. It may be ordered on Amazon.com for $29.99 plus shipping. American buyers may order a copy from me for $23 including shipping.

Each book is available from the author William Seaton. Write seaton@frontiernet.net.


A categorized index of all work that has appeared on this site is available by looking under the current month in the Blog Archive section and selecting Index.


This site is listed in BlogCatalog and

Literature Blogs
Literature blog








Monday, October 1, 2018

Knowing and Not Knowing



     We value knowledge and regard its lack as a simple deficiency, but that view is neither inevitable nor is it always serviceable. In fact knowing and not knowing, like all bipolar oppositions, have a dialectical complementarity. [1] Their relation is so intimate that ignorance is entailed by every specific claim to knowledge, and skepticism in general need not be a logical cul de sac. The apophatic tradition’s route even as far as the divine is only the most spectacular use of not-knowing. Neither the lack of direct demonstrable evidence (of God, for example) nor an insufficiency of evidence (for any other proposition) need bring an end to inquiry.
     There is an inescapable figure/ground relationship involved in sense perception and no less in cognitive processes. Gestalt psychologists have demonstrated that, when one focuses on an object, one necessarily, at the same time, becomes unaware of its context. For every apparent gain in understanding, there is a corresponding loss. It is no more possible to maintain an equal awareness of all parts of a field than to fix both the position and momentum of a quantum object. To understand an utterance means to ignore other associated data. To recognize one reality means to be unconscious of many others. For functional problem-solving and most science, this presents no difficulty; indeed, the limited focus is essential and fruitful. In this way, not knowing is harmoniously intertwined with knowing throughout daily experience.
     Rightly understood the apparently limiting condition of our inescapably partial vision is more often the enabler of conviction than an obstacle. Growing up one is educated by acquiring the beliefs cultivated in one’s own culture. While the process enables an individual to function effectively in a social situation, it requires becoming blind to other possibilities. Yet societies do change, and, for the individual as well, this patterning of blindness and insight [2] may develop, evolve, and alter. The comfortable certainties of received ideas may be threatened or overturned by exposure to other societies with other visions, which may leave the thinker hopelessly at sea, but which often results in an eclectic or a skeptical point of view, or simply a more informed conclusion. A similar step toward enlightenment may occur due to ratiocination, meditation, drugs, or any of the range of techniques people have developed for altering consciousness and thus broadening the mind’s horizon.. Only then does the individual realize the significant role ignorance played in what had felt very much like secure conviction.
     But there can be no eliminating a residue of uncertainty about even the most superficially self-evident facts. One of the most systematic and influential philosophic formulations of this is the Indian catuṣkoṭi, a series of propositions that has been used in a wide variety of ways by Asian philosophers; my own use is doubtless different from theirs. [3]
     The catuṣkoṭi is generated by considering the array of possibilities when considering the truth of a proposition P. It may be so (P) or it may not (not-P). It also may be that both P and not-P are true, or that neither P nor not-P is, resulting in the following. Clever logicians including the great Nagarjuna then doubled this to eight propositions and added a capping ninth term sunyata, or emptiness.


Positive configuration
1. P
2. Not-P
3. Both P and Not-P
4. Neither P nor Not-P


1.
Negative configuration
1. Not (P)
2. Not (Not-P)
3. Not (Both P and Not-P)
4. Not (Neither P nor Not-P)

Sunyata


     This catuṣkoṭi has been used in a wide variety of ways by Asian philosophers; my own use is doubtless different from theirs. [4] To me it is a dialectical series of oppositions that, rather than resolving, leads to a further bipolar pair. It expands indefinitely like a human embryo starting with a single cell, then doubling and redoubling into nearly unfathomable complexity. In the broadest application the formula applies to any proposition, that is to say, to the world at large.
     One may walk through the progressively unfolding implications of the catuṣkoṭi until their complexity becomes unwieldy. One naturally takes the reality of the phenomena one can perceive for granted. This is the first term of the original tetralemma. The first duality then appears with the suggestion that the world is in fact illusory, a veil of maya, avidya, or not-knowing into which one must look more deeply to achieve enlightenment. At this point the critical doubt is productive, suggesting possibilities which would not otherwise arise. This skeptical questioning, flying in the face of common sense, produces the second term.
     Yet the world is not wholly and simply non-existent either. Even if it be a magic show, a puff of smoke, a flash of light, even these are something. The world must simultaneously exist in some sense while not existing in the last analysis. On the other hand the paradox forces the observer to conclude that it neither fully exists nor fully lacks existence in the ordinary understanding. These then are the third and fourth terms.
     This schema already gives the juggling thinker too many thoughts to keep airborne at once, but the savants’ increasingly exquisite metaphysical elaborations may serve the receptive mind as a basis for epistemology. Frustrating though it may be for those with little tolerance for paradox and mystery, this view, in which knowing and not-knowing are symmetrically intertwined, seems the closest approach we may attain to Truth.
     The view of those pursuing the apophatic conception of Ultimate Reality makes an even stronger claim: that the divine is “the affirmation of all things, the negation of all things, and beyond all affirmation and denial.” Nirvana etymologically refers to being extinguished, blown out like an oil lamp, yet it is the goal of Hinduism, Jainism, and Buddhism. Recent studies have pointed out significant parallels between these spiritual traditions and the discoveries of modern physics. [7]
     What can it mean that the positive and negative charges in the universe are equal? Surely the same should be true of matter and antimatter, though, for the present, these seem stubbornly unequal. [7] When one totals up the entire cosmos the answer must be zero, but a simple blank is not the result, or we would not be here wondering. On the contrary the observer, knowing and not knowing at the same time, gazing through the optical lens of ordinary vision corrected by the additional lens of philosophic speculation, sees most often instead the phantasmagoric phenomena of the world which are both there and not there. We know only by not knowing and see only by blindness.



1. Among the classic statements of this idea is the second poem in the Dao de Jing. As it is critical to the concepts to follow, I include a translation of a portion of that poem in James Legge’s clunky old translation for which, despite all its awkwardness (and its author’s Christian bias), I retain an affection: “All in the world know the beauty of the beautiful, and in doing this they have (the idea of) what ugliness is; they all know the skill of the skilful, and in doing this they have (the idea of) what the want of skill is. So it is that existence and non-existence give birth the one to (the idea of) the other; that difficulty and ease produce the one (the idea of) the other; that length and shortness fashion out the one the figure of the other; that (the ideas of) height and lowness arise from the contrast of the one with the other; that the musical notes and tones become harmonious through the relation of one with another; and that being before and behind give the idea of one following another. Therefore the sage manages affairs without doing anything, and conveys his instructions without the use of speech.”

2. This tidy phrase is, of course, the title of Paul de Man’s virtuoso critical performance. Deconstruction, with its insistence on the statement which is sou rature, “under erasure,” directly engages the dialectic of knowing and not knowing.

3. In fact this gap may well be considered an example of my own ignorance or blindness fostering a new conclusion. The catuṣkoṭi is closely paralleled by reports of the philosophy of Pyrrho of Elis in Sextus Empiricus. As Pyrrho is known to have traveled east with Alexander where he conferred with Persian magi and Indian yogis it is likely that he returned with some Eastern ideas. See Diogenes Laertius 9.61. For a useful sketch of parallels between Pyrrh and Madyamika, see Thomas McEvilley, “Pyrrhonism and Maadhyamika,” Philosophy East and West xxxii, 1 (January 1982), 3-35.

4. Note that, unlike some of the Asian thinkers I accept all these propositions as finally equal in truth value. For some they are alternatives among which one must choose.

5. Eriugena's translation of the pseudo-Dionysius “omnium positio, omnium ablatio, super omnem positionem et ablationem inter se invicem.” (Patrologia Latina CXXII 1121 c-d).

6. The seminal work was Fritjof Capra’s The Tao of Physics. Capra was qualified both as a particle physicist and a psychedelic veteran. His books have, not surprisingly, had a mixed reception. I have not read them.

7. This is called baryon asymmetry.

The Uses of the Monstrous: Chaucer’s “Anelida and Arcite”


     Horace begins his “Ars Poetica” [1] by recommending propriety and adherence to convention, suggesting that works with ill-fitting parts lack unity and must be monstrous, similar to a human with a horse’s neck or a feathered mammal. He says a beautiful woman above the waist whose body is that of a fish below is unsightly and, at best, comic.
     Yet that last example might imply that even monsters have their uses. What struck Horace as a hideous freak was to Tennyson an ideal of beauty: “I would be a mermaid fair.” [2] Chaucer’s “Anelida and Arcite” is generally slighted by critics, largely because of its discordances. A recent critic characterizes the poem’s reputation in short by describing it as “one of Chaucer’s most abused poems.” [3]
     The poet himself may have shared this dismissive attitude. The work is unfinished, which certainly could suggest a failed experiment, though many of Chaucer’s other works, including, of course, the monumental Canterbury Tales, is similarly incomplete. Despite its well-accepted place in his canon from contemporary scholars, Chaucer himself did not mention it when cataloguing his works. To many it is an ungainly compound of the third person narration in uniform stanzas and the metrically elaborate first person complaint. The combination of sources -- from Boccaccio in the story and Machaut in the stanzas given to Anelida [4] -- has better pleased scholars tracing Chaucer’s career than those looking for coherence, unity, and organic form. Chaucer himself mentions neither influence directly, but claims Statius as his source, going to the length of including a few lines from the Thebaid as a sort of guarantee. Having dodged acknowledging his French and Italian sources, he compounds the question by mentioning a certain “Corynne,” generally identified with the female Greek poet contemporary with Pindar. He further confuses the issue of sources by using the name of a figure in Boccaccio to tell a story that seems to be original with him. His elusiveness about the issue of authority may be taken as an emblem that well represents the ambiguities the poem presents as a whole.
     The fact that the poem is unfinished marks it for some as inferior, an aborted experiment, perhaps, unworthy even in the eyes of its creator. However, one might as well view its truncated form as exemplary of lived experience, for is not every one cut off in life rudely before one is sufficiently prepared? One can lend cast one’s autobiography in a comely form, but the result is artful and not inevitable. The lack of an ending then might be regarded as rendering the poem more adequate to represent life as lived.
     The double invocation must strike the reader as odd. It seems epic in ambition, though the poem lacks such a grand scale. What follows is anything but an epic; the story is primarily a frame for the complaint. The second invocation, to the Muses, might pass as a throw-away convention, but the first to Mars is more surprising. War is only in the background of what plot there is, but the mention of the god of war, the lover of Venus, though here immediately doubled by a female counterpart Bellona, reminds the reader of the countless poems -- Romance of the Rose, which Chaucer translated, for one -- in which male/female relations are represented in terms of battles. Chaucer here lightly evokes that immense field of associations which reinforces the suggestion of peril and vulnerability that accompanies love. In an echo of this martial opening, “The Story” does open with the aftermath of military action and, in fact, the “ymage of Mars” carried in the field, (31) the public suffering of war preceding the private suffering of love-longing.
     It is as though Chaucer is playing a game with his reader’s expectations. Writing at a time when convention and its play were centrally important to poetry, he yet managed to twist the tropes round to make something new. One of the conventions he honors by refracting in unpredictable ways is the appeal to authority. Chaucer claims value for his work by attributing it to imitation of a Classical model. “First folowe I Stace” (l. 21) implies that he derives his poem from Statius’ Thebaid. The manuscripts even open “The Story” with a few lines of Statius’ Latin. Yet in fact Boccaccio’s Teseida is his most significant source for the narrative and Machaut for the complaint. Unsatisfied with this shell game, he realizes he can do as he pleases because his story is basically an original one, after all, and he tosses off another source: “Corynne” (21), generally identified with the Greek poet contemporary with Pindar. This suggestion, apart from the satisfaction of its providing another male/female doubling, is entirely a playful red herring. As Chaucer comments, time has a way of devouring all things. (12 ff.)
     The implications of this complex attribution of authority are clear: every work is original and no work is original. Where one thinks a notion arose may be altogether different from where it in fact did. The Classics provide a rich field for training readers in the fabulous potential of poetic language, but they are not the last word. Experimentation seems to assert itself in one aspect after another of “Anelida and Arcite”
     The combination of narrative and complaint might be considered as a representation of the duality of objective/subjective in everyday life. Instead of constituting an aesthetic failing it may be a bold move to record life as it is experienced. The continual check of one’s sense of what seems true to the observer on the individual subjectivity is one of the consistent rhythms of consciousness.
     While apparently Chaucer’s own invention, the story is in part quite traditional. Anelida suggests the archetype of the faithful woman like Constance in the “Man of Law’s Tale” or Griselda in “The Clerk’s Tale.” Her loyalty is contrasted with Arcite’s faithlessness which is not portrayed as the failing of an individual but rather as a typical male characteristic since the time of the first polygamist: “he were fals, for hit is kynde of man/ Sith Lamek was.” (149-150) [6] Men’s pursuit of novelty in love is said to be inherent: “The kynde of mannes herteis to delyte/ In thing that straunge is.” (201-202)
     Arcite is said to have used the conventions of love poetry with exactly the same rhetorical competence that Anelida displays, but toward his own false and treacherous ends. To him the “ful mykel besynesse” (99) of the seduction includes declaring that his is like to go mad or to “dyen for distresse.” (101) Thus the plot arises from the capacity of language to represent either truth or lies, positioning even the text itself balanced on a ridgepole of doubt. Whereas compliance with readers’ conventional expectations will in general reaffirm received ideas, Chaucer’s innovative manipulation of familiar literary usages must cultivate critical questioning.
     Almost in order to wink at the twenty-first century critic, the author specifically refers to his “slye wey” of writing. (48) [7] Whether that be a mirage or not, with its fragmentary character, its wild wrenching of convention, and its “sly” self-questioning, “Anelida and Arcite” may be read as an early predecessor of modernism. Horace’s rule covers in fact only half the house of literature: those texts which reinforce (or refine or further develop) preconception. It is through the violation of convention that authors question assumptions and introduce new ideas and forms.


1. More properly the Epistula ad Pisones.

2. From “The Mermaid.” Of course, in general the mermaid’s beauty is balanced against her destructive potential exemplified by the Sirens of the Odyssey or the Lorelei. Many other tropes exist such as the frightening and serious mermaids of Neruda “Fable of the Mermaid and the Drunks” and Yeats “The Man Young and Old: iii “The Mermaid.”

3. T. S. Miller, “Chaucer's Sources and Chaucer's Lies: Anelida and Arcite and the Poetics of Fabrication,” The Journal of English and Germanic Philology, Vol. 114, No. 3 (July 2015), pp. 373-400. To Manly it was “purely an experiment in versification.” (Chaucer and the Rhetoricians, 98).

4. The debt to Boccaccio is evident throughout the narrative; that to Machaut is exhaustively demonstrated by Madeleine Fabin in “On Chaucer's Anelida and Arcite,” Modern Language Notes , Vol. 34, No. 5 (May, 1919), 266-272).

5. Compare the use in the “Friar’s Tale” to describe the summoner’s system of spies. “A slyer boye nas noon in Engelond.” (Canterbury Tales 1322)

6. “Kind,” of course, or “kynde” meant nature or natural in Middle English. In the University of Michigan MED: “inherent qualities or properties of persons, animals, plants, elements, medicines, etc.; essential character.”

7. Lines 162-164 question whether any poet might be able to do justice to the story, asking “what man hath the cunnyng or the wit?” Though “cunning” at the time meant only competence, it already by the late 16th century suggested trickery, implying the same duality of truth and lie. This association must surely have been taking shape for some time.

Song Lyrics as Poetry



This is a draft of my thoughts on the subject to be presented December 9, 2018 as part of a Megaphone Series program on the topic at the Seligmann Center.


     Over the chronological and geographic span of our species, poetry has far more often been consumed as sounds in the air than as signs on a two dimensional surface. In this sense the youth listening to pop songs on an iPod is more traditional than the Wordsworth scholar reading silently in the library. The fact is that until the Renaissance, most poetry was performed: lyric forms were sung and epics chanted often to musical accompaniment. Ancient Greek and medieval English poems alike were sung; not infrequently, the authors of Tang Dynasty Chinese poems and troubadours from the south of France titled poems with the name of the well-known song their rhythms recalled. Blues lyrics and some from the Great American Songbook may be among the most beautiful poems of the twentieth century. And, of course, Dylan, who decades ago was praised by Christopher Ricks, the Oxford Professor of Poetry, has now received the Nobel prize.
     The assumption that poems are more beautiful and meaningful than song lyrics is today clearly less widespread than it once was, though it has not disappeared entirely. There is, indeed, no formula nor can there be proof of literary excellence. Value can only appear in one’s consumption of art. Beauty is manifested in widely differing forms depending on the genre of the work in question.
     One sort of art might seem superior to another, more likely to elicit sensations of beauty and sublimity, and the most theoretically compelling is perhaps the Gesamtkunstwerk. If a reader is moved by a written text, how much stronger might the impact be when the text is sung? Add a striking set design, costumes that transform the actors, and dance to add yet another layer of signifiers, and one arrives at the concept, at least, of what might be defended as the very most effective work of art. Yet of course, its advantage is illusory. Quantity of signifiers is not equivalent to their quality. A simple piece may be more powerful than a complex one. Bollywood movies as well as Wagnerian operas employ multiple arts for effect.
     In practice the desirable integration of words and music is elusive. When poetic lyrics are sung, it is very difficult to maintain a balance between the musical and verbal elements. In general, when poetry is read with jazz, for instance, the musicians will follow the poet, accompanying the words with appropriate sounds. On Steve Allen’s television performance with Jack Kerouac , Allen provides no more than frames and decorations for Kerouac’s reading. Often music functions as a movie soundtrack often does, seeking to reinforce the primary element – image or word – while never taking the spotlight.
     On the other hand, Mingus’ “Fables of Faubus” is primarily musical with the simple, direct words making their impression through their apparent sincerity and transgressive hip radicalism. Many thirteenth century comments on troubadours critique their melodies as though the poems were incidental. Who remembers such librettists as Francesco Maria Piave or even Lorenzo Da Ponte as significant poets? How many opera-goers, while knowing the story, even follow the words of each passage? For unity the pitch and timbre of the abstract sounds must equally support and be supported by the language. Yet if this demanding goal is even partially met, the result can be enchanting.
     The general dialectic of performed and written texts is exemplified by the comparison of sung versus read poems. Out loud, the effect is different every time but fixed for the individual performance; on the page it is set as in stone yet subject to ever-new readings. Whereas the sung lyric is animated and immediate though evanescent and caught in the unrolling of time, on the page it stands still, palpably concrete. The exact symmetry of these relations indicates that neither is superior; the excitement of music in the air is balanced against the richness of possibility retained on the page.
     Song lyrics, as they are designed for musical accompaniment, do differ from lines meant to be read, either aloud or silently. The song must be understood in passing, processed by the consumer as it happens like a film or a symphony, while the reader may return at liberty to reread a written text. Therefore printed lyrics may be knotty and resistant to interpretation while sung ones tend toward transparent lucidity. The first is more likely to challenge assumptions and introduce new ideas whereas the latter will tend to confirm pre-existing attitudes.
     Further, the social situation in which singing occurs reinforces the unanimity of response. Often songs are addressed to a more specific audience. Warriors liked heroic epics, a cabaret audience is likely to value sophistication and polish, a heavy metal crowd will like dark and edgy imagery. Jazz clubs appeal to the hip, polka dances to those hip to a different beat altogether. While an individual poem in a book may likewise suggest a certain taste, the next poem may be quite different and the character of the readership is comparatively unpredictable.
     Ordinarily songs have a set stanza form with very little variation from one verse to the next. While a written poem may be structured in the same way, it has as well countless other possible forms. The song usually sticks to a single rhythmic pattern, though variation is always possible within limits, but a poet contemplating publication can use or ignore rhythm and rhyme much more freely. Many songs employ repeated content, whether a refrain or a key phrase, perhaps the song’s title, while poems in a book are less apt to do so.
     Singing, especially to accompaniment, adds elements of volume, stress, pitch and timbre which may either reinforce and enrich or distract from the piece as a whole. Just as the compelling vocalism of a great singer can make mediocre lyrics moving, shallow pop stylings can enervate even strong songs.
     Printed lyrics are generically different from sung ones, and a poem read out loud from a book or a song printed without music will be somewhere between. Each genre has unique challenges; neither is inherently more artful or beautiful. Indeed, each generic distinction opens certain possibilities while narrowing others.


• The addition of signifiers in music, phrasing, etc. increases expressive potential if all elements are mutually supportive. There is a risk of their not fitting and thus generating aesthetic dissonance that is absent in the silent reading of the printed page.

• Due to the social nature of performance thematic elements in songs more likely reinforce the already existing ideas of the audience. Thus they are less likely to challenge preconceptions or introduce new ideas.

• The formal reflection of the comparative thematic predictability of song is their adherence to a repeated metrical and rhyme pattern, adding melody and ingenuity while sacrificing the possibilities available to irregular and free verse.

• Songs have the immediacy of live performance yet lack the rich potential for leisurely contemplation offered by the page. Songs cannot in general afford tangled obscurity but aim rather at clarity and transparence. Sometimes the most direct, seemingly heartfelt lines are strongest, sometimes the ironic, oblique, and allusive.