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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.


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Monday, February 1, 2021

Skipping over the Surface of Things

 


     Years ago I noticed the tendency among certain of the young to watch television in a new way, turning from one channel to the next without lingering long on any.  To me even a second-rate show seemed preferable to wandering always, hoping that the next option might offer that appeal so elusive that it never quite arrives.  The phenomenon was recorded in Springsteen’s "57 Channels (And Nothin' On)," though the fifty-seven channels soon became hundreds on cable and satellite, and then, through online devices, all but unlimited.  Originally such skimming over the surface of myriad possibilities was confined to the time one sat down in front of the screen seeking entertainment, but, with the introduction of smartphones – the term was first used in 1995 but such devices did not become commonplace until Apple’s iPhone in 2007 – people could scan one thing after another anywhere and at any time.  And they do, even while shopping or sitting with friends or in a toilet stall.   In a New York subway car, almost every eye gazes into a small hand-held device.  In a crowded elevator, instead of the conventional prim stance (facing the door, looking slightly down, hands clasped in front) many are now roving mentally around the virtual universe held in the palm of the hand. 

     This has surely amounted to an alteration of consciousness.  On the watch for food sources and for possible danger, animals, predators and prey alike, must be constantly attentive and observant.  In prehistoric times, people, like other animals, walked the woods always alert to their surroundings in the interest of survival.  Everyone in the community contributed to hunting and gathering and mutual defense.  Over time with the division of labor, people learned to focus on specific tasks which for a very few high-status individuals were accomplished entirely in the head: speculation, reading, philosophy, and science resulted, with the consequence that the sharp generalized vigilance that had served so well for millennia eroded.  Working from home in the pandemic has made dramatically clear what we already knew: that today a good many workers, and many of the most highly paid among them, do nothing productive in the old sense, but simply manipulate symbols on computer screens.  Instead of seeking significant information in the world immediately surrounding them, people now perform as small cogs in an immense cooperative machinery, contributing to production in a way that is meaningless in isolation.

     Whereas our ancestors walked daily absorbed in their immediate surroundings, reading the immediate data of earth and sky and smells and sounds, people may prosper today without ever knowing the phase of the moon or a single edible plant.  The specialization of work roles diminished the range of human consciousness in many ways, but it also enabled its fabulous expansion in others. When, millennia ago, aristocrats and intellectuals were freed from the necessity of vigilance that had been inescapable in the prehistoric era.  Technology, science, and art developed prodigiously to the extent that, many have ample free time to contemplate what they will.  On billions of Smartphones people choose to occupy their minds and emotions with the rich variety of possibilities of the tiny screen.  While that is all very well and understandable, entertainment being a latter of taste, it remains to inquire about users who are not listening to music or writing letters or performing other specific tasks with their devices, but merely flipping.

     The phenomenon suggests that it not the content that keeps people spellbound, but rather the medium.  I once read, in Scientific American I believe, a study tracing the appeal of the television screen which even to infants draws human attention, to the instinct to focus on any element of the environment which is moving or changing.  Unlike the obvious value of such awareness for early humans, the attractiveness of the scintillating screen is desirable only for advertisers seeking to increase sales. 

     This skipping attention is quite unlike the purposeful cognitive activity involved in problem-solving or the experience of art; it is the very opposite of the solid and steady concentration of meditation.  To me this shallow skipping consciousness is similar to addiction.  Seeking the distinctly human pleasure of playing with the mind, the individual never quite finds it, but is sufficiently motivated only to continue the endless and always unsatisfied quest.  The same derangement of behavior is evident in drug users and the sexually obsessed, not to mention those with a compulsive greed for food or money or power.  In each of these cases the soul  like a hungry ghost grabs after satisfaction but finds only deeper frustration.

    Yet might one find as well in this digital wandering something like the non-attachment in which the Buddha glimpsed the possibility of freedom?  There is no reason that one might not similarly skip across the surface of life, watching each moment with mild but sustained interest as if from a slow river steamer proceeding up the Amazon.  Would the Sixth Patriarch find any reason to favor more functional cognitive churning?   Perhaps the very deepest and most finely pointed concentration, the sort one hears is available to skilled meditators, is identical to the shallowest, and the drifting consciousness is an example of the flow of the Dao.    

What is Literature?

 

 

What follows is an attempt to distill my own theory of literature, portions of which are expressed in dozens of critical essays on individual works.  Doubtless my formulations may preserve traces of the vocabularies of critical schools from New Criticism to Deconstruction, but my own categories have, I think, taken shape a posteriori.   

 

     When I was an undergraduate in the middle sixties in a Midwestern state university, a professor asked his American Literature class to prepare a succinct definition of literature, and the exercise had the desired initial effect. Many of us, like Socrates’ interlocutors, were quite surprised to find that we were less sure of a definition than we had thought. Though many of us were English majors, we had neglected theoretical consideration of the object of our study. Most literary critics took a nearer view, focusing on individual works or authors; with a few exceptions, most notably Northrup Frye, the speculations of philosophers seemed distant from critics’ concerns.  Casebooks for students might include a contribution from a Freudian or Marxist or a hunter after archetypes, but these were understood by most readers as incomplete readings, even if revealing. 

     During the early eighties, my graduate Comparative Literature program might most conveniently be described as Post-Structuralist.  People wrote criticism of criticisms of critics and, in contrast to my earlier experience, rarely descended sufficiently from the airy heights to comment on a specific poem.  It seemed as though the focus had gone in the interval from too close to too distant. 

     While academia may be susceptible to (sometimes salutary) vogues, it is consistently true that every critic operates in certain recurring ways that might be formulated as theoretical assumptions.  Those who claim to have no “theory” are like historians who pretend to an unachievable “objectivity” rather than candidly acknowledging and defending the bases for their judgments.  

     After fifty-five years, I am better prepared to offer an answer to my professor’s question, though I am afraid that the eminent scholar who posed it has departed.  Literature is the symbolic representation of reality, but this description is in itself insufficient, since other writings -- scientific studies, for example -- do the same, and all language is symbolic.  The composer of aesthetic texts explicitly aims to record patterns of consciousness, however, while those who were once called natural philosophers seek to record the phenomena of nature.  The inadequacy of language to represent lived experience and the gap between subjective human experience and some sort of Truth would be defects for other discourses.  However, semantic slippage, imprecision, ambiguity, and reader’s misprision all of which would weaken a laboratory report, become for literature the source of not only beauty, but the only way to capture the play of consciousness in every mind. 

     One of the commonest cliches in criticism is useful to further define literature: good poetry will “delight and instruct,” a goal most identified with Horace, though shared in varying degrees with Aristotle and Boileau and countless others.  As literature is far from alone in these goals, further definition is required. 

     Many things might delight – a good dinner, a sexual experience, or a nap.  Sometimes one derives pleasure from non-literary verbal sources: a pleasing work evaluation, for instance, or a loving letter, yet these are not ordinarily poetry.  

     Unlike the reinforcement of social support signaled by supportive words, the pleasure of art arises from the contemplation of the object in isolation and not from any source outside the page.  People’s minds naturally seek to perceive patterns whether of sound or form or meaning and everyone relishes certain patterns as pure forms without regard for realism or truth.  This is most evident in such genres as instrumental music and abstract painting, but it is present in all reception of art.

     In poetry and, to a lesser extent, in prose, literature employs musical sound patterns based on syllabic stress or vowel quantity or pitch accent, while other devices — among them alliteration, assonance, rhyme, and repetition — fill out the music like the elements of a symphony orchestra.

     Meanwhile, aesthetic texts typically add verbal play resembling riddles and puns and the creation of readers’ expectations which may then be satisfied or not, as well as a rich substratum of allusion and association. All these rhetorical figures are specifically designed to delight and surprise.

     Such symbolic play amuses people.  Surely the most distinctive characteristic of our species is our facility in the manipulation of symbols. A person composing or consuming literature is then to the highest degree realizing human potential in the same way a soaring skylark is enacting a specific bird essence. One derives a certain exhilaration from doing what one does well, what one’s species does well.  Whatever else it may be, reading a poem is glorying in being human to the fullest extent, free from functional ends, enjoying one’s own nature like a happy dog.

     Unlike a Jackson Pollock painting or a Bach fugue, though, poetry virtually always refers to lived experience. Yet words are not capable of a direct reflection of reality. They always mediate and refract or include wish fulfillment or in some way convey no universal and objective vision but rather an individual and personal one. Though for science this imperfect representation would be an obstacle, for art it allows the expression of the irrational, the appetitive, the mysterious, the ambiguous, and the ambivalent. Though most of psychic life occurs in these realms, they are rarely explicit in people’s daily transactions, which are consciously felt by many to be largely rational.

     The fact is that we know nothing beyond our own subjectivity. Thus literature, or rather, art is general, is the closest we can approach to truth. The fact that every individual’s experience differs from every other’s, while it complicates matters considerably, in fact renders the view of literature as a whole more comprehensive, more precise, more accurate than other discourses such as history or science. The artist has no special purchase on truth, though claims of inspiration direct from the gods or muses are common. The reader of a broad variety of texts will, however, find in their combination enlightenment absent from any in isolation. In a process like an increasingly sophisticated triangulation the reader who knows several visions will have a view enriched beyond the one who knows but one.  In this way literature exponentially increases experience, allowing access to visions ancient and modern from the myriad cultures of this teeming planet.

     The genres of literature are universal, though not all occur in every setting, and each has a role. Proverbs preserve the prudential wisdom of the group, made memorable by turn of phrase or figure of speech. Folk stories provide nightly amusement as well as reinforcing (and sometimes questioning) social norms. Epics allow for an encyclopedic inclusion of history, religion, and social codes in the course of a stirring tale. Theater presents stories with characters drawn from myth or from familiar society for the reception of the entire community. Meanwhile, all these forms are used by religion to establish itself as a unique source of guidance and by leaders to consolidate and authenticate power. Lyric poetry typically voices the subjectivity of passionate individuals.

     The criteria of literature may be consciously present in a work’s production or its consumption, but neither is necessary. Many works written with other goals in mind have been appreciated as art: Herodotus, St. John of the Cross, Marx, and Freud, to cite a few random examples. On the other hand scholars have utilized literary texts as a source of data to investigate history, philology, comparative botany, or countless other fields. A witty turn of phrase by a physics professor delivering a scientific paper creates a moment of literature, while a linguist searching Homer for a rare grammatical form may see no poetry at all.

     In making such distinctions the only probative elements are found within the work itself, not in any intention of the creator. Some works are directed primarily at their audience, often with didactic aims. A paraliterary example is advertising which uses all the devices of literature with sales as the sole goal. Other works arise from their makers’ interest in self-expression. Such solipsism is extreme in outsider artists, but is present to one degree or another in all. Some writing is directed at the artifact itself, for instance, for those who espouse art for art’s sake.

     Thus determining value must be grounded in the success of individual works as well as genres in achieving specific goals. One poem may foreground description as in Pope’s “Windsor Forest” while for another psychology assumes greatest importance as in the Spoon River Anthology.  Narrative is central to epic and lapidary craft to Symbolism. Paradise Lost aims to instruct perhaps and Canterbury Tales to entertain, though each, of course, does both. Swinburne does his best to get by on sound while early Bly is all about images.

     In fact nearly every poem is a complex structure of a good many of these considerations, each weighted precisely to the requirements of the specific project. Thus in Hopkins melody will take the lead, with theme following behind, and images in third position.

     Then there is the imponderable element of beauty. One can prescribe symmetry and harmony and yet an asymmetrical and discordant work may prove to have many admirers. Taste may be explained but not proven. One may praise the taste of oysters without persuading a reluctant diner to share your plate, and in the same way, I may think Keats a greater poet than Shelley and make enlightening comments on both, but I will not convince Shelley’s partisans of my preference. 

     The moment of a reader’s reception provides the measure of every work.  An unprepared student may scan the lines of Shakespeare in vain, while a skilled critic may find much fascinating meaning and considerable symbolic imagery in a television game show.  Those works which have been read and reread accumulate significance.  Scriptures such as the Vedas and the Hebrew Testament illustrate this principle, but so, in a different way, does Bunuel’s L’Age d’Or.  There is no way to prove the greatness of a poem or a novel, but the critic who has experienced literary beauty can seek to characterize the experience with sufficient clarity to convey to others the source and character of that experience, much as the poet or novelist has sought to do.     

     Literature is sufficiently essential to human life that it is found in every society and likely has been at least since the development of language. People with the most limited material culture invariably possess rich stores of verbal technology, useful for encoding their world, providing entertainment as well as preserving knowledge and constructing avenues of spiritual access, all while sitting around a glowing campfire or perhaps a glowing iPad, passing the time.

Notes on Recent Reading 43 (Bellamy, Roy, Melville)

 

Looking Backward (Bellamy)

     A peculiarly American utopian novel in which patriotism and the growth of monopolies are not so much combated by internationalism and organized labor as they are endorsed and extended until there is only one great trust and no capitalist class whatsoever.  And this occurs without violence, by a kind of general consensus.  To Bellamy who concealed his socialism under the name nationalism, the radicals of his day function as operatives of the bosses, since their extremism (which their enemies considered foreign) alienates rather than attracts Americans, retarding the interests of the workers.

     The society Bellamy imagines seems a bit frightening with the total social control of the Industrial Army exerted by technocrats who somehow he imagines would act with no self-interest or partiality.  Nonetheless, he is first-rate when he gets to elaborating on the immense waste in American capitalism and the absurdity of a system in which each person strives to get the better of his fellow citizens.  To me his proposal that every worker, indeed, every individual, receive the same stipend is only reasonable, though for many it would make the whole scheme unacceptable.  Resistance to this particular policy is, however, an instructive illustration of the hold that greed has upon the human ego.  Bellamy’s projection of what life may be in the year 2000 has much to recommend it, even if it is difficult to conceive of an enthusiasm for collective effort and symbolic reward emerging in this country, in spite of the example of the military where such values are indeed strong.  Bellamy’s attacks on “individualism” must have sounded un-American to many, but his ideas were sufficiently acclaimed to spawn a newspaper and several hundred clubs devoted to advancing his vision. 

     Bellamy’s prose is pedestrian when it is not stilted (I do realizer that polite circumlocutions luxuriated in the real conversations of his day), and the novel gets by on the barest excuse for a plot.  One or two images remain with the reader at the end: the stagecoach that figures the old society near the book’s outset and the rose bush representing the transition to the new toward the end. 

     Bellamy does share with many revolutionaries of his day an optimism very rare in our own, a sense that the overwhelming majority of producers over exploiters makes the victory of the masses inevitable once they awaken to their situation.  That tone, which lasted until World War I, smells now like the springtime of the world.  

 

 

The God of Small Things (Roy)

     Arundhati Roy’s first novel is filled with dazzling, poetic, playful, expressive language in a splendidly varied pattern of different characters of various ages.  She is a rhetorician of considerable power, willing to deploy striking metaphors, distortions, repetitions, and substitutions each with at least a plausible significance.  In fact, her chief fault is her exuberance which sometimes leads her to fruitless divigations, overuse of motifs, redundant expressions.  The book has a luxurious texture and often a melody arises from the words even when read silently.  Her verbal play and deep sense of pIace suggest that Roy may be an admirer of James Joyce, though her book, for all the chronological displacement and rapidly shifting point of view, remains far more accessible than even Ulysses.

     The mysterious “double-egg twins” Rahel and Estha are the book’s center.  Their lives are twisted by their family and the local circumstances in their village in Kerala, as well as by the colonial past.  Passive and inward-turning, stigmatized by their parents’ separation, they are vulnerable to mistreatment, and, when in their innocence they seek to capture joy, they find they have violated the “Love Laws” that regulate affection.  

     The sexual scenes at the end provide the reader no relief.  One before and one after the deaths of Sophie Mol and Velutha, they offer little solace.  The desperation of Ammu’s affair, her wretched survival, alone, for a few years, and the monstrous weight of guilt that haunted the sensitive twins, all these overwhelm any chance for redemptive sexuality.  At the book’s conclusion the concrete specificity of the scenes of love-making contrasts with the vast unknowns of Rahel and Estha’s lives since the traumas of their childhood.  It is, of course, the details, the “little things,” that are real, that are dependable, that anchor the ego in the everyday.  Much of the rest is muddled, obscure, or vicious.

     It took twenty years for Roy’s next novel to appear, but she was hardly idle in the meantime.  She is an active campaigner for progressive causes in the US, In India, and in the world.  I cannot recall having heard her misspeak on these topics.

 

 

Redburn (Melville)

     Contrary to some recent critics, I would agree with Melville himself who considered Redburn a piece of hackwork.  He notoriously stressed its rapid composition (two and a half months) saying that he wrote it simply to keep himself in tobacco.   His haste is evident in the padding.  Like a journalist he tosses in diverting anecdotes and the sort of detailed technical information which one finds as well in Moby Dick but without the suggestive metaphorical weight that the later book generally includes.  The book is unified only broadly as a Bildungsroman.  What exactly is the reader to make of Harry Bolton apart from the undeniable homoerotic element he adds before vanishing? 

     Yet Melville’s grander style is always in the background.  The symbolic system is perhaps not fully operative throughout the story though echoes of Biblical texts in particular occur regularly.  His rhetoric is denied the soaring heights of which he was capable, tending at times toward colloquialism.  The book’s themes, too, eschew the complexities and ambiguities in which Melville came to specialize.  The self-satire by the narrator reflecting with amusement on his younger self recurs (though, at times, his comic naivete is unconvincing and the recurring joke of his appearance in his shooting jacket is soon tiresome).

     Redburn is worth reading for what it implies about Melville’s life and about transatlantic crossings in the middle of the nineteenth century.  (I find it staggering to imagine a sailing vessel capable of carrying five hundred steerage passengers.)  It also has hints of the sublimity of which the author was capable.  In itself it is a readable narrative of which a perspicuous contemporary reviewer might have noted that readers might expect greater things to come from this author.