Maverick Philosopher

The Converse Does Not Hold

If you paid attention in Logic 101 you may remember that the immediate inference called 'conversion' is valid  for the I and E forms of the traditional square of opposition but not for the A and O forms.  Poetic illustration courtesy of Alexander Pope (1688-1744) where 'Every poet is a fool' is an A-proposition:

Sir, I admit your gen'ral rule
That every poet is a fool:
But you yourself may serve to show it,
That every fool is not a poet.

(Epigrams and Epitaphs, Faber & Faber, 1977, p. 82)

Wise Man and Fool on Their Death Beds

Wise man: 

This world is a vanishing quantity.  I am glad soon to be quit of it.  It has nothing to offer in the end but bagatelles that can fool only the foolish and must leave the wise unsatisfied.  Vanitas vanitatum; omnia vanitas.

Fool: 

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rage at close of day;
Rage, rage against the
dying of the light.

Wise man:

Clever verse from a drunken fool to be admired by adolescents.  It amounts to:

Do not go gentle from this dark Cave,
Old age should cherish its lack of sight:
But rage, rage against the gaining of the Light.

(Not) Another Aphorism

You actually
Crawled out of bed
Compromising your rest
To write down another
Of your
Wretched aphorisms?

Heidegger and Wittgenstein: 17 Syllables

One went off the deep end
The other off the shallow
Strange century.

Bukowski's Juvenilia and Mine

Here are the first few lines of Charles Bukowski's one-page late poem "Zero" (You Get So Alone At Times it Just Makes Sense, Ecco 2002, p. 104, originally publ. 1986 by Black Sparrow Press):

sitting here watching the second hand on the TIMEX go
    around and
around . . .
this will hardly be a night to remember
sitting here searching for blackheads on the back of my neck
as other men enter the sheets with dolls of flame
I look into myself and find perfect emptiness.

Here is an adolescent effort of mine when I was literally an adolescent:

tiredly picking my nose
listening to the grinding sounds of
clocks, air conditioners and refrigerators
i can hear it all this night
snarfing a fart now and then, tiredly
checking beef pies cooking in the oven
picking at a jammed-up typewriter
in confusion
dancing around on featherweight fright flights
and tiredly picking
picking my nose & my acne
and eating it
is this any way to run an airline?

I'll grant that Bukowski's poem, published when he was around 66, especially if you read the whole of it, is better than mine, which is not saying much.  But there are plenty of common elements: self-indulgence, self-absorption, diasaffection, alienation and disconnectedness.  My excuse is that my adolescent rubbish was written when I was 16.  At 66 that particular excuse lapses.

Anti-PC Haiku

Writing 'they' for 'he'
They sacrifice grammar
To the god of PeeCee.

Yiddish Haiku

Schmuck means penis in Yiddish
Ornament in German.
You see the link?

Spend It Now or Pass It On?

The quality of  his heirs
Must give pause
To him whose loot
Is slated for their jaws.

A rather more classical meditation on this theme we find in  Horace.

Quis scit an adiciant hodiernae crastina summae
     tempora di superi?
Cuncta manus avidas fugient heredis, amico
     quae dederis animo. 

Who knows if Jove who counts our score
Will toss us in a morning more?
What with your friend you nobly share
At least you rescue from your heir. (Samuel Johnson)

Who know if the gods above will add the hours of tomorrow
 to the total of today?
Whatever you give to your own dear self will escape
 the greedy hands of your heir. (David West)

Who knows if heav’n will give to-morrow’s boon
 To this our daily pray’r?
The goods you take to keep your soul in tune,
 Shall scape your greedy heir. (Christopher Smart)

Seventeen-Syllable Sketches

Be

Between phony formality
And false familiarity
Be.

Pulp, p. 152

Aim low
Don't try
To sleep in your own bed at night
Is success enough.

Bukowski

Too degraded
To be called effete
His droppings were poems
Nonetheless

Meat Wheel 

Meat wheel rolling
Ever voiding
Hopes of mortals
Moiling
In the Void.

Maker of Gravemakers

Born to die
Lupine Road
1922
Wolf to girls
Who make graves.

Forgetful Troglodyte

The bridge bum forgot
The shirt he stole
Which I found
And wore to Geneva.

Animation

You are alive!
So not just body.
Mystery of animation!

Universalia ante rem

Same shape
Different size.
Two Tabasco bottles
On the window sill.

 

Don Colacho's Aphorisms

If you value aphorisms, do not miss these specimens from a master.  Example:

Poetry rescues things by reconciling matter and spirit in the metaphor.

Permit me a quibble. There are poets who eschew metaphor in favor of metonymy, Bukowski, for example.  If you protest that he is not a 'real poet,' I won't put up much of a fight.

Theodore Roethke's "Dolor"

Listen.

Variations on a Theme

Life's a bitch
And then you die.

Life is a bitch. And then you die?
No: Life is a joyous adventure. And then you die. (Ed Abbey, Confessions, p. 325)

Life's a beach
And then you dive.

Life's a beach? Which?
Sonova Beach.

Life's a bitch
But I'm married to one. (Redneck bumpersticker)

Life's a bitch
But I found my niche.

Arbor Vitae
Life's a beech
And I found my niche.

Life's a beach
My Anscombe's found her Geach.

 

Philip Larkin Reads "Aubade"

Reading by Larkin.  A reading by another, with text.  This is a great poem!

Herder on the Dream of Life

Ein Traum, ein Traum ist unser Leben
Auf Erden hier.
Wie Schatten auf den Wolken schweben
Und schwinden wir.

Und messen unsre trägen Tritte
Nach Raum und Zeit;
Und sind (und wissen's nicht) in Mitte
Der Ewigkeit . . .

Johann Gottfried Herder

My loose translation:

A dream, a dream is our life
Here upon the earth.
In a sea of shadows we drift and disappear
Like whitecaps on the surf.

Our sluggish steps we measure
By space and temporality;
Moving in the midst (though we know it not)
Of eternity . . .

A Poem by Robert Dodsley (1703-1764)

From The Oxford Book of Short Poems, eds. Kavanagh and Michie, OUP 1985, p. 100:

Song

Man's a poor deluded bubble,
    Wandering in a mist of lies,
Seeing false, or seeing double,
    Who would trust to such weak eyes?
Yet, presuming on his senses,
    On he goes, most wondrous wise:
Doubts of truth, believes pretences,
    Lost in error lives and dies.

 

To Brandeis Girl

I gave you my love
You handed it back
A letter unread.

You said,
"It was wrongly addressed
To being-in-love
And not to me."

You were wrong about that.
I loved love, but you too.
You should have handed it back
Without explanation.

Better a brute refusal
Than a refusal rationalized
Badly.

With that I began to take a hard-eyed look at you
The cataracts of love lasered to bits
Your faults swam into view
And our love was soon a dead letter.

 

Non-Nature-Themed Haiku

Haiku Grammar Lament

Into desuetude
Falls the subjunctive mood
Along with the hyphen.

Haiku Commentary on Marx's 11th Thesis on Feuerbach

The Marxist Nowhere Man
Attempts to change
What he does not understand.

Anti-Commie Haiku

Utopic heads in fog,
They broke real eggs
For an unreal omelet.

9/11 Haiku

Nihilist numbskulls
Virgins in brain,
Topple a tower with a plane.

Kerouac October Quotation #9: Mexico City Blues 228th Chorus

Kerouac reads.

My Angelic Wife

One indicator of her angelicity is her support of my chess activities -- in stark contrast to the wives of two acquaintances both of whose 'better' halves destroyed their chess libraries in fits of rage at time spent sporting with Caissa. "Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned," wrote old Will.

I'm no bard, but here's my ditty in remembrance of my two long lost Ohio chess friends:

   Forget that bitch
   And dally with me.
   Else I'll decimate
   Your library.

Poetry as a God Substitute?

From the mail:

Thanks for your blog. It deals with matters of real interest (...using the word 'interest' in its original sense of 'it matters').  [From Latin inter esse, which is suggestive.]

Perhaps you could elaborate on something you mentioned in your (very funny) post on some aphorisms of Wallace Stevens:

After one has abandoned a belief in god, poetry is that essence which takes its place as life's redemption. What a paltry redemption! It would be better to say that there is no redemption than to say something as silly as this. Learn to live with the death of God, my friend! Don't insert a sorry substitute into the gap. Don't try to make a religion of what is only a dabbling in subjective impressions. Compare John Gardner, "Fiction is the only religion I have . . . ." (On Writers and Writing, p. xii.)

I doubt you are saying that poetry, perhaps even all art, ‘is only a dabbling in subjective impressions’ because to say that Greek tragedy, for example, is only a dabbling in subjective impressions would surely be saying something even sillier than what Wallace Stevens says. Moreover, you mention that you have ‘nothing against art properly chastened and subordinated to the ultimate dominatrix, Philosophia’. So what did you mean?

Lastly, are there any books of literary criticism/aesthetics you think are especially worthwhile? It seems that apart from Plato and Aristotle, the best treatment of it outside of poets’ letters and journals is Jacques Maritain’s ‘Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry’.

Best wishes, and keep up the great work.

Thanks for the response.  It would indeed be absurdly silly to maintain that all of poetry is "only a dabbling in subjective impressions."  But note that the context is critical commentary on certain aesthetic aphorisms of the distinguished American poet Wallace Stevens (1879-1955).  Wallace is the focus of my interest in that post and no one else.  And my focus is not on his poetry but on certain aesthetic (and thus philosophical) observations of his about poetry and art in general.

What I am objecting to in the passage you quote above, and quite strenuously, is the notion that poetry, especially Stevens' sort of poetry, could be an adequate substitute for God, or that belief in poetry could adequately substitute for belief in God.  To my mind that is silly, absurdly silly.  And Wallace's talk of redemption in this context makes a joke of the quest for genuine redemption. No one who understands what the religious yearning for redemption and salvation is all about could trivialize it in such a way as to suggest that the writing or reading of poetry could satisfy it.  That's ridiculous.  Imagine a naked Jew standing before a grave he was forced to dig himself, about to be shot down by a Nazi SS officer.  Imagine telling him that redemption from meaningless suffering is to be had from the poems of Wallace Stevens.

What I'm saying is: be honest and don't misuse words.  You cannot plug the gap caused by the death of God (Nietzsche) by putting some paltry idol in its place.  Poetry in Stevens' style would be such a paltry ersatz.  Better nihilism than idolatry.  The death of God is an 'event' of rather more significance than the discovery that Russell's celestial teapot has been destroyed by an asteroid.  The death of God, as Nietzsche well understood, has grave and far-reaching consequences.  Knock out the celestial teapot and nothing of moment changes. The death of God is the death of truth and meaning.  Everything changes.

As for your question about lit crit recommendations, I'd have to think about it.

Sans Souci

The renter builds no equity

In exchange his abode is sans souci.

Me I'd rather own something real

And leave it to my stoicism to adjust how I feel.

Haiku Commentary on Marx's 11th Thesis on Feuerbach

The Marxist Nowhere Man
Attempts to change
What he does not understand.

Philip Larkin on Death

David Rieff, son of Susan Sontag, writes movingly of her mother's love of life and her refusal to accept extinction in Swimming in a Sea of Death: A Son's Memoir (Simon and Shuster, 2008). Her attitude and his is close to the one expressed by Philip Larkin in the following poem which displays Larkin's power as a poet in tandem with his weakness as a philosopher. Rieff, p. 13, quotes approvingly from the stanza which I have bolded.

In my humble opinion, the "specious stuff" in Larkin's phrase below is not the wisdom of Epicurus to which allusion is made, but the boozy self-indulgence Larkin serves up. What annoys me, I suppose, is the poetic passing-off of substantive claims with nary an attempt at justification. Am I again criticizing poetry for not being philosophy as I did once before with reference to Wallace Stevens? Perhaps. Or perhaps I am objecting to the nihilism of much of the 'art' of the 20th century.

Larkin's poetry illustrates how life must appear to those for whom God is dead. Read some more of it here. It is skillfully symptomatic of the age.

Getting back to Rieff and Sontag, I find curious their unquestioning conviction that physical death just has to be utter extinction. How can they be so cocksure about that? Socrates, Plato, Moses Mendelsohn and a hundred other luminaries were just deluded fools? And then there is this thought: if physical death extinguishes us utterly, then the game is not worth the candle, and Sontag's stubborn refusal to accept her mortality even after 71 years worth of this ephemeral life is just ridiculous, and the opposite of anything that could be called wisdom.

A Death Poem for Year's End

As another year slips away, a year that saw the passing of John Updike, here is a fine poem of his to celebrate or mourn the waning days of ought-nine:

Perfection Wasted

And another regrettable thing about death
is the ceasing of your own brand of magic,
which took a whole life to develop and market ——
the quips, the witticisms, the slant
adjusted to a few, those loved ones nearest
the lip of the stage, their soft faces blanched
in the footlight glow, their laughter close to tears,
their tears confused with their diamond earrings,
their warm pooled breath in and out with your heartbeat,
their response and your performance twinned.
The jokes over the phone. The memories packed
in the rapid-access file. The whole act.
Who will do it again? That's it: no one;
imitators and descendants aren't the same.

Commentary

Viewed from a third-person point of view, death seems entirely natural, not evil or tragic.  Deciduous trees give up their leaves in the fall, but new ones arrive in the spring.  Where's the evil in that? We too are parts of nature; we hang for a time from des Lebens goldener Baum, and then we drop off.  So far there has never been a lack of new specimens to take our places in a universe that can get on quite well without any of us.   But "imitators and descendants aren't the same."  No indeed, for what dies when we die is not merely an animal, not merely a bit of biology, not merely a specimen of a species, a replaceable token of a type, but a subject of experience, a self, an irreplaceable  conscious individual, a being capable of saying and meaning 'I.'  "Who will do it again?"  No one!  I am unique and it took me a lifetime to get to this level of haecceity and ipseity.  This interiority wasn't there at first; I had to make it.  I became who I am by my loving and striving and willing and knowing: I actualized myself as a self.  It was a long apprenticeship that led to this mastery.  If I did a good job of it I perfected, completed, mastered, myself: I achieved my own incommunicable  perfection, which cannot be understood objectively, but only subjectively by a being who loves.  In the first instance that is me:  I love myself and as loving myself I know myself.  In the second instance, it is you if you love me; loving me you know me as an individual, not as a specimen of a species, a token of a type, an instance of a universal, an object among objects.  There were all those outside influences, of course, but they would have been nothing to me had I not appropriated them, making them my own.  As a somewhat greater poet once wrote, Was du ererbt von Deinen Vätern hast, erwirb es, um es zu besitzen.

And so therein lies death's sting: not in the passing of a bit of biology, but in the wasting of that unique and incommunicable perfection, the instant evaporation of that ocean of interiority.  But is the perfection wasted?  Does the magic just cease?  The animal ceases no doubt, but the magic of interiority?  These questions remain open.

Good Advice from John Ciardi

Poet John Ciardi (pronounced Chyar-dee, emphasis on first syllable, not See-ar-dee) was born in 1916 and died in 1986. A brilliant line of his sticks with me, though I cannot recall where he said it, and Mr. Google didn't help: "Never send a poem on a prose errand." Tattoo that onto your forearms, you would-be poets. (I myself am no poet, I know it, so I can't possibly blow it.  I hereby allude to a certain troubadour who, though I would not call him a poet, others would.)

Here is the epitaph Ciardi composed for himself:

Here, time concurring (and it does);
Lies Ciardi. If no kingdom come,
A kingdom was. Such as it was
This one beside it is a slum.

UPDATE (14 December):  The ever-helpful David Gordon, and that indefatigable argonaut of cyberspace, Dave Lull, inform me that Ciardi's exact words were, "But I have learned not to send a poem on a prose errand."  The quotation can be found on p. 60 of Ciardi Himself: Fifteen Essays in the Reading, Writing, and Teaching of Poetry.

Salvation Through Art? Comments on Some Aphorisms of Wallace Stevens

Herewith, comments on some aphorisms of Wallace Stevens from Adagia, aphorisms that sum up much of the aesthetic attitude  I am concerned to oppose. (To be precise: I am out to oppose it in its imperialistic ambitions; I have nothing against art properly chastened and subordinated to the ultimate dominatrix, Philosophia.) I have bolded Wallace's lines.

Thought is an infection. In the case of certain thoughts, it becomes an epidemic.

If thought is an infection, then poetry is mental meltdown.

After one has abandoned a belief in god, poetry is that essence which takes its place as life's redemption.

What a paltry redemption! It would be better to say that there is no redemption than to say something as silly as this. Learn to live with the death of God, my friend! Don't insert a sorry substitute into the gap. Don't try to make a religion of what is only a dabbling in subjective impressions. Compare John Gardner, "Fiction is the only religion I have . . . ." (On Writers and Writing, p. xii.)

For My Divorced Friends

A little poem by Dorothy Parker:

Comment

Oh, life is a glorious cycle of song,
A medley of extemporanea;
And love is a thing that can never go wrong;
And I am Marie of Roumania.

(From the front matter of Joseph Epstein, Divorced in America: Marriage in an Age of Possibility, E. P. Dutton, 1974.)

Saturday Night at the Oldies

Something different this week: Sylvia Plath, Daddy.