30: It's the Magic Number

On Sunday at the end of this week I turn 43 years old and I’ve been thinking not so much about turning 43 as about the difference between turning 40 and turning 30. Our culture makes a big deal about turning 40. And it is significant. At 40 one is typically half way through a life. Taking stock of how far one has come at such a point is not only natural it seems inevitable. Failure to reach some goals by this age may result in the proverbial mid-life crisis. Though, in ancient Rome, 40 was considered the prime of life, the time to enjoy the fruits of all you had accomplished, if, indeed, you had accomplished something. But, looking back, I realize that 30 is really the age of deepest significance. 30 is when you step into time, you feel it like a friction. If we fall into life, we fall into a vacuum, drifting without effort until we hit 30, when we hit the atmosphere and start feeling the burn of entry. Many famous literary figures are 30: Hamlet, K in Kafka’s The Trial, Hugh in Under the Volcano, Roquentin in Nausea, the main character in Fight Club.

30 is when you become more than simply aware of mortality, rather it infects your soul. You don’t only realize a clock is ticking, you can now hear it. Because of it, whether you believe in a life beyond this one or not, you sense now that there will be a reckoning of some sort. If anything produces the disillusionment that comes with shedding youth, it is this thing that seizes you. And that may be another way of understanding the difference. In one’s 20’s, there is the knowledge of mortality, but once 30 comes, somehow it knows you. Here is Hugh, the nephew of the main character in Under the Volcano, reflecting on his life in his 30th year.

Twenty-nine clouds. At twenty-nine a man was in his thirtieth year. And he was twenty-nine. And now at last, though the feeling had perhaps been growing on him all morning, he knew what it felt like, the intolerable impact of this knowledge that might have come at twenty-two, but had not, that ought at least to have come at twenty-five, but still somehow had not, this knowledge, hitherto associated only with people tottering on the brink of the grave and A.E. Houseman, that one could not be young forever—that indeed, in the twinkling of an eye, one was not young any longer. For in less than four years, passing so swiftly to-day’s cigarette seemed smoked yesterday, one would be thirty-three, in seven more, forty, in forty-seven, eighty. Sixty-seven years seemed a comfortingly long time but then he would be a hundred. I am not a prodigy any longer. I have no excuse any longer to behave in this irresponsible fashion. I am not such a dashing fellow after all. I am not young. On the other hand: I am a prodigy. I am young. I am a dashing fellow. Am I not? You are a liar, said the trees tossing in the garden. You are a traitor, rattled the plantain leaves. And a coward too, put in some fitful sounds of music that might have meant that in the zócalo the fair was beginning. And they are losing the Battle of the Ebro. Because of you, said the wind. A traitor even to your journalist friends you like to run down and who are really courageous men, admit it—Ahhh! Hugh, as if to rid himself of these thoughts, turned the radio dial back and forth, trying to get San Antonio (“I am none of these things really.” “I have done nothing to warrant all this guilt.” “I am no worse than anybody else. . .”); but it was no good. All his resolutions of this morning were to no avail. It seemed useless to struggle any further with these thoughts, better to let them have their way. . .
. . . No: I am much afraid there is little enough in your past, which will come to your aid against the future. Not even the seagull? Said Hugh. . .

Notice the guilt Hugh feels, his efforts at self-justification. Suddenly, in the wake of time’s presence, in the certain knowledge of mortality that grips him, there is a need to justify the past, the way he has been living, but nothing there will save him from the future and its inevitable conclusion. Up until now, there has been no such need, life was his own, there was no time, only his choices and actions. There was no concern for consequence. “I have done nothing to warrant all this guilt” he says. “I am no worse than anybody else.” It is so brilliant, that youthful, insouciant gesture that says, “I’d rather regret what I did than what I didn’t do.” Of course, however, though I too would maintain this same stance even today, the guilt is inescapable, because from my very best intentions have sprung some deplorable consequences and fight it how we may, they partly define us.

Hugh’s efforts at self-justification could have been lifted from Kafka’s The Trial. K, on his 30th birthday, wakes to find he has been arrested. He spends the entire year trying to prove his innocence to a court whose higher judges he never meets and he is finally executed. What did he do? What is he guilty of? One never knows. But it is the weight of actions taking place in time. He, like all of us, is inescapably guilty. With the freedom of youthful potential stolen, he is now someone who is known, fixed in the continuum of the clock. Near the end of the novel, at the core of it he is confronted by a priest in a deserted church:

“You are Joseph K.,” said the priest, lifting one hand from the balustrade in a vague gesture. “Yes,” said K, thinking how frankly he used to give his name and what a burden it had recently become to him; nowadays people he had never seen before seemed to know his name. How pleasant it was to have to introduce oneself before being recognized!

Who doesn’t know the desire to be somewhere you aren’t recognized, the pleasure of this chance to transform yourself into someone else entirely, to have the possibility again to get right the correspondence between who you are and who you appear to be? It’s the desire to be someplace where there are no expectations.

Ticket
by Charles O. Hartman

I love the moment at the ticket window—he says—
when you are to say the name of your destination, and realize
that you could say anything, the man at the counter
will believe you, the woman at the counter
would never say No, that isn’t where you're going,
you could buy a ticket for one place and go to another,
less far along the same line. Suddenly you would find yourself
—he says—in a locality you’ve never seen before,
where no one has ever seen you and you could say your name
was anything you like, nobody would say No,
that isn’t you, this is who you are. It thrills me every time.

But you can’t escape your own expectations. So we are burdened by history, the weight of all the accumulated past in the moment of recognition. Before that moment, before that point in time, the future is infinitely open and there is the chance that one could become anything or anyone. But then the moment comes and doors start closing, the field of vision narrows until it’s just you, standing there inescapably carrying your history. Camus wrote too about this very dilemma in the Myth of Sisyphus:

Likewise and during every day of an unillustrious life, time carries us. But a moment always comes when we have to carry it. We live on the future: “tomorrow,” “later on,” “when you have made your way,” “you will understand when you are old enough.” Such irrelevancies are wonderful, for, after all, it’s a matter of dying. Yet a day comes when a man notices or says that he is thirty. Thus he asserts his youth. But simultaneously he situates himself in relation to time. He takes his place in it. He admits that he stands at a certain point on a curve that he acknowledges having to travel to its end. He belongs to time, and by the horror that seizes him, he recognizes his worst enemy. Tomorrow, he was longing for tomorrow, whereas everything in him ought to reject it. That revolt of the flesh is the absurd.

Once the bell tolls at the age of 30, there seems to be only 2 ways out: existential freedom, that is accepting that everything is already lost in your inevitable death and there is therefore no reason not to see all choices available to you, or the transcendent response found in everything from Christianity to Whitman’s Song of Myself where Whitman says of all the different events of life both good and bad:

These come to me days and nights and go from me again,
But they are not the Me myself.

Apart from the pulling and hauling stands what I am,
Stands amused, complacent, compassionating, idle, unitary,
Looks down, is erect, or bends an arm on an impalpable certain rest,
Looking with side-curved head curious what will come next,
Both in and out of the game and watching and wondering at it.
(From Section 4)

Jesus began his ministry at 30 and indeed, by Biblical reckoning, a person is not an adult until they reach 30. It is the time at which, as Roquentin in Nausea says, “Nothing has changed, but everything is different.” If there is an iconic image that captures this moment it is Hamlet staring into the skull of Yorick. A short time after, Hamlet asserts his final philosophy regarding the imminence of death. Horatio warns Hamlet to call off the dual with Laertes if he suspects any foul play but Hamlet says,

Not a whit. We defy augury. There’s a special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, ’tis not to come. If it be not to come, it will be now. If it be not now, yet it will come—the readiness is all. Since no man of aught he leaves knows, what is ’t to leave betimes? Let be.

“The readiness is all.” Here is one point that encompasses both religious and secular insight, namely, that one cannot make wise decisions without taking into account the fact of one’s approaching demise. David in the Psalms said,

LORD, make me to know mine end, and the measure of my days, what it is; that I may know how frail I am. Behold, thou hast made my days as an handbreadth; and mine age is as nothing before thee: verily every man at his best state is altogether vanity. Selah. Surely every man walketh in a vain shew: surely they are disquieted in vain: he heapeth up riches, and knoweth not who shall gather them. And now, Lord, what wait I for? my hope is in thee. (Psalms 39:4 – 7)

Here David dispenses with worldly accomplishment, recognizing it for the temporary show it is. What is the main issue? Something that transcends the time-bound: God. David comes to this realization that he must hope in God in light of knowing that he is mortal and going to die. Similarly, Pascal in his Pansées said of death “that the only possible way of acting with sense and judgment is to decide our course in the light of this point, which ought to be our ultimate objective.”

At 30, perhaps the choices or lack of choices from adolescence finally yield their return and in that reckoning, the arc of life through time is first known, we can measure its metaphysical weight in the consequences. Then the realization seizes us that our life is not just the result of our choices, but of consequences beyond our control, that consequence breeds consequence and does not end. Against those forces, those beyond control, all philosophies and theologies attempt to take arms. True identity comes into reality in this crucible, the definite shape of who we are is forged in this fire. Seize the day, amor fati, thy will be done – these are the bricks and mortar of our temple to salvation, the bulwark built to shore up our minds against the onslaught of time. At 30, whether secular or religious, we enter that temple and know ourselves as mortal.

On Reading

To invent a theory of reading would be an intellectual gesture commensurate with a tyrant's salute. It is taking an experience that is highly private and coercing or presuming its commonality. However, I imagine that those who enjoy reading at least have in common the enjoyment without coercion or presumption. This delight is the first and most important principle. Without enjoyment there is no understanding, at least not in the literal sense Webster renders the etymological meaning of the word. To understand is “to stand among.” But what is disliked is avoided. One avoids repugnant company but one "stands among" delightful company, becomes a part of it. One loses one's self in it. This moment of abandon to the enjoyment, whether of literature or another art, is one half of the total function of art. It is a moment of self-transcendence that leads ultimately to the other half which is a deeper self-awareness.

On my bedroom wall is a postcard. It is a miniature reproduction of a painting called "Reader." It is by a German painter by the name of Michael Sowa. It depicts the small, mid-distant figure of a man reading. His hands are thrust into his pockets. The book levitates in the air at eye level, suggesting that it, like its reader, has transcended its physical nature. It defies gravity. The man too defies gravity. He stands atop the thick, oily blue water of a sea that stretches from horizon to horizon. Threatening, white-crested waves rise all around revealing the intensity of wind. The man is oblivious and unaffected. He is secure in his book. The great dangerous expanse of the seascape is nothing to him. The very words he reads protects him against the elements. He is as confident as Christ astride Gennesaret.

Of course, one can interpret the water as symbolic of the unconscious. Yet this only intensifies the realization of the reader's complete absorption. He is unaware of his actual surroundings, which probably are a study, a porch, or maybe even a beach where people play volleyball only a few hundred feet away. Time passes and he doesn't notice. The light of late afternoon dims into the early evening, then dims into the darkness of night. He doesn't notice. He grows hungry and doesn't notice. One might say he is out of his senses except for the fact that he is highly concentrated, highly aware. What has happened is that the timing of his own day has been replaced by the timing of the book he reads.

The Russian poet Joseph Brodsky said, "Song is, after all, restructured time." I would take this a step farther. All art, whether poetry or otherwise, is an embodiment of a certain timing, a certain rhythm. The difference between time and timing is the difference between when your alarm clock goes off and when you actually wake up. Timing is the pace at which you move through the day. The "morning person" moves at a different tempo than the "night owl." And what these two perceive in their world and what they make of it will correspond to the pace at which they move through it. Even if they live in the same neighborhood, they will see and understand that neighborhood differently.

In The Republic, Plato notes that the modes or rhythms of music in a given city never change without a corresponding change in that city's laws. Although the uses to which Plato puts this insight have been heavily disputed for centuries, the insight itself is nonetheless a remarkable one and one generally accepted. The insight is that the pace at which one moves manifests itself as a philosophy, as a way of understanding the world. Rhythm is a kind of wisdom.

Losing oneself in a novel, a painting, a piece of music is to lose one's own rhythms in those of the artwork. It is to get hungry and not notice, to actually grow tired, have an itch, or have your foot fall asleep and not notice. Then you finish the poem, the novel, or the essay. Your stomach growls. The digital clock winks to an unreasonably late hour even though you are the "morning person." But you still haven't emerged completely. The world looks different from the last time you glanced at it. The angles and curves of the furniture in the room appear strangely sharper, more distinct. It is as though one's sense of perspective were heightened. You are still looking with the eyes of the narrator of the book. It is what a friend of mine calls "book shock." It is the other half of the total effect of reading. It is the return to the self, the moment of self-awareness or self-remembrance.

This "book shock" doesn't happen with all books and for any number of reasons which this essay isn't about. What is important is that the experience doesn't depend upon whether you agree or disagree with the work or author. My own most extreme experience of this was after reading the novel, The Recognitions, by William Gaddis. The novel depicts many pitifully twisted characters, most of whom deceive themselves as much as they deceive others. The sense of their pain and desperation is pervasive. But no description of the novel will impart what I experienced for more than a week after reading the novel. I saw people differently. I was acutely aware of the self-deception in others and in my self.

Eventually my own way of seeing returned. My own rhythm of living came back to me. But from the vantage point of having read the novel, I gained a perspective on other people and myself. It is not a way I typically live. It is not the rhythm of my walk or the tenor of my dialogue. The novel's assumptions and rhythms are ones I find unfair and unforgiving. However, a rhythm is not truth. It is only a means to reveal truth. So I carry this rhythm from the novel in my head and sometimes a person will say something or gesture a certain way and remind me of the tune, of some character from The Recognitions or some event in it. There are even times I will say or do something that stops me in mid-motion because I am reminded of the insights granted through the perspective of the book. I wonder, "Have I fooled myself all this time? Has my desperation blinded me to such an obvious self-deception?" Through the book I have gained a perspective on my own motives and intentions.

For those who spend their energy trying to locate the meaning of a text either in an author's intentions or motives, this way of reading will appear strangely to leave the author out of the equation. I'm not suggesting that learning about an author's life can't enlighten one's understanding of his work. However, the majority of books available to us are by authors who are dead. Whatever intentions or motives these authors have are now only real to us through the works they've left behind. They are embodied only in the rhythms, diction and syntax of the actual work, just as unconscious activities are typically "read" from someone's body language and inflections.

But honestly, no distinction is as blindly habitual as the modern distinction between conscious and unconscious minds. It is probably more clarifying to talk about attention. What one pays attention to one invests with both the conscious and unconscious minds. In other words, the whole mind is invested into the object or person toward which the active attention directs itself. A work of art is invested with an immense amount of attention. What that attention leaves behind is not only meaning but also love. Quoting Joseph Brodsky again, this time from the poem “In England” in memory of W.H. Auden, he writes:

Subtracting the greater from the lesser—time from man—
you get words, the remainder, standing out against their
white background more clearly than the body
ever manages to while it lives, though it cry "Catch me!"—

thus the source of love turns into the object of love

This way of reading is admittedly lofty. It is not the way one reads everything, especially not instruction manuals or road signs. But reading is a private experience and the way one reads is equally private. We all come to a love of reading under different circumstances and for different reasons. Those differences will manifest themselves in how one reads and what one reads. But for all that privacy, the one thing all avid readers share is their delight. This delight is the seduction that leads to insight, a greater understanding of oneself. In an essay called, "The Necessity of Poetry," Paul Valéry said the same thing. He wrote, "art gives us the means to explore at leisure that part of our own sensibility that remains restricted in its relation to reality." As I have suggested, this is true in spite of what a text means. If a person who delights in reading reads a book he disagrees with, the common delight of reading counterpoints his disagreement. That counterpoint is a kind of reconciliation with the rhythms of the self and is manifest as a deeper self-awareness, a profounder understanding of who one is and how one lives.

The Sensible and the Meaningful

To begin June on my blog, I decided to post some current thoughts on poetry. Lately I’ve thought about Wallace Stevens’ remark that, “a poem must resist the intelligence almost successfully.” It seems to me that a poem should actually succeed in this resistance, but only just. The intelligence should fail but be so consistently close to succeeding that it can’t resist renewing the effort to bring it under its dominion. A poem should be the perfect seduction of the intelligence. I think of a poem like Joseph Brodsky’s “Kalamaki” as a perfect example, at least for me. It is a poem I have felt always on the verge of fully comprehending. I could sense the boundaries of its meaning as I neared its end, just as it slipped away. It’s like someone whose hand is big enough to almost palm a basketball, but not quite. Portions of it leap out at me as I go along; I gather a thread here and a thread there. I’m about to tie them in a neat little bow when, right at the end, it unravels. And I never fail to return to the poem at some point and renew the journey because it is so amazing, so deeply meaningful, although inexplicable. And that is the subtle distinction that has brought me to this idea of how a poem should function.

Though a thesaurus will show them as synonyms, there is a difference between what makes sense and what is meaningful. Of course, the sensible has many definitions. What I mean by sensible here is: that which is of sound judgment or good sense, something that is fitting. But what we typically consider sensible is so only according to our given understanding of the world. However, the realm of possible meaning is much larger than this. That is, what is meaningful is larger than what is sensible. So, while everything that makes sense is meaningful, there are a vast number of things that are meaningful which make no sense. This is the realm poetry should explore. It is where such poets as John Ashbery, Marvin Bell, even Mallarme and sometimes Fernando Pessoa make their homes or pitch a tent.

It recalls another thought I’ve frequently had, a definition of a poem that has recurred to me throughout the years: that a poem is the clearest explanation of something. The consequence of this is that the explanation of a poem is both a movement away from clarity and a redundancy. Of course, this doesn’t mean we should abandon literary criticism, only that, the best literary criticism should, in itself, approach the nature of poetry. It’s why writers like Walter Pater and Edward Dalhberg are preferable to simple critics like Harold Bloom or Helen Vendler: as admirable and interesting as they are. It is in this spirit that I continue to write my own thoughts on poetry and poets and look forward to shortly publishing my thoughts on Walter Pater after having recently reread The Renaissance.

Matthew Arnold: Man that is Not

This essay on Matthew Arnold was an attempt to do at least two things. It was first, a consideration of Matthew Arnold’s place within the context of modern literature and the modern psyche as a whole. Second, it was an attempt to develop a more discursive voice for my prose. This second purpose meant handling the material differently than with a simple academic focus, but rather with a kind of poetic rhapsodizing. Thus the essay is a meditation on the fragmentation of the modern psyche using Matthew Arnold as the focal point around which that consideration revolves. Disparate elements play into it, but return to him as a leading representative at the beginning of its manifestation in the world.

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Matthew Arnold: Man that is Not
By Michael T. Young


“You must be something to be able to do something.”
-- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Matthew Arnold was the reluctant modern. “Resolve to be thyself” he pleaded because he was unable to embrace his own spirit. He longed for unity but wrote to his sister, “I am fragments.” These expressions seem excessive to us only because we are its natural descendents. “Man is the only creature that refuses to be what he is” said Camus. And George Oppen wrote, “We have chosen the meaning of being numerous.” The multitudinous and fragmented world that daunted Arnold can no longer overwhelm us because we are it. Arnold was among its firstborn, for what Arnold the critic resisted, Arnold the poet embraced. He refused to be wholly himself, and this war with himself made him as modern as any poet writing today.

Arnold was appointed to an inspectorship of schools in 1849. He valued education and knowledge perhaps as highly as we value information. That he turned to the Greeks as models of the best in poetry and thought was all too instinctive. For the Greeks understood ignorance as the enemy of integrity. The Delphic Oracle said, “Know thyself,” to help conduct people to a noble life. But modern man is beyond the Delphic dictum for he has foregone integrity for multiplicity. The modern person in quest of self-knowledge does not seek to know himself; he seeks to “find himself.” And Arnold was such a man because he knew “who finds himself, loses his misery!” Modern man is not ignorant but lost. A labyrinth of constant self-analysis confounds him. He is the Daedalus of his own mind, an inventor of mazes and convolutions of thought for which his conscience imprisons him. It does not let him rest. It drives him to circle his cell, to ever move and never get anywhere, to ever learn and never come to a definite knowledge.

Hither and thither spins
The wind-borne, mirroring soul,
A thousand glimpses wins,
And never sees a whole;
Looks once, and drives elsewhere, and leaves its last employ.
("Empedocles on Etna," 2.82-86)

This same spirit is why Hamlet remains contemporary. He is one of the first modern characters not because he is petrified with inaction but because he must unpack his heart to the air and holds a mirror up to the heart of all around him. He is a mind discovering itself, haunting the world with his brooding confessions, a voice of enchantment echoing inside each of our privately bounded nutshells. This is relevant because Arnold, recognizing Hamlet as a type characteristic of his own age, said, “The dialogue of the mind with itself has commenced; modern problems have presented themselves; we hear already the doubts, we witness the discouragement, of Hamlet and of Faust.”

Modern man’s identity is a series of momentary stays against confusion. He is perpetually asserting his psyche’s identity to withstand the threat of other identities. Arnold noted that “Hardly have we, for one little hour,/been on our own line, have we been ourselves.” Keats could not have conceived of the numberless selves springing up and dissolving in the modern psyche because negative capability was, to him, a poetic talent or character trait. But to the modern mind it is either its nature or its neurosis. This dualistic psychology gives birth to our multiple warring personalities. Seeing this multitude rising in himself and in the world, Arnold was one of the early thinkers to conceive of “the masses.” He knew man was getting lost in the multitudes both in the world and in himself. “Each half lives a hundred different lives” he said. And none of those halves are in harmony, but moving in a growing discord. Sartre’s remark that “hell is other people” was foretold when Arnold said, “Other existences there are, that clash with ours.” Feeling the perpetual struggle, Arnold looked at nature with envy.

And with joy the stars perform their shining,
And the sea its long moon-silver’d roll;
For self-poised they live, nor pine with noting
All the fever of some differing soul.
(“Self-Dependence,” 21-24)

The stars were not only tranquil but joyful in their shining because they were not the victim of a “differing soul.” They remained themselves, always shining, always there, reliable enough to navigate by. Arnold labored to order the flying fragments of the new world, the multitudinous scatterings of industrial society. He pressed images of nature hoping to transform them into symbols of man’s potential ideal. The stars were

A world above man’s head, to let him see
How boundless might his soul’s horizons be,
How vast, yet of what clear transparency!
How it were good to abide there, and breathe free;
How fair a lot to fill
Is left to each man still!
(“A Summer Night, “87-92)

But all the exclamation points belie his passion to believe his own words. Arnold was not an optimist in his taste or his sentiment. He admired the melancholic poetry of Leopardi and ended his own most famous poem by saying of modern man’s condition that,

. . . we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
(“Dover Beach,” 35-37)

Arnold in his social criticism chastised British society for “the anarchical tendency of [their] worship of freedom.” He knew that some authority must exist to which people answer, even if it were only his cherished “right reason.” But Arnold was, as Blake said of all true poets, “of the Devil’s Party without knowing it.” In his prose Arnold knew where poetry was going and why, and in his prose he struggled against it with all his might. But his poetry was authentic as his prose was desperately sincere. His prose demanded guidance from right reason, but his poetry enshrined the boundlessness of man’s soul and the endless struggles it was condemned to engage.

Charge once more, then, and be dumb!
Let the victors, when they come,
When the forts of folly fall,
Find thy body by the wall!
(“The Last Word,” 13-16)

Torn by the force of the indifferent mechanism which modern society has become, he is in fragments. But driven by the rage to assert his integrity or charged by the very power that rips at him, modern man tries to understand himself, hoping enlightenment or knowledge will save him.

But often, in the din of strife,
There rises an unspeakable desire
After the knowledge of our buried life;
A thirst to spend our fire and restless force
In tracking out our true, original course;
A longing to inquire
Into the mystery of this heart which beats
So wild so deep in us—to know
Whence our lives come and where they go.
And many a man in his own breast then delves. . .
(“The Buried Life,” 45-55)

It’s to “know thyself.” But at some point the quest becomes a red herring. Faust sold his soul for knowledge and for all he knew, it could not save him. Solomon proclaimed, “The fool hath no delight in understanding, but that his heart may discover itself.” He turns and turns in himself to understand his own fragments, to gather them into some organized whole. It was the poetic project of Stevens who was always diving and mining for “Words of the fragrant portals dimly-starred,/And of ourselves and of our origins.”

Modern man does know himself. He is better informed than all before him about psychology, physics, and the numberless scattered trivia that compose his external and internal worlds. His failure is that he “isn’t” himself.

. . .we try in vain to speak and act
Our hidden self, and what we say and do
Is eloquent, is well—but ‘tis not true!
(“The Buried Life,” 64-66)

To the problems he saw in the world, Arnold tried to interject solutions, but his poems ring true when he simply records his observation of the discord that he cannot resolve. Even in his prose, when he defines culture “not in resting and being, but in growing and becoming” he has already embraced the spirit of an age he condemned. While he warned against the “unrestrained swing of the individual’s personality,” he hoped to fill a cultural need by “spontaneity of consciousness.” Like us, Arnold had enough self-knowledge to know the faults if his time but not enough inspiration to know the way to resolve them. His ultimate abandonment of poetry was inevitable.

Arnold excluded “Empedocles on Etna” from later collections of his poetry. He said it was because its sufferings had no release in action, that there was no relief from the pain through hope or resistance. And this is partly true because Arnold already understood what Sartre said in the 20th century, that for modern man “there is no reality except in action.” Empedocles’ most assertive self-expression was self-destruction, the most valid action for the man “whose insight has never born fruit in deeds” (“The Scholar-Gipsy,” 174). That is, a violent action becomes the only action for those whose self-knowledge has no expression in their being.

Empedocles leaps into the fires of Mount Etna,

My soul glows to meet you.
Ere it flag, ere the mists
Of despondency and gloom
Rush over it again,
Receive me, save me!
(“Empedocles on Etna,” 2.412-416)

“Empedocles on Etna” is the earliest expression of Amor Fati, the only control left for the non-existent. Death is Empedocles’ salvation.

A character in Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano says, “What is a lost soul? It is one that has turned from its true path and is groping in the darkness of remembered ways.” It is caught in a circuit of habit and recollection, reiterations of yesterday which it mistakes for tomorrow. This is what produced the nostalgic poetries of Leopardi and Hood. In them, it was innocent and young but in Arnold, it was a spirit of self-knowledge and fragmentation. For us, in the 21st century, it is simply the nature of things. As Larkin said, “nothing like something, happens anywhere.” The non-existent has taken place of our being. Arnold was the first poet to register this displacement with something like conscience. His struggle against it became part of the discord which made him one of its primary representatives in the Victorian age. In his poetry he affirmed the fragmentation, the fears and the self-assertions that he denied in his prose, but not because he lacked self-knowledge but because his self-knowledge could not change what he was.

The Secular Sublime

Ten or fifteen years ago, I wouldn’t have given a poet like Gerald Stern a second thought. Today he is one of my favorite poets, one of those liberating voices I am constantly refreshed by. The following essay grew out of a particular poem of his that kept coming back to me after reading his collection This Time. The poem “June Fourth,” even months after I’d read the collection, kept reviving in my mind: it’s imagery and tone, a kind of quiet rebelliousness. This gentle obsession ultimately led me back to his work and a deeper consideration of it. Out of that reconsideration, I discovered a poet whose work connects to a long history.

(Please note: I have written permission from the author to reproduce “June Fourth” in its entirety.)

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The Secular Sublime: An Appreciation of Gerald Stern
By Michael T. Young


There are experiences and perceptions that change us so completely that when we look back at how we lived and saw things before, it is as if looking at another person. It seems that an old self is sloughed like a snakeskin and a new self emerges. It is a refinement. It is an experience of what some call the sublime. Such moments are the center of Gerald Stern’s poetry. His poems almost always take place at a moment of transformation, the instant of breakthrough. He is America’s consummate poet of the modern sublime.

Stern’s poems are deceptively simple. He writes in a language completely devoid of pretense and yet dignified with the elegance of profound meditation. He thinks and thinks deeply and through thought, the sublime is registered. We are transformed. As he says in the poem “The Thought of Heaven,” “I let it change me, that/is the purpose of thought—I call it all thought, whatever/changes you” (239. ln. 71, 72).

This change occurs to a figure in his poem “June Fourth.” It is a short poem that gathers all the major threads of Stern’s project: experience of the sublime, mourning of the past, and exhilaration of the emerging self. These threads all rise or recede in Stern’s poetry as his sensibility is sensitive to one, now another of them. But in “June Fourth” these threads come together with a subtle neatness.

Today as I ride down Twenty-fifth Street I smell honeysuckle
rising from Shell and Victor Balata and K-Diner.
The goddess of sweet memory is there
staggering over fruit and drinking old blossoms.
A man in white socks and a blue T-shirt
is sitting on the grass outside Bethlehem Steel
eating lunch and dreaming.
Before he walks back inside he will be changed.
He will remember when he stands again under the dirty windows
a moment of great misgiving and puzzlement
just before sweetness ruined him and thinking
tore him apart. He will remember lying
on his left elbow studying the sky,
and the loss he felt, and the sudden freedom,
the mixture of pain and pleasure—terror and hope—
what he calls "honeysuckle" (90).

One of the attractions of this poem is the articulation of the man’s experience as “honeysuckle.” Not only does the poem articulate an inner reality through a sensual experience; it was a stroke of genius to have chosen a smell as the vehicle. Physiologically, smell is the most closely connected to memory. But memory isn’t only relevant to this poem, as we shall see later it is also a relevant characteristic of the modern sublime.

Over a long period of time I was haunted by the poem’s simple and beautiful articulation. It slowly seduced me. Part of that seduction was the realization of its connection to another transformation beginning at least as far back as Milton. It seemed necessary to compare the figure in Stern’s poem to Satan in Paradise Lost.

The most obvious connection between them was the use of metaphorical language to articulate an inner experience. As the man in Stern’s poem uses “honeysuckle” to express his transformation, Satan expresses his transformation with the famous line, “Which way I fly is hell, myself am hell” (bk. 4, ln. 75). “Hell” becomes the term that articulates his internal reality. But this merely scratched the surface. Their kinship is deep and rooted in the drastic, even violent change both experience and how that experience is of the sublime.

“Sublime” derives from the Latin word “sublimis” and means “to lift high.” In Medieval Latin it meant “to purify” or “to refine.” The original Latin implies a change of place. The Medieval Latin implies a change of quality. But both imply a change of some kind. Although it is not reducible to change alone, change is the term common to every experience of the sublime and is a reasonable starting point for comparing the figures.

The man in “June Fourth” is ruined by sweetness and torn apart by thinking. Not only is it a change but it’s described as a violent one. The violence of Satan’s transformation is obvious enough: cast from Heaven to eternal damnation in Hell. But Satan’s change is also initiated, like the man in Stern’s poem, by a moment of taking thought.

Lifted up so high,
I ‘sdained subjection, and thought one step higher
Would set me highest.
(bk. 4, lns. 49-51)

How conspicuously that phrase "lifted up so high," suggests the original meaning of "sublime."  But more simply, for us, this moment of thinking to take God’s place on the throne of Heaven initiates Satan’s fall and subsequent transformation. Though what the figure in Stern’s poem is thinking isn’t clear, it is thinking that initiates his transformation. In the words of the poem, it tears him apart.

The man in “June Fourth” feels misgiving and puzzlement. He feels loss and freedom, terror and hope. Satan shares this confusion of emotions. He is tormented by the thought of “lost happiness and lasting pain” (bk. 1, lns. 54-56) but in defiance cries, “Here at least/we shall be free.” (bk. 1, lns. 258, 259). He feels the same exhilaration of “loss and freedom.” He describes the other fallen angels as being “astonished.” Thus both figures are filled with an apprehensive anxiety, a wonder before what has happened to them. Interestingly, 18th century critics, especially Edmund Burke, tied these same emotions to the sublime.

Burke wrote, “A mode of terror, or of pain, is always the cause of the sublime” (136. Part 4, Section 7). Furthermore, and more importantly for Stern’s poem, Burke said,

“As common labour, which is a mode of pain, is the exercise of the grosser, a mode of terror is the exercise of the finer parts of the system. In all these cases, if the pain and terror are so modified as not to be actually noxious; if the pain is not carried to violence, and the terror is not conversant about the present destruction of the person, as these emotions clear the parts, whether fine, or gross, of a dangerous and troublesome incumbrance, they are capable of producing delight. Its object is the sublime. Its highest degree I call astonishment” (136. Part 4, Section 7).

That Burke should identify the highest realization of the sublime as astonishment is significant since it is the very emotion Satan applies to the fallen angels. However, I want to focus on Burke calling “labour” a mode of pain and, consequently, a “grosser” type of the sublime. The man in Stern’s poem is a laborer. He works for Bethlehem Steel. Though it is of the grosser type, his pain is thus an experience of the sublime and it connects him to Satan’s pain, for like Satan he inwardly rebels against his condition.

Satan, before his decision to aspire to God’s throne was the highest angel. He was the morning star. But he was in this position because God, his creator, placed him there. Satan himself said, “Lifted up so high.” Having been “lifted” implies an external force, i.e., God, put him there. What this means is that Satan before his fall and transformation deferred his will to God, he obeyed God, he was in subjection to God. The man in Stern’s poem also defers his will. He is a worker at Bethlehem Steel. He defers his will to those who employ him: his supervisors, managers, and, more importantly, the shareholders and board members of the company. It is the owners of the company who are the secular version of God. It is they who hold the highest power in the company and determine its standard practice or laws.

Part of the worker’s change is that he is ruined by sweetness. Honeysuckle, the term used to identify the figure’s transformation, has a sweet smell. The association is with all that is outside: sunlight, fresh air, and open space. These are set in implied opposition to the factory where it is dirty, claustrophobic and hot. What he aspires for is nothing less than freedom from an oppressive job, freedom to enjoy the sunlight, fresh air and open space. But what he requires for that freedom is the money and power of those over him, especially of those like the shareholders. Implicitly, the man aspires, like Satan, to the position of those in power over him. This quiet rebellion, this opposition, during the 18th century, became an intimate part of the modern definition of the sublime.

Hume, in The Treatise of Human Nature, wrote, “any opposition which does not entirely discourage and intimidate us, has rather a contrary effect, and inspires us with a more than ordinary grandeur and magnanimity. In collecting our force to overcome the opposition, we invigorate the soul, and give it an elevation with which otherwise it would never have been acquainted . . .. Opposition not only enlarges the soul; but the soul, when full of courage and magnanimity, in a manner seeks opposition” (qtd. in Boulton l, li).

This “elevation” of the soul, obviously associated with the sublime, in Hume, is also associated with opposition itself. The association gained acceptance among critics through the 18th Century and in the Romantic poets was embraced in the images of the rebel and outcast as hero: Shelley’s Prometheus, Byron’s Childe Harold, Blake’s Los. In fact, Blake not only claimed Satan was the true hero of Paradise Lost but also expressed Hume’s point epigrammatically, “Opposition is true friendship” (42).

A curious historical fact lends credence to this point for the Stern poem. After Bethlehem Steel closed in the mid-90’s, a theater troupe took the unemployed workers and staged a performance of Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound. This gives us the analogy that, in Stern’s poem, Bethlehem Steel is the Zeus-like power against which the Prometheus-like worker thinks to rebel. The opening of Demogorgon’s final speech in the play is relevant.

This is the day, which down the void abysm,
At the earthborn’s spell, yawns for heaven’s despotism
(130. lns. 554, 555).

We live in a secular age and in such an age, heavenly despots are replaced with a board of shareholders, hell with earth, and Satan or Prometheus with the ordinary, working man who, like those figures, aspires toward the better life of those who employ him. The man in Stern’s poem is “the earthborn” yawning for “heaven’s despotism” and he experiences all the mixed exhilaration of those other independent, self-determined figures.

The man in Stern’s poem doesn’t openly rebel against his employers. He doesn’t quit his job, try to steal from them or to kill them. His rebellion is internal, an epiphany, a moment of insight. However, it is not spurious for being so. Most of us go to jobs we care little for, in fact, probably hate. We inwardly rebel against a condition to which necessity forces us to acquiesce. This does not make the disparity between our actions and feelings, between our outward circumstance and inward reality any less real or less painful. Each of us determines in some way, we are not defined by our job, we are something else. This is also to say that the essence of the rebellion is the desire for self-determination and the power used to define that self is the imagination or memory.

To the assertion that God created him and to him Satan owes his being, Satan says,

Who saw
When this creation was? Rememberest thou
Thy making? While the Maker gave thee being?
We know no time when we were not as now;
Know none before us, self-begot, self-raised
By our own quickening power
(bk. 5, lns. 856-863)

Satan is invoking the power of memory to claim his past. What he can’t remember, he denies, thus reducing his sense of self to what his memory dictates. He is attempting an act of self-creation. He wants to be “self-begot, self-raised.” Memory is the faculty by which he tries to claim that power and it is the same power invoked at the beginning of Stern’s poem.

The goddess of sweet memory is there
Staggering over fruit and drinking old blossoms.

Memory defines the boundaries of the poem. But there is a hint that something isn’t quite right. The peculiar phrase “staggering over fruit” implies something of a stumbling block, perhaps a kind of alcohol, intoxicating the mind. The “drinking” of old blossoms reinforces the assertion. It is reminiscent of taking the fruit in Genesis, for there the temptation was that “ye shall be as gods.” That is, you shall become like your creator, becoming, in a way, self-created.

Satan, for the same desire, was cast into Hell. The worker in “June Fourth” suffers no less. Though we never see him in a heaven from which to be cast, we see him in his desire for the heights of it. He lies “on his left elbow studying the sky.” “Left” has always had unfavorable implications. The word itself derives from an Old English word meaning “idle,” “weak,” and “useless.” The word “sinister” derives from a Middle English word meaning “on the left side.” The worker in Stern’s poem, by this gesture, is aligning himself with the rebellious, with the sinister.

The man also is “studying the sky.” He is not simply looking distractedly in its direction. It implies that he isn’t thinking of something else, he is thinking about the sky, for one studies something in order to master it. Quietly, and symbolically, the figure follows in the footsteps of Satan, Prometheus, Los, the rebels of literary history. For his ambition, he is banished to labor “under the dirty windows.” The word “under” is telling for it could have easily been “behind.” But “under” suggests a vertical direction for the worker in relation to it. That is, the worker has been cast down. The factory is hell. But he has our sympathy, for he is the hero of our age. He is the underdog. He is our co-worker. He is each of us going to work everyday.

Works Cited
-------------------------
Blake, William. The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. Ed. David V. Erdman. New York: Doubleday, 1988.

Burke, Edmund. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. Ed. James T. Boulton. Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1986.

Milton, John. John Milton Complete Poems and Major Prose. Ed. Merritt Y. Hughes. New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1957.

Shelley, Percy Bysshe. The Selected Poetry and Prose of Percy Bysshe Shelley. Ed. Carlos Baker. New York: Ramdon House Inc., 1951.

Stern, Gerald. This Time: New and Selected Poems. New York: W. W. Norton, 1999.

Intro and Appreciation of Oppen

The most difficult thing about starting this blog has been determining what to call it. I settled on The Inner Music only because the Capote quote from which I took it strikes a chord with my own aesthetic. There is something deeply satisfying about good writing and though I might not always call it music, that word suggests enough of a larger country beyond its simpler definitions. At some point I’ll post a brief essay on why I write. That essay engages this question of what in us is satisfied in the aesthetic experience.

My intention here is simply to share my thoughts on poetry, books, writing, and art in general. I’ve been writing for twenty-five years and over that time I’ve read and commented on many books and authors, jotted down many thoughts on art and writing. Unlike poetry, which is my first passion, I don’t really try to publish my prose. I’ve published a few book reviews and even fewer essays, but decided a blog would be a good forum for sending my prose work into the world.

I’ll try to revise so things don’t read as dated works, although, sometimes this will be unavoidable. For instance, I wrote on the movie Fight Club and will post that here at some point. Since the movie is now ten years old, it’s impossible for the essay not to be dated. Although the significance of it still seems relevant.

To kick off this site, I’ve posted a brief appreciation of the poet George Oppen that I wrote a few years ago. Although he’s gained more recognition in recent years, it’s still safe to say he’s not as well known as his contemporaries, or as well known as he deserves.

For those who visit, I hope you find here something engaging, something thought provoking.

Michael T. Young


-----------------------------------

The Pleasure of Being Heard:
An Appreciation of George Oppen
By Michael T. Young

In a poem to Charles Tomlinson, George Oppen wrote,

I would like,
as you see,
to convince
myself
that my pleasure in your response
is not
plain vanity
but the pleasure of being heard

The irony of Oppen’s desire is that he seems largely unheard by poets born beyond the mid-60s. Like his fellow Objectivist, William Carlos Williams, Oppen won a Pulitzer. In 1976, his Collected Poems was nominated for a National Book Award. But in spite of these recognitions, in standard college surveys of major American poets, while Williams receives great attention, Oppen receives relatively little. His work was not even included in The Norton Anthology until the most recent editions.

In an attempt to understand this neglect, I was drawn to a comment by Eliot Weinberger. Talking of Oppen’s importance to poets in the 60s, he said “There were, first of all, the facts of his life, which had particular resonance in the era of the Vietnam War and of hectically mutating events and values.” Though Weinberger’s essay, first published in American Poet in 2002 and then used as the introduction to the New Collected Poems of Oppen, was most likely meant to renew interest in Oppen’s work, it seemed possible that Oppen’s political significance skewed the reading of his admirers and limited his audience. With too much emphasis on his political and social appeal, his significance as a poet passed away as those circumstances did. What intrigued me was Oppen had not only served in World War II but, in order to take political and social action, stopped writing for about twenty-five years, in what is probably one of the most famous poetic silences.

Grounded as I am in formal poetry, coming to Oppen’s work was a complete surprise. My natural affinity was for the poetry of James Merrill, Richard Wilbur and Anthony Hecht: a different generation and altogether a different sensibility. I had read poets like Williams, but the aesthetic never engaged me. I read it. I knew it. However, I had no interest in it. That is, until I came to George Oppen. His poetry not only engaged me, it enlightened me. Here was a modern voice that never said anything for the simple beauty of a phrase, indeed, never dared speak except to utter in the clearest words its most exacting vision. Here was a poet with an integrity that could be located in every line.

I have not and never did have any motive of poetry
But to achieve clarity.
("Route")

To the mind of some readers, Oppen’s concern for clarity is possibly belied by his syntax. It is perhaps the most peculiar of any major modern poet, even more difficult than the philosophical phrasing of Wallace Stevens or the intellectually dense formal lines of Edgar Bowers. But it is Oppen’s desire to make every word take part in a meaningful creation that accounts for his syntax. When the words used to manipulate me in advertisements, politics, and social events are called on to express my most intimate experiences—my sense of being, my sense of identity—they are, by the time I come to use them, emptied of any potency by their trivialization in the everyday world of buying and spending. Words are

Ghosts
Which have run mad
In the subways
And of course the institutions
And the banks.
("A Language of New York")

By the time I come to speak of myself, I can say nothing.

He wants to say
His life is real,
No one can say why

It is not easy to speak

A ferocious mumbling, in public
Of rootless speech
("Of Being Numerous")


This rootless speech is what the poem calls a speech of “anti-ontology.” It has no being. The man trying to speak the meaning of his life has no language to speak it. It is unreal because politics and public life have appropriated it for ends other than an existential dialogue. The implication is that the ontological use of language must precede or take precedent over all other uses or the consequence is the loss of our ability to articulate being. We will be left always trying to recover the ontological use of language against the erosion of meaning by these other, less significant, uses.

And there are words we have learned
Not to look at,
Not to look for substance
Below them. But we are on the verge
Of vertigo.
("The Building of the Skyscraper")

The battle to recover these words for ontological use is what accounts for Oppen’s syntactic oddities. A further implication is that even poetry becomes ineffectual for certain things. Simply put, it has limits. If I think that language can accomplish everything, whether as an advertiser or a poet, I rob the true ontological root, which is everyday life, and render language ineffectual in its true and most valuable role: as an instrument for creating meaning.

Who are the people? that they are

That force within the walls
Of cities

Wherein the cars
Of mechanics
And executives

Echo like history
Down walled avenues
In which one cannot speak.
(Part 3, "A Language of New York")

It is only treating words with the utmost care, even as ghosts, that maybe,

Carefully they will restore
I hope to meaning
And to sense.
("A Narrative")

This is why Oppen’s poetry needs no politics or prose, but caries its integrity and dignity all on its own. Ontology precedes politics and art in every situation for Oppen. Ontology is the ground of everything. Thus he takes no word, no matter how slight, for granted. Oppen does not simply use words, he employs them. That is to say, he pays a price for them. Nothing is said unless his personal experience teaches the meaning of a word and that word comes to maturity through his personal experience of it in life. The significance of a word is restored through the experience of it in daily life.

It is the business of the poet
‘to suffer the things of this world
and to speak them and himself out.’
("The Building of the Skyscraper")

Thus we know in Oppen’s poetry, he is the speaker. The artful persona is nowhere in Oppen, for it is contrary to everything in his poetics. He does not separate his aesthetic concerns from daily ones, his life as a poet from his life as anything else. Thus, that famous, long silence was not without its poetic validity even though it was a consequence of pursuing a goal beyond the capacity of poetry. During that time Oppen experienced language and recovered it for his later poetic projects. Without that rescue in actual life experience, his poetry would have been mere linguistic exercises. But as we have them, they are one of the greatest authentic poetic pronouncements of 20th Century American poetry.