10 Lines from 10 Authors

The love of poetry is rare these days. It’s a lonely hobby, I’m afraid. Few are those who read it; fewer still are those who can read it properly, with enjoyment. I am willing to publicly disgrace myself (probably because it is 3 o’clock in the morning) by admitting that I have a mound of poetry books piled on my bathroom sink. Added together, you’d find a leaning tower of poetry stacked 3 feet high --no exaggeration--within arms length of the toilet. It has been like this for years, giving me plenty of time to rummage through thousands of poems. What follows are some nifty lines from poems I particularly enjoyed—though you will not find my favorite poems in this list. They come in no order and completely off the top of my head. As such the indentations, grammar, and all such details will be desperately off. My apologies. I wish only to convey those things I’ve enjoyed, without having to put in the effort normally demanded during daytime hours. I simply needed something interesting enough to keep me from being bored and boring enough to put me to sleep.

10. “Even now, I know that I have savored the hot taste of life/, Lifting green cups and gold at the great feast,/Just for a small and forgotten time/ I have had full in my eyes from off my girl/, The whitest pouring of eternal light,/ The heavy knife, as to a gala day.” – from the final stanza of Black Marigolds translated by E.P. Mathers

9. “lady I swear by all flowers” –e. e. cummings

8. “is it so Wind, is it so? All that you and I do know is that we saw fly and fix ‘mongst the flowers and reeds of Styx, yesterday, for a bed of tiger cubs, a great fly of Beelzebubs, the bee of hearts, which mortals name: Cupid, Fie, and Love for shame.”—From Song of the Stygian Naiads by Thomas (Lovelace?...Love something) Beddoes

7. “May she be granted beauty and yet not/ Beauty to make a stranger’s eye distraught,/ Or hers before a looking glass, for such,/ Being made beautiful overmuch,/ Consider beauty a sufficient end,/ Lose natural kindness and maybe/The heart revealing intimacy/ That chooses right, and never find a friend.”—From A Prayer For My Daughter by the ineffable William Butler Yeats

6. “or do the Modern dance. To you that’s destiny, to us it’s chance”—from The Truest Poetry is the Most Feigning by W.H. Auden

5. “so Eden sank to grief, so dawn goes down today. Nothing gold can stay” from Nothing Gold can stay by Robert Frost

4. “his effable, effin ineffable, singular inscrutable name”—from The Naming of Cats by T.S. Eliot

3. “for art is a form of catharsis, and love is a permanent flop, and work is the province of cattle, and rests for a clam in a shell, so I’m thinking of throwing the battle—would you kindly direct me to hell”—from Coda by Dorothy Parker

2. “And happy melodist, unwearied, Forever piping songs for ever new; More happy love! More happy, happy love! For ever warm and still to be enjoyed, For ever panting and forever young, All breathing human passion far above.” --From Ode on a Grecian Urn by the grandiloquent John Keats

1. “life is over there on the shelf”—by Emily Dickenson

4 Character Sketches without Characters or Sketches

This is what happens when you read too much Faulkner. You want the feeling that comes from the grit of the soliloquy without the work it takes to write a story.......blarg..........or...........blog?

1. “Do not tell a man who comes to you in need of aid that he must simply depend on grace, and think for one moment you have supplied him with countermeasures. You have not offered him advice; you have scarcely uttered a word. Grace only means we do not know the exact cause of our fortune. To tell a man he must depend on grace is to tell him he must affirm the consequent, or have Jesus Christ create a stone so heavy that all the powers incarnate cannot lift it. What you have done, what you have smuggled into this man’s mind is the idea that if he fixates on a turn of phrase concerning grace, it will grant him the power to abandon his fixation with cutting or pornography. You have taught him magic where machines are necessary for his deliverance. You have sent him sailing with Ulysses toward a home he does not have, saying words he does not mean, with an identity he cannot locate. You have, in effect, successfully diagnosed him the angel Lucifer only to immediately thereafter prescribe him the Devil.”

2. “Dreams and sophistication. Dreams and the color of the length of your favorite food. I remember once I dreamt about relations with my cousin; how I would quote ‘I have committed incest father’ where I spoke to no Father and it didn’t count as incest with my cousin. And I remember Freud how he would say that I had killed him. And then I thought how Jesus had usurped his Daddy, and we call Him Abba reverently, as in a contradiction, and the two together the Trinity, and the Holy Spirit tagging along sitting next to me and somewhere inside me during Sunday School.”

3. You will say my religion is a fantasy—the construct of a society in need of therapeutic measures to ensure its survival. And I will say, ‘so what if it is’? True weakness, your weakness, is the failure to dive into the illusion. It is only in the illusion that suffering is real. It is only in the illusion that happiness is real. Reduce me to a chemical, and I will forget the smell of both corpse and rose. And I will forget that I have forgotten the smell corpse and rose. When you expect the grace of the gods only to find yourself disappointed and yet still manage to slither back into hope like Satan into Eden then and only then may you give me a lesson on the meaning of strength. Acquiescence to the mundane is not strength. It is not even weakness. Weakness is a failure to reach the prize and acquiescence has no prize.

4. “You don’t mean ‘I don’t know.’ I don’t know never means I don’t know. It means I do not want to say or I think modesty is more advantageous or I am not going to put the effort into thinking about it because if I do I might find out something I don’t want to. “Seek and you will find.” You know the answer. You just don’t give a damn where it’s more important to give a damn because you have no love of others in your heart because you have no love internally. It’s the insides and inner inconsistency of a man that no filter can hide. The eyes always tell, or the mouth contradicting the eyes; our cheek muscles betray us when our words juggle. I may not catch it at the time or care, but I always remember later about that moment I felt something funny when you said it. And what am I doing when I feel funny all the time, and don’t say something right then to stop you? Why don’t I demand clarification there and then? Does it mean I don’t know; or does it mean that I know and don’t want to say or modesty is more advantageous or I am not going to put the effort into thinking about it because if I do I might find out something I don’t want to”?

On God and Grammar

Wayne Proudfoot (not to be confused with the Proudfeet hobbits in Tolkien’s Shire) makes the argument in Religious Experience that grammar constitutes our conception of God, specifically his attribute of ineffability. It is not uncommon among religious traditions to find the attribute of ineffability ascribed to deities or moral thingamabobs like, for example, the Tao. Anselm’s “God is that than which nothing greater can be thought” and Aquinas’ esse in his account of Divine Simplicity fall into this category. God used in this sense acts as what Proudfoot calls a ‘place-holder,’ since the very ineffability of “God-ness” fails to function as a pure referent.

Aquinas is particularly clear that we cannot actually talk about the essence of God. Our language is insufficient. At best we can only do one of two things: 1.) identify negative differentia and 2.) employ positive differentia, that is, analogous properties of what God might be like. Negative differentia are things which God is not. He is not a stone, a train, a story, a concept, an abstraction, etc. On the other hand, He is like some things. He is something like “Love,” something like our “Father,” something like “the Good.” Aquinas fears that to reduce God to anthropomorphic terms is to remove our sense of His otherness. (If my Aquinas is rusty, forgive me; it’s been 3 or so years.)

In other words, God as a symbol is not a referent to an actual object. There is no correspondence. Weird, right? Some religious theorists have taken issue with this characterization, saying that it is a form of intellectual laziness or simply bad logic. To refer to an object which cannot be referred to is nothing short of nonsense.

Proudfoot, however, makes an interesting play, positioning himself somewhere between Aquinas and these other religious theorist. In a sort of quasi-Wittgensteinian move, God in use has a function distinguishable from a referent and acquitted from being nonsensical. God’s very ineffability functions to produce a sense of otherness in His believers. How? Ineffability has a ritual and belief function determined by grammar. The grammatical backdrop inherent to theological paradigms provides the belief in God’s ineffability, and that ineffability functions as a catalyst for a belief in His mystery. In order to maintain a sense of the mysterious, theologians have included ineffability within their definition of God. Thus Aquinas says exactly what he means, and his characterization of God is not nonsensical.

Whether Proudfoot is right is beyond me. Much needs to be said about Proudfoot’s sneaky psychological evaluation of our theologian’s motives. Likewise, much needs to be said about whether grammar can produce the meaning of ineffability independent of religious experience, or whether, as another option, a priori categories of God might be determined by Calvin’s sensus divinitatis. Really, the question is whether the ineffability of God can be reduced to linguistic categories in the way Nietzsche construes the “leaf is the cause of leaf” problem. When does language constitute and create categories and when does it not? What I can say is that his approach is symptomatic of all things philosophy of language in the past century. Or to put it differently, his approach is nifty and I kinda like it.

Thoughts After Theory

Last Thursday night Dr. Dunning brought forth the rather ironic difficulty of theorizing about methods of theorizing. William James' typology of religious experience provoked the topic, leaving us questioning the legitimacy of typologizing itself. The catch word here is obviously 'legitimacy.' What can we possibly mean by it other than: to what degree does this method provide us with the means for knowing truth? Does typology provide us with truth? But even still, Dr. Dunning's question was more hermeneutical, i.e. how can we know that the interpretation of the presented data (that we typologize in order to find truth) is the right interpretation?

The trouble, he was pained to express, is that we cannot look at data qua data where it is not already interpreted. In phenomenological terms, objects (mental or not) are presented to us, and such as they are, they are already interpreted. Such is the problem of the hermeneutic circle: the transcendental subject 'perceiving' the immanent object (to use Husserl's terminology), and thereafter, the inability to 'step outside' to objectively view the immanent object without interpreting the interpretation. All immanent objects are necessarily and already interpreted, including the one perceived while stepping outside. To try to view the method of typologizing from the outside is really just another way of saying theorizing about theorizing where the neither theorizing possesses and objective point of view. Hence the circle.

To proceed down irony road, Dr. Dunning went on to produce a typology of modes for how people tend to interpret the data. There are, on his model, paradoxical thinkers and clear thinkers (and some others which i don't discuss here). Both James and I easily fit into the paradoxical category. Add nearly every poet since the beginning of time, a few of my favorites like Chesterton, Lewis, Tolkien, the majority of religious people, and a slew of Continental philosophers, and you'll have a picture of the paradoxical type. Life as it appears to us is a symphony of suggestions. The platitudes of 'clear' thinkers have little effect on us because we constantly feel that propositions set forth by the clear type are, well, either of little pragmatic consequence or boring.

I say this not to discount the clear thinkers. In the first place they are the last people on earth you want to make your enemy. They tend to be argumentative and, God help them, unconsciously sentimental. In the second place i have been too close to too many of them not to find it a credible modus operadni. They are unhesitatingly obsessed with the truth. Unfortunately, however, they also tend to think that their mode of obsession the only kind. Their criteria, of course, is that the truth, whatever it is, be clearly understood. Those who do not express or discover truth this way are not interested in it in the right kind of way. Many of them probably go so far as to say that if you do not express or discover truth this way, you do not express or discover it.

Thus you will find our analytic philosophers squabbling over the minutia of some minutia. It is a tactful and impressive exercise, really. Only someone with a certain temperament and mental constitution can do it. But it is tragically naive of those of them who think that they possess the modus operandi par excellence. I ask, "par excellence in virtue of what"? How can someone say their mode of interpreting the data is the better mode without invoking an objective principle--out of thin air-- for which mode is best ? Brake it down in layman's terms and you have, "i see the world this way and so should you."

I am beginning to think modes of interpretation have their corresponding psychological temperaments. It is very William James of me, i must confess, and i haven't yet worked out the details. The fear of consigning oneself to a false conclusion determines the insistence of our analytic types toward a modus operandi which fosters clarity. Given the true premises, we attain, however in-often, a certain answer. On the other hand hope as a temperamental disposition fits closer with the paradoxical type: truth, however incomplete or stretched, is attained en route, almost accidentally one might say. Additionally, it is almost always evolving. Of course, like every typology, there is not a one to one correspondence, not to mention it is an oversimplification. Any given human psyche is a bit more complex than that.

But what i like best about both approaches is their humility. Our clear types are O.K. with saying "i am only right about a very few number of things." Our paradoxical types are O.K. with saying "i am wrong about a great number of things."