Not for Reading

I.

Our language can be seen as an ancient

City—pace Wittgenstein—who

Surely meant a baptized city, for

The names come only with the blessing…

II.

And even though he boards in Muzot, finds

A seat with a window so he can watch

The rain, a pad and pen and swollen eyes—

His naming is no longer for the living,

He knows that. Squatting, old, narrow-gauge trains:

He studies his reflection in the dark tunnels

In the glass: There is swelling, that

Awful puffiness, rust in the throat…

Mimetic passion, not rocket science.

Teleology

Heard any good actuary jokes lately? Here’s one:  How do you keep an actuary in the shower all day? Give him a bottle of shampoo that says ‘lather, rinse, repeat’. Here’s another: An actuary and a farmer were traveling by train. When they passed a flock of sheep in a meadow, the actuary said, “There are 1,248 sheep out there.” The farmer replied, “Amazing. By chance, I know the owner, and the figure is absolutely correct. How did you count them so quickly?” The actuary answered, “Easy, I just counted the number of legs and divided by four.” This one, though, is my favorite: Actuary talking: “There are three kinds of actuaries. Those that can count. And those that can’t.”

I don’t know if this is a general truth or not, but it seems in proportion to the seriousness of the profession, and in proportion to its obscurity, the sillier and the more voluminous the jokes about it are. Actuarial science might serve as the poster boy for this idea. For one, it is a rather grim area of investigation, and two—well, admit it, you’re not too sure what it is an actuary practicing actuarial science actually does, are you? Turns out, insurance companies use it to figure the averages on things like how long we will live and how much money they will need to pay us our pensions. Actuarial science is the way they have of estimating when you and I are going to die and how they can make money off it. So, yes, a good actuary needs to be able to count, but he also needs to understand the statistics of mortality. If I live to 110 and the actuary has said it was okay to pay me x thousands dollars a year, it’s no big deal; but if we all live that long then the insurance companies will take a beating—and we don’t want that, do we? Actuaries do the math. They set the odds on old age. They estimate how many of us will die at age 20, for example, in a motorcycle crash and how many of us will die at 49 from leukemia, and how many of us will live into our 80’s and 90’s, burdening the health care system. It’s calculating the future, and it depends on a stable, predictable society. The goal of the actuary is to insure that most of us don’t beat the actuarial charts.

My father understood the science pretty well: When I was 16, 17 years old, he came home with a stack of photos from his office. These photos were not scenes from the Christmas party, or the annual company outing to Bear Mountain. They were pictures of mangled machines and mangled bodies, pictures taken by professional photographers to be used in court cases to settle insurance claims. They were pictures of motorcycle accidents. Machine and bodies smashed and pulped. The machines were replaceable; maybe some could even be rebuilt. The bodies were all dead bodies. And this is a general truth: You can’t rebuild a dead body. My father was telling his son: you have a shot of walking away from an accident if you’re in a car. Take a good look. This is a statistic you don’t want to be.

So, as a symbol of freedom or craftsmanship the motorcycle has never worked for me. While I liked Easy Rider and Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance well enough, it was also clear that you weren’t really free on a motorcycle and that there were other ways to get into Buddhism. While it’s true that both freedom and Zen involve commitment and risk, stupid is still stupid. My father set up for his son a path through the middle class of post-war America. It was a path that did not include motorcycles; it was supposed to be the same sort of path he walked on, in the stable, predictable society he lived in. My father had no thoughts about a Heideggerian equation between thinking and following a path; he would have considered Flaubert’s self-description that he ‘lived like a bourgeois and thought like a demigod’ mere pretension; and he would have snubbed the use of such words as ‘teleology’ in thinking about the science and craft of the actuary. The idea that the motorcycle was a symbol of anything other than a too early death would have struck him as errant nonsense.

Let’s look up ‘teleology’ for a moment, just a dictionary definition: The study of design or purpose in natural phenomena; the use of ultimate purpose or design as a means of explaining phenomena; belief in or the perception of purposeful development toward an end, as in nature or history. Humm. Is it a stretch to say that actuarial science is anti-teleological, that it’s a study in the limits of human striving, a pitting of man’s wishes and desires against the hard statistical reality of sickness and death?

Now, no one denies that when I walk to the corner store to buy a loaf of bread, I am engaging in a purposeful activity, and it would be foolish to think of my walk only in terms of a step-by-step account of my neural-motor functions. It would miss the fact that I wanted a peanut and jelly sandwich for lunch. So, from that perspective, working in a little teleology seems reasonable: humans do have goals. We call these goals ideas. The issue is about a broader conception of end directed activities—does the universe have a purpose? does history? does evolution?—that kind of question. The issue may be about the humanizing the universe—are we extrapolating wildly from our petty human concerns and projecting human goals out on to what is an indifferent cosmos, or are we seeing what is really there? I have a good idea. Let’s have peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for lunch. Would it make any sense to attribute such a thought to the universe? Humankind, love one another and your life will be enriched.

In a way it’s strange that we are still batting this question around. Kierkegaard in the early part of the 19^th century put it dramatically, thus:

If there were no eternal consciousness in a man, if at the bottom of everything there were only a wild ferment, a power that twisting in dark passions produced everything great or inconsequential; if an unfathomable, insatiable emptiness lay hid beneath everything, what would life be but despair?

Bird in Space

The first sentence test: It is not a serious novelist’s nightmare (the possibility is so absurd); nevertheless, suppose you fancied yourself a serious novelist (a writer, as they say, of the first rank), and a wire were delivered in your dream (the telephone rang, there was a sudden knock), and this were followed by the formal announcement that you, Julia Peterkin, or you, Marjorie Rawlings, or you, Allen Drury or Michael Shaara or Alison Lurie, had been awarded the Pulitzer Prize in fiction for 1929 or ‘39 or ‘60 or ‘75 or ‘85.

So, what do you think? This is Bill Gass, and he has done worse and/ or better, depending on ‘blue pencils, blue noses, blue movies, laws, legs and stockings, the language of birds, bees, and flowers and sung by Longshoremen, that lead like look the skin has when affected by the cold, contusion, sickness, fear’ to get his point across; depending, that is, on whether you think such sentences are ‘beautiful and breathless’ (and, yes, use these words when quoting), or a type of prison (as in prison sentence), because this particular sentence, the opening one for On Being Blue (I mean the quote in this sentence; we will get back to the first sentence), via the semicolon, will go on into the next page and he doesn’t even get to Babe the Big Blue Ox; and depending if you want your sentences to actually say something, something like ‘Dick and Jane went to the corner store and brought a loaf of bread’, and hold off to page two the injunction to, “Run Spot, run,”; depends anyway on if you think such sentences should name something, or at least say something (call them facts, call then propositions) or just be…gassing.

And it depends on how much work you are willing to let ‘depend’ do in any one sentence; I had it doing too much, I think; first pointing to some simple sentence structure, and then suggesting your evaluation depends on your tolerance for verbal flora and fauna, and then luring you perilously close to committing  something philosophical on names and propositions (‘say something’) or at least committing to a kind of realism, and maybe got you wondering if an account of language use was equivalent to an account of learning a language—what are you learning about anyway—and ending in some kind of childish appeal to flatulence. I could have said Out, out damn spot; and enough with the semicolons already.

In fiction, it makes sense to start with a character, put her right in that first sentence. This fiction we will call Bird in Space—

Saint Bromide surrendered to the stench of death as she forced herself to step into the darkened classroom. The purpose of the first sentence, she thought, is to get the reader to read the second sentence .It was like stepping over debris. If you don’t read the next sentence you will die a horrible death, and besides it’s a short sentence, so go on, take a look—please—I’ll be your best friend forever.

But the children had turned to clay and stone.

‘Call me Ishmael’, she announced to the darkness. Could anyone hear her voice? Was there anyone still alive? Speak the passwords and wait, she had been told.

From nowhere a voice emerged. ‘Melville’, it said. ‘Herman Melville.’

‘Bromide’ she answered bravely. ‘Felicia Saint Bromide’.

Synapse

Suppose I say, ‘I have this idea. Let’s climb up to the top of the cliffs and see if we can fly.’ Or:  I start to tell you an idea I have about setting up this investment company, but rather than invest the money we can use some of the new cash to give great returns to the old investors and skim off the rest, live high on the hog. It’s the perfect idea…

Aside from getting us killed and/ or put in jail, I’m advertising something here called an ‘idea’, and right now I’m giving you the idea that ideas are a bad thing (though look here before you cancel on the flying plan) but of course ideas always start out to be good—otherwise why have them, why say them, why write them down. ‘I have this stupid idea. Let’s climb…’

Some would say ideas are the province of philosophy; some would say ideas are the right of all free men and women, that they are in fact one of the things that makes us free; some would say ideas are the bane of mankind, the essential problem, that you can do just about anything with ideas—with the possible exception of eating them: It’s difficult to tell where ideas start and stop; it’s like the universe is pure mind generating impure thoughts: If mankind is the mind of the earth, ideas are like lightning in the night sky.

A. C. Grayling has a new book out called Ideas that Matter: a Personal Guide for the 21^st Century and The Edge has an ‘interview’ with him—actually he just talks for 10 minutes or so—where he sets out some ‘questions’ that are on his mind, ideas about science, liberal democracy, the mind, and information theory, and Memorial Day seems a good time to talk about them. For example: Science, he argues, is a the greatest achievement of mankind to date. We need to figure out a way to get more people interested in it. We need more scientists, more science education, more science awareness in general.

A.C. Grayling is a philosopher. That is his considered opinion; we can take it a fine example of an idea; we can even wonder if it is true.

Dr. Greg H. Bahnsen also has some videos on the web. Here he’s lecturing about ‘Problems for Unbelieving Worldviews’(sic), and even though he doesn’t earmark things as clearly as Grayling, he does have an idea we can talk about: You can’t actually do philosophy.

Dr. Bahnsen is a Christian apologist. This is his considered opinion; it too is a fine example of an idea; and while we would like to wonder if it’s true—I wonder if Dr. Bahnsen will let us, that wondering stuff being desperately close to doing philosophy.

Now Grayling seems pretty tame, maybe too tame:  We’ve got to get the kids into the lab. The more people that study science the better we will be. Sounds unexceptionable: it’s not like he’s drawing his cudgels to do battle with Dr. Bahnsen about philosophy: we’re talking science here, the science that gave us penicillin and the smallpox vaccine; that’s put a man on the moon; that’s given us evolution and the DNA molecule, has harnessed the power of electricity. Science has to be a good thing; so, it must be good to have more of it.  Right?

Let’s run a little thought experiment: these days the most popular major in college is business—finance, money and banking, economics, all that stuff—we’ve been putting the kids into the office, not the lab—so to draw a parallel with Professor Grayling’s thinking—if more science education will produce more and better science, we should be expecting a great flowering in our economic life right about now, a golden age: Third world countries finally getting the financial help they need, thoughtful and creative ways to provide universal health care, a true safety net for the old and infirm, economic stability for us all.

That’s not quite what’s happening, is it? Even if we don’t totter over the brink in to financial chaos, it seems fair to say that all we’ve produced lately is a lot of financial sharpies out trying to steal our money. And in a big way. Want to get a picture of just how much 700 billion dollars is? If you count a dollar a second, it will take you 31 years, 251 days, 7 hours, 46 minutes and 39 seconds to count one billion dollars. One billion. To count 700 billion we’re talking over 20,000 years: if you were just finishing your count today, you would have had to start in your cave during an ice age in the Pleistocene. You want a hot chocolate or anything?

Chapter XIV

Had it been up to Miss Stackpole they would have left the confines of Gardencourt immediately, but it was not up to Miss Stackpole; the decision was Isabel Archer’s, and Miss Archer was of the decided opinion that her discourse with Lord Warburton had not been concluded, not to either’s satisfaction; so they waited for something happen, waited while Warburton prevaricated, waited while he dithered, waited for Warburton to arrive…

At least this was Miss Stackpole’s opinion.

Isabel, on the contrary, rather felt that Lord Warburton’s delay was understandable, that it corresponded with his desire not to appear aristocratic and arbitrary. She felt it both established his concern for her feelings and credited his need to let some time pass while he mastered his own difficult emotions. It was, in short, appropriate to Warburton’s situation whether Miss Stackpole thought so or not, and her uncle silently agreed with her, for when Warburton did finally come to lunch, Mr. Touchett made it his business to be present, providing a kind of umbrella of support and camouflage to both Isabel and his good friend.

Isabel was at first surprised that Lord Warburton brought his sister with him. Was Miss Molyneux there for support or camouflage? The two visitors were introduced to Miss Stackpole, who sat next to Warburton and questioned him avidly. Isabel couldn’t help but admire his self-possession, for while Warburton neither looked nor spoke to her, he conversed freely with the rest of the table and seemed to enjoy his meal. Miss Molyneux was wearing a simple silver cross that bespoke deep Anglican mysteries. She appeared to be quite taken with Miss Stackpole, and while they talked, Isabel took in her smooth features and quite demeanor, her almost nun-like self-possession. Isabel wondered what Miss Molyneux would think if she knew she had refused his brother’s marriage proposal, but quickly realized Miss Molyneux would never know of this event. Lord Warburton did not tell his sister such things. Miss Molyneux would find the act difficult to comprehend, and surely see the situation as a failure of Isabel’s—of Isabel’s own comprehension—and not that of her brother’s heredity certainties.

Despite her friend’s pensive state, Henrietta Stackpole was not inclined to miss her opportunity. ”Do you know you’re the first lord I’ve ever seen?” she stated to Warburton. “I suppose you think I’m awfully benighted.”

“Then you’ve escaped seeing some very ugly men,” he answered, glancing briefly at Miss Archer.

“In America, you know, they try to make us think they are all handsome and magnificent, and that they all wear robes and crowns.” She reflected: “They can’t all be ugly.”

“Ah, the robes and crowns are gone out of fashion, I’m afraid—like your tomahawks and revolvers.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” Miss Stackpole replied. “An aristocracy ought to be grand. I can’t see any other use for…”

“Potatoes?” Warburton interrupted. He was holding a plate of boiled potatoes. “They’re awfully good.”

Bleak House

At first it seems like a flouting of the phony. A magician steps on stage, Mysterioso the Magnificent, set to amaze us with prestidigitation and conjugation, so the sign says—he’s even got his black cape on, he twirls an elongated mustache, bows to the audience, speaks with a wicked smile: ‘Watch me pull a rabbit out of my hat’…we groan, ‘not that old hat trick’…and instead pulls out ‘flowered curtains thin and frayed’ and ‘a strip of building land,/ Tussocky, littered’ and ‘the same saucer-souvenir’ and ‘the Frinton folk/ Who put him up for summer holidays’. He digs in again: ‘and at his age’…

Conjugation?

Is there such a thing as a ‘thrill’ of sorrow, a ‘sad’ frisson? Is there a harrowing melancholy? A despair so ordinary you can wrap it up tight and put it in a poem?

The hat Mysterioso’s opening out is this poem by Philip Larkin:

'This was Mr Bleaney's room. He stayed
The whole time he was at the Bodies, till
They moved him.' Flowered curtains, thin and frayed,
Fall to within five inches of the sill,
Whose window shows a strip of building land,
Tussocky, littered. 'Mr Bleaney took
My bit of garden properly in hand.'Bed, upright chair, sixty-watt bulb, no hook
Behind the door, no room for books or bags -
'I'll take it.' So it happens that I lie

Where Mr Bleaney lay, and stub my fags
On the same saucer-souvenir, and try
Stuffing my ears with cotton-wool, to drown
The jabbering set he egged her on to buy.

I know his habits - what time he came down,

His preference for sauce to gravy, why

He kept on plugging at the four aways -

Likewise their yearly frame: the Frinton folk

Who put him up for summer holidays,

And Christmas at his sister's house in Stoke.

But if he stood and watched the frigid wind
Tousling the clouds, lay on the fusty bed

Telling himself that this was home, and grinned,

And shivered, without shaking off the dread

That how we live measures our own nature,

And at his age having no more to show

Than one hired box should make him pretty sure

He warranted no better, I don't know.

Names must count for something. Name your protagonist ‘Maurice Conchis’ or ‘Mr. Cogito’—not to mention ‘Everyman’—and you’re suggesting to your reader something universal is going on here, something cosmic: consciousness itself is to be scrutinized, the fate of mankind is being weighted, so pay attention. Name your character ‘Mr. Bleaney’ and it’s not so obvious that you mean anything more than, you know, you opened the phone book and randomly pointed at ‘Harold Bleaney’. You’re going for the ordinary. You don’t know him; it’s just a name; because everyone has to have a name, don’t they?

Preamble

It’s a simple idea really: each philosopher gets 10 minutes of camera time to say a little about his or her work. That’s the whole movie. The exceptions being Cornell West who gets a couple of appearances—he opens the show with what might be a new genre, call it ‘philosophy rap’, and then closes, rapping again, before walking off into the night and into the mid-town Manhattan traffic to end the film—and Judith Butler who conducts a peripatetic interview with Sunaura Taylor as they go for a ‘walk’ through the San Francisco streets. While on the surface of it Sunaura qualifies to be in this film only by being the filmmaker’s sister, she has as much to say as anybody about philos ophy. When she walks, Sunaura walks with a wheelchair. I will say more about this in a minute, for walking and talking are the motifs one takes out of the theater. The name of the film is The Examined Life, and it’s about philosophers walking and talking and if this sounds boring to you, stop reading here. When I saw the film at a theater in New York City, there were four other people in the room. Walking, talking, thinking. Not a sexy film, I guess.

But, Cornell West is sexy, leaning forward to do some heavy name dropping, in his trademark three piece suit—and not walking, but sitting in a car—with a speech he’s made before, intent and intense, explaining what we don’t really need explained, this bit about the examined life: The Socratic imperative of questioning yourself requires courage…It takes more courage to examine the dark corners of your own soul than it does for a soldier to fight on the battlefield. Maybe…but it seems an unhelpful dichotomy. The battlefield might be a likely place for examination of those dark corners…and this idea of examining… It’s not just thinking about your ‘self’, right? It’s examining your ‘self’ as you live in the world, the decisions you make, the place you find yourself in, where you are going and where you have been. ‘Philosophy’ insofar as it becomes the act of questioning one’s self necessitates a questioning of the whole world, a questioning of existence. It’s not simply a matter of getting your ‘self’ a good shrink.

Avital Ronell wants to replace ‘philosophy’ with ‘thinking’, which seems good, except we don’t get too much exploration of what this particular type of thinking is, except to say that Heidegger did it, and that there are analogies with following a path. The sequence with Professor Ronell was filmed in Tomkins Square Park and it seems some of the locals got into the act, disrupting some of the scenes—though this did not make the final print, which is too bad. Sometimes when you’re walking and talking—and being filmed—you’re a walking, talking provocation. Just who does she think she is, anyway? Imagine getting paid to think. You think I can’t think?

Peter Singer wants everyone to keep their shoes on—their old, sensible shoes—when walking. He makes a sensible point that most of us spend more money than we need to, and could turn over a sizable portion of our income to legitimate charitable organizations. Just think of what the world would be like if Oxfam and Doctors without Borders had billions of dollars flowing through their coffers. Has this kind of thinking something to do with philosophy and with the examined life? Is ‘philosophy’ the act of being sensible? Of walking a sensible path?

Facing Stanley Dancing

 Steady. If you need a chair or something to hold on to, try this sentence:

It is a condition of, or a threat to, that relation to things called aesthetic, that something I know and cannot make intelligible stands to be lost to me.

There. There’s your rock to anchor to. Now we will start with two ‘conjoined quotes’, the first one by John Dewey, who is quoting Emerson, and the second by Nietzsche who is thinking about Wagner.

As Emerson says in his essay on “Self-Reliance”: “A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, . . . else to-morrow a stranger will say with masterly good sense precisely what we have thought and felt all the time, and we shall be forced to take with shame our own opinion from another” . . . Language does not help us at this point; rather the habits of our vocabulary betray us . . . To know what the words mean we have to forget the words and become aware of the occasions when some idea truly our own is stirring within us and strivingto come to birth.

Art has never been so much talked about [by critics, journalists, in schools, in society] and so little esteemed . . . On the other hand, many a being more nobly and delicately endowed by nature, though he may have gradually become a critical barbarian in the manner described, might have something to say about the unexpected as well as totally unintelligible effect that a successful performance of Lohengrin, for example, has on him—except that perhaps there was no helpful interpreting hand to guide him; so theincomprehensibly different and altogether incomparable sensation that thrilled him remained isolated and, like a mysterious star, became extinct after a short period of brilliance. But it was then that he had an inkling of what an aesthetic listener is.

That Dewey should be quoting Emerson at all is evidence that pragmatism does share some roots in Emerson’s thought. For Emerson and Dewey, habits tend to be a bad thing; it is better to cultivate an attention on the mind at the birth of an idea, to the ‘light’ that flashes from within; it keeps one from suffering the opinions of others as one’s own. Dewey, however, doesn’t quite get Emerson’s sense of the power of words, that we can use them against themselves, make them our own. The habits of our vocabulary betray us, he sums up. True, but this is not the whole story. John and Waldo seem to be taking a slow turn around the dance floor, agreeing that a habitual response is bad, but politely misunderstanding each other’s words about words.

Nietzsche is dancing to Lohengrin, but he too has words on his mind. Never has art been talked about so much, and never has it been so little esteemed. Curious, isn’t it? One would think that the interested listener could—should—be able to use words to describe the effect that a performance of Lohengrin has had on him. We seem to have two bi-polar pals in the concert hall, the critical barbarian and the aesthetic listener, the wordsmith without sensibility and the sensibility without the vocabulary to aid him.

The aesthetic listener? My, that rather recalls to mind Kant’s characterization of aesthetic judgment… at least it reminds Stanley Cavell of Stanley Cavell’s characterization of Kant’s notion in a little essay he published in Must We Mean What We Say? in which he proposes that Kant’s characterization of the aesthetic judgment models the relevant philosophical claim to voice what we should ordinarily say when, and what we should mean in saying it. Underline ‘ordinarily’ here, because this whole dance we’ve been blocking out is in the interest of Stanley Cavell’s recovery of ‘what J. L. Austin and the latter Wittgenstein name the ordinary.’

Not to worry. We have merely crossed the threshold of Something Out of the Ordinary, which started out as an address Stanley Cavell gave to the American Philosophical Association and is now chapter one in a book called Philosophy the Day after Tomorrow. Are you ready? Fred Astaire is going to perform and Immanuel Kant is out front warming up the crowd. Something out of the ordinary. They say Ginger Rogers danced every step Fred Astaire did, but backwards, facing Fred. All we have to do is dance a little dance backwards, facing Stanley—and figure out what the ordinary is—in the work, you know, of John Austin and Ludwig Wittgenstein. That’s all.

One problem we have to start with is that Stanley Cavell might well be the Mount Rushmore of philosophy. Reading him fills one with words and sentence structure and difficult rhetoric—all good stuff—but one can be left gasping—and that breath of air competes with a breadth of knowledge and a range of reference and an idiosyncratic style—perhaps we confront true philosophy here, perhaps we duplicate the sort of thing the Athenians dealt with when talking in the Agora with Socrates…

And perhaps we don’t.

For Valentines’ Day this Year…

…we will discuss a perennial question: What makes a poem a love poem? What are the qualifications that push your ordinary, quotidian poem into the realm of the romantic? That’s going to be my present this year. Everybody okay here? It’s either that or I buy another Whitman’s Sampler…and you know where that takes us.

“Honey, does this box of chocolates make me look fat?”

So…one, it has to be a poem and, two, it has to have something to do with love (to get the banalities out of the way), and, three, there has to be some further affinity going on, some synergy—or sovereignty—that putting the two together creates. I mean, why do ‘love’ and ‘poetry’ jump each other’s bones?

There are websites devoted to bad love poetry. Here’s an example, pretty much chosen at random

Butrose,

I also agree,

I am falling

in love,

continually

This poem bears the title ‘Adoration, part 3’and is attributed to ‘Liarbyrd’. Butrose is pushed together, suggesting maybe someone’s name—or posterior—and where ‘But, rose, I agree’ would at least have shadowed the apostrophe in William Blake’s great poem, The Sick Rose—‘O Rose, thou art sick…’— there is a weak ‘also’ suggesting, I guess parts 1 and 2. Compared to other very short poems, where powerful imagery prevails, like Pound’s In the Metro Station—

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;

Petals on a wet, black bough.

—‘Adoration, part 3’s’ not even trying. And as to its rhyming agree with continually…well:

Thy smell continually

Is with thee;

Is it the sea—

Or Brie?

***

When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes,

I all alone beweep my outcast state

And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries

And look upon myself and curse my fate,

Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,

Featured like him, like him with friends possess’d,

Desiring this man’s art and that man’s scope,

With what I most enjoy contented least;

Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,

Haply I think on thee, and then my state,

Like to the lark at break of day arising

From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven’s gate;

For thy sweet love remember’d such wealth brings

That then I scorn to change my state with kings.

There are of course websites with good love poems. This poem is called Sonnet 29…and, no, I am not going to do a compare and contrast with ‘Adoration, part3’: Like to the lark at break of day arising from sullen earth…

To propose some broad questions we could ask: What is love and why should we think it has something to do with poetry? Or: what is poetry and why should it be thought the perfect vehicle to express love? And: What’s the connection here? Does this particular highly charged emotion have something particular to do with poetry, or is this some wash-back from Romanticism? While there may be poems that express shame or envy, these aren’t genres. ‘So-and-so, he’s quite a master of Pity Poetry. I feel bad for him.’

A Nihilist at the Superbowl

Kickoff

Right away there’s a problem: Exactly how do you go about saying anything at all about nihilism? Or learning anything…or simply knowing anything? The Latin root nihil means ‘nothing’, so nihilism is, quite literally, a nothing-ism—a doctrine of…well, what? The dictionary tells us that nihilism is ‘an extreme form of skepticism that denies all existence’, and ‘a doctrine holding that all values are baseless and that nothing can be known or communicated.’

No, we are never going to learn anything about nihilism—at least not from the horse’s mouth. For a dedicated nihilist must, it seems, subscribe to the idea that those who say don’t know and those who know don’t say. Even a path of pure negativity is fraught with problems: Say, A asserts something, anything: “The sky is blue.” What response do you give? A shake of the head? This is clearly not enough, but try to explain why you can’t say ‘the sky is blue’—and suddenly you’re defending the status of your criticisms. If you can’t know anything, you can’t know that you can’t know. Na, na, na na na.

And this case-by-case approach has got to be exhausting, what with humanity gushing sentences right and left—not only is the sky blue, but the sea is green, the rose is red—and one wonders if a punctilious nihilist isn’t fast on the way to refuting his own position. Why persevere? If I think the Superbowl is just super, you might spend time showing me the error of my ways, but the case for, say, the World Cup being superior or the Olympic Games is likely to be more convincing to me than a hectoring: Hey, nothing is super, man. You don’t understand reality.

If I want to kick back, open a few beers, get a pizza, have a few friends over, buy a big screen TV, and root for, ah, whoever it is who’s playing…well, damn it, the Superbowl is super. The Giants won last year and it was a great game, a great game. Remember that catch that, ah, what’s his face, made? Unbelievable.

The claim that nihilism is inarticulate, however, should give us an uneasy pause. Just because we’re pushing at the limits of our language here, doesn’t quite mean that the Superbowl is super—because, let’s face it, we know it isn’t—and it’s not super only in comparison to the World Cup; it’s not super because it doesn’t appear to be rooted in anything. At best, it’s an epiphyte, a pretty orchard living off our dreams in a dense wood. Kierkegaard had a notion that he called the rotation method. It’s a subtitle way of distracting oneself from the realities of life; instead of focusing on one thing, you constantly rotate your distractions; it keeps us from growing bored with our empty existence. This week it’s the Superbowl, next week it’s NASCAR, and, hey, March Madness is just around the corner. Sure we have trouble talking about nihilism; so we talk about football and let that draw an outline around the emptiness. Winning isn’t everything, said Vince Lombardi. It’s the only thing. Sure coach. Sure.