Showing posts with label art. Show all posts
Showing posts with label art. Show all posts
Friday, June 1, 2018
Saturday, April 21, 2018
Saturday, August 19, 2017
Sunday, March 10, 2013
Sunday, August 5, 2012
Swagger
L. Paul Bremer III, who spent the Bush administration bringing disaster to Iraq, is now self-employed as a landscape painter in Vermont. At
http://blog.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2012/08/02/the_watercolor_paintings_of_paul_bremer
you can find an illustrated article about his oeuvre. The man is every bit as good at being an artist as he was at being a proconsul. But he's confident enough nevertheless to bring his work before the public.
Here, in front of the cathedral in Padua, is the first Renaissance equestrian statue, Donatello’s image of the condottiere Gattamelata. In their own right, the armored image and the cathedral come to us massively, in the final rightness that history bestows on its darlings. But click the photograph anyway if you wish to enlarge it.
Sometimes confidence does bring forth works with the power to outlive. For them, "outlive" is an intransitive verb. It survives their makers, burning away all the evil of their beginning. They can kill, but the deaths they impose aren't just blundering Bremerian Fingerfehler. We love them for the reason Rilke loved his angels: because they serenely disdain to destroy us.
http://blog.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2012/08/02/the_watercolor_paintings_of_paul_bremer
you can find an illustrated article about his oeuvre. The man is every bit as good at being an artist as he was at being a proconsul. But he's confident enough nevertheless to bring his work before the public.
---
Here, in front of the cathedral in Padua, is the first Renaissance equestrian statue, Donatello’s image of the condottiere Gattamelata. In their own right, the armored image and the cathedral come to us massively, in the final rightness that history bestows on its darlings. But click the photograph anyway if you wish to enlarge it.
Sometimes confidence does bring forth works with the power to outlive. For them, "outlive" is an intransitive verb. It survives their makers, burning away all the evil of their beginning. They can kill, but the deaths they impose aren't just blundering Bremerian Fingerfehler. We love them for the reason Rilke loved his angels: because they serenely disdain to destroy us.
Tuesday, June 30, 2009
When contexts vanish, part 2
I was calling your attention to a pair of nineteenth-century girls posed for a tintype photographer in skirts and hats marked with the word "SLAVE." The girls were also garlanded with chains, and one of them was posing in a pioneer attitude. The girls were self-captioned with signs connecting them to an external context, I said, but that context is probably gone forever. What's left of the girls now is only their picture, and we're reduced to seeing that picture only in formal terms.
Of course a part of the curriculum of art education has always been the discipline of formalized seeing, but most of us don't see only formally and don't want to. It is not mere sentimentality to want to see through a family photograph to the real person that its array of pigments evokes. But we can't do that sentimental kind of seeing through unless we have a pre-existing idea of what lies behind the image. About an image posted to the Web by an online anonymity we can meaningfully say, "I love this picture because it reminds me of my dog," but the girls in the tintypes can't provide us with a dog to imagine -- or a pageant either, or a political rally, or anything to love. Whatever the tintypes that we see now may have meant to the girls and the people who made up their world in their lifetime, to us they can mean nothing more than light and shade, color and volume, form and formalism. The girls' chains might as well be shackling them for eternity to the surfaces of their tintypes, those little slips of blackened metal coated with a silver halide emulsion in which reflection from the photoreduced areas of elemental silver creates the illusion of white flesh and steely chain. The only context those images have is themselves.
Well, the comical impossibility of an auto-generated context ("I am a slave. You can tell because I'm labeled 'Slave'") was dealt with long ago by Shakespeare. In A Midsummer Night's Dream, when Snout explains that he's carrying a stone and some mortar to show us that he's a wall, we laugh because we realize that a metonymic label claiming to represent reality by association ("I am a wall. You can tell because walls are made of stone, and I'm carrying a stone") is always too small to cover the entire area it's supposed to represent. The man holding a stone is still a man; the white girls in the tintype studio are still white girls in a tintype studio. Metonymy hasn't effected the transformations it tells us it has effected. It hasn't changed its subjects' relations to us. Metonymy solemnly tells us, "Before Snout picked up the stone he was a man, but now he's a wall" -- and we laugh at metonymy, because we can see better.
But we also laugh because this particular failed transformation is reassuring. The play performed by Snout and the rude mechanicals originates in the horror story that is Ovid's Metamorphoses, a vast parable which says that transformation does occur, and we are powerless before it. You are not what you think you are, say the Metamorphoses; sooner or later, gradually or suddenly, you will become something other. The happy ending of A Midsummer Night's Dream, like the happy endings of other comedies (think of almost any sports movie, for instance), is simply an arbitrary assertion that the ceaselessness of change will now cease. At the end of the sports movie, the game has been won, finally and forever; at the end of A Midsummer Night's Dream, Hermia and Lysander, Demetrius and Helena, and Theseus and Hippolyta have entered the great unchange of happily ever after. And the laughable falsity of the tragic play within the play convinces us, by contrast, that the comic outer play must be true. But Ovid pokes his head around the closing curtain to remind us that the most fantastic words in any fairy tale are The End.
I once experienced both the metonymy and the realization of change's endless unmeaning, simultaneously. It was the loneliest instant of my life in language.
The time was midmorning on a February day in 1966; the place was the break room in Building 400 of the Greenfield, Indiana, laboratories of the pharmaceutical manufacturer Eli Lilly & Co., my employer. The macrotext was the Indianapolis Star, a newspaper whose conservative editorial views (Don't let the communists fluoridate our water!) permeated every page. The microtext that day was an article about an event in Bloomington, sixty miles south of where I sat reading. There in Bloomington, said the article, a man had recently delivered a poetry reading on the campus of Indiana University. The man who read the poems was never named; instead, the article referred to him only as "a 'poet.'" The scornful journalist thought his readers should know that the "poet" had begun the reading by announcing, "This is my wife, Peter."
I read the article. With some excitement, I thought: "I know who that poet is!" Then I thought: "I bet I'm the only person in the plant who does know." And then: "Or care."
On the frozen flatlands of Indiana, I experienced desolation.
I had been able to place an item of data into a context and give it meaning, but the meaning was incommunicable. Strictly speaking, the knowledge I had created had no meaning -- at least, no meaning for anybody in Greenfield, Indiana. In Greenfield, at the time, you could spend the night in the Hoosier Poet Motel, which was named after one of Ezra Pound's favorite poets, the Greenfield native James Whitcomb Riley. The site of one of Riley's most beloved poems, "The Old Swimmin' Hole," was still preserved in a Greenfield park. But it was full of rats, and I was alone.
In due time I left Greenfield for Bloomington, and eventually I read Ginsberg's own poem about the reading: "Auto Poesy: On the Lam from Bloomington" (The Fall of America: Poems of These States 1965-1971 [San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1972] 27). It isn't a very good poem, but for me it brings back memories of the drive east from Indiana on US 40 in the days before Interstate 70, with the crossing from Ohio into West Virginia at Wheeling: "Across Ohio River, noon / old wire bridge, auto graveyards." I enjoy that part because I can read through it to a sentiment of my own, as if I were looking at a picture of somebody else's cute puppydog.
But the process of evocation worked differently a few lines earlier. There, the poem describes the ride past "Eli Lilly pharmaceuticals' tower walls / asleep in early morning dark outside Indianapolis / Street lamps lit humped along downtown Greenfield" -- a ride made more interesting by the "Ho! Dimethyl Triptamine flashing circle vibrations" with which the poet was keeping himself busy at the time. When I read that, I protested to the book in my hand, "But Allen, all we made there was vaccines!" That little truth constituted the "Little did he know" moment that characterizes dramatic irony, but on the only stage where it ever will be performed there was no one but me. Mr. Ginsberg wasn't in the audience, and neither was anyone else. I had brought a context into existence, but it was a context doomed to go to the grave unremembered as soon as I do. Looking now at the tintypes of the girls costumed in their slave word, I realize that they and I are in the same historical situation of muteness before the event.
Still, I do draw pleasure from the tintypes. Maybe I don't really need any contexts beyond language itself. Cute puppydog, as formal as a Picasso!
Of course a part of the curriculum of art education has always been the discipline of formalized seeing, but most of us don't see only formally and don't want to. It is not mere sentimentality to want to see through a family photograph to the real person that its array of pigments evokes. But we can't do that sentimental kind of seeing through unless we have a pre-existing idea of what lies behind the image. About an image posted to the Web by an online anonymity we can meaningfully say, "I love this picture because it reminds me of my dog," but the girls in the tintypes can't provide us with a dog to imagine -- or a pageant either, or a political rally, or anything to love. Whatever the tintypes that we see now may have meant to the girls and the people who made up their world in their lifetime, to us they can mean nothing more than light and shade, color and volume, form and formalism. The girls' chains might as well be shackling them for eternity to the surfaces of their tintypes, those little slips of blackened metal coated with a silver halide emulsion in which reflection from the photoreduced areas of elemental silver creates the illusion of white flesh and steely chain. The only context those images have is themselves.
Well, the comical impossibility of an auto-generated context ("I am a slave. You can tell because I'm labeled 'Slave'") was dealt with long ago by Shakespeare. In A Midsummer Night's Dream, when Snout explains that he's carrying a stone and some mortar to show us that he's a wall, we laugh because we realize that a metonymic label claiming to represent reality by association ("I am a wall. You can tell because walls are made of stone, and I'm carrying a stone") is always too small to cover the entire area it's supposed to represent. The man holding a stone is still a man; the white girls in the tintype studio are still white girls in a tintype studio. Metonymy hasn't effected the transformations it tells us it has effected. It hasn't changed its subjects' relations to us. Metonymy solemnly tells us, "Before Snout picked up the stone he was a man, but now he's a wall" -- and we laugh at metonymy, because we can see better.
But we also laugh because this particular failed transformation is reassuring. The play performed by Snout and the rude mechanicals originates in the horror story that is Ovid's Metamorphoses, a vast parable which says that transformation does occur, and we are powerless before it. You are not what you think you are, say the Metamorphoses; sooner or later, gradually or suddenly, you will become something other. The happy ending of A Midsummer Night's Dream, like the happy endings of other comedies (think of almost any sports movie, for instance), is simply an arbitrary assertion that the ceaselessness of change will now cease. At the end of the sports movie, the game has been won, finally and forever; at the end of A Midsummer Night's Dream, Hermia and Lysander, Demetrius and Helena, and Theseus and Hippolyta have entered the great unchange of happily ever after. And the laughable falsity of the tragic play within the play convinces us, by contrast, that the comic outer play must be true. But Ovid pokes his head around the closing curtain to remind us that the most fantastic words in any fairy tale are The End.
I once experienced both the metonymy and the realization of change's endless unmeaning, simultaneously. It was the loneliest instant of my life in language.
The time was midmorning on a February day in 1966; the place was the break room in Building 400 of the Greenfield, Indiana, laboratories of the pharmaceutical manufacturer Eli Lilly & Co., my employer. The macrotext was the Indianapolis Star, a newspaper whose conservative editorial views (Don't let the communists fluoridate our water!) permeated every page. The microtext that day was an article about an event in Bloomington, sixty miles south of where I sat reading. There in Bloomington, said the article, a man had recently delivered a poetry reading on the campus of Indiana University. The man who read the poems was never named; instead, the article referred to him only as "a 'poet.'" The scornful journalist thought his readers should know that the "poet" had begun the reading by announcing, "This is my wife, Peter."
I read the article. With some excitement, I thought: "I know who that poet is!" Then I thought: "I bet I'm the only person in the plant who does know." And then: "Or care."
On the frozen flatlands of Indiana, I experienced desolation.
I had been able to place an item of data into a context and give it meaning, but the meaning was incommunicable. Strictly speaking, the knowledge I had created had no meaning -- at least, no meaning for anybody in Greenfield, Indiana. In Greenfield, at the time, you could spend the night in the Hoosier Poet Motel, which was named after one of Ezra Pound's favorite poets, the Greenfield native James Whitcomb Riley. The site of one of Riley's most beloved poems, "The Old Swimmin' Hole," was still preserved in a Greenfield park. But it was full of rats, and I was alone.
In due time I left Greenfield for Bloomington, and eventually I read Ginsberg's own poem about the reading: "Auto Poesy: On the Lam from Bloomington" (The Fall of America: Poems of These States 1965-1971 [San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1972] 27). It isn't a very good poem, but for me it brings back memories of the drive east from Indiana on US 40 in the days before Interstate 70, with the crossing from Ohio into West Virginia at Wheeling: "Across Ohio River, noon / old wire bridge, auto graveyards." I enjoy that part because I can read through it to a sentiment of my own, as if I were looking at a picture of somebody else's cute puppydog.
But the process of evocation worked differently a few lines earlier. There, the poem describes the ride past "Eli Lilly pharmaceuticals' tower walls / asleep in early morning dark outside Indianapolis / Street lamps lit humped along downtown Greenfield" -- a ride made more interesting by the "Ho! Dimethyl Triptamine flashing circle vibrations" with which the poet was keeping himself busy at the time. When I read that, I protested to the book in my hand, "But Allen, all we made there was vaccines!" That little truth constituted the "Little did he know" moment that characterizes dramatic irony, but on the only stage where it ever will be performed there was no one but me. Mr. Ginsberg wasn't in the audience, and neither was anyone else. I had brought a context into existence, but it was a context doomed to go to the grave unremembered as soon as I do. Looking now at the tintypes of the girls costumed in their slave word, I realize that they and I are in the same historical situation of muteness before the event.
Still, I do draw pleasure from the tintypes. Maybe I don't really need any contexts beyond language itself. Cute puppydog, as formal as a Picasso!
Thursday, June 4, 2009
"Entirely impersonal, lacking in any human interest"
In Mexico City on November 12, 1925, Edward Weston recorded one of the ever-recurring moments when he saw the shape of a body as if for the first time. "I was shaving when A. came," he wrote in his Daybook,
But Weston was uneasy with abstraction. He craved his "fleeting moments from life." After he had photographed the pure shape of one of his peppers, he ate it. In the aftermath of art, too, art's consumers use it to experience their own fleeting moments from life in the only way they can: with money. In the upper part of this image, for example, we can see the shape Edward Weston saw for one now vanished instant in 1925. Then we see his signature: the reifying, immortalizing equivalent of the fiat, "This note is legal tender," on the money we live by. And then comes one of many fleeting moments from the image's second life, the one that will now last forever. This moment takes the form, for now, of another kind of Daybook entry. On the day it records, the news read, "Sold for $1.6 Million Record."
http://www.artknowledgenews.com/Sothebys_Sale_of_The_Quillan_Photographs_Collection.html
Eighty-four years after Weston accepted a woman's body in the guise of lines, forms, and volumes, the New York Times helped its readers accept their newly impoverished economic situations by running an article about another artist -- one who made buying and selling into an art form existing purely on its own terms. His was an art of pure circulation, as Brancusi's was an art of pure geometry. The artist's name was Charles Ponzi, his art form was what is now known as the Ponzi scheme, and we are to read the article about him (Ralph Blumenthal, "Uncovered Manuscript Sheds Light on the First Ponzi," New York Times 5 May 2009: A19+) with the help of another photograph.
The caption to this image in the online version at http://nytimes.com reads, "When Ponzi's scheme started to unravel, investors tried to get their money back. This was the crowd outside his firm, at 27 School Street [Boston], on July 30, 1920." Without the educational guidance of those words, however, what we primarily see with our naked eyes is an eddying, two-part composition made of men's hats. Almost all of these are the flat straw hats called boaters which were standard summer wear for middle-class American men as of 1920. Looking closely for deviations from the standard, I spot only a few felt hats, a few military or police caps, a few of the flat caps worn by men of the working class, and one Panama. This, then, is a street scene portraying a society in which men regulate their looks by a norm. Only the words printed below the scene can tell us, now, that these men are out on the street because they have just learned that the norm was nothing but a work of art.
But near the lower right corner of this crowd of men enacting Charles Ponzi's performance there is an exception to the norm. It is this exception, in fact, which helps us understand the norm to be a norm.
This exceptional aggregation of people appears to be a family group. Among all these men, its body language is feminine. Leading the group is an older woman, with a younger one behind her and two children to her left. Behind the younger woman walks a young man, and next to him is another figure who may be a third woman. The two young women, and only they, are looking toward their right, away from the crowd on the sidewalk where they stand. The head of the young woman who stands closer to us is inclined forward, as if she is listening for something being spoken. She is placed symmetrically in the middle of the composition: behind the older woman with the children, before the young man and the other young woman. Surrounded by the circumstantial data that we will look at in 2009 and call "history," she was, on July 30, 1920, what Weston would have called a living, palpitating body. Living and palpitating, listening for words coming toward her through the air, she had a name and what she would have called a biography. But we know her now only as an image. In that form -- "entirely impersonal, lacking in any human interest" -- she will now live forever.
Her immortality came to her through the labor of two artists: an anonymous photographer on a summer day in Boston, and -- prior to the photographer, and enabling his work -- Charles Ponzi, a choreographer whose material consisted of crowds of desperate men. That is their glory, and it is a glory entirely impersonal: the rigor of "the love that moves the sun and the other stars." Weston and Balanchine and the other great modernists have enabled us who dwell in their aftermath to see form in the act of rising free from the body. And -- thanks to the art of Charles Ponzi -- for a while it was possible to believe that the ballet of money was a way of making that act of transcendence available as a second chance to those who possess neither beauty nor a camera.
hardly expecting her on such a gloomy, drizzling day. I made excuses, having no desire, no 'inspiration' to work. I dragged out my shaving, hinting that the light was poor, that she would shiver in the unheated room: but she took no hints, undressing while I reluctantly prepared my camera. And then appeared to me the most exquisite lines, forms, volumes--and I accepted,--working easily, rapidly, surely. (The Daybooks of Edward Weston. Volume I, Mexico. Ed. Nancy Newhall. Millerton, NY: Aperture, 1973. 136)The next day, Weston looked over his November 12 work and compared it with another series of nudes: the passionately intimate ones he had created from and for the body of his mistress and fellow photographer, Tina Modotti. Thinking of the difference, he wrote:
I made fifteen negatives of A. Eight I may finish, six most surely. My first enthusiasm has not abated, I was not unduly excited. Under cool reconsideration, they retain their importance as my finest set of nudes,--that is, in their approach to aesthetically stimulating form. Most of the series are entirely impersonal, lacking in any human interest which might call attention to a living, palpitating body. Not that I am prepared to say this is a finer use of photography than the rendering of realism, the frank statement of fact, the capturing of fleeting moments from life, as I have done, and never better than with Tina,--in fact I have always held the latter approach more important, since no other medium can possibly picture life so well: but one must satisfy all desires and at present my tendency seems entirely toward the abstract.This nude from 1925 (not of "A.," I believe) will show us what Weston meant by "tendency toward the abstract." As he says elsewhere, he had been learning cubist form from Brancusi.
But Weston was uneasy with abstraction. He craved his "fleeting moments from life." After he had photographed the pure shape of one of his peppers, he ate it. In the aftermath of art, too, art's consumers use it to experience their own fleeting moments from life in the only way they can: with money. In the upper part of this image, for example, we can see the shape Edward Weston saw for one now vanished instant in 1925. Then we see his signature: the reifying, immortalizing equivalent of the fiat, "This note is legal tender," on the money we live by. And then comes one of many fleeting moments from the image's second life, the one that will now last forever. This moment takes the form, for now, of another kind of Daybook entry. On the day it records, the news read, "Sold for $1.6 Million Record."
http://www.artknowledgenews.com/Sothebys_Sale_of_The_Quillan_Photographs_Collection.html
Eighty-four years after Weston accepted a woman's body in the guise of lines, forms, and volumes, the New York Times helped its readers accept their newly impoverished economic situations by running an article about another artist -- one who made buying and selling into an art form existing purely on its own terms. His was an art of pure circulation, as Brancusi's was an art of pure geometry. The artist's name was Charles Ponzi, his art form was what is now known as the Ponzi scheme, and we are to read the article about him (Ralph Blumenthal, "Uncovered Manuscript Sheds Light on the First Ponzi," New York Times 5 May 2009: A19+) with the help of another photograph.
The caption to this image in the online version at http://nytimes.com reads, "When Ponzi's scheme started to unravel, investors tried to get their money back. This was the crowd outside his firm, at 27 School Street [Boston], on July 30, 1920." Without the educational guidance of those words, however, what we primarily see with our naked eyes is an eddying, two-part composition made of men's hats. Almost all of these are the flat straw hats called boaters which were standard summer wear for middle-class American men as of 1920. Looking closely for deviations from the standard, I spot only a few felt hats, a few military or police caps, a few of the flat caps worn by men of the working class, and one Panama. This, then, is a street scene portraying a society in which men regulate their looks by a norm. Only the words printed below the scene can tell us, now, that these men are out on the street because they have just learned that the norm was nothing but a work of art.
But near the lower right corner of this crowd of men enacting Charles Ponzi's performance there is an exception to the norm. It is this exception, in fact, which helps us understand the norm to be a norm.
This exceptional aggregation of people appears to be a family group. Among all these men, its body language is feminine. Leading the group is an older woman, with a younger one behind her and two children to her left. Behind the younger woman walks a young man, and next to him is another figure who may be a third woman. The two young women, and only they, are looking toward their right, away from the crowd on the sidewalk where they stand. The head of the young woman who stands closer to us is inclined forward, as if she is listening for something being spoken. She is placed symmetrically in the middle of the composition: behind the older woman with the children, before the young man and the other young woman. Surrounded by the circumstantial data that we will look at in 2009 and call "history," she was, on July 30, 1920, what Weston would have called a living, palpitating body. Living and palpitating, listening for words coming toward her through the air, she had a name and what she would have called a biography. But we know her now only as an image. In that form -- "entirely impersonal, lacking in any human interest" -- she will now live forever.
Her immortality came to her through the labor of two artists: an anonymous photographer on a summer day in Boston, and -- prior to the photographer, and enabling his work -- Charles Ponzi, a choreographer whose material consisted of crowds of desperate men. That is their glory, and it is a glory entirely impersonal: the rigor of "the love that moves the sun and the other stars." Weston and Balanchine and the other great modernists have enabled us who dwell in their aftermath to see form in the act of rising free from the body. And -- thanks to the art of Charles Ponzi -- for a while it was possible to believe that the ballet of money was a way of making that act of transcendence available as a second chance to those who possess neither beauty nor a camera.
Thursday, May 28, 2009
Poets vs. people
When we say "good," what do we mean? The ambiguous old word caused its standard old problem once again last week.
Humanly speaking, this time the problem came out looking like a hybrid of Anthony Trollope and Newt Gingrich. At Oxford University, the Afro-Caribbean poet Derek Walcott withdrew from competition for the prestigious elective post of Professor of Poetry after at least 100 electors received an anonymous mailing which called attention to his age, 79, and documented accusations of sexual harassment brought against him in the 1980s. Walcott, a Nobel laureate, had been the candidate most favored to win; after his withdrawal, the only remaining competitors were the Englishwoman Ruth Padel and the Indian Arvind Krishna Mehrotra. Padel won easily, becoming the first female Professor of Poetry in history. In her gracious victory statement, she deplored the smear campaign against Walcott.
But shortly afterward, it turned out that she'd been associated with the campaign herself. After a tenure of just nine days, she resigned.
And then, of course, it was time for one more run with the old problem. Yes, what do we mean when we say "good"? By way of locating Walcott in a historical context, the Telegraph columnist Michael Deacon raced his readers through a whole list of good (i.e., competent) poets who were not entirely good (i.e., virtuous) men, from the physically filthy W. H. Auden all the way back and down to the depraved Earl of Rochester. Here's a link to the column.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/personal-view/5330369/An-Oxford-poet-slayed-by-gossip.html
And when you put the problem the way this column does, it is as simple as the columnist makes it sound. John Henry Newman stated it this way for his mistaken students who thought they were in college to become good men: "Knowledge is one thing, virtue is another." That was in 1852, in the lectures that would become The Idea of a University. In freshman comp in 2009, I still teach the oceanic paragraph where Newman's idea comes rolling in, wave after wave. I teach it as an example of the periodic sentence, but I believe it too.
Knowledge is one thing, virtue is another; good sense is not conscience, refinement is not humility, nor is largeness and justness of view faith. Philosophy, however enlightened, however profound, gives no command over the passions, no influential motives, no vivifying principles. Liberal Education makes not the Christian, not the Catholic, but the gentleman. It is well to be a gentleman, it is well to have a cultivated intellect, a delicate taste, a candid, equitable, dispassionate mind, a noble and courteous bearing in the conduct of life;--these are the connatural qualities of a large knowledge; they are the objects of a University; I am advocating, I shall illustrate and insist upon them; but still, I repeat, they are no guarantee for sanctity or even for conscientiousness, they may attach to the man of the world, to the profligate, to the heartless,--pleasant, alas, and attractive as he seems when decked out in them. Taken by themselves, they do but seem to be what they are not; they look like virtue at a distance, but they are detected by close observers, and on the long run; and hence it is that they are popularly accused of pretence and hypocrisy, not, I repeat, from their own fault, but because their professors and their admirers persist in taking them for what they are not, and are officious in arrogating for them a praise to which they have no claim. Quarry the granite rock with razors, or moor the vessel with a thread of silk; then may you hope with such keen and delicate instruments as human knowledge and human reason to contend against those giants, the passion and the pride of man.
Simple enough, for all its elaborate beauty. To become smart, go to college; to become good, go to church. To learn virtue, go sit at the feet of Maya Angelou. To learn poetry, take a course from Derek Walcott. Poetry has its own claims. But how do those claims become ours? Where does language become a poem -- in a poet's isolated mind, or in the world that the poet shares with readers and their needs for language?
To make the problem manageably small, we could consider just one little world with poetry in it; say, England after World War II. England after World War II was feeling pathetic, I sometimes tell my students, and the reason Philip Larkin became the most historically significant poet of the era was that he was uniquely qualified to put pathetic feelings into accessible form. Consider, for instance, the bitter nostalgia suffusing Larkin's masterpiece, "High Windows." All but physically soiling the page it's printed on, this poem is the secretion of a narrator who is a dirty old man; and (I tell my students) one reason Larkin was so good at realizing that dirty old man in words may be that in what's called real life he was a dirty old man: a bigoted, alcoholic miser with a collection of stroke magazines.
"Always historicize," says Fredric Jameson, writer of ugly prose. In the undergraduate poetry classroom, the dictum works. But post-Padel you can see how historicizing can also oversimplify. By linking a poem to its time-bound poet the way I did, by making a poem the subject of biography and thematic analysis and moralism, I didn't leave myself any way to read its actual words. It's as if I think any dirty old man could write "High Windows." I've demoted Philip Larkin, a poet, to the status of Maya Angelou, a talking biography. I've left out the art part.
And the art part is what this blog proposes to be about.
Humanly speaking, this time the problem came out looking like a hybrid of Anthony Trollope and Newt Gingrich. At Oxford University, the Afro-Caribbean poet Derek Walcott withdrew from competition for the prestigious elective post of Professor of Poetry after at least 100 electors received an anonymous mailing which called attention to his age, 79, and documented accusations of sexual harassment brought against him in the 1980s. Walcott, a Nobel laureate, had been the candidate most favored to win; after his withdrawal, the only remaining competitors were the Englishwoman Ruth Padel and the Indian Arvind Krishna Mehrotra. Padel won easily, becoming the first female Professor of Poetry in history. In her gracious victory statement, she deplored the smear campaign against Walcott.
But shortly afterward, it turned out that she'd been associated with the campaign herself. After a tenure of just nine days, she resigned.
And then, of course, it was time for one more run with the old problem. Yes, what do we mean when we say "good"? By way of locating Walcott in a historical context, the Telegraph columnist Michael Deacon raced his readers through a whole list of good (i.e., competent) poets who were not entirely good (i.e., virtuous) men, from the physically filthy W. H. Auden all the way back and down to the depraved Earl of Rochester. Here's a link to the column.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/personal-view/5330369/An-Oxford-poet-slayed-by-gossip.html
And when you put the problem the way this column does, it is as simple as the columnist makes it sound. John Henry Newman stated it this way for his mistaken students who thought they were in college to become good men: "Knowledge is one thing, virtue is another." That was in 1852, in the lectures that would become The Idea of a University. In freshman comp in 2009, I still teach the oceanic paragraph where Newman's idea comes rolling in, wave after wave. I teach it as an example of the periodic sentence, but I believe it too.
Knowledge is one thing, virtue is another; good sense is not conscience, refinement is not humility, nor is largeness and justness of view faith. Philosophy, however enlightened, however profound, gives no command over the passions, no influential motives, no vivifying principles. Liberal Education makes not the Christian, not the Catholic, but the gentleman. It is well to be a gentleman, it is well to have a cultivated intellect, a delicate taste, a candid, equitable, dispassionate mind, a noble and courteous bearing in the conduct of life;--these are the connatural qualities of a large knowledge; they are the objects of a University; I am advocating, I shall illustrate and insist upon them; but still, I repeat, they are no guarantee for sanctity or even for conscientiousness, they may attach to the man of the world, to the profligate, to the heartless,--pleasant, alas, and attractive as he seems when decked out in them. Taken by themselves, they do but seem to be what they are not; they look like virtue at a distance, but they are detected by close observers, and on the long run; and hence it is that they are popularly accused of pretence and hypocrisy, not, I repeat, from their own fault, but because their professors and their admirers persist in taking them for what they are not, and are officious in arrogating for them a praise to which they have no claim. Quarry the granite rock with razors, or moor the vessel with a thread of silk; then may you hope with such keen and delicate instruments as human knowledge and human reason to contend against those giants, the passion and the pride of man.
Simple enough, for all its elaborate beauty. To become smart, go to college; to become good, go to church. To learn virtue, go sit at the feet of Maya Angelou. To learn poetry, take a course from Derek Walcott. Poetry has its own claims. But how do those claims become ours? Where does language become a poem -- in a poet's isolated mind, or in the world that the poet shares with readers and their needs for language?
To make the problem manageably small, we could consider just one little world with poetry in it; say, England after World War II. England after World War II was feeling pathetic, I sometimes tell my students, and the reason Philip Larkin became the most historically significant poet of the era was that he was uniquely qualified to put pathetic feelings into accessible form. Consider, for instance, the bitter nostalgia suffusing Larkin's masterpiece, "High Windows." All but physically soiling the page it's printed on, this poem is the secretion of a narrator who is a dirty old man; and (I tell my students) one reason Larkin was so good at realizing that dirty old man in words may be that in what's called real life he was a dirty old man: a bigoted, alcoholic miser with a collection of stroke magazines.
"Always historicize," says Fredric Jameson, writer of ugly prose. In the undergraduate poetry classroom, the dictum works. But post-Padel you can see how historicizing can also oversimplify. By linking a poem to its time-bound poet the way I did, by making a poem the subject of biography and thematic analysis and moralism, I didn't leave myself any way to read its actual words. It's as if I think any dirty old man could write "High Windows." I've demoted Philip Larkin, a poet, to the status of Maya Angelou, a talking biography. I've left out the art part.
And the art part is what this blog proposes to be about.
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