Tag Archives: philosophy

Reverie

“The image can only be studied through the image, by dreaming images as they gather in reverie.” ~Gaston Bachelard

I’m immersed in Bachelard’s The Poetics of Reverie, which has a subtitle I adore:  “Childhood, Language, and the Cosmos.” In the book’s first section, however, I felt myself a bit bogged down because the reverie of words (language) he describes deals with word gender. That works for French, and for most languages [or so I understand], but not for English.

Initially, then, I found myself wondering why I was reading the text. But I like Bachelard’s style, enthusiastic and looping and always replete with inquiry upon inquiry; and I love his dedication to and defense of poetry. Not all philosophers have been so kind to poetry.

As I was driving to work one morning, however, I found myself dwelling upon the above chapter about the reveries words can inspire. I fell into a recollection of myself as a very young child, the way I loved to peruse the dictionary. Even before I could read, the heavy tome with its onion-skin pages and glossy color plates of the flags of the world or of gemstones appealed to me as a room in which to become lost, a forest of leaves in which to cover myself or to lie upon, a river of language in which to be immersed. When I was older and a more capable reader, I browsed the examples, the multiple meanings and uses, the parts of speech and the etymologies of the words.

Ann E. Michael

Bachelard, I realized, is correct. The contemplation of words themselves leads to reverie, to thinking about thinking, to making dreamlike concatenations that chug through the consciousness and lead to imagination. His example involves contemplations and imaginings about the genders of words and how they suggest all kinds of interweavings and reactions, but noun gender need not be the motivating inspiration. For me, etymology accomplishes the same ends.

Contemporary adult life offers few chances for reverie. My commute to work is often the only time during the week when I can daydream a bit. My best opportunities for reverie are during a walk outside or while gardening, but I don’t get to do those things every day. I agree that reverie or daydream leads, very often, to poetry or to philosophical innovation or understanding; and Bachelard’s initial chapter on the rambling, amusing, aimless process of reverie makes me wish to go back to my childhood days of less responsibility and more imagination. Of course, that is impossible, but of course, that is part of what the philosopher intends (there is a later chapter on childhood reverie…I will be reading that pretty soon).

Boredom invites reverie. Who, in these busy times, with the many entertainments we carry in our pockets, is ever bored? So many of us, when bored, simply turn off the iPhone or the TV and sleep.

“It is a poor reverie which invites a nap.” ~Gaston Bachelard

My upcoming musings on this book will probably include garden reveries. Or memoir. Or etymology. Who can tell?

Ambitious poetry

Recent discussions with a few colleagues brought up the question of what poetry “should” do. This question is seldom considered philosophical–it generally occurs among inquiries more aesthetic or educational in nature. Any time we have a “should,” though, we may be more clearly looking at an “ought.” Which brings us to philosophy. Or to poetics.

A friend stated that poetry should have aims, aims that relate to society. She prefers the poem that speaks to “all” to the poem that speaks to (or of) the individual. This is a rather grand and ambitious “ought” for poetry, but it strikes me as valid.

Another colleague defends what she calls the “quiet” poem, the one that circles in on itself with some kind of reminder that interior reflection is occurring in the poem. This sort of poem also has, it seems to me, an ambitious project (I hate that term, but I’ll go with it for now): getting the unknown reader to feel he or she is authentically inside that poem’s quiet, particular, individual world. Have you ever tried to convince another person to understand your perspective on anything? It is never an easy project. It can be accomplished sometimes. To accomplish it through a poem is, frankly, marvelous. So this poem is as ambitious as the poem that endeavors to speak to all.

Donald Hall has a significant essay on this topic, ambition and poetry, and edited an anthology of essays on various views of what poetry’s ambitions might be. I turned to it again last night when mulling over the topic of what poetry “ought” to be, or to do, or to say.

Hall begins, “I see no reason to spend your life writing poems unless your goal is to write great poems.” And that is certainly ambitious.  I do feel that is my goal; I don’t expect to attain it. Heck, if I produce even one poem that is great, I will be happy. Hall also writes, “We develop the notion of art from our reading.” Those texts are our models of what great, ambitious, lasting art (poetry) is.

So we develop the idea or aesthetics of what great art is through our enjoyment, study, acculturation, through the models we choose–or reject–ourselves.

Hall wanders into the controversy over writing workshops (the essay is from 1983). I’m not interested in that discussion for this post. But I constantly remind myself of this section from his essay:

Of most help is to remember that it is possible for people take hold of themselves and become better by thinking. It is also necessary, alas, to continue to take hold of ourselves—if we are to pursue the true ambition of poetry. Our disinterest must discover that last week’s nobility was really covert rottenness, etcetera. One is never free and clear; one must work continually to sustain, to recover. . . .

I’m prepared, on my best days, anyway, to accept that I will never be free and clear, that as a poet and as an amateur philosophe (is there any other kind?) I will always be working, continually taking hold of myself, trying again and again to become better by thinking. For me, this is what poetry ought to do.

More difficult books

photo by Ann E. Michael

Some weeks back, I posted about reading “difficult books.” It occurs to me that there are different kinds of difficult books, and perhaps different kinds of motivation for reading them.

In my previous post, I addressed why I read philosophy. I also read books on subjects like string theory, fractals, physics, economics, psychology, and other topics that might be considered difficult, especially for a person who is not a scholar in any of those areas. One example is the book I’m reading now, Daniel Kahneman’s best-seller Thinking, Fast and Slow. Kahneman is a psychologist who won a Nobel Prize in Economics, and this book explores how human beings make decisions, are rational or irrational depending on circumstances and how information is presented, make judgments, develop intuition and biases, and learn or fail to learn from mistakes. He’s a fairly good writer for the layperson, staying away from jargon and taking pains to explain his work clearly for the non-psychologist, non-economist, and non-mathematician. Nonetheless, this book–while wonderful!–is not easy material to read. One reason is that the text is about thinking, so (like philosophy) the endeavor is entirely metacognitive. Also, Kahneman’s findings directly challenge many of the things we think we know about ourselves. That sort of book is inherently difficult.

Another book written in lively anecdotes avoiding too much technical language but that I found difficult all the same is Stuart Kauffman’s At Home in the Universe. Kauffman explains Boolean logic in a way that helped me to understand not just the basic premise but how Boolean operates in terms of randomness and the development of algorithms. His book, however, takes for its subject complexity theory. You can tell by the name of the theory that this material’s a little challenging. Furthermore, he begins by writing about chemistry, a science in which I have almost no foundational understanding. I learned much from his work about self-organization of things like molecules and stellar systems, and this book enabled me to read his more theoretical text on “reinventing the sacred” with deeper understanding (and even a bit of skepticism). But easy to understand? No.

Joao Magueijo introduced me to the research and theories of young cosmological physicists through his book Faster than the Speed of Light, a book that is laugh-out-loud funny in places and written with the casual tone of having a conversation with an enthusiastic and possibly jerky scientist while at a university-neighborhood pub (there were more than a few asides in his narrative, most of which dealt with university or science politics). I know more physics than chemistry, but I can’t do the math. I had to re-read some of the pages in Magueijo’s book to figure out where he was going with his potential discoveries. I read the book years ago, yet it stuck with me; recent news about possible faster-than-light particle movement reminded me instantly of the work this team was doing in the late 90s.

Science and philosophy are difficult; and while books that involve the relationship between the disciplines (such as Hofstadter’s now-classic Gödel, Escher, Bach and Kauffman’s Reinventing the Sacred, to name only two) are not necessarily twice as difficult, they cannot be categorized as easy-to-read, even when the author is a marvelous writer. True “System 2 thinking” (see Kahneman) means constant engagement with the text, and our brains simply get tired. But they also get exercise and plasticity from the enjoyable work of reading what is hard, a workout I find exhilarating.

Affirmation

larch cones by Ann E. Michael

I am almost finished reading Parfit’s Reasons and Persons, and I think his conclusions about the self (person) in society and as individual are valid; I have long questioned the self-interest theory of philosophy but only on an intuitive basis as I am no philosopher, merely a student of the discipline.

What strikes me after having read this lengthy and rationally-argued book is that there are so many ways philosophical reasoning does actually intersect with that “most irrational” of impulses, art.

Here is a lovely excerpt from poet David Ignatow, from an essay he wrote in 1971:
“There is no contravening another person’s sense of himself and his world. We must accept it on his terms, though we need not accept it for ourselves…men and women have discovered themselves as individuals, and that this sense of individuality is something among them…In affirming themselves, they affirm all others.”

He later adds that poetry “is formed by the terms with which the person sees himself.”

It seems to me that Ignatow possessed an excellent understanding of the psychological and emotional as well as the rhetorical aspects of poetry–indeed, of any art.

Lewis, Buber, Dickinson

“Meeting with God does not come to man in order that he may concern himself with God, but in order that he may confirm that there is meaning in the world. All revelation is summons and sending.”   –Martin Buber, I and Thou

I suppose I ought to know this, but I cannot recall reading about whether C.S. Lewis was influenced by Martin Buber’s work, specifically I and Thou. Some of Lewis’ writing seems to suggest that he agrees with the concept of relation: as Buber describes it, the stepping out to meet Thou as Thou, and the insistence that “Man’s [sic] desire to possess God” keeps said man from true relation with God (a point described in The Great Divorce through the allegorical character of the Episcopal Ghost). God has become an “It” rather than a Thou for the Bishop, though he feels he is a true believer, an error made in lesser ways by other characters such as the Big Man.

Many of the students I tutor are writing their final papers for a Theology class that uses Lewis’ texts as a foundation for the course, which is why I’m feeling a bit conversant with Lewis lately, many long years after reading his fiction and his theological writings. And a random quote (above) that I read on a colleague’s email put me in mind of Buber, whose I and Thou reads, often, like poetry….which got me thinking about Emily Dickinson.

How’s that for a train of thought? Perhaps I need to examine the concatenation step by step.

1) Buber, I and Thou, a work deeply influenced by the author’s immersion in non-Western and Cabbalistic “mysteries” (the idea of the radii and the Centre closely parallels the Hindi conceptualization of Indra’s Net, just to name one example). Buber returns to the Western religious traditions throughout, though he mentions the way of Buddha and others as he examines the ever-present confrontation with the Thou of relational experience.

2) Lewis, The Great Divorce. Students interpret this work as one in which the author outlines his agreements and differences with, among other things, ideas about free will stemming from Socratic/Platonic through Augustinian and more modern concepts of Heaven/Hell. They tend to miss the concepts of what makes union/relation significant in the choice to unite with God, but they “get” the gist of the allegory.

3) Emily Dickinson, who more informally and more frequently uses “you” and “I” to explore these depths, but whose contrarian views on soul and spirituality knit the religious with the genuine in complex and exciting ways through the art of language.

An example, in which she does employ the King James Bible diction:

725

Where Thou art—that—is Home—
Cashmere—or Calvary—the same—
Degree—or Shame—
I scarce esteem Location’s Name—
So I may Come—

What Thou dost—is Delight—
Bondage as Play—be sweet—
Imprisonment—Content—
And Sentence—Sacrament—
Just We two—meet—

Where Thou art not—is Woe—
Tho’ Bands of Spices—row—
What Thou dost not—Despair—
Tho’ Gabriel—praise me—Sire—

—

How similar to Buber, those lines “And Sentence—Sacrament—/Just We two—meet—”

and the idea that “Where Thou art not—is Woe—”

Poetry precedes philosophy more often than not, though philosophy may object.

On ignorance, mostly

Now I am reading Derek Parfit’s Reasons and Persons, a series of philosophical arguments, dilemmas, extensions and inquiries in small dense type. It requires more concentration than I’ve had to expend on a book in quite some time. So much so that I began to wonder if the reading would ever yield anything valuable enough to have been worth the effort—but I think it is worth the effort. Granted, I am not yet much more than a quarter of the way through its 543 pages (ok, 454 if you don’t include notes, appendices, index); but I’ve reached some discussion about happiness and what can be defined as “good,” and Parfit gets there by means of examining theories of happiness that are directly or indirectly self-defeating. Among other things.

Although Parfit does not mention ignorance, at this section of the book I found myself musing on it, specifically “ignorance is bliss” (a phrase which seems to refute the Socratic statement about the examined life while allowing Socrates his insistence on his own ignorance and, I suppose, his happiness). And having recently read Emma Donoghue’s novel Room, which confronts how much reality is valuable for happiness, under extenuating circumstances, the concept of ignorance as a not-necessarily-negative state of being intrigues me…I, who have tried all my life to avoid ignorance. Though this book is doing a fair job of making me feel pretty ignorant, I don’t feel bad about it.

Am I suggesting ignorance is good? No…but it may be value-neutral, or it may be relative, operating along a sort of continuum that cannot be categorized as “good” or “bad.” I return to my last post, on malclichés. It is possible, even likely, that an instructor who encounters one of these mis-hearings/mis-writings in a student essay will assume the student is ignorant. The student may indeed be ignorant of the conventions of spelling or the usual turns of overused phrases. Such mistakes, however, may indicate a lack of education, simple laziness or disinclination or haste, an over-reliance on AutoCorrect, or perhaps a disability in the areas of vision-hearing-neural processing: not necessarily ignorance.

Then what is ignorance? (This is why so many people get irritated with philosophy: you have to define everything!)

One thing ignorance is not is a lack of conventional education, even though that definition may be the easiest to assume. Again, it’s kind of a continuum, isn’t it? If I miss an allusion to a line in a Yeats poem, am I ignorant? And am I more, or less, ignorant than if I miss an allusion to a Shakespeare play or, perhaps, an allusion to the Kardashian sisters?

(That sentence makes me really want to write a poem that contains references to Yeats, Macbeth, and the Kardashians; but I probably ought to leave that to Billy Collins.)

Anyway, Parfit’s book is really more about what is rationality and what is morality and how individuals may or may not be rational or moral, both as individuals and as persons within communities and societies. Which inquiry and argument, by the way, would encompass Yeats, Shakespeare, and the Kardashians.

Perhaps after I finish reading it, I will be better educated on rationality and morality. I may be just as ignorant, but I’ll try not to be too judgmental about being so.

Here’s one from Philip Larkin, titled (appropriately) “Ignorance”:

Strange to know nothing, never to be sure
Of what is right, or true, or real
But forced to qualify: Or so I feel
Or: Well, it does seem so,
Someone must know

Strange to be ignorant of the way things work
Their skill at finding what they need,
Their sense of shape, and punctual spread of seed
And willingness to change
Yes, it is strange

Even to wear such knowledge—for our flesh
surrounds us with its own decisions—
and yet spend all our lives on imprecisions,
that when we start to die
have no idea why.

~~~

OWS: Trust and the need to revel in difficulties

Why I support the Occupy movement

First, I need to explain who the Occupy supporters and protesters are. These people are my friends. I respect the values of my friends; my friends are well-educated, experienced, thoughtful, and often wise. If they support an action or a cause, I don’t necessarily jump on the ol’ bandwagon just because I like them; but I do take a good look at their claims. The description that follows is based upon my own experience and may not be statistically accurate.

There is no way to generalize my friends and colleagues who support the protests. They range in age from 18 to 86, and they are of both sexes and numerous “races,” a term to which I object on scientific grounds but which serves a purpose here. Sexual orientation among these friends varies, but the vast majority of them are heterosexual people involved in long-term committed relationships. Many attend religious services regularly. While I may be acquainted with a few more radical liberals than the average citizen is, I do not know any Communists involved with Occupy and most of the people I know who support the movement are moderate, middle-class or formerly-middle-class taxpayers. None of them are homeless. Although one or two are “underwater” with their mortgages, most of them are managing to pay their loans and make ends meet; they are all employed or under-employed (a term I shall define below).

The vast majority of my Occupier colleagues have college degrees, but not all of them are employed in white-collar jobs. Many, many, many of my friends and colleagues who support OWS are working part-time, or working at jobs for which they are over-qualified, or working free-lance on a less-than-regular basis; or they own and run small businesses such as consulting practices that don’t always generate income when the economy is stale. They are educators and artists and even young lawyers right out of grad school. These are the under-employed, and there are so many of us out there that the government statistics are bound to under-count us. They are recent college grads who have mountains of debt to pay off and who now realize the career for which they’ve trained has, at present, no place for them…so they pick up some retail work or start a part-time small business or try to earn a living however they can, often swinging two or more jobs just to pay the bills. They are not lazy lay-abouts who want a government handout for free.

The majority of these people support capitalism, yet they feel our nation’s government has not quite lived up to its role of protector and defender of the people. Most of these folks feel that a government “safety net” or a more equitable method of taxation is not the same as a socialist agenda and that a moderate level of social support is not incompatible with democracy. They are willing to pay taxes for the kinds of support they request, but they want fair taxation and fair wages and a chance to serve the world through diligent and profitable work. The lack of fairness is what irks them; they want to live in a nation that is “just.” The idea of justice is not only something that pertains to the judicial branch of government but to the idea of fairness across the board, in all endeavors, including economic endeavors.

I have friends and colleagues who are atheists, Buddhists, Jews, Wiccans, Muslims, and agnostics; but the majority of the people I know personally who are involved in OWS identify themselves as Christians. I think this is relevant on many levels: it messes with stereotypes of Christians as “right-wingers,” for one thing. Jesus’ teachings tend to focus on caring for the least among us— Jesus was not a supporter of oligarchy. He did remind us that we need to be grateful for whatever we have, to love the world that God gave us; the implicit and explicit reminder is that each human being is part of that world.

There’s a slogan with which we are all familiar: “In God we trust.” Some Americans have chosen to focus on the Big G-word of this slogan. Some citizens think it should not appear on the legal tender of a nation where there is separation of church and state. Others claim that God is what the country should be all about and that we need to rewrite or re-interpret our laws to reflect that idea.

Suppose, however, we were to focus on the T-word instead? Trust. My diagnosis—and I admit, I am basing it only on the people I know personally (and I know quite a few) among the loose collective movement that is OWS—is that people feel a loss of trust. Protesters often use the word “betrayed” when they are interviewed about why they are sleeping in Zuccotti park. For many years, Americans have been naively but wonderfully trusting:

–why didn’t you read the fine print, Grandma?

–because the banker was trustworthy on my last two mortgages; why would the bank want to take all my money now?

Does this country really want to move from “In God we trust” to “caveat emptor”? That would mark a huge change in the collective character of the US citizen. I hope that legislators and politicians will pay attention to the people of the Occupy movement and hear how vital trust is. We cannot move forward until there is trust on all sides of the discussion.

The press has made much of the OWS movement as being vague or aimless, and it is true that the anti-war protests of the 60s and 70s seemed to have more purpose. Still, “End the War” was not the only demand of those protesters, and some of the protests were both obscure and misdirected. The protests that made up the War on Poverty were composed of a cacophony of different and often dissenting voices, too. Certainly, there was little agreement on the specific ultimate aims of the Civil Rights movement or on how to attain those rights. In retrospect, it’s always easier to say what the purposes were.

I’m not out on the streets with a sign and a sleeping bag. I have classes to teach and I desperately need to keep my day job. But being silent doesn’t show support or argue for trust and fairness in a nation founded on rational goodness which, idealistic as that is, was one of the aims of Thomas Jefferson. My sense is that specific aims will be synthesized from all this discontent. People are brainstorming. This is what I tell my students to do when they have to write a paper: revel in difficulties for awhile. Figure out what your purpose is going to be.

Then go for it.

Here’s another take on OWS, with some quite reasonable analogies:

Lemony Snicket on OWS

Poetry Break.

I took a break from difficult reading to read Eluard’s “Last Love Poems” as translated by Marilyn Kallet. Alas that I am mono-lingual and cannot read poetry in any language other than English. I have to take the translator’s word for it (literally and figuratively) that the beauty in the lines can be nearly portrayed in English. The struggle translators must have to go through to transform such a studied thing of language as a poem is into a different tongue amazes me. Inevitably there is some loss of connotation, wordplay, music, rhythm, cultural freight; the careful reader understands that there may be lacunae of some kind, and a mono-lingual reader recognizes that she will not be able to track down where those subtle gaps occur. A good translation, however, manages to maintain the beauty.

“Beauty”—now, there’s a moving target. Quine devotes a few pages to the discussion of the concept in his “intermittently philosophical dictionary.” He writes: “The aesthetic pole is the focus of belle lettres, music, art for art’s sake. But it is a matter of emphasis, not boundaries. Scientists in pursuing truth also seek beauty of an austere kind in the elegance of a theory, and happily some of them seek literary grace in their expository writing.” Quine ends his brief entry on Beauty by suggesting that truth and beauty are not a binary system, that we need not see them as poles apart; yet he does not quite agree with Keats’ conflation of the two. We need ethics and rhetoric in addition to truth and beauty, says the philosopher.

Peter de Bolla, writing two decades or so later, inclines toward a less binary way of looking at beauty and truth when he writes that, since the art of music is  an “articulation of the temporal,” there is a “philosophical argument music makes about relationships between time and being.”  And that argument results in beauty, when it is a well-composed argument, I suppose.

Suddenly the welcome earth
Was a rose of luck
Visible with fair mirrors
Where everything sang to open rose

(“Seasons,” Paul Eluard, tr. Marilyn Kallet)

de Bolla asks: What does the poem know? This poem knows music, and beauty “in the gentle desert of the street” and “beneath life overpowering and good.”

Ah.

ann e. michael, waterfall, poetry

Why read difficult books?

Poetry can be difficult, but I love to read it. Poetry is not the only form of ‘hard reading’ I do, though. Reading a text that’s challenging takes more time and more effort on my part, and for a person who is often pressed for time the question presents itself:

Why do I read hard books?

Bachelard. de Bolla. Girard. Kuhn. I’m immersed in Quiddities by W. V. Quine at the moment. Slow going, though I enjoy his sense of humor, because I’m not as comfortable with philosophical terms as I once was. Next up: Derek Parfit.

Philosophy, poetics, aesthetics…not as easy nor, I suppose, as entertaining as popular fiction. I admit I enjoy how novels erase the boundaries between my life and the characters’ lives, their times and places (historical? imaginary? far from Emmaus, Pennsylvania?); it is easy to feel wrapped up in a novel, and I appreciate being taken elsewhere.  I’m a fan of short fiction, too. It’s easy to love fiction.

That’s not always the effect I seek from reading, however. I read non-fiction to become informed, and I especially treasure information that is delivered in a beautiful, literary fashion. John McPhee, James Prosek, Annie Dillard, Phillip Lopate, Terry Tempest Williams, to name a few. Writers such as these make reading science and politics and biology and culture and other informational material a joy.

I read difficult texts such as philosophy and physics because I love to think. Thinking deeply has always resulted—for me—in new forms of perspective, in inspiration, and in poetry.

Poetry is sometimes difficult to read, as well. Think of the many ways the word “difficult” can mean in this poetic context: Marie Howe is difficult in a different way than Jorie Graham, or Lyn Hejinian, or Ezra Pound, Gray Jacobik, or Gregory Orr’s early collection Gathering the Bones Together.

Stuff that is hard to read can be extremely rewarding. And, when I am puzzled (which I often am), I feel inspired to question and to observe…which leads to writing. Much of what we call “art” is a response to difficulty.

Oh, how I relish the difficult!