Tuesday, January 31, 2006

Descartes says that you cannot completely convince yourself you don't exist, or, you can't truly doubt your existence. I disagree. I think that you can doubt your existence by assuming that the part of you that thinks is motivated by some other being of whom you are only part, and as such, you don't exist in the way necessary for you to be able not to doubt it. That is, the fact that you supposedly could not naturally doubt some level of existence is only a necessary fiction created by the entity which controlls you, akin to a dream of that entity.

Or, again, your existence may be a fiction entered into wholly by an entity other than yourself only periodically, or only for a limited amount of time, again like a dream, only with the distinction that the entity inhabits your exact existential position or context in such a way as to be deceived into thinking that your supposed existence is its own existence, which, like waking from a dream, it will later view as false (but will be unable to doubt till that time [the span of your "existence"]). The basis for the problem is, then, the inexact nature of existence within time, and the corollary, the inexact nature of the knowledge of the continuity of existence.

I just thought I should put that out there, in case I start acting strange, or any of you do, or any of you disappear, or I die or seem to die. Also, maybe I'm actually an angel, or one of you is!

Thursday, January 26, 2006

Since my last post, I have begun to wonder how specific to Proust the "dual metaphor" could be. If you, gentle reader, have an opinion on the subject, feel free to use the "comment" function built into this blog template, marked with a little pencil icon. However, I shall probably not be posting on Proust for a while, as the volume I was reading has come due, and is not renewable, being an interlibrary loan (ILL hereafter) book. Can you believe that the Minneapolis Public Library (MpLib) grand board of good literature fit for public consumption did not see fit to keep it in circulation, but rather left it in a box along with hordes of other, lesser books from the temporarily closed Central Library? If you tell me our civilization is crumbling, I won't be surprised, not any more.

So I am reading a Harry Potter book instead for the time being. Look forward to posts on the literary genius of J.K. Rowling.

Wednesday, January 25, 2006

The literary genius of Proust, at least in part, is his ability, while drawing illuminating connections between the inner and outer world or otherwise making metaphor, to also have rather profound ideas expressed within each part of the metaphor, so that each of the thoughts expressed and connected could stand on its own as a worthwhile statement.

To put it another way, a standard metaphor is an expression in which two things are put side by side in order to illumine on of the two elements. For instance, if I compared the process of being in love to the digestion of a cow, the process of being in love is (presumably) illumined, while the digestion of a cow is not, but, being fixed, is used to "ground" the "artistic" or "floating" idea of the process of being in love. Proust's metaphor (though he also uses more normal metaphor) is often a comparison of two things not "fixed," which creates the effect of a dual illumination.

Of further note is the fact that this use of "dual" metaphor may help the narrative to achieve the phantasmic quality so fitting for a roman fleuve, especially one so concerned with memory, and, as Proust himself puts it somewhere in vol. 3, the phantom of the real (the phantom of Albertine). While most literature is like a ship moored by the hempen threads of metaphor to "the real world," Proust, by using what I am calling dual metaphor, allows himself to be more at sea, or at least more frequently at sea. Perhaps, however, this is the seed of one of his flaws: creating prose tortured by the weight of innumerable observations stacked upon each other or more precisely inserted into one another.

Another somewhat unrelated aspect of Proust's writing is what could be called the literal metaphor. What I mean by that is that the metaphor is based upon a somewhat literal correspondence, especially in structure, if that makes sense (this correspondence does not, I think, conflict with my comments on dual metaphor above). This type of metaphor is somewhat akin to allegory, but shortened and never as explicit. Proust is the master of this type of metaphor, however, and so he pulls it off without being too forced. Furthermore, he can be excused because his metaphor is of value, in that the process reveals what could not otherwise be expressed, which, I suppose, is perhaps the value of metaphor and the basis, or rather the evidence, of poetic knowing (mentioned in my first post).

Saturday, January 21, 2006

Why I Fear Losing You

1.
How old I've become, with my prejudices
Formed as if from blueprints
Written on the blue of a sky
Intercrossed by unseen winds
From the jet stream shuffling
Sun-eclipsing clouds
To the subtle breeze interposing
A coldness between us

Understood as little as our love
Our two souls even:
Salt over the shoulder
A mass, the body and the blood

An effect of unfurling oak leaves
Bringing a coldness to the spring

A coldness like that of a poem
Written from the muse of unconscious words


2.
How old I’ve become
With my prejudices
Formed like civilizations
Along the rivers of my senses

My eyes are supernovae
They give birth to
Lights for my firmament

Lighting my innards
Depicting curvatures as on a medieval map
With little sense of proportion
With no certain edges

Edges marked “unknown”
But inscribed with mythic figures


If I were to sail upon those unknown seas
Decorated only by the imagination
Would I not find them desolate
With all their waters between us

Bearing upon their waves
(rippling effects of some long-dead wind)
A coldness?


3.
How old I’ve become
Remarking on the shortness of the years

The things that change
Leave in us the detritus
Of things remembered

A weight
Like the weight of unconscious words
The dregs of long silences

4.
Things remembered
That no longer exist
Like things unknown
Wrap coldly around us
With the sinuous heft

Of a snake
Oceanus

Or the fragility
Of a mantle of fallen leaves
Like bed-ridden old men
Finally pressing
Slight frames
Against the earth

Detached by an autumnal coldness



5.
How old I’ve become
With my prejudices
Formed as if from dialectic.


A synthesis of things remembered
And unconscious words
As yet unformed

Interposes a coldness between us
The coldness of uncertain memory

A graveyard
Whose marble inscriptions
Have succumbed to the seasons.


6.
There
We are
Lowered

Delivered
With slow
Histrionics

Like
A charlatan’s
Incantation

Like
Words
Separated

Into caskets
Of extended
Silences

Friday, January 20, 2006

How bleak the world appears to me tonight. I just got done looking at my financial situation; I was born free, but everywhere I am in chains! There is a weight in the guilt of money ill-spent, but how much greater the weight of an inevitable situation that has already dug the grave for my hopes and dreams (though that grave need not be deep, for they are so flimsy they will be forgotten, will vanish, before the time required for a natural decomposition).

How fortunate for me that our civilisation has progressed to the point where major banking corporations will assist me in discovering myself through a liberal arts education. If only I could shed the weight of their cold fingers along with the old skin of my youth, if they laid claim only to that former self, who was the one who signed their papers. Even my signature has changed!

If I had known five years ago how much ill I now lay at the door of that fool of a youth, I suppose I would have shuddered. In fact, there was a period of time in which I was depressed beyond anything I have known since, which was perhaps the result of my current ire, who knows. Now that I am looking in the maw of an upcoming return to school, I am haunted by the ghosts of my undergrad days, which I have no doubt will be incorporated into new devils to cavort under the fingers of new userers (I mean, venture capitalists in my rosy future). How comforting to know that future at least still awaits, and if my dreams are buried, perhaps now I may venture to hope I will one day succeed as a practical career man.

Wednesday, January 18, 2006

…He Thought He Was a Skywalker

the city breathes warm
in the winter morning's chill

it breathes, rising cloudy
against the falling snow

through my window
I know there are people
because I see their smoke and steam
that billows writhes and fades

a city of people
like snowflakes in a fog
morning traffic
like drifts in a wind


love seeps out through fissures
from the center of the earth
molten swirling magnetic

leave these thoughts here
bustling like a Pompeii
blocked like a mosaic
so human as they are caught bathing and so forth


in the morning you
leave a trace
a warmth on the bed
your breath
a warmth upon the air

I wish that you were here
beside me now
breathing the breath of sleep
on my shoulder

and the wealth
of our existence

I would horde
I would bury we two
deep in the warm earth
under the flowing rock
(time’s roots wont’ penetrate)
to mix with all the mass
that holds me here

while the sky draws coldly
my smoky breath

Tuesday, January 17, 2006

I have resisted the temptation to start a blog for quite a while, but either I have decided that my ideas are now important enough to be read (theoretically) or I have realized, more probably, that it might be useful to set out some of my impressions for my own later reference.

I plan to post my poems as well, and maybe some of my music if I figure out how, which isn't terribly likely.


***

I'm startint to get rather sick of Proust's Remembrance, which I have been reading now for about seven months. At this point in the narrative (vol. 4), Marcel is examining jealousy in love, which was also a relatively large part of the content in vol. 1. While I am in fact prone to jealousy, his narrative goes places foreign to my experience. I have nothing against pure imagination as the sole contact between reader and text/author, but find it difficult to relish this particular interaction.

Before I go farther, I suppose I should set forth my current idea about reading literature--more particularly the value of that act. The context for my view, though not perhaps a necessary one, is the philosophical problem of view (I'm not any sort of philosopher, or even a particularly astute student of philosophy, so please excuse the following). That is, the problem of the subjective and objective, the epistemolgical problem in particular: how does one know that which is, it seems, outside oneself (the objective). I suppose the problem concerns the subjective as well. I won't get into it here.

My concept, probably better expressed by a thousand people as many years ago, for the "solution" of this problem (not in the philosophical sense a solution, but a sort of salve for the pain it causes to my mind or soul) I call imaginative or poetic knowing. Wait...a part of my solution, I should say, i.e., poetic knowing is one of the types of knowing often overlooked, and which, I would suggest, is not the type of knowing which "created" the problem, or better, in reference to which the problem has here been briefly stated. Other types of knowing important to a sort of epistemological holistic healing would include, I think, for instance the knowing mentioned in the New Testament of the Bible: the renewing of one's mind in a spiritual sense by a Christian rebirth and subsequent indwelling. And there are no doubt other ways to categorize knowing (not to be confused with "multiple intelligences").

Poetic knowing, to me, is the way in which we gauge the quality, so to speak, of art of many types. It is poetic knowing which causes us to believe in their value, and it is poetic knowing which inspires the artist to create. Creativity itself is a separate thing, I would argue (an artist who has much creativity but little knowing will evidence this difference). Poetic knowing, I think, is related to memory and experience, which are its troves. And of course, its realm is in some sense the imagination. If you combine the above elements, you get art as a by-product of the attempt to form it into knowlege or more properly wisdom, hence poetic knowing. Of course, reading literature is a sort of shortcut to poetic understanding, though it is only reasonable to assume that one must have the raw materials of actual experiences and so forth before one could refine poetic understanding, either from reading lit. or simply as the mind's act of reflection.

The ideas expressed above I consider part of a solution to the philosophical problem of knowing, because, whether I have been able to express it or not, I think they help provide a reason for the amount and type of knowlege we know that we do posses. But whether "poetic knowing" helps solve the problem or not is, after all, I suppose, not the main issue (though the that may be important to me, perhaps my above idea is useful only to me in that respect) for poetic knowing, since that problem may not absolutely be within its realm. The main issue is whether the idea of poetic knowing helps explain the phenomenon of reading literature and gaining thereby. It is presumably in that context that my idea of poetic knowlege would be formed naturally, though, as I mentioned, perhaps the main context of application for me is the epistemological problem, if only since that is something I have been thinking about recently.