Grammar

During the first week of classes one of my professors said something which, though two very busy weeks have followed, has kept most of its original force in my mind. The following represents my paraphrase from memory:

The Invisible Man is a long novel, but to be in this class you will have to own it-to have most of it    somehow in your head. I realize that this imperative, in some ways, goes against the operating educational paradigm: that we do not need to posses our knowledge, but rather only need to know the location of our knowledge…

I think a part of the reason that his declaration has stayed with me is because of its accuracy. Moreover, it is accurate twice-first, in its recognition of the prevailing “paradigm” and second in its unfashionable amendment to that paradigm.

Let me explain what I mean. Think of your classes, where in them have you ever been asked to own the material? What sort of class (or professor) was it that made the demand of you? How did you react?

By these question, I do not mean to suggest that this sort of thing never happens at Amherst College (nor is it even the case that the Invisible Man is my only experience with “ownership” in two years), I have seen once or twice that it does. I am more interested in where it happens. Is it only in literature courses? Or philosophy? Or are students at the college ever asked to own formulas and models, too?

With an instance of “ownership” in mind, now I want to ask, what is the difference in the quality (not just good/bad, but the quality, in the broad sense sometimes termed “accidence”) of that knowledge? For instance (taking a poem as an example) what is the difference in “knowing” the following poem from having read it many times:

Batter my heart three person’d God, for you
As yet but knock, breath, shine, and seek to mend;
That I may stand, o’erthrow me’and bend
Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new.
I, like a usurp’t town, to another due,
Labor to admit you, but oh, to no end;
Reason your viceroy in me, me should defend,
But is captiv’d and proves, weak or untrue;
Yet dearly I love thee, and would be loved faine,
But am betrothed to thine enemie:
Divorce me, untie, or break that knot again,
Take me to thee, imprison me, for I
Except you enthrall be, never shall be free,
Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.

(And, besides having read it many times, also having basically committed the general progress of the poem to memory.) What is the difference between that and having the poem itself memorized? Does it look differently when recalled-as opposed to “accessed”? If so, what’s the difference.

To whet the plane here, I’ll share some suspicions.

1)      Memorizing, especially with something like poetry, forces you to listen to what you’re reading, for the simple reason that line after line of text is hard to memorize without the sound and rhythm to help you. (unless you have some sort of photographic memory).

2)      Memorizing encourages readers to more carefully unpack syntax, again, for the simple reason that it’s much harder to memorize a poem if it seems to you not to make coherent sense.

3)      Memorizing allows readers to feel their way into patterns and structure in a poem. As you work to remember the lines, you have to work to remember the movement of what comes next-the question, for me at least, is never really, “oh, what’s the next word,” its always much closer to, “oh, where does it go next.” It has always helped me with a sense of time and space, as well.

Whetted and true-what thinketh you (plural)?

       In his essay “The Aims of Education” Alfred North Whitehead  speaks of something he calls “inert ideas,” which he describes as those “ideas that are merely received into the mind without being utilized, or tested, or thrown into combination.” These “inert ideas” can take any form, in any field of study, at any moment because the quality of “intertness” is not really in the idea itself–not in its content–but rather in our relationship to the idea, and finally whether it has life in us. 

       That sounds pretty hackneyed in the abstract–granted–but I want to take up an example to see if I can’t better explain what I mean. I am taking an English course this semester in which we discuss (sometimes at significant length) the idea of meter. For instance, just last week we were talking about the following poem:

‘Tis the year’s midnight, and it is the day’s,
Lucy’s, who scarce seven hours herself unmasks ;
    The sun is spent, and now his flasks
    Send forth light squibs, no constant rays ;
            The world’s whole sap is sunk ;
The general balm th’ hydroptic earth hath drunk,
Whither, as to the bed’s-feet, life is shrunk,
Dead and interr’d ; yet all these seem to laugh,
Compared with me, who am their epitaph.

Study me then, you who shall lovers be
At the next world, that is, at the next spring ;
    For I am every dead thing,
    In whom Love wrought new alchemy.
            For his art did express
A quintessence even from nothingness,
From dull privations, and lean emptiness ;
He ruin’d me, and I am re-begot
Of absence, darkness, death-things which are not.

It was a frustrating class because we spent the majority of the already short time we had on the poem counting syllables and laboring over the rhymes (trochee this and dimeter that!)

       Now, on the one hand, I understand that it’s helpful to establish the way a poem should be read, and that it is just as helpful to pay attention to the rhymes, but on the other hand our discussion stalled at this point in our speculation. No one, including myself, and not even the professor said anything about what bearing the meter might have on the meaning of the poem. Instead we distantly related our approximation of its structure (pentameter, pentameter, tetrameter, etc) to a few other historically relevant (read: Shakespearean) examples, and spent the rest of the class pretending that we had talked about the poem. There were never any stakes in our discussion, and the idea of “meter,” though we appeared to deal with it, was always dead.

       From this, I think the next question to ask of me is the following: alright, if speaking in that way about meter represents one of Whitehead’s “inert” ideas, what would it look like to talk about meter as if it were alive in us? Tonight, I am not sure, but I would be quite interested to hear what others had to offer on the prospect–

xaire

I am conflicted in my criticism of our new Center for Community Engagement: on the one hand, it was only through a fellowship with the center that I was able to spend a month in New Orleans this summer working with Habitat for Humanity, and it was good work. In as much as I was directly helping someone to rebuild their life, the effort seems to justify itself and, in some sense, to lie beyond the sometimes abstract business of general criticism.

On the other hand, I find myself strangely apprehensive about the sudden preeminence of the center at the College, and the seemingly undisputed way in which it has assumed a central part in the Amherst experience. My unease may simply be that it feels to me like the question of whether such a Center actually belongs at a liberal arts college was never seriously posed to our community, that it slipped in unnoticed, and then, that the significance of its arrival has, since, been precariously underestimated.

The question of the relationship between engagement and the Liberal Arts cannot be simple because to deal with it is, in a basic way, to deal with the general question of the purpose of Liberal Arts–of what justifies the now famously prodigious endowments of institutions like ours and what explains the tenured respect they have commanded from societies for centuries. Moreover, I admit, at first glance, that there doesn’t appear to be anything contradictory about a Liberal Arts college committing to the sort of community service opportunities offered by the CCE. In fact, it almost seems to be the opposite case, that the one must actually beget the other. But despite appearances, the accommodation is more difficult than it seems.

A simple thought experiment helps to illuminate some of the complications: imagine for a moment we accept that the particular sort of community service work that the CCE offers is indisputably good–noting here that I speak of the work itself, of bricks and mortar, and not of the CCE, or of the more general idea of community service. In other words, that the work Habitat offers (and other similar volunteer labor) is worthwhile. Accepting as much is only to accept that performing a good service for another individual, in need of that service, and without payment, is a good thing.

However, if we accept this premise (and it does seem to me a kind of necessary premise) then, if we are honest with ourselves, we are obliged to take a hard look at the Liberal Arts education we are taking from Amherst and try to figure out if the “good” it affords is as good as the “good” of the community service. In other words, if we accept that Habitat work is good, then the question becomes–is reading John Donne as valuable to the individual, and through the individual to society, as working for Habitat for Humanity? Or if not John Donne, any sort of study at Amherst College? If our answer is no–which, perhaps, at first it must be–we then have to ask ourselves, what it is about reading John Donne, or even, coming to the College in the first place, that justifies our being here for four years and not being in New Orleans rebuilding houses?

Of course, I don’t know-but there seem to me to be three immediate options: First, it is possible–though bizarre–to accept Habitat work as “good” without feeling an obligation to enlist in the cause. If short-term self-interest were the guiding force in our life, we might see the suffering of the people in New Orleans, be aware of our potential to relieve some of that suffering, and, because the cause did not immediately concern us (i.e. we are not suffering), we might still feel no need to travel to the place and help.

Second, we might clearly see our potential for doing good work (being the robust twenty-somethings that we are) and perceive our potential being wasted in the slow and more introspective movement of the Liberal Arts education. In other words, we might conclude that, yes, John Donne has written a very many pretty things, and even that we enjoy reading them, but that our reading them represents, in some fundamental way, an indulgence–an accident of our privilege–and, as it is only pretty rather than helpful, that we have no right to indulge in our inheritance, and must put down the books and locate our hammers.

Third, and differently, we might have had some experience with John Donne, perhaps, here:

I wonder by my troth, what thou, and I

Did till we loved, were we not weaned till then,

But sucked on country pleasures childishly,

Twas so….

That, though it seemed unrelated at the time, and centuries apart from the storm-beaten city, lent something to us, in access to ourselves, that made more vivid both the suffering we would come to witness and our obligation entangled therein.

I have been vague and brief in my characterization of this last possibility, and some will, unfortunately, discount the entire notion only for the reason that one man has struggled to express its significance, today. It is the most difficult possibility to describe because, unless you have felt something lent to you, at some point in your stay at the College (in whatever field of study), it will most certainly seem like the empty words of a wandering imbecile, who, if you sympathize with the first hand, must seem like he is wasting his time, or, if you sympathize with the second, like he has compounded the problem by trying to justify the already wasted time.

Still, each hand has his blindness and his indulgence, and it seems to me, the burden of the original problem must be shared across all three (and others, perhaps). The problem is complicated-it is that I could tell you, had I never read a word of Donne, I would not have seen Orleans as vividly, but that I cannot show you what the difference is, what it feels like, or what its different mandates are–only that I went, and it seemed to me upon return, more and more certain, that our sympathies are only keen as our imaginations, and that imagination is won. Moreover, I believe it is won here, at the College, first and most importantly.

In any event, it is no longer a question of whether we should have a Center or not. We have a center, and presumably (barring some great scandal!) the effort spent on the Center was not done so provisionally. I believe, for better or worse, it is here to stay, if for no other reason that that the vague intentions of a vague majority have, historically, sunk deep roots.

Yet it seems clear to me that a serious commitment to a Center for Community Engagement (and if we are to commit, it should be seriously), if accepted, must represent a significant redirection of the resources of the College (resources, in the most general sense), perhaps towards progress, or then to pitfall, but at least away from the bedrock commitment to a measured, contemplative, imaginative, and essentially individual growth.

The redirection must also correspond to a revision in our understanding of the purpose of our own education: whether it is to prepare us for the immediate cries in our world, the hungry now, and poor, or whether some withdraw from the world–which might also be, originally, a commitment to that world–is necessary, at intervals, in our development, in order that we might hear cries clearly and feel their purpose deeply.

 Last week we had a good discussion on the role environment plays (or does not play) in supporting literary discussion. I believe that there is much more to be said on that subject, and I still hope to get more people (and different thoughts involved), which is to say that posts of this nature are still quite welcome. Yet in the interest of the general march, I have turned my own attention in this final week of class to the second and I believe more difficult question the letter that I received a week ago asked. The following represents my own paraphrase of the question:

How can a literary community-dedicated to serious discussions of literature-avoid, on the one hand a vulgar elitism and, on the other hand, allowing for pure nonsense?

I think a place to begin addressing this question is with a clarification-an elaboration, if you will-on the nature of the poles between which we might be allowed to seek our community. To qualify myself, the following represent exaggerated caricatures meant only to clarify the nature of the problem by exposing the extremes:

Vulgar Elitism

He imagines himself well-read. He knows enough of Shakespeare to quote him at a pulse, but not enough to  restrain himself. He has read Derrida and Foucault, and believes he understands language quite well. He is impressed with himself for said understanding. He believes himself quite intelligent (and he may be), yet he disdains conversation with most-for after all, he has read so much more, and must not waste his time with the plebes.

Pure Nonsense (2 Varieties)

1)    He believes, on a basic level, that discussions on literature amount to little more than a sophisticated joke. Sophisticated-as in sophistry. He believes this either out of a commitment to post-modernism or to indolence, and he cannot understand why he should ever spend his time talking about stories.

2)   He believes, on a basic level, that discussions on literature amount to little more than a forum for self-expression; that is, the rude ejaculation of opinions. That is, narcissism. He is compelled to connect everything in literature to some form of social activism, and to use magnetic poetry to further “diversity” and multifarious multi-cultural experiences. 

Besides these over-drawn exemplars, we can try to understand the poles in a number of other ways. On the one hand there is insularity, on the other hand, plurality. On the one side there is over-seriousness on the other side there is none. On the one hand there is hyper-criticism, and on the hand there is a slobbering-affectionate-malaise. Yet in what way are these poles (besides the details) particularly related to literary discussion? Are these not more general concerns about personality?

 All of this is just to say that I suspect when we say we are concerned about a serious literary forum becoming elitist, it seems to me to be the case that we are, in fact, worried about one of two more general things:

1)    Unpleasant personalities and their preponderance.

2)   The quality of our own intelligence. 

To the first, I can only say that this is a general concern of mine. And to the second, that in moderation this would seem like a good thing-for it would seem to signal that we have something to learn from other who are involved in the conversation. At a certain point we have to take responsibility for how we manage the doubt-whether we let it prevent us from engaging with others who seem to exhibit great pretense. 

For it simply cannot be the case that to say something intelligent on the Amherst campus is to be an elitist (in the negative sense). Did we not come here hoping to say a good many intelligent things, and to hear a good many intelligent things said in return? 

I believe we do ourselves a great disservice if we allow the intelligence of our peers to be stifled by an oversensitivity to pretense.  

Xairete   

Last week I received a long and very thoughtful letter from a fellow student that (after giving me a well-deserved jab in the abdomen for a few self-deprecating remarks I made in an earlier post) asked me to address the following two-quite legitimate-concerns. As he/she requested to be kept anonymous, I will do my best to paraphrase:

1) Doesn’t a literary “blog,” by virtue of its abstract, anti-social, and virtual nature risk losing something basically human about discussions on literature?

To be fair, my friend, I think the answer is yes. There is significant risk associated with this project, and I think you are exactly right to locate a part of this risk on the medium. For one thing, it does seem to be the case that good discussion about literature are good as much for the intimacy that they support between conversants as they are for anything we might hope to uncover about literature. What I think you are pointing to (and please correct me if I am wrong) is the following question: to what extent does the medium of the Internet dehumanizes communication?

On one level, it seems perfectly obvious that it does. When we look at instant messaging and email and the quick often thoughtless way in which they are released, it seems pretty clear that they are not comparable as modes of communication with the Letters I spoke about in my last post (and that is to say nothing of the violence committed behind the strange veil of anonymity that the Internet so quickly affords).But on another level I think the situation is less clear-and may have more to do with our own shortcomings (which the medium of the Internet merely brings into relief) as communicators.

What I have in mind this the following: A few weeks ago I was in a meeting with Professor Howell Chickering in which I was making the case to him for opening up the Bruss Room to English Majors (precisely on the grounds that English Majors needed an intimate space to have the sort of fireside literary discussions your letter alludes to). Part of my argument for the room in that meeting had to do with the Department’s symbolic poverty-that we had no rich, collective symbol.I tried to point to Johnson Chapel as a possible source of “rich” unity for English Majors (on the grounds that it is both beautiful and old). Professor Chickering, thankfully, balked at this and pointing to his temple replied, “The richness is all up here.” In other words, he was suggesting that I had confused a basic premise of my argument–that paramount among the resources offered to us at the College is the richness of each other’s minds. In this sense, I find the argument that the Internet (and by implication-god help me-the “blogosphere”) inherently dissolves the richness of human expression somewhat weaker.

If you really want to know the truth, I think that there is a deeper problem here, and that is, that none of us have really been taught how to write–properly with or about feeling. I do not mean this in the sense of the self-esteem movement, and I am not a proponent of uncritical self-expressionism. To my mind these exist on the same level as exhibitionism, and are generally much less amusing. But rather I mean it in the sense that we have not yet learned to write them, our feelings-to take impressions and unrefined experience, to think about them critically, to handle them, to familiarize ourselves with them, to re-read them, and then to organize them, with whatever strength our constitution allows, into something which is not simply a mechanical reaction to our environment-a whine or a yelp-but constitutes a honest reflection and a real response. For inevitably, as we move towards preparing a feeling to be communicated, we must (if we are paying any attention at all) move deeper into that feeling and maybe even learn something about it.

When we speak of the lack on intimacy across electronic mediums, I think what we are really recognizing is the lack of cultivated feeling and the preponderance of emotional indolence that we hear (whether we recognize it in the moment or not) as the great white noise of the network age. All it takes is a quick comparison with the richness we have (probably at least once) experienced in another’s company to convince ourselves that the lameness of our discourse is due to the Internet-to the emergence of “blogs” where there were once drawing rooms-and not in any way to ourselves, and how we still have not learned to speak.

Don’t get me wrong, I am in favor of drawing rooms and fireside conversation of all sorts. I do not mean to have argued against these. I only mean to suggest that although our world has changed, the choice need not necessarily be between a Romantic (or romantic) attachment to an archaic past literary culture or our more “modern” soul-less chats. I believe there may yet exist other options. I intend, in so far as I can, to make this “blog” one of these options. I cannot help myself:

Men at some times are masters of their fates:
The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,
But in ourselves, that we are underlings.

Thank you again for the thoughtful letter. I think there is plenty here to discuss for this week. Depending on how things go I plan on addressing the second and more difficult question that was raised next week.

Xairete

I have been told—on more than one occasion—that I’ve too much the bleary-eyed Romantic in me, and that I fall, too quickly and too often, for the heavèd exhortation:

…. Ah dismal soul’d!
The winds of heaven blew, the ocean roll’d
Its gathering waves—ye felt it not. (Sleep and Poetry 187-89)

Despite my having been warned against these tendencies, (and by the sound judgment of my very sensible friends), a man arrived recently—out of an alarming (and so disarming) proximity—to tease these regions of my heart. And I confess, for some weeks now I have been involved with the poems of John Keats.

As I have introduced the intent of “this ’ere log,” it might now seem appropriate (following these introductory remarks) to move into a detailed discussion of Keat’s poems, and together attempt to discern what we can as to the merits of the Romantic sensibility—moral and artistic. Pray, the Nightingale:

My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains
My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,
Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains
One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk:
’Tis not through envy of thy happy lot,
But being too happy in thine happiness –
That though, light-wingèd Dryad of the trees,
In some melodious plot
Of beechen green, and shadows numberless,
Singest of summer in full-throated ease.

I am not opposed to this approach, if this is where we want to wander naturally, and I certainly will do nothing prevent the affair. Yet for myself, for now, I cannot but admit that I am too much in awe of the man to speak upon his poems, and would—as in the haste of recent bliss—as quickly leave them as they lie, imposing, in the background of what follows.

What follows is the Letters and the true subject of my consideration tonight this morning. Professor Kim Townsend (The Moral Essay; Keats and Wordsworth) has called the Collected Letters of John Keats the best letters ever written by a literary figure. Whether this is, in fact, an accurate claim I cannot say—I simply haven’t read enough—yet from what I do know, it does not seem to me an unreasonable assessment. There is at least a great deal of interest in the letters: the oft-spoken of theory of Negative Capability, the metaphor of the “chamber of maiden thought,” Keat’s take on “soul-making,” and his letters to love Fanny Brawne–e.g:

“. . . . You absorb me in spite of myself–you alone: for I look not forward with any pleasure to what is call’d being settled in the world; I tremble at domestic cares–yet for you I would meet them, though if it would leave you the happier I would rather die than do so. I have two luxuries to brood over in my walks, your Loveliness and the hour of my death. O that I could have possession of them both in the same minute.” (3 May 1819)

Now, that has all been very tidily put, and I apologize for this, but I feel that I must once more step over my intent. For as worthwhile as the Letters are for their own sake, and for as urgently as I can recommend them, I have not spoken of them today for that sake, but rather for our own, and for what I worry it might mean for us to have come about in a world in which the vessel of focused intimacy traditionally expressed in epistolary discourse has no obvious analogue: We do not write each other letters.

I might, on dark days, even go so far as to say that we do not think each other letters. That for the convenience of our everyday discourse we, in fact, say very little to each other—ever—and that in this way, we are robbed of two things:

First, the intensity of bonafide human intercourse. There is a strange tendency for conversation these days to develop in one of two very particular ways. For the sake of simplicity, I will call them–”shooting the sh**”, and therapy. “Intensity” in our exchange has come to mean (roughly) a display of much head nodding and rude emotional disclosure. We seem to think that our emotions are intense, and do not themselves need refining, or rather, that the purpose of disclosure is merely display and certainly not criticism (read: empathy) and the possibility of growth.

Second, we miss the experience of getting to know someone as they piece together their own thoughts. That is, as they are. Recently, a movie was made about our College’s unfortunate “hookup culture.” Unfortunately, I was unable to make the film, but after it came out, I have thought once or twice about the connection “hookup culture” has with our decayed discourse. At first the causation seemed to run thus—people just want to get drunk and touch each other, thus, we learn very little about each other in “unnecessary” conversation. Yet part of me is coming to suspect that the arrow actually runs the other way. That the culture is so pervasive precisely because alternatives are not obvious, and that people (including, of course, myself) really don’t know what they want—

—unfortunately, my class began five minutes ago, and I am going to have to leave this thought—rough as it is—even vulnerable to criticism of incompleteness. Forgive the generalization in these last two paragraphs; they are of course in need of a great deal of qualifying and backtalk. Yet weigh the ducks against your own, and see if we cannot begin some worthwhile exchange.

As this is the first post on this ’ere log, I thought it might be worthwhile, before we begin, to give a brief introduction to the affair—namely, to say what it is I think this blog is meant to achieve; what I hope that it is able to avoid; and to give some indication why it is that I would ever take time (that I don’t have) to write it. First of all, this is not Pepper. Nor is it The Indicator—nor is it The Student, or the Circus, or The Amherst Review. Nor do I have any desire to write book reviews, or social analysis, or cover the news, or indulge in creativity. All of these things already exist on this campus (successfully or no), and I am quite content not to meddle in other people’s business.Second of all, in this best of all worlds that we inhabit, I’d rather speak less than more. I am not a columnist, and I would rather not become one. My prose has a tendency to over-emphasize itself, and I tire of the sound of my own voice. In fact, the only thing makes this project worthwhile for me is the possibility that I will, at the end of the day, not have to say too much on my own. But that instead, we will collaborate, and I will have the opportunity to learn from the far reaching intelligence that, despite regular appearances to the contrary, I still believe exists on this campus. Here of course, I speak of you.With this sentiment in mind, I propose to offer you what I have, which is only my thoughts—vaguely about books—in the hope of starting some worthwhile discussion. My only requests, besides your collaboration, are the following: one, that you don’t ever criticize me concerning my use of italics. My friends have intervened. I know that I have a problem, but you can’t tell a crack addict to just stop one day. There are twelve steps, and I am working on it.And two, that you be utterly outrageous. If you can, keep it clean(ish), and thoughtful, and generally accessible, but for god’s sake let loose. I, for one, plan to speak ridiculously—as the Porter has in fact—and say all the things that silly classroom pride and politics prevent. I vacillate unpredictably between a profound trust in the bounties of literature and an unmatched repulsion for so many wasted hours—it is madness—which is to say that I am in love, and plan to act with all the appropriate irresolution and bewitched intent—Huzza!Finally, if as we are discussing a piece of literature you feel that you absolutely must say something technical, please, qualify yourself; tell us all how silly you are first, pray for the strength to resist the urge, and if you still must, keep it brief. Profane before you make pretense.Yet here I am–in love:…. Some years ago—never mind how long precisely—having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen, and regulating the circulation. Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people’s hats off—then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball. With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take to the ship. There is nothing surprising in this. If they but knew it, almost all men in their degree, some time or other, cherish very nearly the same feelings towards the ocean with me.If any care to share—any lovers like myself—I’d ask this week for places where you find the sand to set your anchor down—