Is This It?

Waving Adieu, Adieu, Adieu

That would be waving and that would be crying,
Crying and shouting and meaning farewell,
Farewell in the eyes and farewell at the center,
Just to stand still without moving a hand.

In a world without heaven to follow, the stops
Would be endings, more poignant than partings, profounder,
And that would be saying farewell, repeating farewell,
Just to be there and just to behold.

To be one's singular self, to despise
The being that yielded so little, acquired
So little, too little to care, to turn
To the ever-jubilant weather, to sip

One's cup and never to say a word,
Or to sleep or just to lie there still,
Just to be there, just to be beheld,
That would be bidding farewell, be bidding farewell.

One likes to practice the thing. They practice,
Enough, for heaven. Ever-jubilant,
What is there here but weather, what spirit
Have I except it comes from the sun?

Wallace Stevens


For the time being I can no longer pretend that I have the time or the motivation to continue blogging here on a regular basis. The nearly 300 posts since last year (counting the longer predecessor of "Blue to Blue") have been a fascinating project, well worth doing. But I have said many of the things I had to say, in this format at least, and circumstances have changed; there are real-life matters that need to be taken care of.

I may occasionally return if I have a poem or other bee in my bonnet that I can't resist sharing, but it won't be on any regular basis, and it would be for myself more than for anyone else. After the first of the year things may have settled down enough that I'll want to undertake something new. I will continue to follow some of the folks on the Blogroll from time to time. But as for this site, thanks for reading up to now.

Poetic Diagnosis

I wasn't familiar with this poem, which I happened upon this morning:

Neurotics

No one gives you a thought, as day by day
You drag your feet, clay-thick with misery.
None think how stalemate in you grinds away,
Holding your spinning wheels an inch too high
To bite on earth. The mind, it's said, is free:
But not your minds. They, rusted stiff, admit
Only what will accuse or horrify,
Like slot-machines only bent pennies fit.

So year by year your tense unfinished faces
Sink further from the light. No one pretends
To want to help you now. For interest passes
Always towards the young and more insistent,
And skirts locked rooms where a hired darkness ends
Your long defence against the non-existent.

Philip Larkin

In some ways this seems a harsh, unlovely, and ungenerous piece, but on the other hand it has its accuracies. When it was written, in 1949 according to my volume, "neurosis" of course was a commonplace term owing to the cultural prominence of psychoanalysis. Neurosis remains a widely recognizable term, of course, but one no longer finds it in mainstream psychiatric diagnosis, as it has been split into myriad anxiety, mood, and perhaps personality disorders.

However, the construct of "neuroticism," which is a general tendency to emotional negativity and instability and susceptibility to stress, still exists as one of five major components of personality as identified in psychological testing (the other four are openness vs. conventionality, conscientiousness vs. expediency, extroversion vs. introversion, and agreeability vs. its lack). Neuroticism is correlated with increased risk for depression, anxiety, and eating disorders among other things. To my mind, describing someone as broadly neurotic can be more helpful and convenient than listing the five DSM-IV diagnoses they may happen to meet criteria for.

As for Larkin's poem, it painfully depicts the disfiguring and ostracizing effects that neuroticism can have; no, it is not (quite) leprosy, but it can alienate almost as much. It conveys the sense of stasis and sluggishness ("clay-thick"), of emotional torpor that results not from repose, but from wasteful psychological exertion (the metaphor of wheels spinning but gaining no traction on earth is just right).

Larkin puts his finger on the core problem of neurosis, which is the lack of internal freedom; while philosophers forever debate freedom vs. determinism in the abstract, the neurotic battles fatalism on a daily basis. Cheer up; don't be afraid; eat less; exercise. How can these things seem so impossible? For one thing, the neurotic lives in a different perceptual world from the rest of us, with a mind that will "admit only what will accuse or horrify."

"Tense unfinished faces" is perfect, suggesting the way in which anxiety inhibits and blurs individuation. There is a sense in which neurosis is a disabled identity. I'm not sure that "hired darkness" works as well, but I assume Larkin means here the classic avoidance by which the neurotic seeks to fend off "non-existent" threats, although ironically the threats in question are in reality all-too-existent, merely within the neurotic's "locked rooms," and not without as he imagines.

In the Country of the Blind...

In a culture of visual and information overload, does one close one's eyes and detach, or does one peer and squint all the more intently? It depends, of course, as a couple of recent Web tidbits remind me. At Salon, a letter writer asks Cary Tennis whether he is culpable as a "blog stalker" for anonymously following a family's apparently fairly intimate but not yet exclusive website. The writer's scruples are an example of increasingly unheard of discretion.

When I first became interested in blogs a couple of years ago I went through a period of browsing countless sites, often chosen at random, just to sample the astonishing diversity out there. It felt a bit as I imagine a bird might feel that is able to coast on updrafts, although this bird would possess supernatural sight and hearing, able to openly eavesdrop on passersby below.

As Cary Tennis noted in his answer, some websites are so open--or in some cases so shameless--that propriety suggests that one should avert one's gaze, as one would from a passionate couple in the park. But this is no ethical obligation, rather mere politeness. One can make a case that if people desire total privacy, they should stay in. In the open, gestures are observed and conversations are overheard, often with delectable curiosity. Similarly, anyone writing an open blog is asking for readers, some of them potentially randomly and scandalously inquisitive.

A quick dash to the dictionary reminds me that "voyeur" has an unsavory connotation, which is a bit surprising. Obviously general "curiosity" is widely commended (except among cats), but we really don't have a positive term for curiosity applying specifically to the interpersonal realm. After all, no one wants to be "nosy" or "prying" either. And yet much of what therapists do is a kind of well-intentioned voyeurism, sheer attention to the Other in ways that would seem inappropriate in many settings.

Some of the charm of personal blogs is owing to the mere sense of plenitude and excess. In an age of inane reality television, 24/7 news, and spam, who needs blogs anyway? It seems to me that blogs are one thing that make the Internet a massive metropolis, always a click away. Blogs afford an often unintentional and unaffectedly sincere look at passersby in the digital city; they are most informative when they don't know (whom) they are informing.

If the blog browser is the flaneur "taking it all in" on a busy city street, then there is the contrary tendency to filter out extraneous crap and control access to the answer, or at least an answer one cares about. In an Atlantic Monthly piece Jamais Cascio discusses the growing power and specificity of "augmented reality."

In a philosophical sense of course we never take in reality in an unprejudiced way; there is no escaping preconceptions altogether. And in some cases one doesn't want to--if a (formerly) Red State rube like me strolls through Manhattan, it is good to have access to a guide book of some kind that tells me what I'm looking at. But there is the danger of touring the guidebook and not the city.

"Augmented reality" is the increasing capacity of phones and other devices to superimpose upon one's real-world surroundings a kind of filter that both comments on those surroundings and screens out aspects deemed undesirable beforehand. It favors control over serendipity. And again, one can't see and hear everything; it is necessary to choose. However, it behooves one to choose the method-of-choosing (the reality filter(s)) most wisely. Maybe that's what wisdom is.

If information today is an open fire hydrant, does one retreat inside a poncho, or play in the shower, or slap a hose on, perhaps to spray someone? It depends on one's goals at the time and on how comfortable the surroundings are.

In environments of information scarcity, the challenges are education and opportunity, but in environments of information excess, the challenges are prioritization and motivation.

In the Beginning...

There may be no better instance of "high" art meeting "low" than R. Crumb's new version of the Book of Genesis (complete and unabridged, primarily using Robert Alter's translation)--an NPR review is here. Crumb, best known for his notoriously carnal and countercultural work in underground comics, explained that the warning on the book's cover--"Adult Supervision Recommended for Minors"--is needed because of the story, not his artwork. And indeed, his version is straight up, honestly depicting the extensive sex and violence of the original without gratuitous detail.

In his generally favorable review from The New Republic, Alter himself explores and questions the extent to which Crumb's illustrations add to the power of the original. However, is this really the primary criterion by which graphic work--whether drawn, staged, or filmed--should be judged? After all, as Alter implies, any one graphic interpretation, inasmuch as it favors one visual version, steers the reader away from imagined alternatives. Indeed, such is the power of primary text that any "strong interpretation" could potentially detract as much as add.

While graphic works can't be considered altogether in isolation from their source texts, I think they also can stand or fall based on their own visual impact. For instance, I love William Blake's illustrations, but I think they retain much of their power even if the words (prodigious in themselves) are blocked out. And some primary texts seem to me to be so profound and uncontainable in themselves that visual interpretations seem almost a distracting disservice. Shakespeare is like this--while I've enjoyed a fair number of staged and filmed versions, I would much prefer to reread the original.

Another way of saying it is that graphic interpretations, while perhaps professing to complement or even enhance the textual original, cannot avoid competing with it and threatening to limit it as well. Perhaps this is why Islam forbids illustrations of the divine. But interpretation, just as criticism itself, can be appreciated as a parallel pursuit, just as I might enjoy Mozart's Mass in C Minor without counting myself a believer. As Santayana I think put it, "There is no God, and Mary is his mother."

When I first read Genesis as a teenager I was most struck, for whatever reason, by the story of Lot's family's flight from Sodom and Gomorrah and his wife turning into a pillar of salt when she turned to look behind her. Perhaps there was some adolescent avidity to know what exactly was going on in Sodom and Gomorrah, but as someone with a weakness for nostalgia to begin with, I also took it as a minatory tale. Descending from high to low culture, I would then proceed to play Boston's "Don't Look Back" at high volume.

So the Book of Genesis, a work of towering influence, doesn't need R. Crumb to augment its stature, but the graphic work is compelling in its own right, establishing its own imaginative region even if, in narrative terms, it does little more than flatter the original. But one definition of a classic--I forget where I read it--is a work that continually generates a buzzing cloud of interpretation.

Goddess

An Everywhere of Silver

With Ropes of Sand

To keep it from effacing

The Track called Land.

Dickinson

The sea is a creature of opposites. And it has always seemed a creature, the female deity corresponding to the male sun. The sublime Russian version of Stanislaw Lem's Solaris, in its depiction of a questionably sentient quasi-liquid world, brings this home.

Timeless and transient, absolutely monotonous yet infinitely various, caressing yet lethal. Above all, perhaps, solemn yet silly, a vast and inscrutable panoply contrasting with trivial sand and whimsically salty air.

The sea at night seems an affront, though, black-upon-black or death-within-death. Perhaps that is why sunrise and sunset are so much more striking at sea: rituals of redemption.

I have never allowed myself to live within two hours of the ocean. Some day perhaps.

The Season

"Autumn Day"

Lord: it is time. The huge summer has gone by.
Now overlap the sundials with your shadows,
and on the meadows let the wind go free.

Command the fruits to swell on tree and vine;
grant them a few more warm transparent days,
urge them on to fulfillment then, and press
the final sweetness into the heavy wine.

Whoever has no house now, will never have one.
Whoever is alone will stay alone,
will sit, read, write long letters through the evening,
and wander on the boulevards, up and down,
restlessly, while the dry leaves are blowing.

Rainer Maria Rilke (trans. Stephen Mitchell)

The Higgs Boson, Fate, and the Future

A Times article, pondering the vicissitudes of the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland, suggests that the great machine may be "sabotaged by its own future." That is, the energies generated may be so prodigious, and the elusive Higgs boson may be "so abhorrent to nature," that its creation ripples back in time to nullify itself. This could be viewed as a protective reflex on the part of the universe, or for the theologically inclined, God's version of "What part of no do you not understand?"

Maybe the whole article is tongue-in-cheek (which makes it no less interesting for that), but with particle physics apparently it's hard to tell. Yet I can't help but wonder: how is the time-travelling theory any different from the proposed project simply being impossible or contrary to the laws of nature, even if we don't yet understand how? After all, if I jump off of a tall building, flapping my arms vigorously, I will fall to my death. Is the prospect of me flying unaided across the cityscape "so abhorrent to nature" that my hypothetically successful flight travels backward in time to insure that I plunge to my doom instead? This suggests that the universe must (retro)actively cut off all kinds of transitions to metaphysically unacceptable outcomes. But if we can never directly view such outcomes, how is this different from the more prosaic notion of the inviolable laws of nature?