[Brian Watson]

I like Dawkins, and Midgely's critique of The Selfish Gene was willfully obtuse:

"Genes cannot be selfish or unselfish, any more than atoms can be jealous, elephants abstract or biscuits teleological".

As Dawkins replied, that's as idiotic as explaining to a particle physicist that elementary particles cannot be charming.

I suspect she's never actually read any Dawkins.

[Brian Watson]

And, incidentally, why can't elephants be abstract?

[Mark Allinson]

Googling about, I found this site advertising a Conference on Poetry and Philosophy from just last year. So we are not alone.

The reason why most modern philosophy is useless for poets is that it is remorselessly rationalist and nominalist. And any other mode of consciousness is sneered at as "primitive" or "magical" or something worse. The Imagination has never had a good press in the West. And the imaginal mode is still considered regressive, dangerous or childish.

[Andrew Frisardi]

Interesting about that conference in Mark's posting. Looking at the program for it brought to mind two other contemporary "philosophical" poets: Jorie Graham and Susan Stewart. I don't like Graham's poetry (some of her early stuff, actually, I like OK), and don't really know Stewart's. Adam Kirsch has been writing some philosophical stuff of late. And Tim Love mentioned Bonnefoy, a really fine poet.

That's right about recent philosophy, Mark: it's all in the head, a symptom of university politics and cultural exhaustion. With a few exceptions. Phenomenology is an aspect of modern philosophy that has a lot to do with poetry. Here's a good description of the phenomenological approach, by Henry Corbin. Corbin was the West's leading scholar of Islamic esotericism--he didn't teach "philosophy"--but by my lights, he was a true philosopher.

"The phenomenon is that which shows itself, that which is apparent and which in its appearance shows forth shoemthing which can reveal itself therein only by remaining concealed beneath the appearance. Something shows itself in the phenomenon and can show itself there only by remaining hidden. In the philosophical and religious sciences the phenomenon presents itself in those technical terms in which the element '-phany' from the Greek, figures: epiphany, theophany, hierophany, etc. The phenomenon, the Greek phainomenon, is the zâhir, the apparent, the external, the exoteric. What shows itself within this zâhir, while itself remaining concealed, is the bâtin, the interior, the esoteric. Phenomenology consists in 'saving the appearances,' saving the phenomenon, while disengaging or unveiling the hidden which shows itself beneath this appearance. The Logos or principle of the phenomenon, phenomenology, is thus to tell the hidden, the invisible present beneath the visible." (from his essay "The Concept of Comparative Philosophy," dated 1974)

This is what the poet does, even if the poem isn't explicitly "philosophical." A living poem is philosophical. Some go deeper and wider than others, but poetic rhythm, the part that can't be translated, is a breath of philosophy, of communion of some kind, regardless of the poem's surface intention.


[This message has been edited by Andrew Frisardi (edited August 30, 2008).]

[Mark Allinson]

Yes, Andrew, I agree, Corbin is a significant figure and the source of much in Hillman.

And I also agree that "A living poem is philosophical."

Here, Emily sounds like Hillman, who echoes Keats and Blake:


Now I lay thee down to Sleep --
I pray the Lord thy Dust to keep --
And if thou live before thou wake --
I pray the Lord thy Soul to make --

(1539).

Being alive while not quite "awake" is to live with an un-made soul.

And here she sounds like Corbin:

Perception of an object costs
Precise the Object's loss --
Perception in itself a Gain
Replying to its Price --

The Object Absolute -- is nought --
Perception sets it fair
And then upbraids a Perfectness
That situates so far --

(1071).

In great poetry, every different angle of vision implies a new metaphysic.

Poetry is indeed philosophy.

[wendy v]

I think elephants can be abstract, but only when they're philosophers. Midgely sounds mighty interesting. Mary, thanks, I'll look into Howe.
Have enjoyed this thread. Mark and Andrew, thanks for the poems.

I agree all living poems are philosophical, and I agree with those above who say in essence, philosophy, yes, measurement, logic, reason, yes, but I prefer music, play, embodiment, revelation and intuition over abstraction and substitution. But by saying so, we assume the worst of the bloodless philosophies, and the highest of sublime poetries. I think it's poets themselves, and not any imposed or imagined establishment which under/overestimates poetry, as though when we put the instruments aside and begin to sing, the ancients and measurements
don't remain, and we aren't dancing with all we know and don't know, but hovering nearby instead.



It was a hard thing to undo this knot.
The rainbow shines, but only in the thought
Of him that looks. Yet not in that alone,
For who makes rainbows by invention ?
And many standing round a waterfall

See one bow each, yet not the same to all,
But each a hand's breadth further than the next.
The sun on falling water writes the text
Which yet is in the eye or in the thought.
It was a hard thing to undo this knot.

(GMH)


--------

----------



By silver water, fruit of gold bowed low
to free the spellbound prince from form
of tree or beast, or keep from harm
the peasant girl before whom all will bow.

What shall we do with all our magic now?
Our wands are turned to sticks to beat
each other off and school belief.
Once, our gift of meaning to our world

gave back the gift of meaning to our days.
But even still, imagination
lets all understanding happen;
even then, curiosity was praise.

- Carolyn Connors


---------


--------

There is no such thing as collective consciousness !
- JM


Snowflake

Behold:

one

by floating

one

they come,

feather like,

small, and sweet,

molecular
and oh so

like-we unique,

melting at
the child’s cheek,

lighting on
the tattered aster,

at the backs
of elder trees,

accumulating in our sleep,
chalking the slate, revising the field,
clinging to the heresies
of silence and

significance,
of gathered weight, and influence,
of sway, touch, alight, and word,
of seasonal law acquiring earth.


(wendy v)






[This message has been edited by wendy v (edited August 30, 2008).]

[Andrew Frisardi]

I really enjoyed the poem choices, Mark and Wendy.

Here's another:

Mind

Mind in its purest play is like some bat
That beats about in caverns all alone,
Contriving by a kind of senseless wit
Not to conclude against a wall of stone.

It has no need to falter or explore;
Darkly it know what obstacles are there,
And so may weave and flitter, dip and soar
In perfect courses through the blackest air.

And has this simile a like perfection?
The mind is like a bat. Precisely. Save
That in the very happiest intellection
A graceful error may correct the cave.

--Richard Wilbur

[Andrew Frisardi]

This thread might be on the way down the page, but before it disappears I wanted to add one more posting.

It has to do with ideas of beauty. What is artistic beauty for? is related to the question, What is poetry for? We work at the craft so that our poems will be well made. To what end? Is it just for diversion (nothing wrong with that!), or is it also, at times anyway, for something larger than that, something longer lasting?

What kind of knowledge is aesthetic knowledge? Emotional, obviously. And sensual. Is it also cognitive or intellectual? The Platonists talk about "intellectual beauty": what's that? What poems have it and which don't?

I've come up with a few pretty good quotations on this issue, and wonder what other Sphereans make of it.

"The Greek original of the word 'aesthetic' means perception by the senses, especially by feeling. Aesthetic experience is a facutly that we share with animals and vegetables, and is irrational. The 'aesthetic soul' is that part of our psychic makeup that 'senses' things and reacts to them: in other words, the 'sentimental' part of us. To identify our approach to art with the pursuit of these reactions is not to make art 'fine' but to apply it only to the life of pleasure and to disconnect it from the active and contemplative lives." --Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, "A Figure of Speech or a Figure of Thought?"


"It is commonplace today to speak of a 'civilization of the image' (thinking of our magazines, cinema, and television). But one wonders whether, like all commonplaces, this does not conceal a radical misunderstanding, a complete error, For instead of the image being elevated to the level of a world that would be proper to it, instead of it appearing invested with a symbolic function, leading to an internal sense, there is above all a reduction of the image to the level of sensory perception pure and simple, and thus a definitive degradation of the image. Should it not be said, therefore, that the more successful this reduction is, the more the sense of the imaginal is lost, and the more we are condemned to producing only the imaginary?" --Henry Corbin, "Mundus Imaginalis"


"Art is not talent, it is knowledge. Beauty is a form of cognition. And when beauty is debased from cognition to sensation the next step is to perversion. The perversion of this experience of beauty in our civilization is a clear fact. . . . there is nothing to remind us of a destiny which transcends our small personal life. Hence our feeling of loneliness. Hence our sense of alienation." --Cecil Collins (English painter, 1908-89)


"Poet and sculptor, do the work,
Nor let the modish painter shirk
What his great forefathers did.
Bring the soul of man to God,
Make him fill the cradles right.

"Measurement began our might:
Forms a stark Egyptian thought,
Forms that gentler phidias wrought.
Michael Angelo left a proof
On the Sistine Chapel roof,
Where but half-awakened Adam
Can disturb globe-trotting Madam
Till her bowels are in heat,
proof that there's a purpose set
Before the secret working mind:
Profane perfection of mankind.

"Quattrocento put in paint
On backgrounds for a God or Saint
Gardens where a soul's at ease;
Where everything that meets the eye,
Flowers and grass and cloudless sky,
Resemble forms that are or seem
When sleepers wake and yet still dream.
And when it's vanished still declare,
With only bed and bedstead there,
That heavens had opened.
Gyres run on;
When that greater dream had gone
Calvert and Wilson, Blake and Claude,
Prepared a rest for the people of God,
Palmer's phrase, but after that
Confusion fell upon our thought."

--Yeats, from "Under Ben Bulben"




[This message has been edited by Andrew Frisardi (edited August 31, 2008).]

[Mark Allinson]

Ah, yes, Beauty!

Thank you for raising this point, Andrew, which might even deserve its own thread.

Beauty is the great casualty of the anti-aesthetic theories of Pomo/Marxism/Feminism.

I agree with Robinson Jeffers who goes as far as saying that - "Beauty is the sole business of poetry."

But, as you ask, what is "beauty"? Is it only a sensual experience? Jeffers says, "beauty is not always lovely". It can be terrible. This relates to Romantic theories of the "sublime" (Edmund Burke). And yes, beauty (as Shelley says) can be "intellectual" - mathematicians often use the word about formulae. There can be beautiful ideas, feelings, situations, as much as beautiful objects. Any experience which causes us to draw a sharp breath is aesthesis, the aesthetic effect.

And we can't live well, or for long, without beauty.


The Beauty of Things.

- Jeffers

To feel and speak the astonishing beauty of things--earth, stone and water,
Beast, man and woman, sun, moon and stars--
The blood-shot beauty of human nature, its thoughts, frenzies and passions,
And unhuman nature its towering reality--
For man's half dream; man, you might say, is nature dreaming, but rock
And water and sky are constant--to feel
Greatly, and understand greatly, and express greatly, the natural
Beauty, is the sole business of poetry.
The rest's diversion: those holy or noble sentiments, the intricate ideas,
The love, lust, longing: reasons, but not the reason.

[Andrew Frisardi]

Yay, Jeffers! I love his work, but I'm not getting his distinction between "natural" and "noble sentiments" at the end. Aren't they both an aspect of the same thing?
I did indeed think of starting a thread with the topic Beauty--before I even thought of the philosophy one.