Mussolini: "Why do you want to get your ideas in order?"
Pound: "For my poem."
Eliot: "What do you believe?"
Pound: "I believe that a light from Eleusis persisted throughout the middle ages and set beauty in the song of Provence and Italy."
My aim in keeping this blog is to try to articulate, in as many ways as possible, a project that has occupied me since I hit on the slogan, "Philosophy is the art of writing concepts down." It occured to me almost immediately that this art, which may be called "conceptual notation" (reviving Frege's idea of a Begriffsschrift), parallels a particular approach to poetry, which can be called "emotional notation", i.e., the art of writing emotions down, and which seems to be what Ezra Pound understood the troubadours to be doing.
In German, this might be referred to as Ergriffsschrift (though this is probably a neologism), evoking shades of Leo Frobenius. In his Kulturgeshichte Afrikas: prolegomena zu einer historischen gestaltlehre ("towards a historical doctrine of form"?) he tied emotion (Ergriffenheit) very closely to the formative processes of the "paideuma" (p. 26), which Pound defined in the Guide to Kulchur as "the gristly root of ideas that are in action" and distinguished sharply from the Zeitgeist, viz., "the notions that a great mass of people still hold or half hold from habit, from waning custom" (p. 58).
I find it useful to collect these fragments in one place. Absolute Astronomy has a helpful entry on the Begriffsschrift, which links to entries also on "thought", "formula", "language", "logic" and "notation". It is, of course, terse, technical and scientific, but it indicates something of what I am after, even if it does not provide us with the tools we need.
In the next few posts I want to go on to look at intuitions and institutions and to try to characterize poetry and philosophy as forms of writing, or more technically, systems of notation, whose aim it is to arrange imagery to present our intuitions and institutions to us in a useful (meaningful) way, allowing us to get a "grip" (Griff) on them.
I continue only to trace around the outline of my problem, rehearsing its form, its formal properties, its formulae. But T. S. Eliot did suggest that the work of art should arrange "a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of a particular emotion" (he famously called this the "objective correlative" in "Hamlet and his Problems", The Sacred Wood, p. 100).
Pound tried to evaluate a writer "in proportion as his work is exact, i.e., true to human consciousness and to the nature of man, as it is exact in formulation of desire." ("How to Read", LE, p. 22)
Betrand Russell said that "a good notation has a subtlety and suggestiveness which at times makes it almost like a live teacher. Notational irregularities are often the first sign of philosophical errors, and a perfect notation would be a substitute for thought." (Introduction to Wittgenstein's Tractatus, p. xviii). He is talking about a kind of conceptual notation, here, and the poetic homologue would invoke a "substitute for feeling". No notation (no form) is perfect.
Each poem aspires to its own perfection, however. That is the quality of its affection.
4 comments:
As always, your comments touch the live nerve and spiky part of the doctrine.
There's a major qualification in any formula that runs "If a perfect X could function as a Y. . ." Nothing, like I say, is perfect. So one is talking here only about a certain intrinsic aspiration.
Science at some point got so complicated that individual scientists were no longer able "to get their minds around" it, they could not conceive of it as a whole. They were having trouble thinking.
So along comes logical notation to lift a part of the burden for them. (Whether you start things with Aristotle, Leibniz or Boole only indicates the sense of "complicated".)
Well, I think the politics of the various courts in the 13th century had complicated things enough to warrant a notation of passion in the same sense.
For what its worth, I think Ginsberg was "exact in formulation of desire"--given the emergence of a very specific set of desires after WWII, which are still largely relevant today. Poems like Paterson, America and Howl are notationally quite perfect--and they do spare me the trouble of feeling a range of things.
I don't mean that the way it sounds. We might say, rather, that these poems bring us into the very precise vicinity of those feelings which are their theme, cutting through a lot of imprecise "cultural", as you say, rubbish in order to make the experience effectively available.
Naturally, you have to be interested in that experience in order for it to have value. But today we have an almost objective interest in these experiences. We are having trouble feeling (and largely on the same grounds that troubled Ginsberg). We can't get our hearts around it. Or (since the core is to the heart what the perimeter is to the mind) we need to find a "way in", yes.
We probably have to make a pact with Ginsberg, no? Let there be commerce between us. . .$500 down on your old strophes.
The Unquiet Grave continues to prove its worth in its archives. Recall Tony's discussion of songs like Leonard Cohen's "One of Us Cannot Be Wrong", which he called "maybe the most devastating song I've ever heard."
"These sort of songs on repeat are my guilty pleasure. The sort of stuff that a Wes Anderson character would listen to on a bus. Except for hours on end ... Even now I like to take a night to drink Wild Turkey, sit in the bathtub and listen to Nebraska about a dozen times. This is healthy artistically, makes sure I don't get this adolescent emo stuff into the poems. I'm a hugely sentimental person . . ."
I use (popular) music in a similar way. It frames the problem for me. Take David Gray's "My oh my". Now, this is by no means brilliant poetry (and is devastating, if at all, only in the actual performance). But poetry is supposed to provide us with some of the means to deal with the problem that this song glosses, in a sense, glosses over.
The heart beats at the core of language, the mind patrols the frontier.
We work the interstices, disremembering (?).
It may be a matter of becoming capable of the interstice, the joint, the articulation. But this does not mean being able to bear the feeling and the thought involved in the conjunction.
That's the importance of Tony's bathtub. You need other containers in real life.
Late morning, here in Copenhagen. Plugging away at work.
Try listening to Elvis Costello's "(I don't want to go to) Chelsea" immediately followed by Lloyd Cole's version of "Chelsea Hotel".
Then imagine the chorus repeated after that somewhat cute ending "that's all I don't think of you that often."
(beat)
BUT YOU GOT AWAY DIDN'T YOU. . .
repeat
repeat
repeat
might work
Hi Megan,
Thanks for the question. I'm not sure I understand the last part, but I think that the ordinary (or "real life") containers, i.e., the bathtubs of sentimentality, allow us to get by, on a day-to-day basis, without being precisely articulated.
So I guess I'm saying that containers (tubs) are alternatives to articulations (joints). They are where the articulation don't take place, because they don't have to.
There are two ways of maintaining a form--one is by joining things up in a self-supporting, lattice-like structure. The other is to pour it, in a liquid state, into a container.
My suggestion is that a poem is "articulate" (jointed), i.e., a lattice structure, and that a pop song depends on the bathtub of popular culture (public sentimentality) to hold its form.
I'm not sure that it is possible to get whole landscapes to intersect.
Hope that's of use to you.
Best,
Thomas
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