I think Edmund Burke was right to say that "a great clearness is the enemy of all enthusiasm whatsoever." Fortunately, clarity and enthusiasm are not proper pangrammatical supplements. Clarity is to philosophy as intensity, not enthusiasm, is to poetry. Poems should not produce enthusiasm at all. Likewise, philosophy should eschew profundity. Ultimately, philosophy and poetry are the enemies of profundity and enthusiasm, two entirely dispensable (and often distasteful) states of mind and heart. In their place, they put clarity and intensity. Philosphy clarifies the appearance. Poetry intensifies the surface. Out of the depths. Down from the heights.
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The surface-depth metaphor in interpretation of poetry is one of the things that makes people intimidated by poetry: "it's too deep for me." But there's no depth, and nothing "between the lines": it's all shimmering surface.
Yes, exactly.
"I SHALL DERIVE MY EMOTIONS SOLELY FROM THE ARRANGEMENT OF SURFACES, I shall present my emotions by the ARRANGEMENT OF MY SURFACES, THE PLANES AND LINES BY WHICH THEY ARE DEFINED." (Gaudier-Brzeska)
I agree. However, is there a pangrammatical way of capturing the sense in which profundity and euthusiasm are *constitutive temptations* af philosophy and poetry?
((I think there is some place in the Big Typescript, where Wittgenstein says something to the effect that profundity is enemy of philosophy, but I don't have the BT at hand at here))
It's along these lines that I have always interpreted Benjamin's point about having nothing to say, only to show.
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