A friend reminds me that today is the first day of spring.
…life again begins to assume its normal appearance as of "today". Only the imagination is undeceived. The volcanos are extinct. Coal is beginning to be dug again where the fern forests stood last night. (If an error is noted here, pay no attention to it.) (WCW, Spring and All, p. 10)
Like last year, I'll devote a series of posts now to the delightful correspondences between Williams' Spring and All and Wittgenstein's Tractatus.
The words "existential philosopher" are not yet* as ridiculous as the words "inspirational poet". But they should be. First of all, both are pleonasms. All philosophers are existential, all poets inspirational. That's their business. It's silly for a poet to insist on the role of inspiration in their work. The same goes for the role of existence in the work of the philosopher.
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*The Pangrammaticon has not yet been influential enough.
It's one of those sentences that once you think of it, you imagine must already have been written, but which Google then comes up empty on. All this happens in a flash, before you know whether the sentence even expresses an opinion you hold. Like the way a poem begins.
It expresses an idea that is related to Lisa Robertson's views on money. There is a general trend in culture—it's been going on for thousands of years—to turn experience into information. It's unfair to inventors and craftsmen to call this process the rise of "technology". It's the actual fact that the things I value, even the things I love, are increasingly experienced, by me, as information, and this information is increasingly coded in terms of money. Cities "dissolve in the fluid called money".
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Update: it is possible that art is the opposite of money. Art turns information back into experience. This is why really great art is so expensive. It's money trying to overcome art. There would not need to be any art if all value was experienced directly. (I'm talking about "high" or "pure" art, of course, not craft. Art for art's sake is the craft of combatting the deleterious effects of money on experience.)
None of this should be considered a kind of "anti-money" position. Someone who complains about the flooding of his basement is not "anti-water". It's about proportions. Some value is best administered with information. Just not all.
Poetry is the most precise means we have at our disposal to engage with culture. Philosophy offers comparable precision in dealing with nature.
I'm tempted to say your culture, your nature. That is, a poem will never occasion a confrontation with culture "as such", and there is of course no such thing. There's only ever whatever culture you carry within you. Likewise, philosophy can show you nature as it inheres in you, not as "it is" separate from your experience of it.
The locus of our philosophical encounter with nature is the concept, which is simply the attunement of our perceptual apparatus to particular things, thus rendered immediately knowable in experience as objects. The temper of our poetic encounter with culture, meanwhile, is the emotion, i.e., the direction of our actual dispositions among particular people, thus immediately empowering us as subjects.
It is by putting these encounters into words, clearly in the case of philosophy, intensely in the case of poetry, that we attain the highest available precision in our engagements with nature and culture.
Language strives towards precision. It articulates us.
All my joys to this are folly,
Naught so sweet as melancholy. (Robert Burton)
Or if thy mistress some rich anger shows,
Emprison her soft hand, and let her rave,
And feed deep, deep upon her peerless eyes. (John Keats)
If folly is the domination of reason by the passions, let us say that melancholy is the domination of passion by reason. The danger is that folly degenerates into mere stupidity, melancholy into cruelty. But if Erasmus was able to sing the praises of folly, Dowland was able to compose his melancholy into music. That is, Erasmus was able to argue that folly made love possible despite reason, Dowland was able to show that wisdom was possible in the face of great passion.
Something like that.
It is important to recognize folly as a kind of intelligent stupidity—unwise, to be sure, but not a denial of wisdom. Likewise, there is something loveless about melancholy but not a denial of love as such. There is always a kindness in its cruelty.
Finally, consider that folly thrives in seduction, and melancholy dwells in our contradictions. Folly leads us astray, melancholy speaks against us. Always for our own damned good.
