Poetry – Page 6 – Maverick Philosopher

Haiku Commentary on Marx’s 11th Thesis on Feuerbach

The Marxist Nowhere Man
Attempts to change
What he does not understand.

Philip Larkin on Death

David Rieff, son of Susan Sontag, writes movingly of her mother's love of life and her refusal to accept extinction in Swimming in a Sea of Death: A Son's Memoir (Simon and Shuster, 2008). Her attitude and his is close to the one expressed by Philip Larkin in the following poem which displays Larkin's power as a poet in tandem with his weakness as a philosopher. Rieff, p. 13, quotes approvingly from the stanza which I have bolded.

In my humble opinion, the "specious stuff" in Larkin's phrase below is not the wisdom of Epicurus to which allusion is made, but the boozy self-indulgence Larkin serves up. What annoys me, I suppose, is the poetic passing-off of substantive claims with nary an attempt at justification. Am I again criticizing poetry for not being philosophy as I did once before with reference to Wallace Stevens? Perhaps. Or perhaps I am objecting to the nihilism of much of the 'art' of the 20th century.

Larkin's poetry illustrates how life must appear to those for whom God is dead. Read some more of it here. It is skillfully symptomatic of the age.

Getting back to Rieff and Sontag, I find curious their unquestioning conviction that physical death just has to be utter extinction. How can they be so cocksure about that? Socrates, Plato, Moses Mendelsohn and a hundred other luminaries were just deluded fools? And then there is this thought: if physical death extinguishes us utterly, then the game is not worth the candle, and Sontag's stubborn refusal to accept her mortality even after 71 years worth of this ephemeral life is just ridiculous, and the opposite of anything that could be called wisdom.

Continue reading “Philip Larkin on Death”

A Death Poem for Year’s End

As another year slips away, a year that saw the passing of John Updike, here is a fine poem of his to celebrate or mourn the waning days of ought-nine:

Perfection Wasted

And another regrettable thing about death
is the ceasing of your own brand of magic,
which took a whole life to develop and market ——
the quips, the witticisms, the slant
adjusted to a few, those loved ones nearest
the lip of the stage, their soft faces blanched
in the footlight glow, their laughter close to tears,
their tears confused with their diamond earrings,
their warm pooled breath in and out with your heartbeat,
their response and your performance twinned.
The jokes over the phone. The memories packed
in the rapid-access file. The whole act.
Who will do it again? That's it: no one;
imitators and descendants aren't the same.

Commentary

Viewed from a third-person point of view, death seems entirely natural, not evil or tragic. Deciduous trees give up their leaves in the fall, but new ones arrive in the spring. Where's the evil in that? We too are parts of nature; we hang for a time from des Lebens goldener Baum, and then we drop off. So far there has never been a lack of new specimens to take our places in a universe that can get on quite well without any of us. But "imitators and descendants aren't the same." No indeed, for what dies when we die is not merely an animal, not merely a bit of biology, not merely a specimen of a species, a replaceable token of a type, but a subject of experience, a self, an irreplaceable conscious individual, a being capable of saying and meaning 'I.' "Who will do it again?" No one! I am unique and it took me a lifetime to get to this level of haecceity and ipseity. This interiority wasn't there at first; I had to make it. I became who I am by my loving and striving and willing and knowing: I actualized myself as a self. It was a long apprenticeship that led to this mastery. If I did a good job of it I perfected, completed, mastered, myself: I achieved my own incommunicable perfection, which cannot be understood objectively, but only subjectively by a being who loves. In the first instance that is me: I love myself and as loving myself I know myself. In the second instance, it is you if you love me; loving me you know me as an individual, not as a specimen of a species, a token of a type, an instance of a universal, an object among objects. There were all those outside influences, of course, but they would have been nothing to me had I not appropriated them, making them my own. As a somewhat greater poet once wrote, Was du ererbt von Deinen Vätern hast, erwirb es, um es zu besitzen.

And so therein lies death's sting: not in the passing of a bit of biology, but in the wasting of that unique and incommunicable perfection, the instant evaporation of that ocean of interiority. But is the perfection wasted? Does the magic just cease? The animal ceases no doubt, but the magic of interiority? These questions remain open.

Good Advice from John Ciardi

Poet John Ciardi (pronounced Chyar-dee, emphasis on first syllable, not See-ar-dee) was born in 1916 and died in 1986. A brilliant line of his sticks with me, though I cannot recall where he said it, and Mr. Google didn't help: "Never send a poem on a prose errand." Tattoo that onto your forearms, you would-be poets. (I myself am no poet, I know it, so I can't possibly blow it. I hereby allude to a certain troubadour who, though I would not call him a poet, others would.)

Here is the epitaph Ciardi composed for himself:

Here, time concurring (and it does);
Lies Ciardi. If no kingdom come,
A kingdom was. Such as it was
This one beside it is a slum.

UPDATE (14 December): The ever-helpful David Gordon, and that indefatigable argonaut of cyberspace, Dave Lull, inform me that Ciardi's exact words were, "But I have learned not to send a poem on a prose errand." The quotation can be found on p. 60 of Ciardi Himself: Fifteen Essays in the Reading, Writing, and Teaching of Poetry.

Salvation Through Art? Comments on Some Aphorisms of Wallace Stevens

Herewith, comments on some aphorisms of Wallace Stevens from Adagia, aphorisms that sum up much of the aesthetic attitude I am concerned to oppose. (To be precise: I am out to oppose it in its imperialistic ambitions; I have nothing against art properly chastened and subordinated to the ultimate dominatrix, Philosophia.) I have bolded Wallace's lines.