- some notes on an Irv in progress (bet you wish you had an Irv like mine!) -
A. “The Untimely Baron”
The book you are currently reading is the direct outcome of difficulties I experienced when, sometime during the late fall of 1999, I found myself, all of a sudden and without warning, stalled in the composition of a long poem – a poem to which, at the time of its conception, I gave the tentative title that it retains today of "The Untimely Baron," in keeping with my predilection for titular references to Nietzsche (the provision that goes along with the title still holds as well – namely, that I may change the title if another, more suitable one presents itself). I broke off work at about the 1000-line mark after having spent several months on it. It all began when I was sitting in the back of a classroom one afternoon, waiting for my students to finish a test. I had been thinking about breaking out of the confines of my usual 15-line stanza and searching for an extended form. I was still fresh off of a reading of Dante a year before, and I thought it might be fun to make an experiment with terza rima - the notoriously difficult rhyme scheme employed in the Divine Comedy that goes ABA BCB CDC DED, etc. I thought, “I can try to integrate Dante's rhyme scheme with my strict alteration of 10 and 12-syllable lines - it might lead to something interesting.” I had recently purchased and read on a whim the Idiot's Guide to Elvis, which I had happened upon in a Taipei bookstore. I thought, what the hell, I'll try, just as an experiment, to write a brief life of Elvis using terza rima. I didn't intend it as anything more than a perverse sort of joke and an experiment to see if my accustomed metrical scheme could be reconciled with a rhyme scheme as difficult as terza rima. I spent the next ten days working on it non-stop. Not only did I make myself laugh like hell as the verse veered precariously through some of the highlights of the King's momentous career. I felt that the finished product had enabled me to give free reign to a certain sardonic voice that had let itself be heard from time to time in my shorter poems. In fact, I found the outcome of my experiment to be so good as to fancy that by way of satire I had made an original contribution to the American science and pastime of Elvisology. One of the highlights was a hilarious conversation between Elvis and St. Peter at Heaven's Gate. I even concluded the piece with my own tongue-in-cheek assessment of what the King's example means for the American Dream: "It's clear there's nothing for us beyond perdition."
I had had so much fun writing this little parody that I immediately went about thinking how to continue it. I first thought of writing a series of equally tongue-in-cheek "American portraits" to accompany the piece that would include segments on Jack Kerouac, Malcolm X, Squeaky Fromm (accomplice of Charles Manson), Don King (the P. T. Barnum-esque boxing promoter, currently at work in China hailing Mao Zedong and dubiously claiming Chinese descent), and Homer Simpson. The whole thing would be a send-up of post-war American entertainment culture. I had recently read some early prose pieces of Borges collected together in a bizarre volume entitled The Universal History of Iniquity, in which Borges extracts various fictional characters from famous historical personages in a manner that is not so much macabre as absurd or impossible given what most people remember of such personages but that eerily expresses some truth about them - sort of as with Kafka apropos of "Amerika" in the novel of the same name. I thought to do something similar with the characters I had chosen - take a few elements, a few famous facts, as I had done with the Elvis piece, and submit them to a reworking that would manage to exhibit the mundane in a ridiculous light.
But then I hit upon an alternative idea. For some time I had thought about writing a homage of some kind to Theodor Geisel, alias Dr. Seuss, who had recently passed away and whose books filled the imaginations even into adulthood of many youthful readers of my generation. Since becoming a kindergarten teacher I had had frequent occasion to peruse his books. I spent some time puzzling over why his drawings and his characters still exert such a fascination on me, even as an adult over the age of 30. I noted, for one thing, that many of his narratives are structurally simple but compelling, centered around a goal or a puzzle to be solved by the protagonist, and that older children and even adults can still feel intrigued by his tantalizing problems long after they have outgrown the allure of the baroquely detailed drawings, the fantastic creatures, and the improbable rhymes. In Green Eggs and Ham the problem is how to get Sam’s grouchy friend to taste the strange fare. In I Had Trouble in Getting to Solla Salloo, one must get to this mythical Land of Assassins without getting killed or otherwise harassed. In Horton Hears a Who, the protagonist's task is to preserve a tiny globe peopled by a civilization too small for most of the world to see or hear from destruction at the hands of Horton's pursuers. In The Cat in the Hat two children must find a way to clean up the mess an extravagant cat has made before their mother gets home. In its sequel, The Cat in the Hat Comes Back, the cat takes matters into his own hands in an effort to rid his young friends' house of an insidious pink spot. Some of the tales have morals. In Yertle the Turtle, Yertle attempts to create a "turtle-tiered Galapagos" (to quote myself) in his efforts to become the undisputed master of all he can see, only to be plunged to the bottom of his pond and taught the lesson that (to quote Bob Dylan) "anyone can fill his life up with things he can see but he cannot touch." In The Big Brag, a far-hearing rabbit and a far-smelling bear argue as to who can out-sense the other, only to be confounded by a far-seeing worm who in a single gaze can see all the way around the world right back to the hill on which the bear and rabbit are arguing, "who seem to have nothing else better to do / Than sit here and argue who's better than who!" Most famously, the Grinch in The Grinch Who Stole Christmas must find out why the Whos are so irrepressibly happy on Christmas Day and whether it isn't true that, if all the trappings of Christmas are taken away, they can't indeed be made quite miserable, only to discover in the process of his experiment the True Meaning of Christmas.
Thus in Seuss's writings you have a wealth of narrative structures similar to the one's avidly studied by literary critics and students of literature throughout the 20th-century. It gradually dawned on me that you could use plot structures and various elements from Dr. Seuss's books to both explicate and parody certain trends in recent thought, much like the material with which film plots have been providing contemporary theorists such as Žižek in recent decades. The project of retelling one of Seuss’s tales in verse might provide me with the opportunity to get away from my one-minute forms and to expand upon certain themes I wished to work with in a way that is impossible in short poems. The goal, however, would be primarily poetic rather than overtly didactic or philosophical, and, ideally, I would write it in such a way that the reader unfamiliar with my theoretical sources would not feel as if he or she were missing out on something through lack of acquaintance with the key documents in psychoanalysis, Marxism, deconstruction, etc.
I soon fixed upon The Cat in the Hat and its sequel for several reasons. First, I considered that it is a tale that many people are familiar with from their childhood. Second, I found that book's sequel to be the most intriguing of Seuss' tales in terms of possible interpretations, with its threatening, amorphous spot and the 26 little cats embedded in the Big Cat's hat. Third, those 26 little cats offered a ready-made vehicle for experimenting with different voices and personas in lengthy monologues, each perhaps offering an interpretation of the menacing spot and a suggestion as to how to get rid of it.
I spent several weeks hard at work on the retelling (after providing a transition of several dozen lines leading out of Elvis and into Dr. Seuss) and got all the way up to the appearance in the second book of Little Cat A, for whom I wrote a monologue with the title "The Absurd Apostrophe of Little Cat A." At this point, after having spent more than a month engaged in this project since conceiving of the Elvis parody, I suddenly took a deep breath and thought, "What have I gotten myself into?" With my wife six months pregnant and the pressures of incipient fatherhood mounting, I decided to take some time off to give this project some thought and think about what steps needed to be taken if I wished to do full justice to such a grandiose conception.
What I'm aiming at is a philosophical poem in the tradition of Dante's Divine Comedy, Milton's Paradise Lost, and Goethe's Faust (Part Two, in particular). (I wouldn't include Wordsworth's Prelude or its offspring, Whitman's "Song of Myself" in this list, as Wordsworth inaugurated an autobiographical mode of writing centered on the ego/self - a tradition I'm at least in part trying to write my way out of.) The most recent representative in this tradition of long, philosophical poems is The Changing Light at Sandover by the late great American poet James Merrill. What such poems have in common is a wide-ranging recourse to a variety of aesthetic, historical, social, political, theological, and philosophical concerns and arguments united through some sort of fiction - in Dante, through the pilgrimage of a narrator through the three supra-temporal regions of Catholic Christianity; in Milton, through the Biblical creation; in Goethe, through the wanderings of a disenchanted scholar who has sold his soul to the devil; in Merrill, through the communications of the poet and his friend with the spirit of a Hellenistic Greek over a series of meetings at a Ouija board. I want Seuss's cats and the problem they are called upon to solve to serve as the fiction around which the poem would revolve and around which I might discourse on a variety of topics. Like each of these afore-mentioned authors, I wished to comment, perhaps primarily, on the current state of human knowledge. I hoped to establish something like a worldview - not so much my own as that of "the objective spirit," in Hegelianese. Each of these authors espoused a worldview. For Dante, it was the hope of divine retribution for the evils suffered in this world. His theoretical apparatus was Thomas Aquinas and Catholic theology. For Milton, it was concern for the chaos caused by the social-political upheavals of 17th-century England, and his theoretical apparatus was based on the ideal of a direct and personal reading of the Bible without the trappings of Catholic theology. For Goethe, it was the disillusionment of humanistic knowledge in the wake of science and technology, as well as a foreboding of the ills that man as a reasonable being would one day dole out to nature. His theoretical apparatus? Well, books have probably been devoted to that question...he had, of course, an encyclopedic understanding of the state of knowledge during his time. For Merrill, perhaps, it was a need to integrate the sobering findings of modern physics into a traditional humanistic and aesthetic framework. Maybe that and a certain Cold War disillusionment that he seems to share with mid-century jazz.
What is the standpoint that I wish to take up in my poem? I think that it's not good to define this before (or rather apart from) the actual writing of the poem. But I would say that it's an attempt to bring poetry up to date with the current state of knowledge as defined by contemporary physics, currents in philosophy, the cyber-revolution, global (or “late”) capitalism...
At times it pleases me to think that, although my conception is impossibly grandiose, I needn't feel overwhelmed by its futility, for the simple reason that no one reads poetry anymore, and the chance that my writing will ever attract much in the way of a readership seems to me increasingly slim. In any case, it’s been four years since I broke off work on this long poem, which I earnestly desire to complete someday. What I have now is a fragment that pleases me as much as it entices me to proceed in two directions: in the direction of taking it back up so as to complete it, and in the alternate direction of finding new reasons to put it off – possibly because I’m afraid I am not yet ready to answer the demands it seems to force upon me, partly because I’m afraid I never will be ready…Anyway, it is with the ostensible goal in mind of educating myself for the task ahead of me that I put aside “The Untimely Baron” four years ago and made a headlong plunge into philosophy (and I’m unsure at this point if I am still plunging downward through the papery deep or whether I have begun my ascent back up to the surface of the everyday and commonsensical Lebenswelt into which I apparently was born). What follows are some notes that reflect my years of daily reading, especially in the light of the project I hope one day to complete.
B. Towards a Poetry of Defunct Knowledge
I read recently, in a scholarly guide to Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, something to the effect that Kant's critical philosophy rendered all pre-critical philosophical systems defunct as systems, and that the most philosophers today can do with early philosophy is mill around the rubble, as it were, for odds and ends that might still be put to good use. The author writes, "In contrast with many other great philosophical systems, Kant's is one that it has continued to seem possible, to some degree, to endorse as a whole, as opposed to an edifice that has most to offer through being dismantled." But the author's "to some degree" is telling, and it seems that with subsequent philosophy, particularly beginning with Nietzsche (and continuing on into the 20th-century with analytic philosophy, Frankfurt school criticism, deconstruction, etc.), even the grand structures of critical or post-critical philosophy (Kant, Hegel, Marx, Husserl, Heidegger, etc.) are no longer read or admired primarily as epistemological textbooks that can tell us how we may come to knowledge of ourselves and of the world or that can tell us exactly what sort of knowledge we may come to. Rather, one admires them on aesthetic grounds - for their sheer intellectual grandeur. One compares the Critique of Pure Reason to Goethe's Faust or Beethoven's 9th Symphony. Why is this? Well, for a lot of reasons either given or presupposed by dozens of authors after Nietzsche, but on an immediate, commonsensical level it seems to me that the successes of the physical sciences have made it increasingly hard to take traditional philosophy at all seriously. More and more, we seem to have some idea how the brain works, or at least we're getting to know how it works, so what use do we have for a critique of pure reason? Psychology has a pretty good grip, apparently, on why we do the things we do, so we don't need Kant's second critique on practical reason either. The most recent decades of the technological revolution seem to have rendered moot the old distinction between bourgeoisie and proletariat, so we don't need Das Kapital (we'll suspend for a moment for the sake of convenience the uncomfortable idea that the proletariat hasn't so much disappeared as resurfaced in areas of this world concerning which we may choose to remain blissfully ignorant as we go about our daily lives in our First World comforts, satisfactions, and enjoyments). Et cetera. The high enlightenment philosophers (Kant, Hume, Locke, etc.) were quick to appreciate that Newton's discoveries had in a matter of months put to rest centuries of inane and unproductive philosophical speculation on the constitution of the universe going all the way back to Aristotle. They knew that they had to begin to circumscribe their field of inquiry. The course of science subsequent to the revolutionary discoveries in physics that took place in the early 18th-century has further circumscribed that field to such an extent that philosophy has been reduced to analyzing word-games or picking apart older structures for their latent ideological underpinnings…
Anyway, this blurb on Kant made me think back to where I began intellectually 16 years ago one day when, after having come upon numerous reference to a German writer named Adorno in the Schoenberg literature, I found a copy of his book with the inappropriately translated title Philosophy of Modern Music. This great event signifies for me the inauguration of my intellectual career. Since that time my thought has proceeded along a continuum - though one interrupted with occasional faults and breaks. What was it that attracted me to Adorno? To many readers he must seem about as fun as a rainy day in Frankfurt. And what has kept me fascinated with Kant, and with philosophy in general? Is one who professes a life-long commitment to poetry really to be concerned with such things?
I've been mulling over such questions for the past several days, and the exact nature of what it is I aspire to has finally come to me. In a word, I am pursuing and have been pursuing a poetry of defunct knowledge. It is my own response to a scientific and technological world from which poetry as well as the Great Intellectual Quest has been largely eradicated. While not wishing to suggest that I'm nostalgic or that my writing is an attempt at an art of nostalgia, it seems that what I wish to do is enter, inhabit, and reanimate the ruins of fallen thought systems. Whereas the guiding motto in Bob Dylan's recent songs has been "everything is broken," my motto would be that "everything has fallen." But fallen not in a Christian sense of something to be redeemed (an idea or set of ideas that crop up in a lot of earlier 20th-century writers such as T.S. Eliot on the one hand and Adorno and Benjamin on the other). My goal is not redemption. Nor is it reconstruction, and reanimation doesn't quite get at it either, as it entails the idea of the ghostly – an idea entirely foreign to my way of looking at things. Rather, I would say that my goal is repossession. Though I suppose it might be too much for a single writer to strive for so much on his own (like Munchhausen pulling himself and his horse up through the muck by his pigtail), still I'd like to think that the predominant voice or persona of my writing is speaking on behalf of an ideal Repo Man of Western Thought.
There have been other literary Repo Men. The greatest of them all was Rabelais, who sought to repossess ancient knowledge. In my view, you didn't get any more then until the late Enlightenment, as Europe had to worry about creating a middle class, promoting a technological revolution, etc. Repossession doesn't go together with progress. There's a bit of repossession going on in Chaucer, as well, who is Rabelais's poetic corollary. Then of course during the English Renaissance - Sidney, Shakespeare, Jonson, etc. But then nothing until late Goethe, whose Faust Part Two, in addition to being, along with Beethoven's late works, the most prescient intellectual production of the age (and one that like late Beethoven wasn't at all understood for at least a century), is a prodigy of literary repossession. In the 20th-century you have hints of a prose of defunct knowledge in the works of Borges, Kafka, Marquez, and Pynchon. For me a poetry of defunct knowledge has been configured only by Stevens, although I believe that Dickinson was a great herald, and there are elements of repossession in Byron, Schelling and Keats. A lot of the so-called high modernists look like Repo Men, but are not. Eliot, Pound, and probably Joyce. Their arts are also arts of defunct knowledge. The problem is that, in contrast to the aforementioned names (who I think can be labelled post-modernists in this sense), they don't recognize that the broken systems and parts of systems with which they are working are now defunct. They are reanimators, not repossessors. Modernist art is an art of nostalgia - an art in which ghosts loom large. In contrast, post-modernist art as an art of repossession is anti-nostalgic. Or rather, it is critical of nostalgia, while accepting that nostalgia is necessary on a certain level.
C. Marxian Wiederkehr
I should say, however, that I have been using my unfinished terza rima fragment, for the sake of which I keep saying I need to conduct an unusual amount of research in philosophy, as a simple excuse to indulge a desire I’ve always had to one day become thoroughly acquainted with the great philosophers. When I decided to give up hopes for an academic career in 1990 and devote myself to poetry, I knew at that time that I had to change my reading habits so as to acquire a writer's rather than scholar's education. The next decade was spent studying the ancients, Shakespeare, Tolstoy, and everything else. But it was always my intention to get back to philosophy and to contemporary thought. Part of the reason I became a poet, indeed, was in response to what I felt were injunctions coming from Adorno to go out and to develop a poetic style that would do justice to Aesthetische Theorie. It's just now that I'm coming full circle after more than a decade's worth of serious reading and writing and am attempting to confront Adorno's central texts once more. The Adorno that means something to me now is an Adorno heavily tempered by Foucault, Lacan, as well as by my delvings into the entire corpus of Marx.
It has been particularly crucial for me to situate myself in terms of Marx (what I said above about the contemporary non-relevance of Marx, along with Kant and Hegel, etc., was meant to be taken with a grain of salt, of course). I'll admit that I gave up on Marx and Marxism after the Cold War ended. Probably like many people, I thought to myself, "It seems that Marx is truly dead now. Capitalism, for better or for worse, is here to stay." The following bit from a correspondence of several years ago reflects this:
“I admire Žižek for his commitment to the dual corpuses (or should I say corpses) of Marx and Freud and to German thought as a whole, in contrast to many French thinkers and their disciples in the American university establishment who have laid Marx and Freud to rest. In my personal reception of these two Titans of late bourgeois reflection, I am in part conditioned by my own upbringing in an empirical Anglo-American thought climate, in which you have hard facts on the one side and poetry on the other. That is, it's impossible for me to take Marx and Freud literally at times, try as I do. I seem to admire their dual thought systems more for their aesthetic appeal. I'm particularly fascinated by the way such massive fictions can at times structure collective, even historical behavior - a recurring theme in my poetry. The revolutionary proletariat, for instance, is a pipe-dream of late-Enlightenment romanticism - but the mistaken belief in one shaped the course of the next century. On an initial reading and taken at face value (prior, that is, to a nuanced, Lacanian reading), the Oedipus complex is as contrived, gassy, and inimical to experience as Nietzsche accused German thought in general of being, but it practically created dual industries in Hollywood and in Hollywood's best-friend, the American self-help industry.
“I recently came up with a distinction between poetic fiction (or "fictive poetry") and what I call "assertive" fiction. By "assertive" I mean essentially the same thing as what the deconstructionists mean by "logocentric" (I believe, in fact, that one of the several meanings commonly assigned to the Greek word “logos” is “assertion”) - a word I don't like because of its jargonistic ring. "Poetic fiction" (or "fictive poetry") is poetry that inhabits and in a way completes ("redeems" or "sublimates", you might say) the abandoned structures of intellectual discourse by calling attention to the aesthetic, even sensual, nature of theoretical reflection and by thus placing theory qua theory in question - in other words, by seeing it as fictive. I see the poet as a mole of sorts, like Kafka's vermin in "The Burrow,"at range in the rotting interiors of defunct intellectual systems such as the grand edifices of Freud and Marx (as I wrote once in one of my first poems: “And I am merely the cynical fop, / Ranging through the rotted interior / With bunioned feet, blue-eyed Babe at my side.”). When I write in one poem that the poet's central activity lies in "drafting fictions stranger than the Law," I mean to conceive poetry as a sort of aesthetic analogue to the German idea of ideology critique in which the poetic mole exposes the holes (or ideological moments) in the outdated systems of assertive fiction (for which "law" is a metonymy and under which I include, not only philosophical systems such as those of Marx and Freud, but economic, religious, social, legal, educational, political, scientific, literary, even critical systems as well).
“To tie in my notion of fictive poetry with my stance vis-à-vis the Marxian theory to which I seem to have committed myself: I would say that poetry is analogous to Marxism in that, just as Marxism "politicizes the realm of economics," so does poetry "poeticize the realm of normative spoken language." If by "politicization of the economic" one means the effort to elucidate and set back into motion the frozen dynamics that govern the ways in which men and women acquire their material necessities, then "poeticization of normative spoken language" indicates the poet's effort to elucidate and set back into motion the dynamics that govern the ways in which men and women communicate through the spoken (and written) word. The peculiarly subversive element of fictive poetry, as I've formulated it, is that it stands the traditional relationship between art and theory on its head, the relationship embodied in the idea that criticism is the completion of art. Rather, I see fictive poetry as the completion of criticism, art as the completion of theory. Just as not all fiction is poetic, so not all poetry is "fictive,",in my sense. I'm not formulating a model for criticism, but am rather describing the sort of poetry I wish to write, and so I would not wish to decide what poetry is "fictive" and what not, although I would name Goethe, Byron, Keats, Dickinson, Stevens, Moore, and our contemporaries John Ashbery, Elizabeth Bishop, and James Merrill as ancestral moles in the Haas family tree.”
This notion of “fictive poetry” was an early formulation of the idea mentioned above of “literary repossession.” It reflects a peculiar view of Marx – a view at once loving, conciliatory, and…I’m searching for an appropriate opposite of “avuncular.” The view is reflected from time to time, perhaps, in my first book (Pages in a Second Round), and is a view that a writer – one with former commitments to a world-view that one had grown accustomed to describing as “Marxist” - was bound to take after the justified though mercilessly short-lived euphoria that echoed around the world in the early 1990’s as brutal and repressive regimes came to an end that, just a few years prior to the collapse of communism, no one had foreseen. Then came 9-11. My own response was to take seriously Žižek's repeated injunctions that many of the purportedly leftist stances that have flourished in the past couple of decades (and particular since the consensually agreed upon “bad guy” disappeared) - stances based on what he refers to as "identity politics" - only serve to mask and reinforce the basic antagonisms that define our late capitalist world and for that reason are inherently reactionary. In short, we must have a return to Marx and to the original texts, in an effort worthy of Lacan on Freud, to distill the originary thought from the ideological brushwood that has grown up around it. That is why I wrote, quite recently, “Norado Defended Against His Devotees” (see below).
If I am a Marxist, though, it is a Marxism entirely shorn of utopian illusions. And the Adorno I’m looking for is one equally shorn of the utopianism he inherited from the generation of Marx’s readers before him. I was reading through Marcuse the other day and it struck me that the utopianism of that generation of German exiles can be viewed positively as a Jamesonian/Žižekian "vanishing mediator" between the last generation of Europeans that could still remember the last vestiges of the pre-industrial age and those of us, particularly in the New World, born in our post-industrial, post-lapsarian age. So that's what I'm currently looking for in Adorno – not so much dialectics without a final Aufhebung (which of course Adorno never gave us), but rather dialectics without the shadow of a hope of a final Aufhebung. A sort of pessimism, maybe - but a pessimism that doesn't have so much as an optimism to remember (and thus fades into a rather indifferent skepticism that no longer quite amounts to pessimism, that falls short of its pathos…).
D. The Third Nature
From time to time it is good to size up one's reading in terms of one's own projects. The past years of constant, hectic reading have clarified a number of key issues for me in this regard. Perhaps foremost among the many surprising points of contact I've uncovered in my reading in reference to my own writing was a passage in the philosophy of Berkeley concerning a possible "third nature." You will imagine the interest that arose when I stumbled upon this passage if you consider the following poem, which I wrote several years back:
The Third Nature
The imagination creates nature from scratch;
the slough of experience it remolds
into a syllabled square resembling a patch,
internally partitioned into peaks and folds.
One searches in vain for the door and latch.
Certain inner removes are sequestered and drear.
That mound in the center resembles Calvary.
The eastern wall is sloped, the western sheer.
The cadence is where one collects one's salary.
One arrives there at the end of a lengthy search.
There's really no need for you to hurry.
Up there you can see Minerva's owl on her perch.
She wants nothing to do with you, so don't worry.
She watches fall the anvils of the mind.
Thus, second nature is with the first intertwined.
The "Third Nature" of the title is obviously a sum of the first two natures mentioned in the ending line. I envisioned the "she" of this poem as the bird sitting on "The Palm at the Back of the Mind" in the Wallace Stevens poem combined with Minerva's owl from the famous passage in Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. Maybe a trope for a poetic consciousness that combines the peculiar ontological status of various creatures in Stevens with an un-Stevensian emphasis on history.
Anyway, I've been trying to interpret what my "Third Nature" means, particularly in light of what I recently stumbled upon in Berkeley’s Dialogue. In Berkeley's piece, two philosophers have come to an agreement that there are two modes of being or “natures” open to us. The first “nature” consists of the ideas with which we are furnished through perception. The second is that of Spirit, to which we attain when we consider that the ideas we have are "our" ideas - i.e. that they achieve unity as possessions of an entity I know as "myself." Further, we are led via the ideas given to us through the first two natures to conceive further that there are spirits apart from our own that also have ideas, as well as an all-knowing and all-powerful spirit (God) who provides us with the ideas we and other thinking minds like us have. The disagreement between the two characters of Berkeley's dialogue hinges on the existence and properties of a possible Third Nature beyond these certain natures of idea and spirit. This is where Berkeley's "idealism" comes in - the belief that this screen I'm looking at as I type and the keys I'm punching in order to make the cursor move across the screen - even my fingers which are doing the punching - do not "exist" in any "real" world apart from the ideas we have of them - or, more precisely expressed, apart from the ideas God allows us to have of them. This is the point that Philemon, Berkeley's mouthpiece, makes, contradicting his interlocuter Hylas's assertion that there is indeed a third “real” world of things that provides the material for our ideas.
In summary, in Berkeley you have a first nature of ideas obtained through sense perception and extended through reflection, a second nature of spirit in things that perceive (animals, people, God), and a possible third nature consisting of some "real" matter or substratum which gives rise in some way to our ideas (which, according to Berkeley, is a fancy or deception of the mind).
How does this fit in with the Third Nature that I came up with all of a sudden that day in February a few years back? That's what I'm puzzling over now. It's a habit of mine to see significance in such seemingly chance concurrences in my own writing with other writers. I think of knowledge as being a web in which each little nook or neighborhood is indicative in some way of the whole (hence my attraction and occasionally flagging commitment to the Marxist world-view). And even if the "third nature" which I dreamed up on that chilly day in February doesn't concur in full measure with the one that Berkeley came up with two and a half centuries ago, the simple fact that I'm interested in examining the possible overlaps and making something of them indicates that there must be something in each of the two expressions that is reaching out to the other. At least, I'd like to think so.
I understand the "Third Nature" of my poem in terms of the more recent motif in philosophy of "Second Nature" - an idea important to Adorno that he derived from Hegel and Marx via Lukács and that is not unrelated to the commonsensical English expression (i.e. “It is second nature for experienced drivers to apply the breaks when the traffic light changes from green to red” – or any better example that you can think of). Central to the "Second Nature" of Hegel and Adorno is the acknowledgement that the "first nature" has been scrapped by Enlightenment philosophy, which culminated in the Kantian dictum that "we cannot know things in themselves." This "first nature," apparently consigned to the oblivion of the pre-modern world-view by Kant, is not that of Berkeley but is probably closer to his "Third Nature" - the idea discounted by Berkeley, that is, that there are things outside the mind, apart from our ideas of them. In the phraseology of Hegel, Marx, and Adorno (expanding on or elaborating this basic theme of Kantian philosophy), every "fact" that we think we know about things outside us or even about ourselves is already "mediated." Following Kant, it's true that we cannot know things in themselves, though for reasons that Kant himself didn't go into - namely, because we are "conditioned" (to put it anachronistically) to understand things in a certain way, either by our exact position within a consciousness or world-spirit that is predominantly historical (Hegel), by the alienation of things through their commodification (Marx), by the limitations set upon us by language (Wittgenstein, post-structuralism), etc. In effect, all that we know or can know is already "Second Nature." (This body or realm of thought seems to ignore the fact that the presuppositions of modern philosophy on the whole have been rendered moot by the progress of science, which has achieved its successes on the assumptions that Berkeley's discounted "Third Nature" seems to exist - though this is how philosophy since Kant and Hegel subsists, as a prolonged and stubborn contradistinction to scientific certainty.)
To repeat: "The imagination creates nature from scratch; / the slough of experience it remolds/into a syllabled square resembling a patch, / internally partitioned into peaks and folds." The “third nature” of the poem seems to indicate the realm of the imagination, or, more precisely, the worlds created through efforts of the imagination. The Third Nature feeds on the "slough of experience," which itself comprises second nature. In other words, the material that the poet feeds on is entirely "already mediated" – always already (immer schon) Second (rather than first) Nature. That's why I rely in my poems on a variety of quotation and paraphrase techniques (techniques in which I first became interested in my late youth during a thorough study of the works of Charles Ives, the American composer). It's my belief that authentic expression in the arts during our time is only possible for those who have recognized that the artist’s true quarry is not nature "in itself," which for us, for better or worse and for any number of reasons, no longer exists (if it ever did) - but in the "slough" of experience - both artistic and non-artistic (in Ives, for instance, you find both kinds of slough - Beethoven on the one hand, discordant marching bands on the others).
But still, I don't at all see my poetry as an art of quotation. In much "high modernist" poetry (particularly Pound and Eliot, and of course in Joyce, too) you see a distasteful amount of what seems from our latter-day perspective like quotation-for-the-sake-of-erudition. My models have always been Frost and Stevens. Stevens in particular frequently resorted to allusion, but the allusions are so oblique as to confound the most diligent of reference-chasers and seem to be used more for the sake of color, or not infrequently to poke fun at the pretensions of Pound and Eliot, his contemporaries. It's always been my goal to write for the general reader and not for the reader steeped in Enlightenment philosophy, French structuralism, etc. Moreover, the "quarry" for me is not so much the great authors of the past but the everyday speech and discourse of the present. Academic discourse, legalese, the Simpsons, hip-hop, sports reportage, popular science and religion, technical writing, children's literature, film, contemporary astrology...it's all fair game to me.
E. Learning to Count to Three the Hard Way
In 1996, when my wife and I were in the process of moving from our first apartment into our current one, I attempted to single-handedly remove a window air conditioner from its window-slot. My lower lumbars gave out, and I was unable to walk about or stand upright for the next two weeks. After a series of meetings with acupuncturists and a couple of "push-pull" guys ("push-pull" is the name given to the traditional Chinese practice that resembles what we understand as chiropractic), I was back in order. But several times each year since then I've experienced considerable discomfort. Sometime in late November last year I was out on my weekly 10K run in the Northeast Taiwan countryside and my back suddenly gave out once more. Knowing that our second child was on the way, I thought to myself, "That's it...I'm going to find a modern chiropractor." An old buddy and long-term Taiwan resident who in the '80's was on the American cycling team introduced me to a chiropractor - a Taiwanese doctor who did his medical training in the States and who works a lot with athletes. A brilliant doctor and a technical virtuoso who can discourse on a variety of topics as he’s deftly applying elbows, palms, forearms and fingers to various parts of your body.
In any case, I have had to spend quite a bit of time in the past months absorbed in chiropractic exercises and in re-educating myself about the most basic things - walking, sitting, standing, etc. This all has coincided, in part wonderfully, in part eerily, with my readings and re-readings of Adorno. To give a small example...You go through life thinking about the way you do the most basic things, thinking that it is all "the real me, the natural me." I mean, the way you slouch, the way you hunch your back over and crane your neck at the piano, the way that you resign yourself through your peripatetic reading habits to the bad posture your elders chided you for when you were a child...But, according to my doctor, all that's second nature - both in the everyday sense and in the Hegelian sense. You accept your basic bodily comportment as nature as such in your youth - say, through your twenties. But sooner or later something snaps and you begin to realize that, rather than the way in which you might fancy that you were primordially given to yourself, instead your entire "nature" is the result of certain decisions you made or that were made for you. You are a bricolage of fortuitous circumstances that might by the age of 37 have granted you an entirely different comportment and external appearance had you, say, been given the opportunity to study the violin rather than the piano, had taken up swimming rather than long-distance running in your youth, had taken a desk job rather than a teaching job upon arriving in Taiwan (the latter which necessitates a good deal of standing around and, invariably, slouching in order to compensate for sore legs), had suffered injury to the neck through removing a ceiling fan rather than to the lower back through attempting to lift an air conditioner...
All this is according to my doctor, keep in mind. Yet it relates to my reading. Adorno is therapeutic. Philosophy often is, but Adorno is exceptionally so. Why? He forces you to think the whole. Or to attempt to think the whole. After all, he did say, "The whole is the un-true." Yet, more than any other philosophical writer since Hegel, I'd be willing to wager - more than Nietzsche, more than Marx, more than Freud/Lacan, certainly more than Foucault - he forces you to think the whole...to think a whole that you can never quite master (which is why, I suppose, “the whole is the un-true”).
So it is that I find myself, at 37, forced to accept the doctor's order that I give up long-distance running, forced to adopt an entirely new approach (I almost said philosophy) to the simplest activities of walking, running, sitting, standing...feeling it is all unnatural to the highest degree, but keeping in mind one of the great maxims of Hegelian philosophy - namely, that, as with religion, if you imitate and practice what seems external to you, at length you will internalize it and it will become nature...or second nature, at least. Anyway, I must do all this if I want to remain upright long enough to be able to say all the things I have long had the presumption to fancy it was vouchsafed to me, by some mysterious transcendent symbolic order of which I have little cognizance, to say in this life (to put it fatuously)...at least to a hale 95, the grand age at which my Uncle Barney, a police officer who retired already in 1956, nine years before I was born, died last year. But what I'm after now is not nature itself, or even second nature. What I'm after, again, is third nature. That's what art is all about. You learn that the first nature was not in fact nature after all but, rather, second nature. You learn further that this second nature has been contaminated with something life-threatening. So you have no alternative but to break down this second nature and start from scratch. This starting from scratch is where art, the third nature, begins. The trouble is that third nature is always (or, continuing in the Hegelian vein, "always already") relapsing back into the detrimental, contaminated second nature. You might say that the third nature is a resultant of a) our pre-artistic beliefs in the first nature (actually we shouldn't say "first nature" but rather Nature Itself, before the fall, before Nature "dirempts" itself into its ordinalized versions), b) our subsequent reflection that all Nature is but second nature, and c) our final realization that the second nature is inherently flawed and must be taken apart, "de-constructed." The third nature – which you can’t define, as, upon definition, it has always already slipped back into second nature…the third nature is what comes next.
F. Finale: “Chronicling the Era of Common Fun”
- an abandoned Internet preface -
Greetings! Greetings family, friends, and mere acquaintances; greetings former mentors, classmates, housemates, workmates; greetings former Spring-Ford Rams, former Nittany Lions, former Dalton Snails! Greetings to you all! Greetings from Taiwan!
Gilchrist Haas, here - or Andy Jones, for those of you who knew me only before I adopted this matronymic in an attempt to come up with a somewhat less inconspicuous penname that might rescue me from the oblivion to which the name I was born would most certainly have destined me as an aspiring author of poems.
I spent much of this year's quite restful Chinese New Year holiday brooding over the five unfinished books that seem to spread out from me in all directions and of which I am the hopeful author ("hopeful," as one can't claim from the mere fragments for which one is responsible the dignity of authorship, notwithstanding the unattainable exception of Franz Kafka). Ten days in the bucolic Taiwanese countryside with no other responsibilities than resting my lower lumbars and making sure that the three Lin family girls kept out of the kitchen and were gainfully entertained when they were not busy gainfully entertaining each other. To which of my unfinished projects should I turn? Much time was lost in brooding over this question. With Vincent Wallace ("Vinnie") due to arrive into this world within the next couple of months and myself the prospective father of two (and prospectless husband of one…just kidding, Rebecca), I thought to myself, "It is incumbent on me to begin thinking of my family's future and to come up with something like a time-line for our eventual return to the Land of the Free and Home of the Brave in order to provide for my children the English-language secondary education they will need to succeed as adults in that part of the world. And here I am, about halfway through my sojourn on this 'unsinkable fortress' [that's how McArthur once referred to Taiwan…or was it Eisenhower?], having completed only one of the six books with which I hope to return to America and which will serve as the individual pages in an unstamped passport that will lead me out of two decades of anonymity and seclusion and into the far less anonymous and secluded future of literary Fame and Fortune, howsoever small my share of space in the crowded lots of those former goddesses may be."
Before getting to the point of this message to you, perhaps you'd like to know about these six books, all of which are more than mere ideas - true paper and ink works existing in various states of completion and disarray.
1. PAGES IN A SECOND ROUND - completed. A book of 170 15-line poems. Some of you have this. A smaller number of you have read it.
2. BARON, ALL TOO BARON - unfinished. A like-structured sequel to #1.
3. THE UNTIMELY BARON - unfinished. A book-length poem that begins with a satirical account of the life of Elvis Presley (who by the way is known in the Chinese world as the "Cat King") and ends with a series of twenty-six monologues by Little Cats A through Z from Dr. Seuss' The Cat in the Hat Comes Back. The magnum opus and intended piece de resistance of my hopeful oeuvre, which I will dedicate (if it's good enough) to the Slovenian philosopher, Slavoj Žižek.
4. READING ADORNO - OR, HOW I MADE THE POEM - unfinished. A scholarly treatise in an unscholarly format on German philosopher T. W. Adorno, as well as an attempt to provide an aesthetic justification for my other five works.
5. THE WILL TO BARON - OR, HOW I MADE A CURRICULUM OF RETRIEVAL - almost finished. A piece of intellectual autobiography that explains, among other things, how I came to write my first book and that will serve as a window for the curious into my quiet but often colorful life in Taiwan.
6. CHRONICLING THE ERA OF COMMON FUN - unfinished. A "novel."
The final entry on this list of hopefuls has provided the motivation behind the circular you are presently reading. I refer to it as a "novel" in quotations, as it's probable that, once completed, this book's relation to the literary form known as the novel will prove tangential at best. Certainly, I have found no direct inspiration from the novelists. The prose (or idea of prose) I am attempting to develop in this book owes far more to other sources than the novel. Those that spring most readily to mind:
a) the short story (particularly Borges),
b) the essay (Montaigne and Bacon),
c) the comedy sketch (Monty Python, Lenny Bruce),
d) the prose poem (Rimbaud, Neruda),
e) the free-verse meanderings of John Ashbery,
f) the philosophical aphorism (Walter Benjamin, late Wittgenstein),
g) the art of contemporary minstrelsy (particularly my boyhood hero, Bob Dylan, who seems to me much the closest that America will ever get to Homer or Chaucer as the true founder of a vibrant literary form), and
h) Children’s literature (Aesop, the Brothers Grimm, the Arabian Nights, Dr. Seuss, the Old Testament, and the wealth of Chinese tales and legends I have picked up from nine years of living in Taiwan).
If I had to look to the novel and its august history for specific influences, I might say that in this book I would like to peel the outer shell of the modern novel all the way back to Rabelais (whom, if anyone asks, I am always inclined to offer as my favorite figure in world literature), back to the improbable and improbably amusing lists and episodes that fill his famous book. Secondly, I'd like to think of my book as an approximation to what Chuang Tsu might have come up with had he been born in modern Europe rather than in Chinese antiquity and had he been so inclined as to write a novel. Thirdly, there's the difficult and maddening example of Raymond Roussel, beloved of the Surrealists and of Michel Foucault, whose book on Roussel (Death and the Labyrinth) describes the odd methods by which Roussel wrote his peculiar fictions, which were presented in poems, novels, and plays and are said to be entirely lost in translation out of the French. Finally, decisive in some way in the shaping of my taste for fictional prose were my readings many years ago of those trenchant critics of American life and culture who couched their criticism in the form of autobiographical novels - namely, Henry Miller and William S. Burroughs (the early stuff before he got lost in the nauseating and incomprehensible prose made famous in Naked Lunch).
But there is no reason that you, dear reader, should browbeat yourself should you lack acquaintance with any, some, most, or all of the aforementioned proper names. Nor, I hope, will such non-knowledge on your part shy you away from reading any further into this message. That tiny peek into my workshop was intended solely for those of you interested in the nuts and bolts of literary production who would refrain from reading further were you not, like Sea World dolphins, offered a few choice sardines. My intent now as always is not to fill my books with allusions that the reader is expected to track into the remotest nooks of his or her nearest university library in order to seek clarification on particularly obscure knots, but rather to write for the Common Reader (assuming that this ideal person dreamed up by Virginia Woolf in the 20th-century will continue to exist, if only in idea rather than in flesh, into the 21st). No, you should no more have to be acquainted with that sort of thing to enjoy what you are about to read than you should have to be a professor of agricultural engineering to enjoy a good steak. So trust me, dear readers, there will be no proper names in what follows apart from those that come out of my own noggin (or from out of the noggins of my own creations).
Thus it is that I propose to send to you, in a series of 170 short daily installments, this novel-in-quotes of mine, Chronicling the Era of Common Fun, the titled "chapters" of which are no more than a page or two in length and should take no more than five minutes or so to read (though you may feel free of course to mull them over for the rest of your day, if it so pleases you…needless to say, that would certainly please me).
Why this format? Dickens wrote the many chapters of his many books on a weekly schedule. He used to claim that if it weren't for the pressures exerted by installment requirements, he'd be much at a loss as to what to write. With his example in mind, I have decided that the format of electronic installments may serve as a goad to the completion of one of my five unfinished books. And, since my chapters are of brief and uniform length, and, moreover, although I strive for the same purity of expression in this book as I do in my poetic offerings, since what I have set down in this book reads quickly and fluidly and does not demand the sort of pauses, rewindings and fastforwardings of the reader's attentive gaze as do my poems, it might be an interesting and novel way of debuting a book that, though it is up to the reader to decide as to its quality, the author can say with certainty is quite unlike in form and in content anything that he's ever had the pleasure or displeasure to read.
If the immortal Walter Benjamin had been born half a century later, he would have thrust himself upon the literary scene of the 1990's with an article on the not yet fashionable topic of "The Work of Prose Fiction in the Age of Electronic Distribution." It is with this inspiring thought that I offer to you, dear reader, on this 3rd day of March, 2003, in the first of 170 daily electronic distributions, my novel-in-quotes, with the working title of
Chronicling the Era of Common Fun
by Gilchrist Haas
- for Stella and Vinnie -
“All the vulgarity of time, from the Stone Age to our present, with its noodle parlors and token resistance, is as a life to the life that is given you. Wear it.”
- John Ashbery
[At this point in the abandoned Internet circular was inserted the first chapter of the piece, “Out of the Darkness.”]
Note: If you don't wish to read any further and would like to "unsubscribe" to Chronicling the Era of Common Fun you may send me a note to this effect, and I will strike your name from the Outlook Express Book of Life. Or, if you wish to avoid hurting my feelings, another choice would be to exercise your forefinger and press "delete." But seriously, I hope you'll give it a go. It will take a few installments before you can judiciously decide whether I (or my narrator) have the cunning of Sheherezade, the divine insight of Joseph, or the trenchant wit of the Wife of Bath.
Second Note: I’m bluffing to a certain extent when I say that this will be followed by “169 daily installments.” For one thing, what I have before me is a novella-sized fragment that awaits development into a novel. The number 170 is merely a goal and has to do with a private numerology I have been following for years. I will keep going until I feel that the whole idea has begun to veer off into bad science fiction, at which point I will call a halt to things, cut my losses, and declare a novella. For another thing, I will probably send out a new chapter every other day rather than every day so that the production keeps pace with the distribution.
And a final thanks to Pamela Bolmarcich Anderson, into whose gift of a leather-bound journal the drafts for these "chapters" have been sketched.
Best to all,
Andy
[I never sent this out, deciding after some consideration that readers would have little interest in attending to the daily chapters, however short, of an “Internet novel” for half a year; in addition, in seems that at this point, as stated, a halt has been called and a novella declared…for the time being, at least.]