On the Nature of Quietude


Pondering on my walk to work this "quietude" & what it is. In context of currently reading Edgar Wind's great book (Pagan Mysteries of the Renaissance) about the Neoplatonic fellows of the Florentine Academy (15th cent.) - Ficino, Pico della Mirandola, et al. (Interested to see that Nicolas Cusanus emerges at the end.)

Anyway, Ron Silliman has laid out his various expositions based on a taunt by Edgar Poe at the reigning fireside magazine verse of his time. Ron's is a heroic narrative, in which the stodgy furniture & debased aesthetics of traditionalist establishment popular/elitist "verse" are gradually dismantled & swept away by the enlarged & vivifying renewals of the ever-resistant oppositiional avant-garde.

Was remarking yesterday, in comments on BK Stefans' review of Robert Lowell's oeuvre, on the lack of repose characteristic of the so-called mainstream eminences of the last mid-century (Lowell, Berryman etc). One way of looking at this would I guess be historicist : these poets were teetering on the brink of the revolutionary changes of the 60s, and their unease reflected that moment before the storm.

But you can't reduce poetry to history, nor these particular poets' work to a simple expression of angst or unease.

In fact you can't reduce poetry to sociology or ideology either.

As I mentioned, I'm pondering in the context of Wind's exposition of the neoplatonic humanists' philosophizing on the nature of humankind and God. So I'm thinking in terms of their ubiquitous triads, from Apollo's tripod up to the Holy Trinity. One of them had to do with the equilibrium of the good life stemming from a balance of three aspects of the soul: contemplation, activity, pleasure (intellectual, irascible, sensual; Saturn, Jove/Mars, Venus; etc. etc.).

It intrigues me to think of the wings of blogpoetics as tending to emphasize one or another of these aspects. Thus the NY School tends toward an epicurean pleasure principle & a light mockery of seriousness in any of its obvious forms.

The langpo-avant-gardists tend toward the vita activa, the irascible principle : art is a "movement" loosely aligned with social liberation & political correctness, struggling against the oppressive decadence of a debased commercialized mainstream. The irascible principle naturally seeks & finds its antagonist(s), the current ectomorph of which is the "School of Quietude".

The problem with this dialectic is that the irascible ones conflate the contemplative faculty with the complacent attitude. Intent, in their irascible fashion, upon reading literature politically & ideologically, they are deaf and blind to what is probably the most basic function of poetic harmonics : to lead the reader/listener to a recognition of inherent & beautiful equilibrium, to a visionary repose where contemplation, activity & pleasure reflect some kind of perennial life-principle, Dante's ben del intelletto.

Have been reading Edgar Wind's classic study, Pagan Mysteries of the Renaissance. What the neo-Platonists of the Florentine School (Marsilio Ficino, Pico della Mirandola) had to say about "vision" vs. "joy", or the threefold aims of the soul (contemplation, activity, pleasure - Saturn, Jupiter, Venus - there are a lot of variations on this), seems relevant to what I was trying to say yesterday about "vision" vs. "minor poetry".

Ficino, for example, valued joy & pleasure over the intellectual search for truth; pleasure in itself was not to be condemned, only it was to be acknowledged that earthly pleasure was limited by time. However, the whole Platonic & Neoplatonic concept of pleasure was derived within the pattern of a divine cosmos - "love is blind" because at the deepest level, the soul intuits its relation with divine Love without needing to "see" it; at some point the distinction between intellectual insight & spiritual love is no more.

So also maybe at some point the distinction between playful pleasing poetry & exalted visions of Reality also disappears.