Dream song of reality

Just read Joshua Rothman's New Yorker profile of philosopher Daniel Dennett, his lifelong pursuit of a materialist, non-religious, un-mystical theory of consciousness.  Dennett steps out as a brilliant, original thinker, with an impressive science background (biology, mostly). And as an admirably enterprising DIY jack-of-all-trades.

I'm neither scientist nor philosopher.  But I have, like many another, puzzled over the question of "mind", this ancient (back to Epicurus, at least) divide between idealism and materialism.

Just a few off-the-cuff reactions to Rothman's Dennett.  He strikes me as a curious, searching person, whose stance toward nature is essentially that of an engineer.  He's interested in the mechanics of process - how things are done.  This is obviously necessary for science, an attentive approach which leads to discovery.  But it seems ironic that Dennett's view of consciousness - as a continuum, shared with other animals and living things - is not that different from the classic "chain of being" perspective of Aquinas (for one example).  That other animals exhibit a "sort of" consciousness (Dennett's term) - an evolutionary preview of the human mind - parallels the chain-of-being picture, only without the traditional hierarchical fence between "Man" & the rest.  For Dennett it's a flow.  & it seems he has focused passionately on explaining (theoretically) the how of it : how our sense of consciousness could arise from purely physical, evolutionary developments.

This is, I would say, the blind spot in Dennett's vision.  There are limits to the mechanical, analytical dissection of reality offered by biology.  Whatever conclusions he can draw from such analysis only serve to justify his prior conviction of the non-existence of an over-arching God, Spirit, or Mind - something which cannot be "proved" by such analysis anyway.

It seems to me that aesthetics & poetry, as well perhaps as some branches of philosophy, can offer a more valid perspective - because they are rooted in a sense of holism, a synthetic sense.

The poet and the artist register the fabric of the dream.  The theologian (or philosopher of God) articulates the analogical/anagogical synthesis.  Materialist attempts to disprove the reality of Mind or Spirit lack the tools to achieve it, first of all - and, secondly, are probably asking the wrong question.

The question, maybe, is not how, but why.  Why does this immense spectacle of the universe exist at all?  "We are such things as dreams are made on..." - but why?

I've always found the theological answer the most satisfactory.  Why the wonder of the cosmos?  The truest answer : it's a gift.  Why human consciousness?  The truest answer is a kind of geometric/analogical one : human consciousness, which governs (imperfectly) life on our planet, demonstrates an analogy - a sort of geometric parallel - with the divine Mind that governs (ineffably) Reality as a whole.  And history is basically a spectacular drama, unfolding the destiny of that governing mind or spirit, working through humanity toward some kind (or kinds) of definitive expression - call it "Providence".

in Aleppo

COMPLACENT WEATHER

A green kid from Appalachia

gone to fight in Fallujah

– someone explain?  Aya,

Babylon!  O generations!  A

late-night flashback (this time

not a war zone) – the stone

cave, the Mezzo-Eon...

the wooden man (half-lamb,

half-king) splayed on an axle

of Lebanon cedar.

Adam, 2nd mate (bare).

In Aleppo, the shells relax

theological distinctions

(strange how disaster

nets cousins together in

dense swallow-clouds).  Sons

remember their angry fathers

in another atmosphere –

benign, complacent weather,

a constant world.  Who bothers

to refit owlish waste places?

Earth presses toward

obstructed Adam, stymied

Eve – each watchful heart races

to reach Yezidi Paradise

(jade Peacock Angel,

over the next hill

from Sheol).  Sol breaks the ice.

6.11.16

 

On demand : Menand on de Man

Louis Menand's New Yorker essay on the notorious 20th-cent. lit. scholar Paul de Man is, like most of Menand's articles, something I read before anything else (except the cartoons).  But I found it both fascinating and disappointing.  He seems to blame the vociferous critics of the Yale School and post-structural theory (deconstruction, et al.) - like Allan Bloom, of Closing of the American Mind fame - for the decline of academic humanities & literature studies.  As if "theory" gave the whole thing a bad name.  Well, it did, to some extent.  But Menand portrays the theories of Derrida, de Man, & their cohort as a sort of "deconstruction lite".  Here's one of Menand's characterizing paragraphs :

"Deconstruction is difficult to explain in a manner consistent with deconstruction. That’s what accounts for the notorious wordplay and circularity in Derrida’s prose. (Derrida’s essay in “Deconstruction and Criticism,” for example, has a hundred-page footnote.) We could say that deconstruction is an attempt to go through the looking glass, to get beyond or behind language, but a deconstructionist would have to begin by explaining that the concepts “beyond” and “behind” are themselves effects of language. Deconstruction is all about interrogating apparently unproblematic terms. It’s like digging a hole in the middle of the ocean with a shovel made of water."

In this design, deconstruction is just a subtle and critical new way to approach literature, a "good read" in its own right.  Derrida & friends are seen as deep readers and defenders of literature & the humanities.  By the same token, Menand separates de Man's scholarly work from de Man "de man" (a criminal scoundrel, by all evidence).  But this doesn't bother me so much as does his simplistic characterization of post-structuralism/deconstruction.

Derrida doesn't strike me as the open-minded reader portrayed here.  Deconstruction depends on a systematic and neo-Nietzschean dismantling of rationality itself (branded as "logocentrism").  Derrida is an anti-Plato : his supposed "free play" of signifiers depends on a very rigid ruling-out of logic itself.  Verbal circularity and the de-humanization of "language" is a necessary boundary rule within which his games take place.

What is behind Menand's affinity for this trend?  Perhaps it has something to do with his own devotion to the American philosophy of Pragmatism (following William James and John Dewey). There is an element of relativism inherent in Pragmatism.  Nothing is really "true" except in the context of its praxis, its application.  Context in this sense trumps universality.  But it seems to me that without universality, truth itself loses its meaning.  This is not to say that either truth or universality are ever simple givens - not requiring critical context, analysis, interpretation and judgement.  But if there is no universality, there is no means of judgement or measurement whatsoever.  Maybe post-structuralism and Pragmatism are joined at the hip (or by the hip, or for the theoretically hip).

The New Yorker this week... poems by Stanley Moss & Clive James... 2 old pros... something historic... better than everything else in the issue (though James Wood's review of VS Naipaul biography a closet 2nd)...

Clive James, I have to admit, did a pretty good thing in "Signing Ceremony" : Yeatsian... the wisdom of old age... the oldsters coming to terms with being, really, tourists in the world... pretty well done, despite some falling-off (obscurity?) toward the end... despite the fact that we have moved, spiritually, beyond Horace, in the last couple millennia... really...

- my reservations having to do with his Whitman put-down in recent Poetry essay... which, actually, Stanley Moss's fine poem {"Peace") demolishes pretty much in toto... no rhyme & meter there, but a tour-de-force anyway...

There was a poem in the New Yorker not long ago I found completely adequate, & now, dagnab it all, I can't remember her name exactly, can't find it. . . Linda Biehrl? Teaches at Univ of WA Seattle? The poem was called "1934". I read & reacted very strongly : Mandelshtamian.

It worked unlike the CK Williams poem by not over-reaching? I can understand Grenier's "I hate speech" - because it's so dang hard in poetry, at the border between rhetoric & art. The Biehrl[?] poem maintained aesthetic distance - very pronounced reserve - created an inner world, an architecture of sound, self-sufficient. Probably to write a "public poem" [occasional] is more difficult to do successfully.
Inner architecture lost to rhetoric.

"The poem lives through an inner image, that ringing mold of form which anticipates the written poem. There is not yet a single word, but the poem can already be heard. This is the sound of the inner image, this is the poet's ear touching it." [O.M., "Word & Culture", 1921]

Elena Glazov-Corrigan (Mandelshtam's Poetics) repeatedly emphasizes the duality in all Mandelshtam's statements on poetics: material/impulse, inner form/manifestation, etc. But the belief that the poetic Word turns on its own center of gravity, its own architecture, is never in doubt. To believe that such an autonomous activity nevertheless participates meaningfully in the world at large, is to believe that poetry neither denies nor succumbs to Necessity, but engages it on its own terms. This is a statement of faith in poetry's universality, its "categorical" presence.