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".

Erwin Schrodinger, science & poetry...

Finished the Schrodinger book (Nature and the Greeks ; and, Science and humanism). This physicist makes an unlikely ally for the artist, in that he maintains a strict sense of the limits of science. He emphasizes (in reflections on early Greek science & its legacy) how the scientific model of objectivity is just that - a model : insofar as consciousness - the consciousness of the observer - is detached from the agreed-upon common worldview which develops along with the development of science. Schrodinger's philosophic attitude maintains an awareness of both dimensions, without confusing them. He reiterates that science has not answered (and cannot) the most basic question : "Who am I? Where did I come from? Where am I going?" (and all the subjective, personal, spiritual experience that consciousness and identity entail). In this he seems to stand in opposition to much current scientific thinking (brain science, biological determinism). His thinking is dense, sophisticated, & deeply informed in philosophy, history of science, & scientific practice per se (he was, remember, one of the greatest physicists of the 20th century). & a pleasure to read - though so subtle & complex (as when he gets into old issues of free will & determinism) I sometimes have trouble following... Want to find his book Mind & Matter now.

Since I was a teenager I've had this bent toward cosmology, metaphysics... & have tended to think of poetry as a different way of being & thinking - in rivalry, that is, with scientific positivism & determinism... but not necessarily irreconcilable (same with religion & science)...

Review in New Yorker of philosopher David Dennett's book on the natural science of religion.

What believers in scientism, like Dennett, forget is that their own belief-systems rest on certain postulates (underlying assumptions). The central postulate of evolutionary theory is that life is the product of an individual & species-based survival mechanism. Dennett goes on to apply such a theory to the origins of religious thinking itself.

But evolutionary theory does not deal with the basic structural elements of the universe - space, time, stars, planets, moons. And it's these elements, perhaps, which were the primary focus of early religious speculation. Where did they come from?

Scientific work stems from free thought - speculation - theory - based strictly on data, facts, whatever is the case. But evolutionists (polemical ones, that is, like Dennett) do not acknowledge similar procedures in religious thinking, which is characterized (objectified) as some kind of evolutionary survival mechanism.

I would suggest, to the contrary, that religious thought is (in part - and only in part : ie., the scientific part) an early form of science, based on observation and reflection about "what is the case" with regard to life and the universe.

Think of it as going on - not as a result of some kind of intellectual hunter-gather mechanism - but during the cave peoples' & archaic citizens' free time : their musing about reality.

Which, needless to say, may still have a lot to offer with regard to what, ultimately, is the case.

Vico (via Mazzotta) juxtaposes science's lust for power over nature (Bacon's New Atlantis), and its mechanical determinism of causation, with the collective "wisdom" of humanities, jurisprudence, political science. Because political science is not "exact", it has to make room for human freedom & unpredictability, the dynamics of debate & consensus.

His lectures on the role of universities in fostering multi-vocal, encyclopedic conception of knowledge : sometimes countering, analyzing, criticizing (Socratic tradition) established political authority.

The self-conscious historical sense. Poetry, unlike science, does not exert control over nature, but rather, through its linguistic shapes & etymologies, unfolds history (the productions of memory).

But I'm conscious of the disconnections, the inability to engage in dialogue. Rationalist, polemical academics who don't understand or appreciate their own cultures; on the other hand, obscurantist philistines, promoting a new dark age of magic formulae & superstition.

Darwinism, "intelligent design", science, literary darwinism...

the phenomena will evolve some gripping essay-toes, I'm sure.

A poet's perspective : somewhere in between. There IS a science culture, which has non-scientific influence on thought-worlds in general, just as religious ideology has ideological, not only religious, impact.

Science now seems lighter, quicker, sexier, than it did when I was growing up (50s-70s) : then it was somehow heavy & sad, like the industrial architecture & the lab coats - more like 1984 than moon-walks for me.

My steady view on the subject is that there is a specifically poetic discourse, which represents truths of the actual as no other discourse can. (see Giuseppe Mazzotta, Dante, poet of the desert, & other books.)

& behind it is a version of Christian humanism, I guess. What is the "humanism" part? That's the part which poses a challenge for scientific positivism and scepticism, as well as for narrow religious dogmatism (really, versions of imposed superstition). It's not "secular". It's grounded in the fundamental notion of "imago Dei".

That is, to translate : our life is fundamentally personal. When we apprehend & recognize a person, an individual, in the clearest, sharpest, deepest way - we are also getting a glimpse of God. God is the invisible supra-personal Person. & life is essentially dramatic.

I link this conception to Osip Mandelstam's Acmeism. Acmeism was a kind of rough-draft poetic ideology, which he sketched out in several essays written around 1912-1920. One of Acmeism's basic tenets held that poetry, along with other arts and crafts, humanizes the earth : helps mankind feel at home on earth, gives confidence & hope. Mandelstam summed it up in a few lines :

Let the names of imperial cities
caress the ears with brief meaning.
It's not Rome the city that lives on,
it's man's place in the universe.

The project of humanizing the earth, of giving people - especially young people, perhaps - a vision of life as person-centered, and earth as metaphysical "home" : obviously, such has philosophical implications : consequences for both scientific & religious education.

lotsa pinblog pinging about Auden today, here &.

I like much about Auden's poetry & criticism. Brilliant in the extreme, engaged. I'm bored sometimes by the Average Man approach. Auden had science/engineering background, & it shows, in that reflexive lot measurement. The rhetoric of the 18th-cent. Restoration : always calculating toward the statistical mean. It gets depressing, like row houses, PBS series, (some of) Larkin... Probably has (ironically) a class basis : in order to address the Common Man, the genteel Oxbridgian scholar feels compelled to apply the dumbed-down statistical patter of the poll-taker, the survey man...

sociological, analytical... doesn't grip down to the coils of individual experience, but puts same in context of the Average. definitely disenchanting, in ways good & bad.

some might want to let the sociologists & novelists carry that load.

Notes Toward & So On (6)

In this series of somnambulistic early-work channelings, I am not trying to legislate how to make poetry. Rather, I am searching for new frameworks for reading, interpreting, understanding.

In a witty and clever book titled Quantum Poetics, Daniel Albright investigated the science metaphors & worldviews which Pound, Eliot, Yeats & others used to explain what they were doing & how they conceptualized poetry. Particle vs. wave - the oscillation between these two determined the pattern of indeterminacy to follow. I think my musings on the symbol locate me closer to the particle end of that spectrum; Albright notes how Pound & Wyndham Lewis, especially, rejected Einstein (the magician who vaporized matter, space, time) in favor of the earlier philosophy of Leibniz & his concept of the monad : the smallest particle of thought-matter in a vital universe of mutually-mirroring microcosmi. (Oddly enough, Einstein spent his later years taking long walks in Princeton with his friend the math genius Kurt Godel, a confirmed Leibnizian.)

Is poetry a Byzantine mosaic of interpenetrating mutually-reflective correspondences, corresponding in turn to the "signatures" of Nature? Is the text a crystallization of same, a glowing object of infinite labyrinthine riddles (Joyce)?

Or, on the other hand, is language a kind of open, free-play medium for wave-vibrations - reverberations, instantaneous relativity-connections - Whitman's cosmic love-vibe (or Joyce's watery Wake)?

I think I would like to find some synthesis of the two. "Resonant symbol." & I have a hunch this morning that the path in that direction leads through the relationship of word & psyche.

What is an image, after all? A product of a certain faculty of mind - the imagination. Ancient concepts of human consciousness located three distinct areas : Reason (judgement), Imagination (conception), and Memory (knowledge).

John Henry Newman, whose great work Grammar of Assent is something I intend to look at carefully, centered the conceptual activity in something he called the "Illative Sense" - a kind of architectonic capability, fusing all three areas of mind in the work of conceptual modelling.

Language, from the beginning, has been the human conceptual-sense response to unmediated reality (experience). The poem can be seen as an end-product of the shaping activity of the illative sense (imagination, taste/judgement, memory), using that primary human tool of representation. But it more than a record of experience : it is a living image of same. How so?

First of all, words themselves present a fusion of senses (image, sound, & evocation of touch, taste & smell). Secondly, poems exhibit a reflexive or self-reflexive pattern : their sensuous qualities - rhythm, image, sound, word-play - run rings around the reader in a reverberating echo-chamber. Reflexivity is a generator of expansive dynamism, a principle of nature & art exemplified in the famous "golden section" of the Greeks, the fibonacci sequence, etc. (ie. any patterned object which contains a ratio between smaller & larger parts, which equals the ratio between the larger part & the whole).

I wrote earlier in this series about the conceptual complexity of the symbol, which faces in two directions : toward the actual object the words evoke, and toward the universe of correspondences or meanings with which it sets up reverberations. Or, as quoted from Austin Farrer, earlier : "We write in symbol when we wish our words to present, rather than analyse or prove, their subject-matter... Symbol endeavors, as it were, to be that of which it speaks, and imitates reality by the multiplicity of its significance."

Again, despite the "reverberations", I am presenting an image of poetry which seems to lean toward the Leibnizian/particle/mosaic end of the spectrum. The completed poem offers a conceptual-sense fusion or unity in dynamism; thus the critic is free to analyze it & explore its constituent parts and implications; the poem is a kind of object, rather than a wave-transmission.

But this is not the end of the story, today or any day. Because I want to go back to that with which I began this post : the notion that the image-symbol is an effect of a faculty of mind (the imagination). Newman's "illative sense" is profoundly, substantially personal, because the mental act of imaginative or conceptual synthesis of experience is just that : a kind of assent to real, as opposed to abstract or notional or merely verbal, experience. & such experience, in Newman's view, can only be personal. What are the consequences of this for our idea of poetry?

Poetry, then, becomes both a record and a communication of real experience (in Newman's sense, real experience can be imaginary : it's an imaginative rendering or conceptualization). The poem is no impersonal object : it bears the fingerprint of an individual (I'm reminded of the Borges poem about how all the texts in his librarian cosmos were really a map of his own face; or the Walt Whitman version of the "disintegrated" cosmic self). Turn over the intricate Byzantine-patterned coin-symbol-object, & you discover the profile of its maker : & the poem is a reverberant wave-pattern, a message, of the poet, from the poet, to you. The Word is a Person. (the langpo is a NY schoolie)

It can be argued that the age of science, enlightenment, & rationalism set poetry free to enter its proper sphere of pure play. & if you accept that play is a central & "serious" human activity, there is some truth to this. But if play/poetry/childhood is framed as part of a duality in which work/seriousness/reality-principle is the more important or essential half, then poetry has been assigned to a play-pen & will be coddled, tolerated, & held in fond contempt.

I would realign these relations, with the claim that science & rationalism cannot, & will never, provide an adequate description of reality. Philosophy reaches a little closer, but its discursive abstractions are still inadequately communicative. Only the arts provide a sufficiently vivid affective-intellectual image of experience & reality. Poetry can span the distance between philosophical concepts on the one hand, and dramatic immediacy & actuality on the other. (Philosophy for its part aspires toward the condition of dialogue & drama.)

I offer these admittedly unoriginal notions to follow up on previous posts. How can poetry assume its full powers, then? I would think one critical measure in this regard would be a poetry's expressive wholeness - its willingness to patiently present & clearly "argue" - or logically defend - its sensuous, affective, or experiential subject-matter & the underlying rhetoric of same. This is what I see, for example, in the tightly-knotted & expressive sentence-structures of Keats' sonnets and odes : these poems display a striking, a startling, fusion of song & statement. Expressive logic or wholeness - as opposed to the poetry of half-statement, deflection, intimation, pose, predetermined attitude, rhetorical inflation-for-effect.

Closer to our time, Wallace Stevens reaches in this direction, with his fusion of philosophical reflection & rhetorical play. Robert Lowell simultaneously argues & suffers with contemporary history. But these are just 2 examples among many, not meant as representative figures; my purpose is to focus on a way of interpreting poetic value.

There's something so important in Eliot's notion of "dissociation of sensibility". I'm not exactly sure what it is, yet. The way someone places a historical marker for where it supposedly begins, is basic cultural myth-making, like the Serbian concept of the Field of the Raven.

Eliot puts it after the "metaphysicals" - and links it to a loss of the medieval synthesis. But the medieval synthesis was mythological. He should read Cusanus : a renascent-metaphysic to beat the nostalgia of metaphysical poetry (Donne's elegy for that synthesis basically scripted Eliot's notion). Cusanus "enfolded" the dualities of what was to come (reality/imagination, faith/scepticism, superstition/science, philosophy/praxis) in a creative intellectual synthesis which bears comparison to Leonardo da Vinci's in the realm of art/science.

I would put the "dissociation" much later. Keats & Milton represent still (& marvelously) synthetic unities of reason/imagination. Their poetry combines feeling and argument, image & discourse.

With the progress of science, Enlightenment, humanism, journalism, telecommunications. . . poetry was forced into a corner marked by indirection. American poetry offers the same picture in colonial miniature : a progress of deflection (Keats to imagism = Whitman to imagism).

The history of poetry in English since 1800 (after the Romantic-Sentimental revolt against Augustan-Enlightenment uber-rationalism) is a progress of deflection - away from the union of logic & song (thus we have Black Dog Songs, as I described them the other day).

Part of my fascination with Language Poetry in the early 90s (when I became aware of it) was my sense that it represented a literary-historical terminus of this process.

. . . But whence cometh this bicameral poetics? I don't think it's simply self-interested polemics. The deeper fault line probably goes back to John Donne's era. When God was no longer understood as Love & Knowledge together, the split between Love & Knowledge, Faith & Science, began. A gradual breakdown of the idealist concept of Nature & the Good, so that the beginning of the 20th century witnessed the final flip-over, the revolutionary displacement of Apollonian by Dionysian humanity : "love" understood philosophically & psychologically as only a veil for subconscious desire, the ideal countered by the anti-ideal, the "knowing", the disenchanted.

The effect of these thought-movements on art was of course manifold : art's basic drive to depict or reflect was no longer guided by an accepted or singular logos or mythology; it began to depict chaos & disorder. The "order" imposed by Modernism is an order of the autonomous artifact.

Such order based on the thing-in-itself sets up a fundamental division between artifact and communication. Perhaps it is this basic division - between the urge to "make" a wholistic thing/machine/poem on the one hand, and the urge to communicate fact, truth, values, on the other - which is reflected in the partisanship of "mainstream" & "experimental".

(Meanwhile the agon between Apollonian and Dionysian - between a verbalized icon of the Ideal and a representation of the commanding power of Desire - sets up an endless productive/empty tumult, since, ironically, the heart's desire is not satisfied by either of them : neither by a detached verbal formula of the Good, nor a worldview framed by impersonal, deterministic hedonism, ie. fulfillment through sensuality.)