The End of the Potter

So. Before heading to watch the final send-off and the fairly paint by numbers hero's journey finale to the harry Potter franchise, Karla gets my attention with the following statement: "I think Harry Potter has affected more people than 'The Lord of the Rings.' Don't you think? I mean. An entire generation grew up with it." Now, there are some issues of logic with the above statement, fair enough. Like an entire generation didn't grow up with "Lord of the Rings?" And yet, she might be right: more books, more films, more money. Of course, the Lord of the Rings franchise had a greater groundswell of followers by the time the films came out due to longevity. But you could make the argument at least. Now, the statement made me bristle and long for a scathing counterargument. Why? Lord of the Rings resonates with me, in an admittedly geeky kind of way, while Harry Potter? Pleasant and well- wrought escapist fare, maybe, but at the end of the day I could take it or leave it. My wife's argument was that Lord of the Rings was written for too specific an audience (?) and Harry Potter cut across all kinds of boundaries, even though it was ostensibly written for children. Now, there are two main obstacles for Harry Potter having much meaning for me in the long run, and a minor detail in the film versions that has the same alienating effect. It seems to me, for a story to work properly we have to be immersed in it, invested in a selfish kind of way. "If I were in that situation, I would..." This kind of magic has to work seemlessly. You're imagination is not so much captured by a good story, but unleashed by it. So. What's wrong with Harry Potter? First, when it came out, it was strictly kid's stuff, and marketed accordingly. By the time the film came out, HP had been crammed down your throat enough, even looking at the billboard felt like dancing to the tune of the Advertocracy. But let that go. If a movie is hyped enough, we all watch it eventually. I knew next to nothing about the book and yet when I watched the first film I felt "something was missing." That sense didn't leave me even when each of the succeeding episodes became "darker." I realized after this final film not that there was something missing, but that there was "too much there." Oddly enough, some of the story is appealing at first...the Gothic elements of Hogwarts, the mystery novel motifs. But something is also alienating, preventing that suspension of disbelief, full immersion. The first aspect of the stories that prevents them from having any staying power for me is the Charles Dickens-cum-Mother Goose alliterative quality of all the names. Hufflepuff. Dumbledore. Salazar Slitherin. Even the name "Voldemort," despite its obvious latinate etymological roots has a sing-songy eightees cartoon character ring to it. This effectively boundaries the story with a sugary cotton candy rim, communicating that "nothing too bad will happen here." And even when it does with a villain here, a murder there, it feels ho-hum, occurring as it does within the boundaries of candyland, and there is an awareness that all will be made right soon. The second obstacle to any kind of resonance from the films has to do with the main characters' aw-shucks virtue. I'm all for selflessness and loyalty, but the inscrutable moral Puritanism of the characters flattened them out beyond distinction for me. Now, you could simply argue "but these are kids movies, they're supposed to be simple." All well and good, but then I don't understand their widespread appeal to adults and why I have to explain myself anytime I respond to someone else's Potterthusiasm with "Meh." The final, albeit minor, reason the films don't finally resonate is that, in terms of inspiring fear, Ralph Fiennes' "Voldemort" just didn't cut it. Sure, people in the story were scared of him, and he wore black, and was kind of pale and ugly, but the very form of children's story set boundaries of taste on what could be considered scary for an adult audience. I think The Neverending Story's Gmork might have been scarier, and he could hardly move. The most inspired piece of the film series, ironically, was the animated insertion in film seven of the tale of the "Deathly Hallows" from the (excuse me) "Tales of Beedle the Bard." There is some simple folk wisdom in the books, to be sure, and a hint that the author has some experience with the wisdom that comes with loss, and she weaves an entertaining story. But in the end, it doesn't quite achieve the same level of mythos as other modern mythologies, such as, oh, I don't know, say, "Lord of the Rings."

Levertov's Essays Continued

So, I picked up Levertov's collected essays again and continued reading. Odd what solicits a longer response from me, given that since my last entry I've read most of Dante's Inferno, most of Frye's study on Blake "Fearful Symmetry," (more on Blake later) Harold Bloom's collection "Romanticism and Consciousness," but what seems to get me to actually write an entry is a smallish low print run book of essays by Denise Levertov. There's something about a well-written essay that opens up an ordered internal space. For me, this mostly occurs when I read essays written by poets (Wiman's "Ambition and Survival," Walcott's "What the Thunder Says," Heaney's "Finder's Keepers" to name a few I've come across recently...or to be more honest, those which Wiman recommends in one of his essays). I think this has something to do with a poet's attention to detail, the care with which words are chosen, the facility a good poet has with ideas and their interrelationship, a knack for the timely image, and a motivation to be precise. I'm thinking of some of the moral implications of art that Levertov argues for. In her work, it seems, she was frequently responding to critics saying she ought to be an observer, not an activist, artistic, but not didactic. For Levertov, however, deep attention to art cultivates a moral sensitivity, cultivates a kind of sacred awareness, or the longing for it, and the lack of it. She quotes a speaker at a Danforth Conference (in 1966!) named Tom Bradley, who says

"Literature is dynamite because it asks - proposes - moral questions and seeks to define the nature and worth of man's life...The vision of man we get from art conditions our vision of society and therefore our political behavior...Art and social life are in a dialectic relationship to each other that is synthesized by political action."

Levertov herself continues: "The literary critic or the teacher of literature is merely scratching the surface if he does not live out in his own life some experience of the multitudinous interactions in time, space, memory, dream, and instinct that at every word tremble into synthesis in the work of a poet, or if he keeps his readings separate in a box labeled 'aesthetic experiences.' The interaction of life on art and of art on life is continuous. Poetry is necessary to a whole man, and that poetry be not divided from the rest of life is necessary to it. Both life and poetry fade, wilt, shrink, when they are divorced."

Now, on the one hand I feel like applauding. On the other hand, I feel like hiding behind a large patch of shrubbery. I frequently harangue my wife for reading many light novels quickly, and for rarely delving into the ethical questions they open up, of mining for truth, or whatever. She wants pace and plot more than thematic complexity, allusive texture, and conceptual depth. And I sit back and fold my arms thinking, "but it's supposed to mean something, dammit." Meanwhile I can tease out ethical implications of McCarthy's The Road or Wiesel's Night and assign projects to bring it home for the students, expanding their awareness and all that, but when it comes to lifting a finger to bring about real change in the world? Um, can't we just read another book?

Art and Identity

Ok, so this semester I'm going through a book called "The Artist's Way" with a small group of selected students, each of whom responded to an invitation and each of whom shows some artistic promise, or creative impulse, and I thought it a good idea to nurture that, or to have some project close to home at my job. Now, there've beeen some challenges. I scheduled it in the morning during home room. Some students have test prep in their home rooms and couldn't make it. Another student was out. Another was depressed, talking to his counselor. So that left two for the first meeting. We'll see how this week turns out. But there was an underlying issue that day as I prepared an introduction for the group. What's the point? Why engage in art and foster a creative sensibility? Do I do that because it's my personality type? Some pre-disposition? Without coffee and with quizzes to write that day I couldn't come up with a satisfying answer. But a student read me one of their poems and my response to him hinted at an answer. If you engage in this process, art can both destabilize and solodify. It can subvert and convert. For us Westerners, this means becoming rooted more deeply in an integrated vision. By this I mean the default world we live in, call it a technocracy, corporatocracy, advertocracy, what have you, is prone to tell you who you are by what you want, and it sets the framework for your choices, telling you what you want, and then setting up a profit system around it. Identity lies at the heart of marketing. And for us, identity is mostly framed by desire, by what we want. And what do kids want, right now? Not much. That is, it falls along a fairly narrow range of choices, as it usually does: something Hello Kitty related. Tom's shoes. The latest smartphone. etc. What does it mean that something is "in" right now? It means a certain set of objects and products are widely desireable right now. And that desire is cultivated by advertising. It is a parasitic force that seeks to channel your thoughts and energy. And with the shifts from phone to laptop, to car radio, to three shots-per-second TV shows, our attention spans are so short, the information we absorb in a single day so great, what we lose is memory, rootedness. Art provides a way of recovering memory, of recovering identity, a process of genuine self-discovery, rather than the vapid "extreme makeover" offered by advertising culture. I was struck earlier in the year that one of my students, who lives apart from his two younger brothers in Guatemala, who undertook a long and arduous journey at the age of ten with his mother to come to America, struggled to learn the language, battled a serious disease, lives in a crime infested area, and manages to pull in A's and B's in honors classes describes himself as "basically an average American teenager." This extraordinary kid sees himself as anything but. He seems to have no sense of context, of awareness, of identity. Now this could have a lot of causes, but at least part of it is that he knows he wants the same things as other American teenagers - a good education, a good job, a nice car, a nice house, a nice cell phone - material prosperity. Which is fine, but when that becomes the totality of a person's identity, as it seems to have become for some, there's a problem. Now with the population I work with, this could also be a case of just wanting to fit in, to not be seen as outsiders, of being accepted as equals, of wanting to be "basically an average American teenager," instead of, say, an average Guatemalan teenager. It could also stem from lack of exposure to the lives of "average American suburban teenagers." But art can step in here and solidify the sense of identity, of connecting to richness of cultural roots, of family, through preserving memory. How do you cultivate a desire for this kind of awareness, to become more rooted, less prone to the Sturm and Drang of advertising culture, which tells you what to want by telling you who you are? I think by letting someone taste that kind of water, or at least leading them to the well. Of course there are a million other directions to take this - art allows you to process your relationship to the world, art preserves cultural values, art questions and comments on culture, art deepens the soul, gives access to the sublime, art allows us to participate in the divine through exercising our creative impulse, or for some people, serves no practical purpose whatsoever. I'm trying to come to grips as to why I'm forming this group n a communicable way. The route of paideia, of forming personhood, identity, in a culture that wants to form it for you. That seems good to me.

Wordsworth and Yorke...not depressing, at least.

Ok, so about two months ago (or so) I checked my inbox when I got to work, and lo and behold there was the announcement: Radiohead has a new album out, released digitally, pay here, etc. etc. My plood pressure rose slightly. I quickly whipped out my credit card, paid the paltry sum, and began downloading. It took 30 minutes, during which time I went to get coffee, returned, feverishly counting off the minutes before I could finally listen to it - a new album by one of the world's most celebrated bands. I didn't want to leave this experience to the tiny speakers on my laptop in my drab and dreary classroom. No. This warranted something more extravagant. I burned a CD, took it out the car, and had a listen...only to remember, sadly, Radiohead just, kind of, bores me. There I said it. This is a fact I've been hiding even from myself. Mind you, this is not an album review discussing the relative merits of "King of Limbs" in relationship to the broader radiohead catalogue. No. The next few days, there was the usual back and forth between friends on Facebook regarding a Radiohead release. "Aw, the best band in the world does it again. Pure magic." And the response. "Hm. I just don't get Radiohead. They always seem a bit, I don't know, depressing?" With the requisite response. "Hm. I guess I just like intense music. I never thought of myself as so much more intense than other people. Thanks for clearing that up for me. You may now put your Journey album back on." And the mildly contrite comeback. "Actually, I prefer true genius, like U2 or Dave Bazan. They inspire me to see the world in new ways without the powerful urge to slit my wrists." Now, while the different points may have their merits, my argument doesn't fall along the intense/depressing spectrum. And I didn't contribute to the discussion because I didn't quite have a handle on how I felt about the music. Then I got a hold of the aforementioned Morton lectures (UC Davis - Romanticism, see below or see tunes, i) and his lecture on Wordsworth made me want to revisit his work. I read all of the Prelude I had merely skimmed in undergraduate. And it struck me. Wordsworth, at least in the Prelude and in Resolution and Independence, is boring as hell. Sure, he has his moments, and Tintern Abbey and Intimations Ode have their truths, their beauty, but after slogging through the Prelude, I could rattle off 15 straight cantos of The Commedia and feel like I was sitting poolside reading Crichton. Morton calls it innovative. I get that, a complete stylistic breakthrough, low-intensity language on purpose. New forms and all, and I thought hm. Now these epithets remind me of the critical literature on someone else, too. Hm. Oh. Ta-daa. Radiohead. Innovative, stylistic breakthrough. No highfalutin' rhetoric in Wordsworth, no choruses for Radiohead. Here's the thing, though, also. I find at least one, sometimes two tracks on every album that are pure transcendent bliss, just as there are lines in Wordsworth that shoot me to the moon (as it's dimly perceived by my half-creating mind, of course). In fact, in polite company one feels obligated to champion both these artists' virtues. But the rest? Actually, as snide as my facebook friend's remark to my other facebook friend was, some songs make me actually long for a good Journey song, to, you know, kick the evening into full gear. I appreciate the need for a contemplative space that some claim to be led into by both Radiohead and Wordsworth. I appreciate that mental opening, but do we really need some flat sounding smushed together beat that suddenly turns into a tick tick tick throughout a fairly boring song? That might be equivalent to the blank verse of Wordsworth's Prelude. The spectrum along which this comparison lies is different than the above "intense/depressing," but rather is constituted along the artists' world-weariness: Wordsworth in his poetry seems cautiously naive, and you never quite feel like you've penetrated into an intimate space, for all its self disclosure, his person in the poems feels constructed, self-conscious, a posture, not quite genuine. While Radiohead's music feels cautiously jaded, given to dehumanized electronic flights of fancy. Similarly, you never quite feel you've penetrated through to something genuine. This is odd, given that so much of Wordsworth's poetry is literally about encounter, and the Romantics are certainly critical of the stylized, mannered culture that precedes them. And Radiohead seems critical of a manufactured, plastic society and its oppressiveness. Neither one seems to offer a means of transcending these cultural deficits, however. Well, except on those rare moments, that one poem in the catalogue, that one song per album, that offers a way out. And although I'm open to being convinced about the virtues of stylized monotony and how innovative it is, right now, I'm not feeling it.

Light

So, I'm driving today to Carlsbad Flower show thingamajigger with Karla, her sister, and nephew Isaac, who's six months old. We see some flowers on the side of the road, purples, pinks, yellows. And I'm wondering how his little mind is perceiving it. He's still in an oral stage, sticking stuff into his mouth and fascinated with novel sounds, particularly, it seems, trying to make the connection between object movement and sounds. His little brow furrows if there's a sound he hasn't heard before and he wants to investigate. I'm watching the other cars drive by, reds and whites, and silvers, and I'm thinking of how we process color. Essentially, as far as I understand the physics of color, each object absorbs each color on the light spectrum except for the frequency we finally perceive and associate with the object. So, a red ball absorbs all the rest of the light except red. It's like the world is comprised of rejected light, the color not absorbed by the object bounces off and we perceive it. As if the physical world is the negative image of reality. Each object accepting so much light. I'm also fascinated by the idea of the evolution of the use of color, the many metal cars painted with modern methods, mixed, selected, synthetic. But the origin, of course is in nature. We perceive colors in nature, in the body, in animals, in plants, in rocks. In ground up rocks and minerals. There's an earthiness to color in its origin. And it's as if the colors of the objects we see around us are distortions of that nature. In essence, then, a distorted negative image all around us. As if the world is inside out. And I'm wondering what we would see in the objects if we saw them for what they accepted. Although what little understanding I hhave of the psychedelic or spiritual vision suggests that even the way that's phrased is too static. Things are vibrating, processing, changing, even as we perceive them as static. The need or desire to keep them static is the result of limited mind, of narrow mind. Just as the mark of maturity is to allow things to change, evolve, grow, to recognize process and impermanence, so too the mark of mature mind is to perceive change, process, fluidity. To be sensitive to it.

Processing Lost

So, the wife and I are going through the Lost series once again for the heck of it. And I'm trying to process afresh, given the whole text is laid out now, and you can identify the main thrust, sift for inconsistencies, divine some meaning perhaps, and, dare I say, interpret? I happened to be finishing up Seminary studies when Lost came out and much was made in casual conversation of its Christian bent at the time. Of course, whatever religious group you're a part of can take a text and pull out the strand relevant to that particular belief system and then pretend that one strand is the text's main purpose. (so Christians can interpret the Matrix as a aparable of salvation and a Buddhist can interpret it as a parable of enlightenment and an atheist can interpret it autobiographically, etc.) I suppose we all want to see our beliefs represented and reflected back to us in some ways. People want validation. Does this narrow and obscure our interpretive capacities sometimes? Indeed.
So I'm trying to hold that in tension with my reading of Lost here. Mind you, I haven't done the extensive research others have, and am considering delving into the "Finding Lost" series to trace some of the threads, but off the top of my head:
First, let's situate Lost in the TV landscape of the time. In the 2000s there arose a kind of two-tiered system in television, with "high concept" shows increasingly popular on cable channels like HBO (later, Showtime and AMC following suit) and formulaic re-tread on most of the networks. Lost broke new ground in a lot of ways. It's episodic story, it's time jumps for backstory and texture, its ecumenical inclusiveness (most popular shows don't have extended bits in Korean with subtitles), the intriigue, the cliffhangers, the (never ending) question marks. The show was innovative. And yet, while it bears close reading, reflection, and discussion, and touches on some important themes, the show still lacks a certain oomph taken in its entirety, and commands perhaps undue attention as a cultural artefact overall. (Side note: one of the results of the blurring of the boundaries of high and low culture is that they are now measured against each other, and, in most cases, the "low culture" loses out. Most decent novels, or even films, hold together better, are more profound, more poignant than this show, maybe because ultimately, Lost wasn't coherent, or, where it was coherent, it wasn't that profound). I mean, there's an entire Lostpedia devoted to unraveling some of these ongoing mysteries, books on the Gospel according to Lost, Lost and philosophy, etc. And I'm certainly not going to cover much ground in one blog entry, and sure, the show is a brain teaser. But how much more is it?
During the first few seasons, people could still have different theories about what was going on on the island. Some theorized the passengers had all died and the island was a kind of purgatory, others they had gone back in time, another dimension, what have you. The writers played with the ambiguity and played with some of the genre conventions afforded by the pseudo sci-fi elements in the story. But most desert island crash stories are asking the question, how is society best organized to function in a healthy way? Also the question asked in the Odyssey, by the way...which brings us to one of the shows mainstays. Allusion. Lost is awash in religious, pop cultural, and mythological allusion from beginning to end, such as the double allusion of Desmond Hume (sceptical Enlightenment philosopher), who for some still unexplained reason bumps into Jack in a Season 1 flashback scene, leading us to believe the show is going to be about the mysterious connections of its main characters in their lives before the crash (this is pseudo-resolved in season six, but not satisfactorily)...this is another misdirection device the show uses to keep the viewers on their feet: lead toward a certain expectation, then undermine it. This has the double effect of leaving the viewer coming back for more, but never leaving satisfied. Hume sails around the world in a boat, crash landing on the island. His lover back home is named Penny, short for Penelope. Here, we add a second layer of allusion, to Homer's Odyssey. In this sense, the show seems to be about allusiveness itself. About intertextuality. This also relates to its Unitarian Universalist afterlife sequence in the Series Finale. Different angles. Same truth (?) Another convention of the show is the withholding of significant information at crucial moments when someone has to make an important decision. "Trust me. You don't want to push that button." "Bush that button!" This back and forth without explanation or background or simple explanations that could help a character make significant decisions in the show are often withheld. Other plot points are introduced, and are seemingly important, then never touched on (Still not sure why Jacob's cabin moves around, why Christian Shepherd and Claire were in it when Locke gets there, for example, why Walt kept showing up mumbling gibberish backwards, why Aaron wasn't supposed to go back to the island, why the numbers were significant, and then they weren't, why Eko's brother's plane crash landed on an invisible, unfindable, moveable island just a little before he did, why Richard Alpert had perfect faith in Jacob for centuries and then all of a sudden doesn't at the very end, why Ben has an implied vast network of connection, wealth, and influence, which he got...how? and then he ends up accepting being Hurley's #2...etc.)
The island itself is never explored or mapped out, leaving it endlessly open to redefinition, addition, expansion. New temples, boats, light houses, cabins, encampments abound constantly. This is useful from a writer's perspective. The space is unmapped and therefore provides inexhaustible terrain. this maintains a sense of wildness and mystery that doesn't exist off the island, in the age of google earth.
Other allusions that beg interpretation, Locke, Bentham, Hawking, Rousseau, Farraday. Either enlightenment philosophers or scientists. Proponents of the rational. The viewer is at first tempted to interpret the character in light of their allusive name, but, beyond loose parallels, this is an unrewarding exercise. Mostly, this serves to set up a discursive field of ideological interplay, including what appears to be the central theme the show is going to explore, represented by Locke and Shepherd early on: science vs. faith. Only, the categories are all mixed up. Dr. Shepherd, son of "Christian," is the man of science. And Locke, allusively son of "the Enlightenment" (and a con-man) is the man of faith...although, ultimately that faith gets him killed, which kind of undermines all his steps of faith along the way...although he is also clearly framed as a Christ figure in the episode where he dies, leading to all the others returning to the island and "saving the day"...although he doesn't have any rebirth or resurrection back on the island, only the sacrifice, and then the evil smoke monster which at first seemed to be a morally testing angel of death, but really is the disembodied spirit of an evil immortal "Esau" character, takes on his shape, allowing him to potentially escape, so...is Locke a sap or a savior? The show doesn't tell us.
In the characters of Kate, Sawyer, Sayid, Charlie, and Eko, the story also seemed to set up a fall-redemption theme it would continiously milk. The characters sinned in their past life, but has a chance for redemption on the island. But each time a character experiences some kind of redemption, it's somehow undermined later. Eko turns evil again. Sayid turns evil in the end. Charlie dies. Sawyer goes back and forth, ultimately becoming the shows Han Solo, the likeable rogue. The categories are messed up. The expecation undermined. From a literary perspective, this gives the show some moral complexity. It's good story-telling, ostensibly. But the seeming lack of design and coherence, the inconsistency, undermine this. The moral rules that apply in one season of the show (do something bad, get killed later) don't apply in later seasons. From a religious perspective, maybe a Buddhist notion of impermanence is implied. It is futile to look for coherence in a world of illusion. Something like that.
What the show boils down to in the end, seemingly, is "we have to stick together, or we're gonna die alone." The island becomes a simple allegory of contemporary life with all the ballyhooed complexity serving mostly as sleight of hand, as distraction, as detritus. The parallel to contemporary life runs something like this: With multiple threats looming, overpopulation, nuclear weapons, global warming, economic collapse, we need to stick together. There is nationalistic, religious, ideological plurality on the island, reflecting the plurality of worldviews in our world today. There are finite resources, tough decisions, and ambigious symbols, just like in real life(!) Some want to solve the problems with reason, some with faith, some with violence, some with manipulation and coercion. French, American, Australian, Iraqi, Southern, Christian, Atheist, Buddhist, self, or Other...we all have to pull together, guys. It's not cool to manipulate and kill each other. Namaste! We should have compassion and sacrifice, guys. Love conquers all, guys. (Not always caritas, or profound compassion. Romantic love will save you, too.) Ultimately, that seems to be the shows message, although it takes three Christ figures: Locke, Jacob, and Jack, to hammer this home. Don't choose evil, choose good. Although, in the end (as Linkin Park has so profoundly put it) it doesn't even matter. We all end up holding hands in a Unitarian Unversalist church walking toward the light. Doesn't this kind of undermine the "character is destiny" idea that lends meaning to a character's arc? I'm on the edge of my seat as Juliet sacrifices herself, Locke gets murdered, Jin sacrifices himself, Jack sacrifices himself, even while Ana Lucia, Eko, Rousseau, Alex, Carl, Charlie, Daniel, Michael, Shannon, and Boone, even the Others all die pretty much needlessly, but in the end, we all end up in the same place, as long as we awaken to the fact that, at one point or other, we hooked up with a member of the opposite sex, as long as we realized we've been loved. So, for me, the show sets up dichotomies it doesn't resolve, then oversimplifies notions of good and evil in the final season, undermining its own moral complexities, and does so in an extremely convoluted way. Entertaining? Sure. But a plot that justs twists and twists and never really untwists is a bit frustrating. The show set out quite promising, and could have, I think, been both profound and satisfying, but finally, ended up falling short, ended up being, of all things, brain candy, with an illusory depth. Although, as one hour escapist fare, it still beats 95% of what's been broadcast on television for about the last decade. But it had the chance to be transcendent. It wasn't. Too bad.
...Addendum:
Watching Season Six reminds me how the whole series is finally framed. It's essentially a bet between the two brothers. Jacob and...evil smoke monster guy...Esau? Something like that. Cain? Whatever. Evil guy, or not evil, but rather, cynical guy thinks humanity is inherently bent toward corruption and self-destruction. Jacob, dresses in white, the optimistic guy, thinks they can be saved, or at least they can figure out how to "live together." Something about living in harmony together, so he brings successive groups to the island to try and prove his point. It never works. But he calls it "progress." So the tropes of the series, faith vs. reason, destiny vs. free will, death, all the social philosophers and religious names, coping with uncertainty, boil down to a vision of history as a succession of social experiments. The series posits some kind of light or moral order at the center of existence, enshrined and protected on the island, and into which the cast members wander off at the back of the church in the finale. There is some suggestion here of benevolent spirit, of having to "let go" to become one with that spirit, which is what season six is all about. Slightly self-contradictory in that you have to let go of your illusions about life and physicality, but reclaim your connection or "attachment" to romantic relationships for the awakening to occur. Love leads to self-sacrifice, the overcoming of the ego, which leads to ability to "let go." Something like that. But love is here narrowly defined as "romantic love," or, if not exclusively, then at least this is foregrounded. I suppose this is necessary to engage a Western audience used to processing that way. Again, it's an odd mixture to enjoy a series so much and yet feel its convoluted plot and some of its foofie underlying ideology take it down a notch or two. Just sayin.

More Tidbits from Levertov

following my earlier comments on shifting the metaphorical landscape of reading from mining (linearity) to sowing (cyclical), I came across this quote in Levertov's "New and Selected essays" on the work of the poet:

"The poet is a farmer, one who tends the land of language and imagination and its creatures, who makes things grow, poem-things, story-things, not out of nowhere but out of the ground on which he walks." (46)

This of course shifts the action from receptive (reaping) to active (sowing, tending, growing), but, well, you know. She goes on...

"[The poet] is an antagonist - but to what? To the hostility of the environment, which, however, contains the elements that will nourish his crops. And in what sense? In the sense of the struggle to compose - not to impose order but to compose the passive elements into a harvest, to grow not tares, but wheat." (47)

given my own sense of moral vertigo, this speaks a kind of comfort, that tilling this soil potentially provides a moral strengthening, both against internal winter, and externally against injustice.

More goodies:
"When we fail to take into account contexts in examining works of literature, we are reflecting a similar failure prevalent in other spheres of life - a kind of parochialism which addresses symptoms not causes, or isolates a single cause from its interrelation with other causes. We can see this in medicine, in education, in the way social problems are addressed, and most of all in the way ecological disasters result from the disregard of the complex interdependence of all things." (66)

Where this hits most frustratingly home for me is in at least weekly meetings in which some aspect or other of low student achievement is ascribed to one oversimplified cause.

In reflecting on her tendency to read poetry that is rooted in the natural world, specifically that of her chosen home the Pacific Northwest (more on a realization this brought about later) and poetry that gives some evidence of spiritual wrestling, she writes:

"The fact that poems such as these (both those of homage to nature and of doubt and faith) are being written and are being read, and that there is indeed, in so many writers and readers, that "deep spiritual longing" Jorie Graham speaks of, seems to underscore the irrelevance to literature, for both reader and writer, of the kind of criticism currently prevalent in the academic world - criticism which treats works of art as if they were diagrams or merely means provided for the exercise of analysis, rather than what they are: testimonies of lived life, which is what writers have a vocation to give, and readers (including those who write) have a need to receive." (21)

Reminded me of the pedantic eisegesis I saw so much at Fuller (where most of it didn't even bother to be pedantic, I guess...too concerned with relevance) and in academic texts in general. Maybe we took the postmodern idea that "what you see depends on where you stand" a little too far, in that we're stuck with our predetermined ideas borrowed from whatever scholar we've hitched our wagon to (de Man, Baudrillard, Derrida, Zizek, Lacan, whoever) will be found in whatever text we examine, keeping us caught in tautological semantic prisons with a bit of arrogance thrown in for good measure (who the hell else understands Hegel but me?). Nowhere is it more evident that we've become disconnected from nature. Well, I guess there's downtown LA...but even there we have a few trees. Naw, academia takes the cake on this one, where nature exists as an a abstract postulate, trafficked as sign and open to constructivist illusions.

The subtle body

Reading back through some essays by Denise Levertov, I'm struck by the similarity between her treatment of the "organic form" of a poem (more on that in a second) and the Rudolf Steiner/Goethean science notion of the subtle body underlying living things. There may be some connection with Native American spiritualities and Romantic intuitions as well. If I could make a feeble attempt at explaining, cutting a middle way between essentialism - that is, we perceive the world as it is, things have inherent substance that is perceivable, and constructivism, things aren't much there at all, the world is a big silver screen onto which our minds actively project objects, people, etc. This way of seeing and perceiving has developed over time (Barfield) and has not always been exactly as it is now, and has something to do with the link between language and consciousness. Enter the subtle body, a kind of spiritual underbody. This may be the underlying aspect of a given oject (does it have to be "alive" to have a subtle body? That is plant, mineral, animal? I don't know) which interacts with our minds, co-creating the perception, mingling with underlying reality to create that which we perceive in everyday life. So, too, Levertov claims, there is a poem beneath the poem, an "organic form," which she defines thusly:

"a method of apperception, i.e. of recognizing what we perceive, and is based on an intuition of an order, a form beyond forms, in which forms partake, and of which man's creative works are analogies, resemblances, natural allegories. Such poetry is exploratory."

She traces this in some poems by William carlos Williams, recognizing underlying patterns in meter and sound, calling it a kind of "pulse" of the poem. I like this idea that poetry mirrors creation (poeisis) in this way. The physical artifact or poem has an underlying, spiritual form manifest in the object or poem itself. I'm putting this in dialogue with the idea put forth in the Morton lectures and elsewhere about a "materialist theory of reading" that is, information is energy, to read a poem, to give it voice is to release that energy in soundwaves, to release its body and texture. I'm wondering also if ideas themselves have substance, energy, materiality, or if ideas or words on the page are merely potential energy, so to speak, and only have materiality when spoken aloud. Speaking with a friend steeped in mystical traditions, he mentioned the idea of the subtle body, and that one theory of ancient medicine is that, rather than some antiquated trial and error, ancient shamans could see the subtle bodies of certain plants in trancelike states (after, say, a vision quest) and could identify their healing properties in that vision state, idetifying which were curative and which were poisonous. What does this mean for my own poems? Do they have underlying pattern, how do I become more sensitized to it? I'm sort of a hack at this point when it comes to mechanics and might say of my work what Levertov says of Williams, that at time he he "gives inadequate attention to detail, fails to follow all the way through, as if he were in too much haste to get on to the next matter." I find poetry a way of getting closer to the ground, potentially of sifting through minerals, of touching reality on the ground floor, whereas most of the time we hover in some middle distance, some toposphere, where the terms we traffic in are vague and general. A good poem gives evidence of spiritual expansiveness, of an enlargened consciousness. The problem is it takes time, patience, and sensitivity. It takes work. It takes a state of awareness that culture is at pains to quash. Soooo, fight the good fight?

Reclaiming Poetry

Is not as easy at it sounds. For one, there's all that reading to do. Kidding. I'll paraphrase Northrop Frye here and talk about the difference between the reader and the critic. The reader has a host of favorite pieces of literature he likes for various reasons, they resonate on some level. The critic concerns himself with literature like a scientist. I assume this means going about the business of organizing the canon into some sort of coherent shape, making distinctions based on impersonal analysis. What Eliot might call "taking in the tradition." I'm struggling here and I might need someone to throw me a life preserver. Sometime last year I made the firm decision to dive back into poetry, having dabbled for some time awaiting acceptance into one program or other, and writing an unfinished novel. Inspired by Christian Wiman's "Ambition and Survival" I read up on different critics first. This serves two purposes: first, to get the topography of poetry. This is either explicitly stated or implied by poet-critics left and right. You learn Bishop was friends with Lowell. You learn Lowell had issues. You learn Denise Levertov chooses Williams over Eliot. You learn Pound had issues. You learn Derek Walcott writes damn fine essays. You learn Yeats was a freak, but a fascinating one. You learn about the 20th century straw man called "free verse" everyone has strong opinions about. I read criticism from Levertov, Di Piero, Pound, Heaney, CK Williams. I read Lowell, Frost, Auden, Milton, 20th century collections. Like the magic eye, some of the picture is beginning to fill in. I recently picked up a collection of Joseph Brodsky, looked back into Milozs, expanding beyond the American voice. And yet, few of the poems I've read stick with me as transformative experiences. Admittedly, I read quickly, and haven't made a ton of space for close examination, for depth. Among the poetry I've read this year, a few poems from the magazine Poetry stick out to me. This is due, in part, to the range of quality and voice, so decent poems stick out. But while I felt I was supposed to enjoy Auden, wanted to enjoy Pound, for tone and voice, for calculated flippancy, I connected with the poems of Phillip Larkin. For subtlety of gesture, for sensitivity to family and the confusion of displacement and a kind of humble grandiosity I enjoyed Li-Young Lee. For their unapologetically masculine timbres, I enjoyed Ted Hughes and William Logan, respectively. I did not analyze any of the poems here, so I'm not speaking, as perhaps I ought, of style or form, but of the overall impact of the poem, with content perhaps foregrounded. This probably says more about me than about some abstracted "problem with poetry," and bears some reflection, but I thought it interesting that after roughly a year, I feel like life is too short to spend a great deal of it "familiarizing oneself with the canon" or some such. What punches you in the stomach? Worry about the whys and wherefores later. Read that. Don't flinch.

Timothy Morton. Cause. Effect.

So, my roommate Wall and I have been listening to itunesU lectures by professor of English Timothy Morton from UC Davis (by way of Oxford) and discussing his treatment of the Romantics. Definitely worthwhile, but we're having different experiences. for Wall, Morton is helping to collapse dualisms (the old Western subject-object dualism has plagued Wall for much of his natural born life, methinks) through his discussion of nature, biology, dark ecology, "ecology without nature," etc. Listen to the lectures for more on this (although for me, the class is a bit overmuch "Romanticism as an occasion for Mortonism," a common pitfall in academia). But for me, there's a simultaneous sense of refreshing thought, intellectual stimulation and the sense of displeasure by that arises by contrast with, what to call it, mundane mind? The network of TV, household chores, small talk, errands, a sense of trivialized work, and resource allocation of the everyday is rendered so utterly banal by comparison, that all things that distract from, call it transcendent mind, are cast in a negative light, unnecessary hindrances to purity of thought, to precision of expression. I am left enlightened, but slightly more arrogant and dissatisfied by the lectures, coarsened, not softened. There are layers to this, no doubt. One is the fact that this man is much smarter than me, manages to have a wife and child and a professorship and combine a vast knowledge of lierature and science, whereas I struggle to teach High School honors English adequately (it's own set of challenges, of course), was unable to get accepted to respected PhD programs in the field, and don't even have a child, yet am hard pressed to carve out a space to grow intellectually. Acceptance of one's current station without allusion is one of my current spiritual hurdles and this is throwing a wrench in the gears. I continue to listen to the lectures, selectively. One such selection came last week, as I was wrapping up Chopin's "The Awakening" with my 11th graders and trying to articulate "feminist criticism" in teenagese. In preparing for the day, I noticed the similarity between Chopin's realist writing and Morton's description of Jane Austen, from whom Chopin obviously learned a thing or two. Indirect speech, point of view, and focalization to use Morton's terminology, referencing "structural narratology." Essentially, there is ambiguity about the shift from description to speech, moving back and forth fluidly, allowing access to the interiority of the characters, because the speech is indirect and its unclear if something is spoken or only thought by a character. The speech is implied. He goes on to say this is the proper focus of literary criticism. i turned this over in my head for a few days and decided that here is where we part ways. He wonders why we should focus on some made up characters when we might just as well write about someone we went out for coffee with. He's essentially trivializing literary criticism that focuses on character and action in favor of linguistic and rhetorical analysis. And while I'm interested in both, it is for different reasons. I'm interested in the focalization technique as a writer, but as a reader, I'm more interested in what's going on with the characters in the story. Why is this more important than someone I went to coffee with? Because my coffee date exists in a fluid space of life, not an intentionally structured narrative to enact some sort of social criticism or other. There's structure, there's authorial intent, however ambiguous or elusive. Call me a Bakhtinian, but there's a speaker and a listener, not just a text existing in and for itself, with techniques to be analyzed in and for themselves. To use an analogy from my Saturday morning activities, this would be like giving the "making of" features of Lord of the Rings, the rigging, the costumes, the set design, the CGI, primacy over the story, which is, after all, what all those pieces are in service of. I'm not entirely sure what camp this puts me in, or if I'm even adequately understanding Morton enough to mount and intelligible counterargument, but there it is.