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.