Oak Boat: I want to come back to that line you quoted earlier from the present-day American essayist Wesley Yang: “that our culture feeds off the plight of the poor in spirit in order to create new dependencies.” We might say: Let’s let Wes Yang meet Nicky Mach. And Wes, meet Nicky Mach, etcetera.[i]
Newt Monk: And who might you mean when you say “Nicky Mach?” Him I know not. (At least, I don’t think I do.)
Oak Boat: Well, Nicky Mach … I mean, you do know, it’s simple shorthand for Niccolò Machiavelli (1469–1527). (Yes, yes, that Machiavelli.) Ole Nicky, despite the popular trash of a myth that continues, even in 2024, to ostracize him as one of the meanest, most cynical humans being to have ever walked the earth, not unlike Caine in Kung Fu, Mr. Machiavelli was actually, believe it or not, quite human and even quite humane.
Newt Monk: Yeah, I might just believe it.
Oak Boat: So, in his book of Discourses, ole Nicky Mach expressing a fundamental political maxim where, essentially, for any and all human civilizations, hunger and poverty mark (and always mark) the two fundamental drives behind all laws and politics. In other words, all statutes, precedents, prohibitions, rule-making, and other public policies, along with all the methods and motivations behind their supposéd achievements, remain rooted in the prevention, restraint, treatment, acceptance (as well as denial) of a civilization’s risk against succumbing to either/or (or perhaps, “both/and’) widespread hunger and generational impoverishment.[ii]
Newt Monk: I sort of see what you’re saying Machiavelli once said. (Sort of). I don’t know if things are quite as absolute and formulaic as you and or ole Nicky Mach say they are. But I grant that general threats like widespread hunger, crop blight, disease, famine, and trade embargos, as well as economic depression and/or the decay of affluence across entire classes—yes, these things have been, and will continue to be, at the root of most political (dis)agreements and conflicts.
Oak Boat: Yeah, you’re following me correctly. What you’re saying is like what a pair of recent translators of Machiavelli’s Discourses, Harvey C. Mansfield and Nathan Tarcov, have suggested: that in that book Machiavelli “tries to show that to understand political situations correctly, one must not listen to the intent of the words people use but rather look at the necessities they face.”[iii]
Newt Monk: Ah yes, I’m starting to see the point. Just as food prices and retirement funds concern much of today’s day-to-day politics––and by “our” I include fellow followers like myself, who are fellow non-leaders of our communities––so too did the hopes (and despairs) of farmers (which includes ranching and fishing) and the general graft of those farmers’ bankers drive the politics of Nicky Mach’s world way back in the day.
Oak Boat: Yeah.
Newt Monk: And these twin drives that beat the heart of all the politics occurred in all the centuries before Nicky Mach ever dreamed of putting his own pen to paper?
Oak Boat: Yeah, that’s why you see today, writers like Yang observing how the leaders who govern us profit off the “plight of the poor in spirit.” You see how that kind of plight continues to constitute the bare essentials to these oh-so-lovely latter-day politics we fellow glitched-out Americans seem to find ourselves stuck in as we grumble toward the fall of 2024. [iv]
Newt Monk: So, ole Nicky Mach, meanwhile, offers in his Discourses no more thantwo reasons for why humans being, so long as they remain uncorrupted, desire freedom?
Oak Boat: Yeah, but do you understand the rationales for why he limited himself to just those two reasons? Do you see the two groups of humans being Nicky Mach divides, a division obvious to all individuals affected by political life for all situations?
Newt Monk: I would guess that his first reason, or the first group involves and includes only a slender few—a perpetual, numerical minority––a few who, for whatever reason, strongly desire the freedom to command others.
Oak Boat: Yeah, those are the ones who want to be free only to make others unfree!
Newt Monk: On the other hand, for the majority of a civilization’s citizens—which may even include mildly meek and moldy me!––they instead deeply yearn for an authentic freedom simply so that they––and that we!––may find a way to pay our overdue bills, to find a few minutes to prune a few overgrown vines and perhaps water some overlooked patio cacti as an overall reflection of how we have found a way to “live secure.”[v]
Oak Boat: Yeah, but often our leaders fail in their freedom to let us (their followers) freely live our lives securely. It happens all the time in all kinds of places.
Newt Monk: So it seems to go. So it seems.
Oak Boat: More like suck it seems to go, I’d say. Suck it seems. So it seems. I mean, that happened in the jim crow American South a century ago, where, instead of secure living, the political system offered to its followers through the leadership of its leaders, it instead, to quote Isabel Wilkerson from her study The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration (2010): “mostly fear and dependence—and hatred of that dependence—on both sides,” both the leaders and followers who somehow lived in that South.[vi]
Newt Monk: Yeah, but as American political philosopher Sharon Krause has pointed out––in Liberalism with Honor (2002)––even in our own modern times, a growing number of members of the nation’s non-leadership class feel a certain sense of powerlessness with what the present has decided to present to them. Presently in 2024, the present seeks to present to we non-leaders a subtle sense of powerless confinement. Krause’s examples highlight how––
the special ‘bills of rights’ that have proliferated in recent years (patients’, victims’, parents’, children’s, now even air travelers’) speak more toa feeling of powerlessness and the need for protection from forces beyond one’s control than to new freedoms. [vii]
Oak Boat: Yet it’s not just academic types who’ve lately noticed, and have later written about, the seemingly ticking temporarily behind an apparent, ever-depleting expiration date for American rights and freedoms. And it’s not just me or you. Would you believe that occasional, prominent personalities who (at least momentarily) make up our popular culture media have sometimes spotted this, sometimes even spoken about it as well?
Newt Monk: I would believe you, and I will believe you, because I believe that you are the one who most wants to be believed. (And I even believe that you mostly believe the beliefs I just stated.)
Oak Boat: So you should then believe me when I take some (modestly popular?) media figure, like Stoya, for example. She’s a retired adult film actress who has shifted her endeavors to become quite an impressive essayist and cultural observer––like when she differentiates modern American notions of empowerment from their notions of entitlement. According to Stoya, when these two concepts are set side by side—or, at least when they are set so in twenty-first century America––the idea of being “empowered feels as though that power,” whether it’s political, cultural, or spiritual sort of power, “can be revoked according to someone else’s whim.” But on the other hand, the word “entitled” tends to mean, at least for Stoya, that “it is far easier to believe that that power is actually mine.”[viii]
Newt Monk: To her intriguing differentiation I might add a blunt line once given by the great comedian and thinker George Carlin when he said: “The powerful keep the power. That’s why they’re called the powerful.[ix]
Oak Boat: “So it goes,” said some sad saint from long ago. “So it goes.”[x]
NOTES
[i] Wesley Yang, The Souls of Yellow Folk, (New York: W. W. Norton, 2018), p. 25.
[ii] Machiavelli contends: “It is said that hunger and poverty make men industrious, and the laws make them good. Where a thing works well on its own without the law, the law is not necessary; but when some good custom is lacking, at once the law is necessary.” Thus, for Machiavelli: “There is greater virtue to be seen where choice has less authority.” See: Niccolò Machiavelli, Discorsi Sopra la Prima Deca di Tito Livio in Discourses on The First Ten Books of Titus Livius, trans. Harvey C. Mansfield and Nathan Tarcov, (University of Chicago Press, 1996), (I, iii), p. 15 (1st quotation); (I, i), p. 8 (2nd quotation).
[iii] Harvey C. Mansfield and Nathan Tarcov, “Introduction” to Machiavelli’s Discourses on The First Ten Books of Titus Livius, trans. Mansfield and Tarcov, (University of Chicago Press, 1996), p. xxxiii.
[v] On the point that they want to be free only to make others unfree, see Edmund Burke’s various warnings:
The effect of liberty to individuals is, that they may do what they please: we ought to see what it will please them to do….
But liberty, when men act in bodies, is power. Considerate people, before they declare themselves, will observe the use which is made of power,—and particularly of so trying a thing as new power in new persons, of whose principles, tempers, and dispositions they have little or no experience, and in situations where those who appear the most stirring in the scene may possibly not be the real movers. (242)
And:
In all [political] bodies, those who will lead must also, in a considerable degree, follow. They must conform their propositions to the taste, talent, and disposition of those whom they wish to conduct: therefore, if an assembly is viciously or feebly composed in a very great part of it, nothing … will prevent the men of talents disseminated through it from becoming only the expert instruments of absurd projects….
In this political traffic, the leaders will be obliged to bow to the ignorance of their followers, and the followers to become subservient to the worst designs of their leaders. (284–85)
Burke goes on to say that “To secure any degree of sobriety in the propositions made by the leaders in any public assembly, they,” that is, the leaders “ought to respect, in some degree perhaps to fear, those whom they conduct”: their followers. But, continues Burke, “to be led any otherwise than blindly, the followers must be qualified, if not for actors, at least for judges; they must also be judges of natural weight and authority.” See: Edmund Burke, Reflections of the Revolution in France (1791) in The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, (12 vols.; London: John C. Nimmo, 1887), III, pp. 242, 284–85; Machiavelli, Discourses, (I, xvi), p. 46.
[vi] Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration, (New York: Random House/Vintage Books, 2010), p. 31.
[vii] Sharon Krause, Liberalism with Honor, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2002), p. x.
[viii] Stoya, Philosophy, Pussycats, & Porn, (Los Angeles: Not a Cult, 2018), pp. 147–48.
[ix] George Carlin, When Will Jesus Bring the Pork Chops? (New York: Hyperion, 2004), p. 106.
[x] Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Slaughterhouse-Five, (New York: Dell, 1969; 1971).
Newt Monk: Of course, I would prefer no leadership, a civil way to live that involved no coaches, no captains, no jefes…. No bosses, no bullies, no bureaucrats and instead just jacks and jennies grazing green grass aplenty. I suppose it’s just a sentimental nostalgia for the imaginary anarchy of Arcadia and all that. If only a way of life could be found that involved no judges, no jailers … and no jerks!
Oak Boat: If only!
Newt Monk: Indeed. Instead I am stuck being an ass from one of Aesop’s old fables.
Oak Boat: How do you mean:
Newt Monk: Aesop of Egypt, the storyteller whom legend says was once a slave, has a fable that goes like this:
At the unexpected sound of an enemy approaching, an old man was stricken with terror and tried to persuade his donkey to run away so that he wouldn’t be captured. The donkey obstinately asked the old man, ‘tell me, do you suppose the victor will make me carry two pack saddles instead of one?’
The old man said he did not think so.
‘I rest my case,’ concluded the donkey. ‘What difference does it make who my master is, if I always carry one saddle at a time?’ [i]
Newt Monk: What strikes me is that how the worker (the ass) asks worthwhile questions, and even knows some of the correct answers to those questions. But that donkey’s master can only cower amid his own ignorance.
Oak Boat: Pitiful.
Newt Monk: Pretty plenty pitiful indeed. But what really strikes me as a reader-listener of this fable is my own self-awareness.
Oak Boat: How so?
Newt Monk: I am aware (and am aware that I am aware) that I am no master (of any sort) as found in the fable. I’d wager instead that I am akin to something between a man and an ass. Because I don’t sympathize with the old man’s ignorance the way I do with the ass’s indifference, because what drives that indifference is a human-all-too-human cry for freedom. I’d wager that’s why Caesar once observed that “all men naturally long for liberty and despise a state of servitude.” Caesar realized that because he too was once a slave.[ii]
Oak Boat: Still, no team can win all its games without a coach. All politics involves the question of who will rule?
Newt Monk: Yep. I’m afraid something to the effect of what you just said has already been said by every sagacious student of humans being from ancient Plato to the late-twentieth-century political philosopher Karl Popper (1902–1994) to the early-twenty-first-century British hip-hop artist, author, and social critic and advocate: Akala.
Oak Boat: How so?
Newt Monk: Plato’s formulation of all human politics boils down to: “the wise shall lead and rule, and the ignorant shall follow,” and “slaves should be subject to the control of their masters.” As a deep reader, and severe critic, of Plato’s ideas concerning governance, Popper has explained that, back in the days of old Athens, “Plato saw the fundamental problem of politics in the question: Who shall rule the state?” while these days, “modern writers … believe that the main problem is: Who should dictate? The capitalists or the workers?”[iii]
Oak Boat: Well, who do you think should, bucko?
Newt Monk: I said earlier: I’m no one’s master. I. Am. No. Leader. I am, therefore, someone who’s “for the workers,” of course. Thus the “most fundamental problem of all politics” is for Popper, “the control of the controller, of the dangerous accumulation of power represented in the state.”[iv] However….
Oak Boat: However! How about hownever, huh? How many “howevers” do we have to have here, bucko? Don’t you know it’s hot out here in the summertime?
Newt Monk: (ignoring him) And despite this seemingly fundamental question of “Who shall rule the state?” according to Sir Popper, most garden-variety Marxists residing in the free West during the late-nineteenth and twentieth centuries “never realized the full significance of democracy as the only known means to achieve this control.” But I digress (I guess?) ….[v]
Oak Boat: I do not deny that you indeed did suggest: that you did digress.
Newt Monk: Well, I didn’t mean to, because I’m not really that interested in the Marxism stuff. I’m more interested in how and why Popper omits to mention throughout his magnus opus: The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945) ….
Oak Boat: Ulf, that’s a big book! (But I did kind of like it.)
Newt Monk: No doubt. And, it’s not only big, but heavily (and occasionally highhandedly) critical of Plato’s teachings so that Popper essentially blames Plato for encouraging, promoting most of the totalitarian forms of government that have emerged in the West during the last two millennia.
Oak Boat: That’s a long stretch time there, bucko. Especially for blaming somebody for something, even if that somebody is Plato, and that something is totalitarianism.
Newt Monk: Yeah, a mighty long stretch of time, spanning not only within breathe of Plato’s own Ancient Athens, but extending down through the ages—all the way down to the fall of the final Reich; down to the slow decay of all-things-Soviet; then down to Balkans in 1990s; alongside the Bath Party of Iraq; down through the ages to twenty-first-century America and her domestic infestation of spliner faction militia movements all infected by messianic “identity” ideologies—they’re all totally totalitarian, dude!––though only partially the conceptual progeny sired by Old Man Plato (whom they will never call their “daddy”).
Oak Boat: Totally.
Newt Monk; But while Popper is busy pointing his finger at Plato, blaming the Athenian philosopher for much of the mess that various totalitarian ambitions of the past two thousand years of history have polluted and pock-marked across large portions of the Occidental side to Gaia’s bosom….
Oak Boat: The Occidental side of Gaia’s bosom? Oh, you mean the geopolitical teat we affectionally call “the West?”
Newt Monk: Yeah sure. But I say Sir Popper might also have had the courtesy to have reminded his readers that, amid all that critiquing of Plato as the prime source of totalitarianism, Plato had himself once been a slave—yes, a slave––not unlike Caesar, and not unlike Aesop.[vi]
Oak Boat: You’re saying that if we readers would consider (and dig into) Plato’s past enslavement a little more closely, it might well aid us in our attempt to better understand why the prescription an elderly Plato later dispenses at Laws (690B)––there where he formulates who should (and should not) be leaders as well as who should (and should not) be their followers in his (the author’s!) hypothetical city––seems so severe?
Newt Monk: Yeah, or at least, seems so “severe” to us so-called “moderns,” yeah.
Newt Monk: Basically.
Oak Boat: You’ve reminded me of a passage from a little book by an American philologist Alexander Welsh (1933–2018). It’s called What is Honor? A Question of Moral Imperatives (2008), and in it Welsh discusses the work of Jamaican-American sociologist Orlando Patterson, particularly Patterson’s studies into the historical origins of the concept of the Western idea of “freedom.” Summing up some of Patterson’s theories, Welsh writes:
Both Athenian democracy and the Roman republic derived their notion of free independent citizens from the condition of their opposites, the slaves who lived in their midst. The presence of slaves makes it all the more attractive to identify with a group of the citizens.[vii]
Newt Monk: Right, and if you’ve been a slave before, like Plato supposedly was––we’ll never really know for sure––you might sincerely find (as well as strongly feel) that being a citizen is rather “more attractive” than subservience.
Oak Boat: Certainly (I suppose).
Newt Monk: And while slavery remains, with the exception of our nation’s incarceration industrial complex, abolished throughout these United States of 2024, one of our country’s contemporary essayists, Wesley Yang, has I think, quite aptly articulated how our present political situations contain close parallels to the greater Greco-Roman slave situation(s) of the ancient past. Indeed, our present political situations may even project a distinct set of shadows to crawl across the general surface of history.
Oak Boat: How so?
Newt Monk: Because, at least from Yang’s perspective as a Gen X (or Y) American, “You could … say that our culture feeds off the plight of the poor in spirit in order to create new dependencies.”[viii]
Oak Boat: Ouch! If that’s the truth, it certainly does hurt.
Newt Monk: I’m sorry if it does. Along the same lines of the way ancient slaves were sorted from ancient citizens is the way we moderns partition all of our leaders away from us (their own followers) in day-to-day life! It is along these lines that British author, intellectual, and hip-hop artist Akala, in his book Natives: Race & Class in the Ruins of Empire (2018), questions how much “self-segregation is caused by the seemingly natural human appetite for tribalism, and how much is due to the social processes that shape a shared identity?”[ix]
Oak Boat: Hmm. While it’s, admittedly, quite a ways to stretch oneself across the Atlantic, I feel Akala’s point in regard to Great Britain partially overlaps with some of what Pulitzer Prize winner (and, for us, fellow Austinite) Lawrence Wright was getting at in his cultural survey God Save Texas: A Journey into the Soul of the Lone Star State (2018). I particularly sense some overlap when Wright notes how “Texas enjoys the singular blessing that every distinct culture must have: a sense of its own apartness. “[x]
[i] Aesop, Fables, trans. Laura Gibbs, (New York, Oxford UP, 2002, 2008), no. 11, (Phaedrus 1.15 = Perry 476), p. 9.
[ii] Though Caesar was once a slave, his translator Carolyn Hammond reminds readers that “Caesar figures in the historical record as both destroyer of the Republic and founder of the Empire,” (“Introduction,” p. xii). The founders of the Roman Republic, Romulus and Remus, are said to have also suffered as slaves in their younger days. See: Gaius Julius Caesar, Commentarii de Bello Gallico (The Gallic War), trans. Carolyn Hammond, (New York: Oxford UP, 1996), (III, x), p. 59 (quotation); Livy, Ab Urbe Condita Libri (Books from the Foundation of the City) in The Rise of Rome, Books 1–5, trans. T. J. Luce, (New York: Oxford UP, 1998), (I, v–vii), pp. 9–12; Plutarch, Βίοι Παράλληλοι (Parallel Lives), trans. Bernadotte Perrin, (11 vols.; Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP; London, William Heinemann Ltd, 1919), Vol. I, “Theseus and Romulus,” (IV, i–ii), Vol. VII, “Julius Caesar,” (I, iv–II, iv).
[iii] Plato, Νόμοι (Laws), trans. Trevor J. Saunders, (New York: Penguin, 1970, 2004), (690B), p. 95; Karl Popper, “The Paradoxes of Sovereignty,” (1945) in Popper Selections, ed. David Miller, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1985), pp, 319, 320.
[iv] Popper, “Marx’s Theory of the State,” (1945) in Popper Selections, p. 335.
[v] Popper, “Marx’s Theory of the State,” (1945) in Popper Selections, p. 335.
[vi] Sonja Anderson, “This Newly Deciphered Papyrus Scroll Reveals the Location of Plato’s Grave,” Smithsonian Magazine, May 1, 2024; Diogenes Laertius, Βίοι καὶ γνῶμαι τῶν ἐν φιλοσοφίᾳ εὐδοκιμησάντων (Lives of Eminent Philosophers), trans. R.D. Hicks, (2 vols.; Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1925, 1972), Vol. I, “Plato,” (III, xviii–xix).
[vii] Alexander Welsh, What is Honor? A Question of Moral Imperatives, (New Haven, CN: Yale UP, 2008), pp. 23–24.
[viii] Wesley Yang, The Souls of Yellow Folk, (New York: W. W. Norton, 2018), p. 25.
[ix] Akala, Natives: Race & Class in the Ruins of Empire, (London: Two Roads, 2018), p. 194; Orlando Patterson, Freedom in the Making of Western Culture, (New York: Basic Books, 1991), pp. 17–18, 42–43, 135.
[x] Likewise, former Secretary of Defense (as well as former Director of CIA), Robert Gates was informed upon his arrival to be the 22nd President of Texas A&M University, in Aggieland (and elsewhere): “If you’re on the outside looking in, you can’t understand it. If you’re on the inside looking out, you can’t explain it.” See: Robert Gates, A Passion for Leadership: Lessons on Change and Reform from Fifty Years of Public Service, (New York: Knopf, 2015), p. 17; Lawrence Wright, God Save Texas; A Journey into the Soul of the Lone Star State, (New York: Knopf, 2018), p. 89.
Oak Boat: So why do we need this crap? Well, according to Dewitt T. Stame’s introduction to the Proverbs or Adages of Erasmus, proverbs and maxims (and maybe adyanta) are useful in four ways:
(1) to promote the understanding of philosophy, (2) to strengthen argument, (3) to add ornament and gracefulness in speech and writing, and (4) to clarify the meaning of some of the best authors.
And Stame also warns: “Erasmus cautions, however, that proverbs serve not as food but as condiments. They are not to be employed to weariness but for gracefulness.” [1]
Newt Monk: The world has too many condiments these days; it’s choice anxiety that will bring us asunder.
Oak Boat: Well, it’s always a good idea to remember that tent stakes are not condiments.
Newt Monk: Welp. And after Erasmus came Montesquieu:
With regard to mores, much is to be gained by keeping the old customs. Since corrupt peoples rarely do great things and have established few societies, founded few towns, and given few laws; and since, on the contrary, those with simple and austere mores have made most establishments, recalling men to the old maxims usually returns them to virtue. [2]
Oak Boat: Welp. And after Montesquieu came Rousseau (echoing ancient Solon):
The more you multiply laws, the more you cause them to be despised: and all the overseers you institute are nothing but new lawbreakers bound either to share [their bounty] with the old ones, or to do their plundering on their own. [3]
Newt Monk: Welp. And before them all was Emperor Aurelius, telling us, and telling himself, that: “You will never be remarkable for quick-wittedness.” [4]
Oak Boat: Welp. And before Aurelius came Confucius, telling us, and telling himself, that: “The superior man wishes to be slow in his speech and earnest in his conduct.”[5]
Newt Monk: Welp. And before Confucius came the end of the Third Age, where in the Red Book of Westmarch readers of this age are told that what we want to call a maxim (but can’t), and that thing that might be something between a catena and an adyanta, might once have been called a riddle. For:
In one thing you have not changed, dear friend,’ said Aragorn: ‘you still speak in riddles.’
‘What? In riddles?’ said Gandalf. ‘No! For I was talking aloud to myself. A habit of the old: they choose the wisest person present to speak to; the long explanations needed by the young are wearying.’ He laughed, but the sound now seemed warm and kindly as a gleam of sunshine.[6]
NOTES
[1] Dewitt T. Starnes, “Introduction,” Proverbs or Adages by Desiderius Erasmus Gathered Out of the Chiliades and Englished (1569) by Richard Taverner, (Gainesville, FL: Scholars Facsimile & Reprints, 1956), pp. viii, x.
[2] Baron de la Brède et de Montesquieu, De l’esprit des Loix (The Spirit of the Laws) (1748), trans. and eds. Anne Cohler, Basia C. Miller and Harold S. Stone, (Cambridge UP, 1989), (V, 7), p. 49.
[3] Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discours sur l’oeconomie politique (Discourse on Political Economy) (1755) in Rousseau: The Social Contract and Other Later Political Writings, ed. and trans. Victor Gourevitch, (Cambridge UP, 1997, 2003), p. 14.
[4] Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, trans. Maxwell Staniforth, (New York: Penguin, 1962), (V, v).
[5] 孔子 Kong Fuzi (Confucius), 論語 (Analects) in The Complete Confucius, (ed.) Nicholas Tamblyn, trans. Tamblyn (?), (Melbourne: Golding Books, 2016), (IV), p. 11.
[6] J. R. R. Tolkien, “The White Rider,” The Two Towers in The Lord of the Rings, (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1954–55; 50th Anniversary Edition, 2004), (III, v), p. 496.
Newt Monk: Thus, do not listen to what I say or seem to say, but try to get a glimpse of what I say I saw in some book written by either Boethius or Machiavelli from long ago, particularly in regard to contemporary politics.[1] In those books I once found what used to be called “maxims” or “rules of thumb,” though better metaphors might now be needed. I therefore sometimes think of them as seeds, as pods, as starting points, as springboards, as tent stakes, as prefabricated political truths, as carbon-composite cookie-cutter constants, as givens, as groundings, as grounds keeping, hence the term “tent stakes” I keep returning to.
Oak Boat: Right, the important thing is that these things-once-called-maxims are not ends in themselves but means (methods, applications) to help scoot one along toward some distant end that will likely never actually be reached but, nonetheless, as an end personified, stares down and scowls at the stooped traveler across her whole journey.
Newt Monk: And as I can’t prove that any of my findings from Boethius and Machiavelli are in common use (particularly in central Texas), I must follow R. B. Y. Scott’s introduction to his 1965 translation of Proverbs and Ecclesiastes in The Anchor Bible: Vol. XVIII to say that what I found were not maxims but artifacts, like finding arrowheads in a field:
Strictly speaking, an epigram, an aphorism, or a maxim does not [p. 4] qualify as proverbial unless it has passed into common use. An epigram like Lord John Russell’s is a perceptive observation wittily expressed, but no one would quote it unless he were discussing the present subject. An aphorism like “Beauty is truth, truth beauty” is philosophical in tone and lacks the common touch. A maxim is an axiom or rule of conduct which may or may not gain widespread acceptance, such as “Knowledge is power.” The homeliness of the truth expressed and the simplicity, conciseness, and picturesqueness of its expression characterize the anonymous familiar popular saying. “Dead men tell no tales.” [“]A new broom sweeps clean.” “Chickens come home to roost.”[2]
Oak Boat: So you won’t call them maxims, these words, observations by dead authors. Rhetorically, one could say what you want is somewhat equal to eidolopoeia: presenting a dead person as speaking, or assigning words to the dead. Yet what you want is also somewhat equal to ethopoeia: putting oneself in the place of another to then understand, express that person’s feelings better.[3]
Newt Monk: Yes, this whittling down of terms, of finding which one is the sharpest, does help. I think what I found in Boethius and Machiavelli sometimes involves the usage of a kind of catena, which Old Oxford has defined as “a chronological series of extracts to prove the existence of a continuous tradition on some point of doctrine.” Plus, the idea of a literary catena was once envisioned by the great bookman Andrew Lang as being “a golden chain of bibliophiles,” that is, as in a chain of quotations from the best books on the best topics found by the best readers, the best lovers of books, etcetera.[4]
Oak Boat: So you won’t call them maxims––these words, observations by dead authors––but you might call them catenas…. Hmm. Rhetorically, one would say that what you ask for sometimes involves epicrisis: the quoting of a passage followed by commenting on it. Still, what you ask for appears to be more than mere antithesis: the attempt to conjoin contrasting ideas.[5]
Newt Monk: Indeed, I think at the end of the day I can only call this thing an adynata—a term that in medieval rhetoric meant something akin to stringing together impossibilities, as an attempted confession that all words eventually fail us. And so calling them “tent stakes” is as good a vivid metaphor for the abstract term adynata as any other I suppose.[6]
A man is a philosopher of genius only when he succeeds in transmuting the primitive and merely natural vision into an abstract idea belonging to the common stock of consciousness. This achievement, and this alone, constitutes his personal value, for which he may take credit without necessarily succumbing to inflation….
To the philosopher as well this vision comes as so much increment, and is simply a part of the common property of mankind, in which, in principle, everyone has a share.
(Die Beziehungen zwischen dem Ich und dem Unbewessten,(Zurich: Rascher Verlag, 1928), trans. by R. F. C. Hull as “Relations between ego and unconscious,” (1928) in The Jung Reader, ed. David Tacey, (New York: Routledge, 2012), p. 105)
And let me add from Walter Kaufmann:
Another question remains which in some cases may be most important of all: What did the author see? The answers to such questions as, for example, what concrete instances he had in mind and against what view he aimed his proposition, do not necessarily solve this central problem, though they are relevant and important. Nor is the difference between what an author saw and said necessarily reducible to the difference between what he meant and what his proposition means. What he meant to say may well have been as wrong as his proposition, and nevertheless he may have seen something important.
(Critique of Religion and Philosophy, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1958), pp. 72–73)
[2] R. B. Y. Scott, “General Introduction,” The Anchor Bible: Vol. XVIII Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, (New York: Doubleday, 1965), pp. 3–4.
[3] See Richard A. Lanham (ed.), A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms: Second Edition, (Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 1991).
[4] Andrew Lang, “Bibliomania in France,” Books and Bookmen, (London: Longman, Green, and Co; Second Edition, 1887), p. 105.
[5] Lanham, Handlist of Rhetorical Terms: Second Edition.
[6] Lanham, Handlist of Rhetorical Terms: Second Edition.
Chapter 0.0 Toward Political Riddles (Rather Than Maxims)?
0.1
Oak Boat: I remember you told me how one night in April 2016 your hosts in Rome took you on an after-dinner drive across La Roma, how the vehicle you rode in passed by the Vatican, passed the Colosseum––passed the Bocca della Verità (“Mouth of Truth”), which is that stone orifice into which Audrey Hepburn’s hand once slipped at the behest of Gregory Peck in Roman Holiday (1953)–– then you said your ride passed a well-lit mansion that the driver said was owned by billionaire ex-prime minister Berlusconi (famous for his “bunga bunga”parties).
Newt Monk: Yes, with our bellies full of pizza from one of our host’s favorite restaurants nestled in the non-tourist part of the Eternal City, we were afterward shown the city sites. And, as they drove us around and pointed at the various ancient stonework as seen under modern light fixtures, our Italian hosts picked our brains about American politics:
“Would it be Trump or Hillary?” (“Hillary, of course!”)
“What is your opinion about all these school shootings?” (“It’s a sort of pornography that the gun nuts enjoy indulging in.”)
There may’ve been other questions, better answers, but I don’t remember, except to make a note to myself to reread Boethius and Machiavelli once we got back home.
Oak Boat: Why?
Newt Monk: It just seemed (at the time at least) like a practical thing to do, being a participating citizen of the American democratic experiment. I’d read them before, found some rules of thumb that seemed (at the time) wise on the surface, noteworthy at first glance, possibly valuable for pondering, bothering to brood on later, in other words, I took notes while reading them.
Oak Boat: Oh yes. And now that you’ve pondered and brooded and done all that?
Newt Monk: It may be time to say goodbye to all that and now unlearn whatever it was I think I might’ve once learned.
Oak Boat: Is it that late in the day already?
Newt Monk: I’m afraid so. For the things we think we learn too often turn out to be completely separate and disassociated from whatever it is we’ve actually learned and apprehended and put into practice without thinking about it.
Oak Boat: “All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us.” [1]
Newt Monk: Yes, and I think it’s time I unlearned everything. It’s time for me to pour out that knowledge onto the ground, in a kenosis-kind-of-way,[2] I guess. Let’s let it evaporate (and thus we won’t let it ever poison Old Isaac’s well). Let it never reach the nether-aquifer we tramp on all the days of our lives.
Oak Boat: Yeah, pour it out, get it out of your system, like the character of Rosalind in Shakespeare:
I prithee tell me who is it quickly, and speak apace. I would thou could’st stammer, that thou mightst pour this conceal’d man out of thy mouth, as wine comes out of narrow-mouth’d bottle––either too much at once or none at all. I prithee take the cork out of thy mouth that I may drink thy tidings.[3]
Newt Monk: Before you now, Oak Boat, take I this oath, full of flowerily language, over-laden with pollen, overgrown with unpruned polyps:
The Oath
Let me fast forthwith and abstain ever more from indulging in the emotionalism that forever accompanies the consumption of:
any crumb (whether fresh or stale) of political wisdom,
any and all strategies for voting,
any philosophies of leadership (whose names, brands, and public relation campaigns merely disguise prescriptions of followership),
any more damned electoral divination—particularly that variety of divination as performed by jingo-journalists and soothsaying commentators and self-appointed experts in the name of their holy culture war (when cheap and simple Rorschach tests made of used sheets of toilet paper fished out of the pipelines of Shawshank Prison would better serve society).
Oak Boat: Truly you have said a mouthful.
Newt Monk: And though the words of that oath may bind me to their meaning, I also find freedom—a fresh kind of freedom—in recognizing, as one of the consequences of having taken the above oath, that philosophy, particularly political philosophy, can never coerce, but only point in some direction. It cannot unwillingly drag you down the rabbit hole (or Hobbit hole, or badger burrow, or through snake-filled tombs of prairie dog towns). As Iain McGilchrist has explained in The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World (2021):
With the best will in the world, on both sides, I can’t make you see what I experience as the truth. I can never convince you of a point of view unless you already, at some level, get it. As Friedrich Waismann [a writer whom both I Newt Monk and you, Oak Boat, know not a jot] put it,
We cannot constrain anyone who is unwilling to follow the new direction of a question; we can only extend the field of vision of the asker, loosen his prejudices, guide his gaze in a new direction: but all this can be achieved only with his consent. [How I See Philosophy, (Macmillan, 1968), p. 20).] [4]
Oak Boat:Yes, you have to content yourself with not being able to see the “whatever-it-is,” as McGilchrist calls it, that someone else sees, even if they think they saw it in something so quaint as an old book:
If I can’t see the moon, that doesn’t mean it stops being there for others. If we are all tuned in to the same whatever-it-is—and I believe it makes no sense to assert we are not—something very like what I can’t see is probably being seen by others, and ultimately that will affect me. It is perfectly possible to be deceived about, or to be in denial about, an aspect of whatever-it-is. [5]
[1] J. R. R. Tolkien, “The Shadow of the Past,” The Fellowship of the Ring in The Lord of the Rings, (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1954–55; 50th Anniversary Edition, 2004), (I, ii), p. 51.
[3] Shakespeare, As You Like It: or, What You Will, (III, ii).
[4] Iain McGilchrist, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, (London: Perspectiva Press, 2021), (Introduction), p. 12.
From the 1982 essay by Edward Said (1935-2003): “Opponents, Audiences, Constituencies, and Community”:
Certainly there is a great deal to be said in favor of a university manifestly not influenced or controlled by coarse partisan politics.
But one thing in particular about the university—and here I speak about the modern university without distinguishing between European, American, or Third World and socialist universities—does appear to exercise an almost totally unrestrained influence: the principle that knowledge ought to exist, be sought after, and disseminated in a very divided form.
Whatever the social, political, economic, and ideological reasons underlying this principle, it has not long gone without its challengers.
Indeed, it may not be too much of an exaggeration to say that one of the most interesting motifs in modern world culture has been the debate between proponents of the belief that knowledge can exist in a synthetic universal form and, on the other hand, those who believe that knowledge is inevitably produced and nurtured in specialized compartments.
Georg Lukács’ attack on reification and his advocacy of “totality,” in my opinion, very tantalizingly resemble the wide-ranging discussions that have been taking place in the Islamic world since the late nineteenth century on the need for mediating between the claims of a totalizing Islamic vision and modern specialized science.
These epistemological controversies are therefore centrally important to the workplace of knowledge production, the university, in which what knowledge is and how it ought to be discovered are the very lifeblood of its being.
(Critical Inquiry, 9 (Sept. 1982) quoted from Reflections on Exile: and Other Essays, (London: Granta, 2001), p. 125)
Here are two poems that continue to stick with me—two poems that somewhat involve Texas as a place.
One poem, “Sailing Ashland Avenue,” (Fortnightly Review, Feb. 2023) by Robert Archambeau, spreads from Chicago to Omaha to Texas. And there is much about Chicago and Omaha and Texas––a strange, strong poem.
Another is “Easter 2022” (Fortnightly Review, Feb. 2023) by Michael Anania. This is a poem that spreads from Texas to Lviv, Ukraine to Poland––a fresh, fragrant poem.
Imagining a Conversation on Imagination between Verbena and Lantana
Can you imagine what the wildflowers have to say to us—especially now in midwinter—can you imagine all the books they’ve read, all those books that they’re ready to recite back to those who look down upon them?
For what else do the wildflowers do?
They shout from where they stand, they recite and re-sight every color, every number, every combination of color and number clawing its way out of the earth and toward the silent sun.
Yes, the wildflowers shout at the silent sun. They shout about what they’ve read.
We can imagine what they read.
We can imagine what they’ve read about the imagination.
Our ears ache as we await their great recitation.
Verbena: We have seen the man with the red beard looking and leaping and weeping and waving paint in our fields.
Lantana: That was old Van Gogh. He refused to speak to us, and only listened. But he wrote some of his letters while in our fields, and we were able to read them while he wrote. Though we were never able to look down upon him, the way he and all humans do to us, we were occasionally able to look over his shoulder. One of the last things he wrote was:
Well, the truth is, we can only make our pictures speak. But still, my dear brother, there is this that I have always told you, and I repeat it once more with all the earnestness that can be imparted by an effort of a mind diligently fixed on trying to do as well as one can—I tell you again that I shall always consider that you are something other than a simple dealer on Corot, that through my mediation you have your part in the actual production of some canvases, which even in the cataclysm retain their quietude.
For this is what we have got to, and this is all or at least the chief thing that I can have to tell you at a moment of comparative crisis. At a moment when things are very strained between dealers in pictures by dead artists, and living artists.
Well, my own work, I am risking my life for it and my reason has half–foundered owing to it—that’s all right—but you are not among the dealers in men so far as I know, and you can choose your side, I think, acting with true humanity, but what’s the use? (“To Theo, Auvers-sur-Oise, late July, 1890,” The Letters of Vincent Van Gogh, trans. (London: Constable, 1929), ed. Mark Roskill, (New York: Touchstone, 2008), pp. 339–40)
Verbena: ole Van Gogh (1853–1890), and at that point in his life, what else did he have left to imagine? Even we, the flowers of the field, occasionally wither. But new things are always sprouting up. After Van Gogh came Karl Kraus (1874–1936), a man who had nothing to do with hunting in woods, farming in fields, or feasting his eyes upon wildflowers. But he had imagination. So when you say you saw Van Gogh writing in the fields, I say I see in my mind’s eye what Kraus had to say about the imagination. I see that he said:
Often I prick my hand with my pen and know only then that I have experienced what is written.
When I read it is not acted literature; but what I write is written acting….
Word and substance—that is the only connection I have ever striven for in my life. (Half–truths& one–and–a–halftruths: selected aphorisms, ed. and trans. Harry Zohn, (Montreal: Engendra Press; Reprint Chicago UP, 1976), p. 36)
Lantana: Unless I’m mistaken, Kraus also said, of himself as a writer-artist, that:
An understanding of my work is impeded by a knowledge of my material. People don’t realize that what is there must first be invented, and that it is worth inventing. Nor do they see that a satirist for whom people exist as though he had invented them needs more strength than one who invents persons as though they existed. (Half–truths, p. 34)
Verbena: And it was Kraus who reminded us that, at least when it comes to writing about the truth (though perhaps it’s not applicable to experiencing or understanding certain truths):
The real truths are those that can be invented. (Half Truths, p. 60)
Lantana: Then, though still out of Austria, but after Kraus, emerged Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951), a man who may have seen a few flowers on a stroll from Grantchester village to Cambridge town proper. What might he have imagined while walking along the banks of the River Cam? We know only what our cousins living in those fertile fields have told us. That it was Wittgenstein who said:
What is in the imagination is not a picture, but a picture can correspond to it. (“Notes for Lectures on ‘Private Experience’ and ‘Sense Data’,” 317–18; see also Philosophical Investigations, (Revised Fourth Edition, 2009), I. no. 301)
Verbena: Then there are those after Wittgenstein. Remember when C. S. Lewis (1898–1963), a sort of Northern-Irish Oxonian Englishman, appeared in Cambridge? What did he say about the imagination?
Lantana: He said (and I think he meant this both anatomically and musically):
Imagination is the organ of meaning. (“Bluspels and Flalansferes” Rehabilitations and Other Essays, (London: Oxford UP. 1939); reprinted in The Importance of Language, ed. Max Black, (NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1962), p. 49)
Verbena: And there was also Lewis’s friend and intellectual sparring partner, Owen Barfield (1898–1997), who tried to teach humans what we wildflowers already know. That:
Imagination is the marriage of spirit and sense. (Romanticism Comes of Age, (Middletown, CN: Wesleyan UP, 1967), p. 79)
Lantana: Barfield also said:
Perception is what we see; imagination is how we look at it. (Barfield, “Matter, Imagination, and Spirit,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 42 (December 1974): 621–29 at 626.)
Bittersweet (But Better): Imagined Pain and Painful Imagination
But imagination is not always fun and games. Pain can be imagined. Pain is part of the imagination. One can imagine being in pain. And to actually be in pain may have something to do with the imagination. And by “pain,” I don’t necessarily mean “icepick through the occipital,” kind of physical pain. It can be emotional pain, like sorrow, as with Geoffrey Chaucer (1340s–1400) and his Book of the Duchess (1368):
For [sory] imaginacioun Is alway hoolly in my minde. (ll. 14–15)
Or imagination can couple with other emotional pains, like anxiety, like depression, as when the character of Satan recognizes early in the Paradise Lost (1667) of John Milton (1608–1674) that:
The mind is its own place, and in itself Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven. (I, 254–55)
Or imagination may bed with amorous pains for a fling, as when Stendhal (1783–1842) recognizes in his exploration of De l’amour (1822):
The difficulty of forgetting a woman with whom you have been happy is that the imagination tirelessly continues to evoke and embellish moments of the past. (De l’amour, trans. Gilbert and Suzanne Sale, (New York: Penguin, 1957, 1975), (I, xxxix, ii), p. 129)
But too much labor and toil can wear down (and out) the imagination, as when Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–1859) saw in his first volume of Democracy in America (1835):
In the Southern States the more immediate wants of life are always supplied; the inhabitants of those parts are not busied in the material cares of life, which are always provided for by others; and their imagination is diverted to more captivating and less definite objects. The American of the South is fond of grandeur, luxury, and renown, of gayety, of pleasure, and above all of idleness; nothing obliges him to exert himself in order to subsist; and as he has no necessary occupations, he gives way to indolence, and does not even attempt what would be useful.
But the equality of fortunes, and the absence of slavery in the North, plunge the inhabitants in those same cares of daily life which are disdained by the white population of the South. They are taught from infancy to combat want, and to place comfort above all the pleasures of the intellect or the heart. The imagination is extinguished by the trivial details of life, and the ideas become less numerous and less general, but far more practical and more precise. As prosperity is the sole aim of exertion, it is excellently well attained; nature and mankind are turned to the best pecuniary advantage, and society is dexterously made to contribute to the welfare of each of its members, whilst individual egotism is the source of general happiness. (Democracy in America, trans. Henry Reeve, (London: Saunders and Otley, 1835), (I, xviii), p. 364)
Even the pains of impotence can be intertwined with the imagination, as when novelist Ian Fleming (1908–1964) writes of his spy character James Bond in Casino Royale (1953):
The doctor had talked often to Bond about his injuries. He had always told him that there would be no evil effects from the terrible battering his body had received. He had said that Bond’s full health would return and that none of his powers had been taken from him. But the evidence of Bond’s eyes and his nerves refused these comforting assurances. He was still painfully swollen and bruised and whenever the injections wore off he was in agony. Above all, his imagination had suffered. For an hour in that room with Le Chiffre the certainty of impotence had been beaten into him and a scar had been left on his mind that could only be healed by experience. (Casino Royale, (Las Vegas: Thomas and Mercer, 1953, 2012), (XXI), p. 138)
When we see an animal in pain, we fulfill fellow Venetian writer Karl Kraus’s (1874–1936) observation: “When animals yawn, they have human faces.” Or, as fellow-Austrian Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) might’ve put it: we interpret the animal’s behavior to mean what a human might feel like in pain. But we don’t imagine a dog experiencing pain in only a way a dog could experience pain. Instead, we hear it yelp and see it limp and know that it is in pain. But how? (Kraus, Half–truths& one–and–a–halftruths: selected aphorisms, ed. and trans. Harry Zohn, (Montreal: Engendra Press; Reprint Chicago UP, 1976) p. 120; Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, (Revised Fourth Edition, 2009) I. nos. 283, 285, 350.)
Elsewhere,* Wittgenstein explains:
Pain in the imagination is not a picture.
And:
What is in the imagination is not a picture, but a picture can correspond to it.
*(“Notes for Lectures on ‘Private Experience’ and ‘Sense Data’,” 317–18; Philosophical Investigations, I. no. 300–301)
The Enveloping Imagination: Wildfire Consuming the Open Prairies of the Mind (Part II of II)
Wildfire on the mind-lands, burning books and paintings, consuming ink and hue—this marks the imagination in action. It reaches for Van Gogh one moment, Kafka the next. Flames lick at critical reflections from Arendt and Kaufmann—smoke and soot surround C. S. Lewis and J. S. Mill in Dickensian fashion. The prairie is full of fire. The enveloping imagination burns wild.
Last time at Bookbread, readers were initially presented with comments by Hannah Arendt (1906–1975) on Kafka and van Gogh and how the final act of creation occurs when the audience begins to think:
It often appears in works of art, especially in Kafka’s early prose pieces or in some paintings of van Gogh where a single object, a chair, a pair of shoes, is represented. But these art works are thought-things, and what gives them their meaning—as though they were not just themselves but for themselves—is precisely the transformation they have undergone when thinking took possession of them. (The Life of the Mind Vol. I. Thinking, (1971), ed. Mary McCarthy (New York: Harcourt Brace & Co, 1978), p.184)
Arendt’s remarks should be compared to those of Walter Kaufmann (1921–1980) when he compares the letters of Kafka (1883–1924) to those by Van Gogh (1853–1890). Kaufmann sees a similarity in how each artist was able to almost detach themselves from themselves while thinking about themselves:
If ever a great artist worked under the spell of inspiration it was Vincent van Gogh. He created literally hundreds of the finest paintings in the world in a mere four years. Of his high emotional tension and total, self-sacrificing devotion there is no doubt, yet his copious letters to his brother show how far he was from regarding the fruits of his inspiration as sacrosanct. Even when committed to an asylum, he never lost or disparaged his critical powers. He discussed his works as well as his situation with a rarely equaled lucidity that furnishes a startling contrast to Buber, not to speak of Benjamin, Adorno, and Heidegger. Freud’s and Kafka’s letters are also free of falseness, pretense, and murkiness but not so intense. All three men—van Gogh, Kafka, and Freud—were distinguished by an amazing capacity for detachment from themselves and could see themselves from above. (Discovering the MindVol. II: Nietzsche, Heidegger, Buber, (New York: McGraw Hill, 1981), p. 256)
At one point in the 1919 letter to his father, Kafka’s explains what he’s trying to do with his writing:
I have already indicated that in my writing, and in everything connected with it, I have made some attempts at independence, attempts at escape, with the very smallest of success; they will scarcely lead any farther; much confirms this for me. (Brief An Den Vater (Letter to his Father), trans. Ernst Kaiser and Eithne Wilkins, (New York: Schocken. 1971), p. 117)
And about forty years before Kafka’s letter, at one point in a letter to his brother, Van Gogh explains what he’s trying to do with his painting:
Of the drawings which I will show you now I think only this: I hope they will prove to you that I am not remaining stationary in my work, but progress in a direction that is reasonable. As to the money value of my work, I do not pretend to anything else than that it would greatly astonish me if my work were not just as salable in time as that of others. Whether that will happen now or later I cannot of course tell, but I think the surest way, which cannot fail, is to work from nature faithfully and energetically. Feeling and love for nature sooner or later find a response from people who are interested in art. It is the painter’s duty to be entirely absorbed by nature and to use all his intelligence to express sentiment in his work, so that it becomes intelligible to other people. (“To Theo, The Hague, July 31, 1882,” The Letters of Vincent Van Gogh, trans. (London: Constable, 1929), ed. Mark Roskill, (New York: Touchstone, 2008), pp. 159–60)
But back to Arendt and her observation that “the transformation they [Kafka and Van Gogh’s early works] have undergone when thinking took possession of them”––for C. S. Lewis (1898–1963), the great artist like Kafka or Van Gogh presents a “total response to the world”:
Very roughly, we might almost say that in Rhetoric imagination is present for the sake of passion (and, therefore, in the long run, for the sake of action), while in poetry passion is present for the sake of imagination, and therefore, in the long run, for the sake of wisdom or spiritual health—the rightness and richness of a man’s total response to the world….
The idea of a poetry which exists only for the poet—a poetry which the public rather overhears than hears––is a foolish novelty in criticism. There is nothing specially admirable in talking to oneself. (A Preface to Paradise Lost, (Oxford UP, 1942; Galaxy Book, 1961), p. 54)
Poetry and eloquence are both alike the expression or uttering forth of feeling. But if we may be excused the seeming affectation of the antithesis, we should say that eloquence is heard; poetry is overheard. Eloquence supposes an audience; the peculiarity of poetry appears to us to lie in the poet’s utter unconsciousness of a listener. Poetry is feeling confessing itself to itself, in moments of solitude, and bodying itself forth in symbols which are the nearest possible representations of the feeling in the exact shape in which it exists in the poet’s mind. Eloquence is feeling pouring itself forth to other minds, courting their sympathy, or endeavoring to influence their belief, or move them to passion or to action. (“What is Poetry?” (1833))
Between Kaufmann, Lewis, and Mill, readers might surmise: whatever the status of the reader, writer-artists tend to overhear themselves when they are rereading-rewriting their works. As overhearers of their own works, writer-artists must somewhat negate themselves during the act of overhearing (if overhearing here means the process of rereading-rewriting). The enveloping imagination negates as it consumes. Yet a fire cannot catch itself on fire…..
I think Kafka hints at the overhearing-through-reading mentioned by Mill when, in an early story, Kafka’s character of Raban points out the inevitable connections that are made between reading two random works:
“Well, it isn’t so important,” Raban said. “I was only going to say books are useful in every sense and quite especially in respects in which one would not expect it. For when one is about to embark on some enterprise, it is precisely the books whose contents have nothing at all in common with the enterprise that are the most useful. For the reader who does after all intend to embark on that enterprise, that is to say, who has somehow become enthusiastic (and even if, as it were, the effect of the book can penetrate only so far as that enthusiasm), will be stimulated by the book to all kinds of thoughts concerning his enterprise. Now, however, since the contents of the book are precisely something of utter indifference, the reader is not at all impeded in those thoughts, and he passes through the midst of the book with them, as once the Jews passed through the Red Sea, that’s how I should like to put it.” (“Hochzeitsvorbereitungen Auf Dem Lande” (“Wedding Preparations in the Country”) (1907–08), trans. Ernst Kaiser and Eithne Wilkins, The Complete Short Stories, ed. Nahum N. Glatzer, (New York: Schocken, 1971), pp. 74–75)
It is as if, while reading, one overhears the comparison of one book to another, or one passage from one book to another (much like how this blog post was written).
Van Gogh was, at least in his early life, notoriously unmethodical (that is, random) in his reading. As his sister-in-law Johanna Van Gogh-Bonger observed:
No other thing has taken its place yet; he draws much and reads much, among others, Dickens, Beecher Stowe, Victor Hugo, and Michelet, but it is all done without system or aim. (“Memoir by His Sister-in-Law,” The Letters of Vincent Van Gogh, p. 50)
And as Mark Roskill, editor of Van Gogh’s letters, put it:
It was characteristic of him to identify himself with fictional heroes, and to pick out from the books he read whatever seemed to have a moral and spiritual application to his own destiny. (“[Note to] To Theo, Paris, February 19, 1876,” The Letters of Vincent Van Gogh, p. 94)
Other critics of Vincent have noted:
Van Gogh always needed an intellectual framework for defending his opinions, his projects, and the positions he took. When he fell in love with his cousin Kee Vos, for example, he plumbed Michelet in search of justifications for his stubborn arguments for marriage, contrary to the opinions of everyone around him, and also contrary to the wishes of the person in question. Along the way, he did not hesitate to take quotations out of context, to abbreviate them, to paraphrase them … an effective way of joining ranks with a thinker whose aura and gravity preclude any attempt at further argument. (Wouter van der Veen and Peter Knapp, Van Gogh in Auvers: His Last Days, (New York: Monacelli Press, 2009), pp. 40–41)
Yet is there any way the arguments in this blog post could be taken further?
Let the present reader find something more random than Bookbread can feed them—perhaps only then could the argument be carried along to some new place—only by a kind of overhearing of oneself whilst reading….. burning while brooding…. the enveloping imagination transfixed on the unbound horizon of the mind-land prairie it has yet to consume…. yearning to burn all into the background.
