An open letter to Kmluby

We live on a giant rock hurling itself through unfathomable space amongst infinite universes, and in a few days, if I don't have my taxes done, I will be 'in trouble'. Fuckawesome.

This is Kevin L.'s Blog: Link

I read Kevin's blog and it kind of hit a nerve. This is not because of any failing on his part. I am more annoyed at his rightness on the whole matter. Not only do I agree with him, It's just that I had the same plan for my reaction-post to Wordsworth's poem. It was going to be called, "Tinturn and the sublime" and it was gonna be great. Now, I have to think more and expand on what I was going to say. Thinking is painful and expansion takes energy; energy requires food, and food requires money. Kevin owes me money for this one.

Sublime Compensation

In recap, Kevin found hints of Edmond Burke's conception of "The Sublime" while reading COMPOSED A FEW MILES ABOVE TINTERN ABBEY, ON REVISITING THE BANKS OF THE WYE DURING A TOUR. This is a striking observation to me because I had a similar feeling during this reading, and extending it to our previous readings of Joyce and Grahame, it seems like another one of those foundational concepts for this class. More on this later.

At the end of his post, Kevin writes:

"I don't really think all of these writer/philosophers believe that the Sublime (or Epiphany) is primarily a painful (as in physical pain though I would be willing to bet a certain amount of physical pain is involved) experience. Rather, just like thambos or deinos in Greek, pain is implied or written into the Sublime (or epiphany) it is part of the connotation. I think the pain of loss that comes along with a fleeting feeling of sublime or an epiphany makes pain a necessary and unavoidable part of the feeling."

(I don't really know what this means, but I like it. The next few paragraphs are an attempt at unraveling the poem slash Kevin's post)

He is locating that the pain of the experience is not only an effect of Sublimity in the work, but an irrevocable component of it. In other words, to be exposed to something sublime is to be "exposed" to something painful (that is, not necessarily "to experience"). It is the recognition of knowledge without having that tactile experience to back up the knowledge (possibly because in actually obtaining the experience, one would cease 'to know'). This is a component of reading that bufuddles me, especially as a senior undergraduate studying literature.

Within our notions of sublime or beauty or otherwise, is a component of reaction to a certain causal event. I look at Kmluby's blog and see a magnificent scene of a mountain and a man engulfed by its enormity. I inherit a bit of that experience. Because it is a picture I gain imagery, I gain a partial memory of it, however, I have not 'experienced' the event in any fashion nearly as compelling as the man himself in the picture. It is a notional thing, not an empirical one. Likewise, I wonder if the stories and poetry I have read augment my experience in any empirical way.

Within Wordsworth's piece, I hear moments of melancholy aimed to the speaker's youth.

He writes:

"Wherever nature led: more like a man 70
Flying from something that he dreads, than one
Who sought the thing he loved. For nature then
(The coarser pleasures of my boyish days,
And their glad animal movements all gone by)
To me was all in all."

Throughout the piece, the poet uses terms such as, "Once again" and sets up the piece as five years on from a previous visit. He reminisces about that which is in front of him, effectively pulling his past to the present and projecting it upon the scene in front of him. In doing so, I as a reader inherit all four dimensions of his experience, the natural language that suggests a here-and-now sense while also the observations which are built from the intervening years between initial visit and current. This is an exercise in remembrance. And as anyone who has had a good time at a summer camp can relate, this leads to nostalgia, or the sadness experienced during the remembrance of things. Regardless of the joyful specifics consisting in his, "...glad animal movements all gone by", the poet feels a tinge of pain at his revisiting this place locking the act of remembrance and nostalgia into the mode of the sublime. The time past, as contained in time present creates pain. Yet, it also creates something else.

I think Kevin L nailed this one down with his observation that "As for Wordsworth, I think for the most part he had a much more positive less painful view of the sublime and especially the sublime in nature. Though maybe not as he looks on nature, reflects on the sublime to hear 'the still, sad music of humanity.'"

The act of time-future-look in this poem unveils something else that I hadn't expected. Joy. Wordsworth writes:

" And now, with gleams of half-extinguished thought,
With many recognitions dim and faint,
And somewhat of a sad perplexity, 60
The picture of the mind revives again:
While here I stand, not only with the sense
Of present pleasure, but with pleasing thoughts
That in this moment there is life and food
For future years. "

In his melancholy and half thoughts and sadness, the narrator finds a sense of rejuvenation in this sublime act. This is divinely hopeful to me. In the existential quandaries found in aging: the fear of death, the fear of age, the fear of Michael Bay films, there is mind reviving. There is not hope, this is bigger than that, there is the act of experience in all moments that go by. We just gotta notice and learn to read them. At least I think this is what the Wordsworth and Kevin L are getting at.

This is separate from the idea that one can derive pleasure from pain and more so that pain is, in itself, a path to pleasure. That fear and death are components to a certain type of beauty. It's just a matter of recognition. And recognition is a part of epiphany.

See what I did there? I made it relevant... so nyah.

I think this may be a thread I will explore for a while. Cool stuff. Thanks Kevin, you asshole, you just my life harder.

A Disconsolate Chimera

I drew a part of Burnt Norton. I was wondering what a disconsolate Chimera was from the part that the Disconsolate Chimera is mentioned so I drew a Chimera (using three definitions: A mythological creature, a fabrication, and a single organ consisting of diverse pieces) with some other things , not sure just how disconsolate the whole thing is though. I stole a lot of imagery/style from Ralph Steadman for this one. More of this crap later... Oh yeah, click for enlargement.

HAHA!

Just got my scanner to work. Expect art dump of irrelevant-relevant crap soon.

Paper idea #1

I figure this to be the first of many ideas about what I want to do my final paper on.

One of the most prominent forces in my life is that of addiction. My father was an alcoholic, my grandfather lost his job to prescription abuse, and I am currently addicted to nicotine. Addiction is also an inescapable facet in American culture. From video games to fast food to alcohol, there are hundreds of thousands of distractions that can take on addictive qualities. I say addictive qualities because the actual determination of addiction's medical category is vague and controversial. I am not interested in this part of the issue. Regardless of systemic process, there are sets of actions that define addiction in a very real sense. They are all a type of delusion though. The loss of control and the obsession are two common manifestations of the ailment and can, in my opinion, be enough to address the topic at the level I hope to discuss it.

There are many proposed remedies to addiction. Herbal cures supposedly make over-eaters feel nausea in the face of hunger while certain ipecac-like solutions make alcoholics viciously sick at even the slightest whiff of a drink. However, one of its remedies has taken on a life of its own- in both industry and psychology. It is neither chemical nor drug; it is, in its practice, simply a set of twelve steps which the addict uses to escape the shackles of their addiction. These twelve steps which I will write further on later in this blog, are aimed at two purposes. These are 1.) the dissolution of addiction, and 2.) the acceptance of a divine entity and thus a humbling of the user to something larger than themselves. In the context of this class, the Twelve Step Program is an attempt to systematize and create epiphany.

Seemingly based in mysticism, the idea that any person is capable of irrevocably changing their behavior through the recognition and emptying in the service to something beyond reason is an idea that requires a special kind of view of human nature. Forgiveness is the acceptance of both past and present while also requiring a view of the future. The twelve step programs are based in forgiveness. They are also based on a sense of presence that is often labeled as bullshit by the more practical of us. This strikes me as wholly literary.

So having not actually figured out a proper thesis or path of study for this thing, I will spend the next week blogging about my reflections, research, and memories on this topic in the context of the epiphany. Hopefully, I will figure out a proper presentation and paper on this subject.

Presentation East Coker II

NOTE: I have some illustrations and stuff to share but my scanner ate it so now I need to find a way to cheaply digitize things that wont make Sara Mast scalp me.


My section is on East Coker II with the omission of a few lines at the beginning and end of the section.

This is my part:

Deployed in constellated wars
Scorpion fights against the Sun
Until the Sun and Moon go down
Comets weep and Leonids fly
Hunt the heavens and the plains
Whirled in a vortex that shall bring
The world to that destructive fire
Which burns before the ice-cap reigns.

That was a way of putting it—not very satisfactory:
A periphrastic study in a worn-out poetical fashion,
Leaving one still with the intolerable wrestle
With words and meanings. The poetry does not matter.
It was not (to start again) what one had expected.
What was to be the value of the long looked forward to,
Long hoped for calm, the autumnal serenity
And the wisdom of age? Had they deceived us
Or deceived themselves, the quiet-voiced elders,
Bequeathing us merely a receipt for deceit?
The serenity only a deliberate hebetude,
The wisdom only the knowledge of dead secrets
Useless in the darkness into which they peered
Or from which they turned their eyes. There is, it seems to us,
At best, only a limited value
In the knowledge derived from experience.
The knowledge imposes a pattern, and falsifies,
For the pattern is new in every moment
And every moment is a new and shocking
Valuation of all we have been. We are only undeceived
Of that which, deceiving, could no longer harm.
In the middle, not only in the middle of the way
But all the way, in a dark wood, in a bramble,

In summary, this section seems like a break from naturalistic poetic versing and a recognizing of the very limitations of language in helping achieve the serenity that Eliot equates to happiness. With it, comes the question, if knowledge and experience are not the paths to wisdom, how does one achieve wisdom? In recognizing the immensity of an environment both physical and mental, a viewer must understand their part in the whole system which mirrors and functions similarly (simulates) the natural world. There is no insulation in decadence from the folding cycle of life, death, destruction, and relapse that exists.