Apr
30
Eros and Violence: On Auden’s "Jumbled in the common box…"
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“Jumbled in the common box…”
W.H. Auden
Jumbled in the common box
Of their dark stupidity,
Orchid, swan, and Caesar lie;
Time that tires of everyone
Has corroded all the locks,
Thrown away the key for fun.
In its cleft the torrent mocks
Prophets who in days gone by
Made a profit on each cry,
Persona grata now with none;
And a jackass language shocks
Poets who can only pun.
Silence settles on the clocks;
Nursing mothers point a sly
Index finger at a sky,
Crimson with the setting sun;
In the valley of the fox
Gleams the barrel of a gun.
Once we could have made the docks,
Now it is too late to fly;
Once too often you and I
Did what we should not have done;
Round the rampant rugged rocks
Rude and ragged rascals run.
Comment:
The end of all things has come up many times before in this blog, but with Yeats’ “The Second Coming” as the impetus. Here we examine another source. We wonder about the erotic not merely as degenerative, but as leading to violence.
If we put aside the notion that eros is part of the Fallen world, the link between eros and violence is hard to conceive. It would be thumos - spiritedness, eros alienated from itself as it is not cognizant of its own incompleteness - which drives towards empire and incites violence. That certainly seems to be the Platonic teaching: Socrates’ eroticism is a softening of education. The Hesidoic myth of gods eating each other, of being trying to annihilate becoming, finds itself put in the background by the Odyssean wiles of the philosophic. Lovers who get angry and hateful and kill each other fall away from the truly erotic in many cases (not in all: I commend you to Nietzsche’s “Why must we destroy that which we truly love?” - a paraphrase). “Anger” must be the sign of spiritedness.
But here Auden gives us a “box of… dark stupidity.” Desiring is not knowing, certainly not self-knowledge. The nutritive, animal and rational souls are all represented by erotic beings - “Orchid, swan, and Caesar.” The last element seems out of place: Shakespeare’s/Plutarch’s Caesar is very much thumotic, knowing no bounds militarily. Perhaps the want to rule all, to be wed to Gaia, means a thumotic/erotic conflation. If we proceed with this, then Auden - despite his eloquence - is prephilosophic.
Yet - maybe something more subtle is going on. If everything is eros truly, then eros is not just constitutive of beings but also what drives moments. Maybe Time, which makes the Truth manifest at its own leisure, gives us another way of conceiving the problem.
Out of the current’s division, out of the current’s power, comes mockery of prophets. What “profit” they made, we can conjecture, is the few hearts they changed. Changing hearts and minds now is the same as making money. Similarly, poets are reduced only to punning, because the language itself has turned on them. Time unleashes Chaos that swallows up the sacred and the refined.
More interesting is when Time starts to cannibalize itself. The light of day giving into a blood red sky indicates there is no future for the future. The hunter is the hunted and human contrivance, which has meant no escape for so many other creatures, offers us no escape.
So what does Time teach about eros? What it does is force us to separate our personal lives from history. Time splits as prophet, poet, mother and hunter split: our roles are the indication that the end of all things is the end of each individual’s world. The separation can never be perfect, of course - if our couple makes the docks, they are still upon the Chaos, still subject in some way to the torrent’s cleft. Our individual mistakes mirror the larger tragedy, where we may be forced permanently into our beginning state. But our feeling that we’re separate somehow - that’s not useless. Despite the rejection of the Platonic teaching, despite the use of eros here as solely tragic, our spirit still exists somehow, aware it has something to say about love too. Notice that separation can be characterized as violence, however.
Nov
27
Is It Possible To Insist On A More Thoughtful Politics?
Filed Under auden, poetry, politics | 6 Comments
Certainty, fidelity
On the stroke of midnight pass
Like vibrations of a bell,
And fashionable madmen raise
Their pedantic boring cry:
Every farthing of the cost,
All the dreaded cards foretell,
Shall be paid, but from this night
Not a whisper, not a thought,
Not a kiss nor look be lost.
- from Auden’s “Lullaby”
1. Perhaps forging a more thoughtful politics is a fashionable madness.
After all, once more rigor is applied to language and argument, such standards, if accepted by many, become mores. Thoughts become rules, then become sentiments, then finally law and the spirit of the law.
Certainty and fidelity might be best left moments in our existence. The problem for a free society is how to encourage fidelity without overemphasizing certainty. But a more thoughtful politics only encourages fidelity when it acts as if it is certain. A continual questioning uproots the law and makes the possibility of moral action difficult to conceive.
There does not seem to be a solution to this problem except to drop “thought” from the foundations and practice of politics altogether. For in any case, all my screaming just becomes a “pedantic boring cry,” sounding vaguely prophetic and most certainly apocalyptic. And some vibrations of a bell echo throughout a mortal coil an entire life, and such a person may not be the most thoughtful, but is more than willing to sacrifice.
2. Perhaps the problem is that I am not clear about the ends of a more thoughtful politics. Do I want people to be more thoughtful because everything is going to work better?
Of course not - it is entirely conceivable we will be a worse world for attempting to think through things. The trains may not run on time; people prone to questioning their country may ask even harder, jarring questions; all possibility for faith could be lost.
The reason why one should want a more thoughtful politics is when one considers that there is a season for all things under the heavens. If we lead our private lives well, even in darkness we do not lose a moment: every whisper, thought, kiss and look matters. It is possible we can experience great pain. But an even greater good is being enjoyed, inasmuch we are loving.
I haven’t been very subtle in arguing that thought is perhaps the greatest form of love. Thought may be a perpetual sacrifice, an alienation of nearly every other desire to merely see how things actually are. Most of the ancients therefore saw mathematics as the highest form of thought, but in doing so, they made a mistake: they thought objectivity - the inherently inhuman - ideal and the greatest good. Mathema are far more important when we consider the perfect forms of the soul, the return to virtue, the fulfillment of human being in the everyday.
3. A thoughtful politics is necessary because it is the product of a thoughtful, concerned people, conducting themselves well in their private capacities. How can our government display, though, our very personal sense of being?
Perhaps, as a thought experiment, we can conceive of Congress as an institution that mirrors how we talk amongst ourselves and deliberate. It can be seen as filled with petty little games and people trying to gang up on each other and then hanging out later drinking like all the cursing and shouting and power trips were meaningless. It can be filled with people enjoying life and their jobs and all the mistakes and goods that accompany such enjoyment.
When things get serious, their real virtues should show - they should be patient and supportive and sparing of words. They should be willing to put their own reputations and constituencies aside, just for a moment, to really think through things and speak wisely and ask when they don’t know.
Every word said in Congress should count at the key moments, when enjoyment isn’t an option. They should be able to switch from their everyday more private capacity of having a career (which just happens to be that of Congressmen), to their true public capacity: representing us at our best.
I know, bringing in Congress to a discussion of love and politics seems corny, and that this entry is a risk: it might show me to be far too immature a thinker to have anything serious to say about politics. But I was thinking that despite the cynicism that is the reasoning behind the Constitution, the idea of representative government is an old one, and one dependent on an ancient question: Can ordinary men govern themselves? If that is the central question, then Congress should mirror us in our perceived weaknesses, and should more than compensate in its strengths.
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May
31
Originially published 2006-06-07.
Are You There?
W.H. Auden
Each lover has some theory of his own
About the difference between the ache
Of being with his love, and being alone:
Why what, when dreaming, is dear flesh and bone
That really stirs the senses, when awake,
Appears a simulacrum of his own.
Narcissus disbelieves in the unknown;
He cannot join his image in the lake
So long as he assumes he is alone.
The child, the waterfall, the fire, the stone,
Are always up to mischief, though, and take
The universe for granted as their own.
The elderly, like Proust, are always prone
To think of love as a subjective fake;
The more they love, the more they feel alone.
Whatever view we hold, it must be shown
Why every lover has a wish to make
Some kind of otherness his own:
Perhaps, in fact, we never are alone.
Commentary:
Imagination, born from pain, gives us true love in our dreams. “Dear flesh and bone” is there; the price is two different aches, though - one pain from the absence of the lovers’ body, the other from the absence of his soul. Those pains correspond to “the ache of being with his love, and being alone.”
The literal reason why they correspond is that we are not given an instance in the poem of anyone actually having a lover. The only thing that comes close is the dream of the second stanza. The three stanzas before the last give us the pain of youth, childhood, and the aged, in that order. Narcissus, a youth, can be said to be self-absorbed because he believes love is real: the problem of youth is the arrogance which stems from actually having something to believe in, one’s dreams. The child’s “pain” comes from a different problem: it is unclear the child has pains. The list of water, fire and stone implies a fourth element: wind. A child is mischievous like the wind, taking everything for granted. Can taking everything for granted be said to be a hallmark of love? Of course not - if the child has a “pain” as regards love, it is the lack of love coming from the child’s inability to conceive an Other. Finally, Proust very much thinks love a “subjective fake:” “Swann’s Way,” the first volume of Remembrance of Things Past, was very good btw, and all you really need to read of Proust’s in order to see this. In that work, Proust turns to nature over and over again to search for meaning in life, and when we realize that, we realize that jumping into a lake or acting like the wind are also manifestations of humanity mimicking nature.
The distance which creates love is written into the world. The lack of a lover’s body is nowhere more apparent than in loving your own reflection; the lack of a lover’s mind is nowhere more apparent than in jumping from tree to tree in joyful, thoughtless bliss. Yet the lack of body, for Narcisssus, comes about because he thinks he understands that which he sees: the reflection and him share the same mind, he hopes. Similarly, the child, in not thinking, is the sensuality of the world: being young, he does not just recall the newness that creation speaks, he also demonstrates, in his activity, the truest love of body in play. Who cares how nature thinks? What matters is that it is there, and wonderful.
Now that we have exhausted this poem quite a bit, the cryptic final stanza should make more sense. The want for otherness is less a “want” but more a realization of self. If you look at what you want, you see who you are. And so it cannot be said that we are alone, inasmuch we are creatures of desire.
May
31
A Thought on Auden’s "The More Loving One"
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Originally published 11 October 2005.
The More Loving One
W.H. Auden
Looking up at the stars, I know quite well
That, for all they care, I can go to hell,
But on earth indifference is the least
We have to dread from man or beast.
How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.
Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
I cannot, now I see them, say
I missed one terribly all day.
Were all stars to disappear or die,
I should learn to look at an empty sky
And feel its total dark sublime,
Though this might take me a little time.
Commentary:
But on earth indifference is the least
We have to dread from man or beast.
Auden proclaims this to us in the first stanza, and I wonder: Is it true? (I certainly don’t think so. Indifference is very cold.)
Later on, we hear this from the speaker:
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.
“More love,” of course, can very easily translate into hate. Any of us who love know this. We know how disappointed we can be because of love. If indifference truly is the least we have to fear, then the wish to be more loving is inconsistent with that “fact.” So Auden has some explaining to do:
Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
I cannot, now I see them, say
I missed one terribly all day.
The attitude of the speaker here - an attitude we are tempted not to reflect on because he has chosen to personify “stars,” and we would rather make sense of that - is that of “indifference.”
Were all stars to disappear or die,
I should learn to look at an empty sky
And feel its total dark sublime,
Though this might take me a little time.
And this indifference, of course, allows our speaker to embrace the infinite void, total darkness, a darkness so “sublime” it cannot be truly embraced until death (”a little time”). Indifference, obviously, is the problem for Auden’s speaker. We can’t be indifferent. Hence we should be more loving.
A very cleverly constructed poem, where the 3 stanzas seem to complement the first, but in fact refute it.
May
31
Originally composed and published 2005-12-23.
Epitaph On A Tyrant
W.H. Auden
Perfection, of a kind, was what he was after,
And the poetry he invented was easy to understand;
He knew human folly like the back of his hand,
And was greatly interested in armies and fleets;
When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter,
And when he cried the little children died in the streets.
Commentary:
Ask anyone what tyranny is and they’ll be sure to tell you and give you detailed examples of when they purportedly lived under a tyrant. They know full well when they weren’t allowed to do something, and they understand perfectly, so they think, that arbitrary control was exercised over them for the sake of arbitrary control only…
I think, in order to approach this poem properly, we need to admit something: We know nothing about tyranny. We know that we are limited, we know we have been limited. But tyranny is far removed from our experience, for most of us.
So let’s take the first sentence seriously. The tyrant is interested in “perfection” of a sort. Let us not dismiss this and say it is “perfection” that is used to tell all the rest of us what to do. That may be true, and the perfection being “of a sort” inclines us to cast doubt on the purity of the tyrant’s motives. Yet let us concede that a tyrant may actually be someone who is interested in perfection.
If we grant Auden’s speaker this, that the tyrant is interested in perfection, then we understand the next two lines. The tyrant is someone who, in his pursuit of perfection, wants to create the Ultimate Art. He wants something beautiful that is also simple. There is no way to avoid the fact that a tyrant emerges from populist urges. His art stems from what the many want, what he feels the many will understand. His art will be the art to end all art, for everyone can understand it, and thus have no need to go to anything “higher” or anything more complicated. All will be spelled out because one man has given to us perfection.
Further, why should we be sarcastic about this enterprise? He knows “human folly like the back of his hand.” His knowledge of our faults - an ability that allows him a frightening amount of control over his enemies, an ability that makes him far more fearful than he really is - is also genuine knowledge of our nature. He can correct us as human beings, he can bring us to something greater. Just because some tyrants go bad doesn’t mean that perfecting the people they tyrannize over is totally out of reach. Knowledge of folly implies that he knows what is greater.
What seems mainly to corrupt the tyrant is his actual holding of power. That he is “greatly interested in armies and fleets” means whatever knowledge he has is devoted to the martial - the crude, physical manipulation of reality - as opposed to enlightenment.
The tyrant wants to write the perfect poem that everyone will understand. Unfortunately, that means his means are not those of gentleness or thoughtfulness. What people understand is fear and bribery moreso than love. And so senators laugh, both out of fear and out of shared criminality.
And so children die, and the quest for perfection, merely because it entails having actual power, ends up destroying the future for all, quite literally. For the true tyranny is to try to make the present perfect, which is what making something beautiful that all can now understand is.
Real perfection would be what the artist does: creating something wonderful - something ideal - now, and hoping that others will understand it, to make the future better. Reality is not a template for one’s designs, and because it is not, others are free to grow and develop, and use one’s wisdom if they so choose. And if they don’t, well, they will end up responding to or complementing that wisdom, for true wisdom is not merely the product of one mind.