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Before I likely disappear for a week or two, I wanted to mention that back in June I ran across (via The Hinternet) a little symposium in Plough magazine in which a number of writers and public intellectuals gave their opinion about which author might be the American Homer. Dana Gioia plunked for Robert Frost, A.E. Stallings for Laura Ingalls Wilder, Zena Hitz for Herman Melville, Ross Barkan for Hart Crane, Joseph Keegin for Walt Whitman, etc. You get the picture.
Now, strictly speaking there can be no American Homer because, as Milman Parry and Albert Lord demonstrated, the quasi-historical Homer was merely an especially impressive singer of tales within a completely oral tradition, whose performances were somehow transcribed into written form but who was not an author in the modern or even classical sense. Thus - again, strictly speaking - Virgil is not the Roman Homer, Dante is not the Italian Homer, and Shakespeare is not the English Homer. However, if we loosen the reins slightly we can see that each of these great writers holds a position analogous to that of Homer in ancient Greece, for each was a formative influence on both the language and the culture of his nation.
Thus the task of identifying an American equivalent of Homer seems not entirely illegitimate. Ideally, we'd be seeking an author who composed epics in the broad definition put forth by the late Frederick Turner, preferably in verse although prose would be acceptable. This removes lyric poets like Robert Frost and Emily Dickinson from the contest, as well as novelists like Laura Ingalls Wilder (or was it really her daughter Rose Wilder Lane??). But instead of seeking one American Homer, we might find it more productive to identify two great American books that are similar in some ways to the Iliad and the Odyssey. Since the Iliad is the Greeks' great saga of war and conflict, I suggest Melville's Moby-Dick - that epic telling of the Pequod crew's battles with Leviathan - as a kind of American Iliad; and since the Odyssey is the Greeks' great saga of exploration and adventure, I suggest Whitman's Leaves of Grass - one great American's exploration of self and democracy - as a kind of American Odyssey.
Inspired by this line of thinking, we might also wonder: who is the American Sappho - the great celebrant of the inner life of the individual? Although a case could be made for Edna St. Vincent Millay, to my mind it's no contest: Emily Dickinson.
(Cross-posted at Beautiful Wisdom.)
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Ever since Elisa passed away in February, I've been engaging in a great deal of self-reflection (which hopefully has not devolved into navel-gazing). One thing I've realized is that, to quote Walt Whitman, I contain multitudes. Although I wouldn't exactly say that I contradict myself, I do possess traits and tendencies that on the surface might seem to be somewhat at odds. Consider the following pairs (some of which require explanation and qualification, which perhaps I'll do some other day):
I think the root cause of these seeming dualities is my dedication to what the ancient Greeks called phronēsis, commonly translated as practical wisdom. As two examples, I'm serious about matters that deserve to be taken seriously yet carefree about everything else, and intense about matters where intensity is appropriate yet easygoing about everything else. This kind of balance (Greek sōphrosunē) is something I strive for, even if I don't always attain it.
P.S. I have a lot going on IRL, so I might not post again for a while.
(Cross-posted at Beautiful Wisdom.)
I've been posting some heavy stuff lately, so I figured I'd publish something lighter: ten haiku about the moon that I've written over the years. I love looking up at the sky (some would say I have my head in the clouds!) and the moon is a classic subject for Japanese haiku, so here goes.
3 A.M.
Flooding light
Frosts the floor
~
Broken clouds
Tinged with white
Somewhere the moon
~
Reddish clouds
The only sign of
Moon's eclipse
~
Skylight frost
Refracting silver
New Year's moon
~
Butter moon
Halfway over the rim
Of the hill
~
Setting moon
Snowy peaks
Which is whiter?
~
Rising sun
Setting moon
Which is brighter?
~
Behind the roof
The moon glows silver
Lights beneath are gold
~
A yellow smudge
Off to the east
No moon for clouds
~
So orange
Like an alien sun
High smoke moon
As you can see, I don't use the standard 17-syllable (5/7/5) form of Japanese haiku, since our tongue has more short words than theirs does (see what I did there?). Instead, I compose these as ultra-short poems of anywhere from nine to fourteen syllables. I'm still experimenting...
(Cross-posted at Beautiful Wisdom.)
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Recently over lunch with a dear friend, we got to talking about the fact that many people simply aren't very good at being friends. Given our modern obsession with technique, we're likely to say that such people lack "friendship skills" and that maybe a paid seminar or a few life hacks will solve the problem; however, I think there's much more going on here, because it seems to me that many folks are constitutionally incapable of freehearted giving, investing in people, or cultivating what Aristotle called character friendship. Similarly, José Ortega y Gasset (in his book On Love) distinguishes romantic love as the "prototype and summit of all eroticisms" from lesser forms such as affection and passion, claiming that "love is an infrequent occurrence, a sentiment which only certain souls can hope to experience" and that "falling in love is a marvelous talent which some creatures possess, like the gift of composing verses, the spirit of sacrifice, melodic inspiration, personal bravery" and such. He writes:
Since love is the most delicate and total act of the soul, it will reflect the state and nature of the soul. The characteristics of the person in love must be attributed to love itself. If the individual is not sensitive, how can his love be sentient? If he is not profound, how can his love be deep? As one is, so is his love. For this reason, we can find in love the most decisive symptom of what a person is.
Ortega locates the essence of love and friendship in surrender, i.e., in yielding yourself up to the beloved or, as he puts it, uprooting your vital depths and transplanting them into the soil of another soul. According to Ortega, in parental love this uprooting happens through instinct and in friendship it happens through a clear decision of the will (although I am not so sure: Montaigne's essay on friendship provides evidence to the contrary), whereas in romantic love "the fundamental surrender is not carried out on the plane of will, but occurs more deeply within the person" through a kind of irresistible influence - which, not shying away from its magical overtones, he calls enchantment.
For Ortega, this "surrender due to enchantment" is unwilled precisely because it is irresistible; although a person can, through an act of will and in self-defense against the beloved, attempt to resist this surrender, success in that endeavor only shows that the person never really loved from the depths in the first place.
Surrender sure sounds scary, doesn't it? It might even be positively unfashionable in this age of narcissism and looking out for number one. While talking with another dear friend the other day (I have a lot of dear friends!), I mentioned a line from Joni Mitchell's song "Both Sides, Now": "don't give yourself away", which perfectly encapsulates the attitude that you'd have to be a sucker to place your heart in someone else's hands. Yet I'm an incurable romantic (as I think Joni might have been when she wrote that song), so I can't agree with the sentiment. To me, the solution is to give yourself away, but to make sure that the recipient is a beautifully good person who cares about you and has your best interests at heart. Unfortunately that's easier said than done! And even if the gods smile on you as they've done on me, it still takes courage to brave the impassioned whirlwind and the inevitability of pain and loss. No one ever said that reaching the heights of human possibility was easy...
(Cross-posted at Beautiful Wisdom.)
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While I was giving that little concert recently, a neighborhood girl about seven or eight years old came to watch and listen with that look of wide-eyed fascination which you see only in children. It struck me that this might have been the first time she had ever witnessed someone making live music, so I gave her a big wink. ;-)
I like the fact that we talk of giving a concert and making music. Music is indeed a gift, as are all the arts. Certain people are drawn to these forms of making and giving, seemingly out of a superabundance of aliveness, creative energy, or imagination. Here again I perceive similarities to the freehearted giving of love in all its forms: parenting, romance, friendship, neighborliness, brotherhood, etc.
José Ortega y Gasset touches on these matters in his book On Love, although he couches them in an old-fashioned (to my mind) psychology of the sexes. Consider the following two quotes:
A man feels love primarily as a violent desire to be loved, whereas for a woman the primary experience is to feel love itself, the warm flow which radiates from her being toward her beloved and the impulse toward him. The need to be loved is felt by her only consequently and secondarily.
And:
Every woman appears to be a little saint, if we think that saintliness consists in sliding over life without letting oneself be compromised by it. And, yet, the truth is exactly the opposite: that almost unreal figure is merely awaiting the opportunity to throw herself - with such impetus, decisiveness, courage, and unconcern for painful consequences - into an impassioned whirlwind, that she outdoes the most resolute man, who sheepishly discovers himself to be of a practical, calculating, and vacillating temperament.
The traits that Ortega uncovers here are, I think, more widely distributed than he lets on: they are not a matter of sexuality but of personality. I, for one, seem to be the kind of passionately giving person he describes. In my youth I worked hard to hide these aspects of myself because certain early experiences made me well acquainted with some of the painful consequences Ortega alludes to. Furthermore, I agree with Ortega that there's a certain sort of courage and fearlessness wrapped up with throwing oneself into the impassioned whirlwind of personal relationships and creative activities. It's not for everyone, and it wasn't for me either until I slowly came to see that this is what life is all about.
I'll let Ortega have the last word: "Let others think what they like: for me, the culmination of life consists of a pure and subtly dramatic passion."
(Cross-posted at Beautiful Wisdom.)
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Lately I've been re-reading one of my favorite books: On Love by José Ortega y Gasset. I've long found Ortega's essays to be the most insightful analysis ever written regarding matters of the heart (and, with some reflection on the reader's part, by extension the love and creation of art). Ortega holds that the choices you make in the people you love and the artworks you treasure are deeply intertwined with your underlying vision of what matters in life, which he calls metaphysical sentiment. Just as Yeats wondered how we can know the dancer from the dance, Ortega wonders how we can know the singer from the song or the lover from the love or the thinker from the thoughts: for instance, in the context of talking about the philosophic conclusions of Stendhal and of Pío Baroja, he observes that "in the manner of songs they tell a truth, not about things, but about the singer."
Having recently given a little concert, I was struck yet again by Ortega's observations. My feeling about musical performance is that it should be a barely controlled cauldron of emotion lit by a sacred fire of passionate presence. At the least, this is how I approach my own performances, whether I'm singing "All Along the Watchtower" or "St. James Infirmary" or one of my own compositions. If I'm not putting my entire soul into the music, why am I playing and singing in the first place? The same goes for my attitude to love and friendship: the point is to engage in freehearted giving, not some coldhearted calculation of benefits and costs. Yes, this requires some form of courage in the face of vulnerability and the inevitability of loss, but if I'm not living to the hilt why am I living in the first place? When I resided in New York City back in college, a fortune cookie I opened at some Chinese restaurant on the Upper West Side said it perfectly: "One crowded hour of glorious life is worth an age without a name."
(Cross-posted at Beautiful Wisdom.)
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