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Related to my post "Aristotle on Freedom" last year, here is a timely quote from Book V of Aristotle's Politics on the free person's innate resistance to tyranny, founded in that illustrious but elusive character trait known as greatness of soul:
[A] valued person in both [tyrannies and democracies] is the flatterer: in popular governments this is the demagogue, since a demagogue is a flatterer of the populace, and with tyrants it is those who hang around them in a self-abasing manner, which is how flattery works. And it is for this reason that tyranny is friendly to corrupt people, since tyrants enjoy being flattered, and this is something no one who thinks like a free person would do. Decent people are friends; in other words, they do not flatter. And corrupt people are useful for corrupt employments - a nail hammered at a nail, as the proverb has it. And it is characteristic of a tyrant to take no pleasure in anyone dignified or free [ἐλευθέρος]. For the tyrant considers himself to be the only person of that sort, and anyone who matches him in dignity and carries himself like a free person robs tyranny of what is exceptional and masterful about it....
These things and their like are the characteristic of tyranny and are safeguards of its rule, and there is no sort of vileness they leave out. One may say that they are all encompassed within three forms, for tyranny aims at three things. One is for its subjects to think small, since a small-souled person [μικρόψυχος] would not plot against anyone. A second is for them to distrust one another completely, since a tyranny cannot be overthrown until some people have trust among themselves. And this is the reason tyrants make war on decent people as detrimental to their rule - not just because such people do not think they deserve to be ruled like slaves by a master, but also because they are trusted, among themselves and by others, and do not inform on their own kind or anyone else. And the third aim is a lack of power for action, since no one attempts impossible things, and hence no one overthrows a tyranny if the power to do so is not there. So the ultimate terms into which the intentions of tyrants are reducible are just these three, since one may trace every tyrannical measure back to these three underlying purposes: making the people not trust each other, making them have no power, and making them think small. (1313b29-1314a29, translated by Joe Sachs)
Or, as Thomas Jefferson once put it: "I have sworn upon the altar of god eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man."
(Cross-posted at Beautiful Wisdom.)
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About 110 years ago (in America we can conveniently date it from the 1913 Armory Show), the shock troops of aesthetic Modernism blew it all up. Disgusted with third-rate late Romantics, this self-proclaimed avant-garde decreed the destruction of meter in poetry, tonality in music, depiction in painting and sculpture, and in all the arts what they derided as the banality of beauty. Instead of seeking regeneration through artistic movements within the broad framework of what had been built up and bequeathed to them over thousands of years, they decided (for reasons I don't fully understand) that we needed to destroy everything first in order to create anew.
At this point we can declare that we've run the experiment and it was not a success. Four or five generations on, the "artworld" is full of third-rate late Modernists, just it was once full of third-rate late Romantics. Although they continue to pat themselves on the back for sticking it to the bourgeoisie, today's institutionalized, bureaucratized, subsidized shock troops no longer shock. Instead, they've reached the end of the line: they have become banal.
I think we deserve better than a culture of banal, third-rate ugliness, don't you?
This doesn't mean we have to return to the banal, third-rate prettiness which preceded the Modernist revolution. That's neither possible nor desirable, in large measure because we should have learned some valuable lessons from the Modernist experiment. Because those lessons are specific to each art form, here I'll limit myself to the two in which I'm active: music and poetry.
As to music, I wrote about it recently so I won't go too deep here. Suffice it to say that when the emptiness of much late Romantic music became clear, atonality (especially in the form of serialism) was not the only path forward. If we revisit that fork in the road, we can see and hear that composers like Sibelius, Bartók, Scriabin, and Ravel were scouting out different kinds of tonality rather than discarding tonality entirely. In an American context, the tonalities and rhythms of jazz represent a priceless gift that even now is far from fully explored; composers like William Grant Still, Florence Price, Mary Lou Williams, Duke Ellington, Billy Strayhorn, and Thelonious Monk were exemplars of creativity and insight who all on their own should be able to inspire a few hundred years of music-making! For myself, I'm intensively studying, practicing, and composing along these lines and will have much more to share in the coming years.
As to poetry, I'll simply say this: meter matters. The measure of a meter is called a foot for a reason: it's what makes language dance. The arbitrarily truncated lines of Modernist poems limp and hobble like some klutz who just twisted his ankle on a tennis court without a net. Such poems might look intriguing on paper the first few times you see them, but they don't sound or sing.
Not that we want to go back to the vapid skipping of 19th century sonneteers, mind you. At its best, Modernist criticism and practice demonstrated that the poet's craft had become flabby with unnecessary adjectives, padded lines, hackneyed metaphors, forced rhymes, and plenty of other cruft.
But between hobbling and skipping there are some striking and spectacular forms of motion and emotion: dancing, spinning, whirling, sauntering, ambling, strolling, striding (à la Art Tatum and James P. Johnson), maybe even strutting with some barbecue (as Louis Armstrong would have it). For American poetry, here too the rhythms of jazz come into play, as in the poems of Langston Hughes and other writers of the Harlem Renaissance and beyond.
Beyond American shores, one of the beauties of poetic form is that it's a worldwide and timedeep phenomenon: dozens of languages and cultures with celebrated poetry traditions have developed unique rhythms and measures, from dactylic hexameter to iambic pentameter, from pantoum to villanelle, from sestina to sonnet, from waka to haiku, from alexandrine to chant royal, from Sapphic to Anacreontic. These forms and many more provide numerous tonalities, as it were, for poetic composition.
And that's not even to get into styles like high, middle, and low; genres like epic, dramatic, narrative, didactic, elegiac, and lyric; and movements like Metaphysical, Romantic, Symbolist, Imagist, and yes even Modernist.
With this endless bounty to work from, it's a shame that English-language poetry of the last hundred years has mostly narrowed to short, free-verse, confessional, lyric poems. Boring! For myself, my primary poetry project these days is an epic poem in blank verse about Pyrrho and Alexander the Great. Take that, Modernists!
(Cross-posted at Beautiful Wisdom.)
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Yesterday my friend Adrian Lory and I had an enjoyable and thought-provoking dialogue on Substack Live about philosophy and psychology as complementary paths to wisdom and fulfillment - so much so that we plan to have a follow-up chat in the coming weeks. Inspired by our conversation, here are some further questions I'm pondering about the interface between philosophy and psychology:
These are in addition to a few fascinating questions we didn't get to yesterday, for instance about the balance between wordliness and spirituality, Plato and Aristotle as competing or complementary, psychology as a way of life (if there is such a thing), psychological strengths and weaknesses vs. philosophical virtues and vices, and what it means practically speaking to live philosophically.
Stay tuned for details on our next conversation!
(Cross-posted at Beautiful Wisdom.)
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For my slowly-progressing epic poem about Pyrrho and Alexander the Great, I'm writing in blank verse, i.e., unrhymed iambic pentameter. Many of the great English-language poets have written in blank verse, including Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, and Frost. Blank verse is especially appropriate, if you ask me, for epic poetry, since it's something like the equivalent in English of ancient Greek dactylic hexameter (another option is to employ fourteeners, as Matthew Arnold preferred for translations of Homer and as A.E. Stallings did in her amazing translation of Lucretius). Aside from its epic and dramatic pedigree, one of the attractions of blank verse is that it steers clear of the chimey sound and forced rhymes of heroic couplets, yet still maintains a regular pulse.
There be dragons, however. For my own benefit, this post summarizes some (updated) lessons I've learned through attention to the poetic masters, discussion with my friend and fellow epic poet Dave Jilk, my own poetic practice, and a recent reading of Robert B. Shaw's book Blank Verse:
In fine:
I treat these not as rigid rules; instead
they're guides to follow as I strive to make
a poem that delights both mind and ear.
(Cross-posted at Beautiful Wisdom.)
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A friend asked me yesterday how it is that I am so disciplined about reading. I perceive a few reasons.
First, I retired early, which means I have a lot of time for reading! But, then again, I planned it this way, because I knew that I wanted to pursue a more contemplative lifestyle at this stage in life.
Second, there's my disposition. Although I was rather lazy in my younger days, by my late twenties or early thirties I had become much more conscientious and disciplined.
Third, there are skills involved. Especially now that I'm not distracted with work and Internet stuff all the time, I'm able to concentrate on weighty texts for long periods of time. However, even in my working days I cultivated what Cal Newport (in his book Deep Work) calls the "journalistic style", whereby I'm able to dip in and out of a task and quickly regain focus. Especially in my final job at Mozilla, I had to do a lot of context switching, and I got pretty good at it.
Fourth and more fundamentally, most of my reading is centered around answering big questions.
The trial run for this practice was a reading program I put in place ~20 years ago to solve, at least to my own satisfaction, the question of what caused the Industrial Revolution and, more generally, the emergence of modernity. The books involved were large historical tomes on political economy, culture, and technology going back to the Middle Ages, with a particular focus on England since that's where the Industrial Revolution really took off.
I have another long-term reading program in place to understand America: its origins, immigrant groups, historical experience, political economy, culture, literature, music, philosophy, etc. This is a topic to which I return regularly as I become interested in various aspects of the phenomenon.
Some of my reading programs are motivated by a desire to write books that answer a big question or that represent a deep encounter with a great thinker. An example is my reading program about Aristotle: over the last decade I have read probably 50,000 pages by and about Aristotle!
Most recently I've instituted a reading program about aesthetics, especially musical and poetic aesthetics; here the goal is to better understand the arts as a path to wisdom, and at a personal level to understand how I can do a better job in my own artistic activities.
All of these questions can be seen to exist in a hierarchy whose underlying theme is my drive for self-knowledge and sagacity: I'm an American who is immersed in (yet somewhat detached from) modernity, engaged in writing music and poetry, trying to live an examined life, and seeking perspective from some of the great thinkers and wisdom traditions of the past. It all fits together, which is why I am so disciplined about the particular books I read.
(Cross-posted at Beautiful Wisdom.)
Over at The American Scholar, Joseph Horowitz has asked the big question about art music in America: can it find an orientation, a future direction, a way forward? In truth, the question has loomed over our musical culture, unanswered, ever since the serialist revolution over a hundred years ago. Horowitz's telling highlights composers who resisted serialism, such as Busoni, Elgar, Sibelius, and Ives (we might widen the lens even further to include the likes of Debussy, Ravel, Delius, Hindemith, Scriabin, and Shostakovich). He also connects a few dots from Dvořák and his stay in America to composers who answered Dvořák's call to honor and integrate music from Native American cultures; a somewhat prominent example is Busoni's Indian Fantasy for piano and orchestra, whereas a more obscure but quite inspiring example is Arthur Farwell's "Hoka" String Quartet (which Horowitz names "the closest thing I know to an American idiom in parallel with Béla Bartók’s raw absorption of Transylvanian song and dance").
Conspicuously absent from Horowitz's analysis are composers working in or inspired by our African-American heritage. The list is long: William Grant Still, Florence Price, Harry Burleigh, William Levi Dawson; Duke Ellington, Billy Strayhorn, Mary Lou Williams, James P. Johnson; Thelonius Monk, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, Charles Mingus, John Coltrane; Lennie Tristano, Dave Brubeck, Bill Evans, Gil Evans; and so many more. And how about that quintessential American Louis Armstrong? Albert Murray dubbed him a "Promethean bringer of syncopated lightning from the Land of the Titans" (!) and identified Armstrong's Hot Fives and Hot Sevens as "the model for a truly indigenous American chamber music" that flourishes to this day. Horowitz also mentions music that "composes itself": what of improvisational masters of free jazz like Ornette Coleman, Albert Ayler, Cecil Taylor, Pharoah Sanders, and the ever-amazing Keith Jarrett? With regard to the underrated Billy Strayhorn specifically, Walter van de Leur in his book Something to Live For shows that Strayhorn independently developed a harmonic and melodic language quite close to Bartók's axis system as described in Ernő Lendvai's book on Bartók's compositional methods. This huge tradition of distinctively American music offers an alternative path out of the wilderness of atonality and twelve-tone madness.
Is there potential for a 21st-century "Third Stream" integration that brings together many of these strands of American and European music? Only time will tell. The music of the future is still to be created...
(Cross-posted at Beautiful Wisdom.)
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