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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.)
FOR FURTHER EXPLORATION
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.)
FOR FURTHER EXPLORATION
Last week I had a brief conversation with two of my neighbors about politics and, specifically, my avoidance thereof. We touched on only the first of the topics I cover in this post, but I thought it might be helpful to me, and perhaps others, if I use this space to clarify my thoughts.
It's an unavoidable fact of life that politics happen. Yet individual citizens have essentially no influence over the course of governance, even though we have to live with the consequences. What's worse, through a kind of collective guilt we often feel somewhat responsible for (or aghast at) the actions of our political "leaders", despite the fact there's almost nothing we can do to change the situation. So I got to wondering: can I make the political personal but in a healthy way, as I've been working to personalize so much else?
As I've described before, I used to pay a lot of attention to political matters, I had opinions about various domains of government policy, I wrote letters to the editor, and I even participated in the occasional rally or attended the occasional city council or county commissioners' meeting. However, that simply raised my stress levels and didn't do anyone else any good, either. Slowly I realized that I have absolutely no influence in Washington D.C., Denver (the capital of Colorado), or even Castle Rock (our county seat). The main reason is that national, state, and even county governance is impersonal: I don't have relationships with the people involved and I don't particularly want to, because building such relationships would turn me into a more political person than I intend to be in life.
However, there is a place and community where I can and already do have such relationships, and that's my neighborhood of about 500 people. Since we moved here twelve years ago, I've served fairly regularly on our neighborhood association's board of directors, I've taken on management of our website, and last April I was selected to serve as the board president. Currently I'm also collaborating with the board presidents of two abutting neighborhoods to oppose a proposed urban-style development in our semi-rural area, which has entailed communicating with the planning department, attending planning commission meetings, and so forth. It's this very local level of political activity and community contribution where I can have a positive impact, so that's where I focus my energies.
The second topic is electoral politics, which for most people means voting (few of us are going to run for office, although earlier in life I contemplated it somewhat seriously and I helped out with a few campaigns). To put it bluntly: the act of voting might feel personally significant, but societally it is inconsequential. These days when everything is so politicized, the worst consequence of voting is offending friends and family; sadly, I've known several couples who nearly ruined their marriages of 20, 30, or 40 years over political disagreements, especially over the extremely divisive figure of Donald Trump.
Here too I've had a personalist realization: I don't know the people running for office. Yes, I might have impressions (often pretty strong impressions), but I don't know them. Leaving aside the well-known national personalities, how am I to make decisions about voting on candidates for, say, county commission or school board? I don't know if these people have good character, good judgment, and good intentions (the three primary factors underpinning the development of personal trust, as Aristotle outlined at Rhetoric 1378a8). Will they make well-reasoned, evidence-based decisions, avoid partisanship, have a strong ethic of public service, listen to the citizens, collaborate in an open-minded fashion with all the relevant stakeholders, not be corrupted by the power of their office, and so on? I have no idea, because I don't know these people. Consistent with Dunbar numbers, there are maybe 150 people in the whole country whom I know well enough to entrust with my vote, and they're not on the ballot!
What to do? Well, I've started simply leaving my ballots blank for all elected offices (I do still vote on initiatives and referendums). I refuse to have my politically somewhat dissonant voice be constrained by those little circles on the ballot and I won't be forced to vote for someone I don't know and trust merely in order to vote against someone else whom also I don't know and trust - especially because it is so easy for other folks to misconstrue that putative vote "for" as the kind of true endorsement that in all honestly I cannot provide.
This brings things back around to the first topic: I am trying to make a positive difference in the only way I know how, which is personally serving the community in my own neighborhood. Everything else in politics strikes me anyway as sound and fury, signifying nothing.
Naturally and as always, what works for me won't necessarily work for you...
(Cross-posted at Beautiful Wisdom.)
FOR FURTHER EXPLORATION
In his essay "Of the Rewards of Honour", Montaigne discourses on the "vain and in themselves valueless distinctions to honour and recompense virtue" that governments have instituted over the centuries: crowns of laurel, special uniforms, privileged seating, names, titles, coats of arms, and the like. Most commonly, these rewards of honor are used to encourage military valor among the citizenry. Montaigne then goes on to say:
There is no virtue that so easily spreads as that of military valour. There is another virtue, true, perfect, and philosophical, of which I do not speak, and only make use of the word in our common acceptation, much greater than this and more full, which is a force and assurance of the soul, equally despising all sorts of adverse accidents, equable, uniform, and constant, of which ours [i.e., military valor] is no more than one little ray.
Because Montaigne declines to speak at length about this "other virtue" (at least here), we must guess at what it is.
First, I'll note one potential point of confusion. Above I quote from the old translation by Charles Cotton, first made in the 17th century. In Donald Frame's highly acclaimed translation from the 1950s, he renders "another virtue" as "another valor"; however, I don't see that in the French: Montaigne simply says "there is another" - il y en a une autre - which as far as I can tell refers to the generic class of virtue rather than to the specific virtue of valor.
As much as I like the suggestion of "philosophical valor" (which I suppose would be intellectual honesty scrupulously applied to oneself), the equanimity or self-possession at which Montaigne gestures here likely has a more prosaic source: the multifarious ancient Greek virtue of σωφροσύνη, typically rendered as moderation. Consider, for example, Book III of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics: after treating at length the topic of courage (which is the greatest human virtue in times of war), Aristotle immediately turns to the topic of moderation (which is, along with justice, the greatest human virtue in times of peace).
Here again Montaigne brings his insights to bear most directly on himself, in that he strives to cultivate inner peace, a certain detachment from the vicissitudes of life, and the kind of constancy that avoids becoming puffed up about successes or crestfallen about misfortunes. Not that this "force and assurance of the soul" is easy to achieve, mind you, but it has always been central to the normative ideal of the sage and to philosophy as a way of life.
(Cross-posted at Beautiful Wisdom.)
FOR FURTHER EXPLORATION
In Montaigne's essay "Use Makes Perfect" or "Of Practice", he recounts at some length a brush with death he experienced because of a horse-riding accident. He then offers some remarkable reflections on his practice of personalism:
This long story of so light an accident would appear vain enough, were it not for the knowledge I have gained by it for my own use; for I do really find, that to get acquainted with death, needs no more but nearly to approach it. Every one, as Pliny says, is a good doctrine to himself, provided he be capable of discovering himself near at hand. Here, this is not my doctrine, 'tis my study; and is not the lesson of another, but my own; and if I communicate it, it ought not to be ill taken, for that which is of use to me, may also, peradventure, be useful to another.... We hear but of two or three of the ancients, who have beaten this path, and yet I cannot say if it was after this manner, knowing no more of them but their names. No one since has followed the track: 'tis a rugged road, more so than it seems, to follow a pace so rambling and uncertain, as that of the soul; to penetrate the dark profundities of its intricate internal windings; to choose and lay hold of so many little nimble motions; 'tis a new and extraordinary undertaking, and that withdraws us from the common and most recommended employments of the world. 'Tis now many years since that my thoughts have had no other aim and level than myself, and that I have only pried into and studied myself: or, if I study any other thing, 'tis to apply it to or rather in myself.
Talk about making it personal! Here Montaigne demonstrates that he was one of the first to consistently resist the universalist temptation and put all insights to the test (French "essai") of usefulness to himself. Although I do wonder who his "two or three of the ancients" were, of whom we are left "knowing no more of them but their names" (presumably sages who penned no writings, such as Pyrrho or Diogenes), in the end that's unimportant: what matters is the personal practice of self-understanding and self-improvement. Notice Montaigne's observation that personalism is a more rugged road than universalism: it's easy to pontificate about what everyone should do, but much more difficult to find your own path. Indeed, since universalism is what everyone else is doing, it's one of "the common and most recommended employments of the world", in contrast to the "new and extraordinary undertaking" of personal soulcraft and providing an account of your own way of life.
(Cross-posted at Beautiful Wisdom.)
FOR FURTHER EXPLORATION
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