The Truth of Metaphor in Nietzsche and Gorgias

Between Never-Never Land and the Essence of Things:

The Truth of Metaphor in Nietzsche and Gorgias

In the Western intellectual life, few figures inspire as much controversy as Gorgias of Leontini and Friedrich Nietzsche (unhappily, as he often claims) of Germany, two master stylists forever resisting fixedly falling into the categories – philosophy, poetry, sophistry – thrown at them by a Western tradition unsettled by their playfully serious provocations. Nietzsche himself directly links his work to Gorgias by claiming that, after all, the sophists, Gorgias included, were right. When Nietzsche writes that “[e]very advance in epistemology and moral knowledge has reinstated the Sophists” (The Will to Power, 233), he of course implies that his own anti-metaphysical move beyond good and evil, as the major advance in epistemology and moral knowledge, is in a fundamental sense in line with the work of the sophists.1 The precise nature of Nietzsche’s reinstatement of sophism, however, remains a matter of debate.2 Engaging in just such a debate is perhaps one way – a compelling one, I believe – to characterize and contextualize contemporary conversations and contentions in many fields of intellectual endeavor. Between the increasingly merely playful dance of differance carried out by gleefully-postmodern academics, on one side, and the increasingly reactionary and dogmatic assertions of anti-anti-foundationalists, on the other, figures such as Gorgias and Nietzsche are points of contention, usually claimed as heroes of multiplicitous invention by postmodern theorists and vilified as enemies of the good by critics of postmodernism. Perhaps, though, Gorgias and Nietzsche actually, and maybe even most radically, offer a middle way, an alternative between meaningless play and falsely-secure seriousness. This paper, in examining Nietzsche’s “On Truth and Lying in an Extra-Moral Sense”3 and Gorgias’s Encomium of Helen,4 seeks to trace a suggestive though by no means complete sketch of such a Nietzschean-Gorgianic middle way, a middle way that can most succinctly be described as the way of metaphor.5 Both Gorgias and Nietzsche assert the fundamentally tropological nature of human language and perception, and they thereby affirm that fitting or “true” logos is a logos that is self-aware of its non-absolute status and that, in and through this self-awareness and its concomitant “danger,” combines play and seriousness in a discourse that can serve the human good.

While Nietzsche’s “On Truth and Lying in an Extra-Moral Sense” utilizes imagistic and metaphorical means6 so as to disclose the unavoidably metaphorical nature of human discourse, Gorgias’s Encomium of Helen functions as a kind of praxis, a metaphor-in-action illustrating how a discourse that makes its own metaphoricity thematic can uniquely serve the human good. As such, the two texts are here treated in reverse chronological order, Nietzsche’s more theoretical text grounding the reading of Gorgias’s Helen. Such an approach overtly seeks to interpret Gorgias’s text through a Nietzschean lens; nevertheless, it certainly cannot be denied that this Nietzschean lens itself draws on and is partially constituted by the insights that Gorgias’s text makes possible. Suffice it to say, both Gorgias and Nietzsche would be at home with, and no doubt delight in, such interpretive circularity.

In “On Truth and Lying,” Nietzsche claims that, at each stage of human perception and communication, the fundamental material of perception – for Nietzsche, nerve stimuli – is translated from one medium to another, just as in metaphor two distinct entities are “falsely” – in other words, metaphorically – equated. As Nietzsche writes: “First, he [a human being] translates a nerve stimulus into an image! That is the first metaphor. Then, the image must be reshaped into a sound!7 The second metaphor. And each time there is a complete overlapping of spheres” (“Truth and Lying,” 248-249). For Nietzsche, the metaphorical activity of perception and communication necessitates that all communication, and thus all language, is always already rhetorical, for humans do not communicate reality itself but rather the relational ground in which reality is apprehended in a metaphorical manner. 8 Persuasive metaphors, and not facts, are the true unit of exchange in the human realm. “What is truth?” Nietzsche writes in a passage that deserves to be cited in full. It is

a mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, anthropomorphisms, in short, a sum of human relations which were poetically and rhetorically heightened, transferred, and adorned, and after long use seem solid, canonical, and binding to a nation. Truths are illusions about which it has been forgotten that they are illusions, worn-out metaphors without sensory impact, coins which have lost their image and now can be used only as metal, and no longer as coins. (“Truth and Lying,” 250)

Note Nietzsche’s use of metaphor – truth is “a mobile army of metaphors,” truths are “coins” – to describe the metaphorical nature of truth. Such metaphors of metaphor – Gorgias’s “Speech is a powerful lord” (Helen, 52) is another example – are true to the metaphoricity that, for Nietzsche, is unavoidable in human formulations of the truth, a metaphoricity that is apt to be forgotten when truths become “solid,” “canonical,” and “binding.” To forget the metaphoricity of truth – its poetic, rhetorical, and relational nature – requires a “lie,” one that, in taking truth not as metaphorical but as absolute, makes of truth itself an illusory kind of anti-metaphor that does not recognize its own metaphoricity and thus lies about its own truthful untruth, as it were. The seemingly paradoxical jumbling of “truth” and “lies”/“untruth” in the preceding sentence, as well as in “On Truth and Lying” itself, is purposeful, for in effect Nietzsche plays with these terms, in the process transforming them into metaphors of one another. His ultimate aim in this most Odyssean of endeavors is to illustrate that human speech is most true when it does not attempt to extricate itself from the non-absolute intersecting gradations of similarity and difference in which it is by its very nature fastened. In sum, then, despite the undeniable polemicism of both Nietzsche’s argument and the mobile army of metaphors of metaphor used to carry it out, Nietzsche does not here claim that human truths are mere fabrications and thus absolutely not true. Rather, Nietzsche suggests that truth taken absolutely is untrue insofar as it forgets or denies its ground in the “primeval faculty of human fantasy” (252).

“On Truth and Lying” goes on to argue that the human intellect – prone to arrogance and self-delusion – fashions the original intuitive metaphors of perception into concepts, those “worn-out metaphors” that “after long use seem solid, canonical, and binding to a nation” (250). Precisely because the intellect “forgets that the original intuitive metaphors are indeed metaphors and takes them for the things themselves” (252), it can build overarching conceptual structures that allow the human being to put “his actions under the rule of abstractions” (252). Such conceptual structures, though they help bring about a distinctively human world, do not ultimately satisfy what Nietzsche calls the “drive to form metaphors, that fundamental desire in man, which cannot be discounted for one moment, because that would amount to ignoring man himself” (254). The drive to form metaphors, which “rational man” both utilizes and stifles so as to form conceptual abstractions, eventually “seeks a new province for its activities… and generally finds it in myth and in art” (254). The “intuitive man,” as exemplified by the artist and the mythmaker, “constantly confuses the categories… [thus] showing the desire to shape the existing world of the wideawake person to be variegatedly irregular and disinterestedly incoherent, exciting, and eternally new, as is the world of dreams” (254). In self-consciously working with intuitive metaphors, the intuitive man rediscovers his inventive capacity and the inherent flexibility of the human world. In putting himself “under the rue of abstractions” that results when human concepts are not themselves recognized as metaphors, the rational man denies his inventive capacity and essentially severs the basis of his connection to the world.9

Because Nietzsche frequently describes the conceptual order of the rational man in undoubtedly negative terms – for example, as “a prison fortress” (254) – many a postmodern theorist has taken Nietzsche to be wholeheartedly urging the endless deconstruction of meaning, the creative artist’s inspired assault against the conceptual order propagated by the falsely secure rational man. To read Nietzsche as univocally championing intuitive man, however, is, just like reading Nietzsche as simply declaring that truth of any kind does not in fact exist, to mistake Nietzsche’s polemicism for absolutism – a move that Nietzsche himself warns against by questioning absolutist readings, even absolutist readings of non-absolutism. As Nietzsche writes when attacking rigid conceptual assumptions:

[E]ven our distinction between individual and species is anthropomorphic and does not stem from the essence of things, although we also do not dare to say that it does not correspond to it. For that would be a dogmatic assertion, and as such just as unprovable as its opposite. (249-250)

For Nietzsche, the dogmatic assertions of delusional absolutism are best combated by situating one’s discourse within a middle position that cannot run for cover toward either absolute truth or absolute meaninglessness. In the end, “On Truth and Lying” suggests that human beings, in order to rise above pure animality, cannot avoid building with concepts. Nietzsche cautions, however, that “the building must be light as gossamer” (252). Rather than taking their conceptual structures as absolute truths, conceptual artists of a Nietzschean bent remain aware of the non-absolute metaphorical base of all their concepts, remembering that “the origin of language is not a logical process, and the whole material in and with which the man of truth, the scientist, the philosopher, works and builds, stems, if not from a never-never land, in any case not from the essence of things” (249).10 Maneuvering between these two “nots” – the absolute freedom of a never-never land and the absolute truth of the essence of things – the speech-artist Gorgias demonstrates with his Encomium of Helen that a speech that makes its own metaphoricity thematic can serve the human good by experientially provoking the realization that the human truths crafted in speech can never obtain an absolute status that makes them canonical and binding in every particular situation. If, then, Nietzsche’s text points the way to how truth can be told in an extra-moral sense, Gorgias’s text exemplifies such truth-telling.

Gorgias’s ostensible task in the Encomium is “to refute those who rebuke Helen… to free the accused of blame and, having reproved her detractors as prevaricators and proved the truth, to free her from their ignorance” (50), a task that Gorgias carries out by arguing that, whether persuaded by fate, force, logos, or love, Helen possessed zero freedom and therefore deserves zero blame. However, the stated task of proving “the truth” proves problematic because, from the Encomium’s opening lines, the Gorgianic notion of truth is anything but straightforward. Though Gorgias claims that truth is becoming to a speech (50), the overall category of the “becoming” – fitting, ordered, cosmic (class lecture) – is primary, while truth, as in essence a species of the larger genus “becoming,” is secondary. Further, Gorgias almost immediately revises his initially stated goal of proving the truth: “I shall go on to the beginning of my future speech, and I shall set forth the causes through which it was likely that Helen’s voyage to Troy should take place” (51). In a Gorgianic cosmos in which absolute knowledge is not possible – “it is not easy for [humans] to recall the past nor to consider the present nor to predict the future” (52) – the very idea of the truth, it seems, is supplanted by the likely. Even more than the slippery nature of the Gorgianic conception of truth, though, the following statement calls into question Gorgias’s stated purpose in the Encomium: “All who have and do persuade people of things do so by molding a false argument” (52). The inclusion of both past and present verb tenses suggests that, even as Gorgias argues that Alexander used a false argument to persuade Helen to accompany him to Troy, Gorgias himself acknowledges that this very argument taking place in theEncomium is itself false! No wonder that Gorgias’s claim in the Encomium’s final line that it is a “diversion” is often taken as an acknowledgment that Gorgias, as a precursor to postmodernism, realizes that his discourse inevitably contradicts itself and in effect unsays the very possibility of its own saying.

Does Gorgias really want to persuade his audience to believe that Helen is innocent of all blame – in other words, is Gorgias being serious? Or, is the Encomium a mere diversion and therefore not really concerned with persuading the audience of anything – in other words, is Gorgias being playful? The additional possibility that Gorgias’s Encomium enacts a serious form of play from a Nietzschean middle position arises upon considering that by not believing Gorgias his audience experientially discovers the following: speech may indeed be “a powerful lord” (52), but it is not all-powerful. The freedom to disbelieve even the most incantatory, spellbinding speech is directly provoked by Gorgias’s hard-to-believe, though powerfully rendered, argument. To not believe Gorgias’s stated argument is to recognize that the Encomium is most fundamentally a speech about speech in which Gorgias highlights the metaphorical nature of speech. Like Nietzsche, Gorgias most effectively demonstrates the tropological nature of speech when speaking about speech itself in metaphorical terms. After metaphorically defining speech as a “powerful lord” (52), Gorgias goes on to equate speech’s power with, in turn, poetry and sacred incantations. As he remarks upon making these metaphorical shifts, “But come, I shall turn from one argument [logos] to another” (52). Indeed, Gorgias in effect turns the metaphorical power of speech upon itself, trying to capture the ever-flowing creativity of speech within specific moments of creative verbal expression. For Gorgias, as for Nietzsche,logos is metaphor, and thus perhaps Gorgias’s seemingly contradictory claim that all persuasion involves “molding a false argument” is not that contradictory after all. For what else is metaphor but a “false argument,” one that, as Nietzsche’s “On Truth and Lying” points out, is all-too-often taken as a literal truth. In such a reading, Gorgias’s argument as a whole, precisely in its falseness, serves as an overarching metaphor of metaphor. By disclosing persuasion as metaphorical, Gorgias does not claim that, because of its failure to anchor itself within absolute truth, human discourse is therefore meaningless. He does, however, imply that by seeing that the nature of speech is metaphorical and not absolute, an audience experiences the freedom to evaluate human speech as more or less “becoming” for particular human communities and particular occasions. By not believing that Helen was persuaded by all-powerful speech, Gorgias’s audience comes to believe in their own freedom to avoid “unbecoming” persuasions.

In conclusion, the Nietzschean and Gorgianic texts discussed above reveal that working with intuitive metaphors recognized as metaphors allows humans to rediscover the inventive capacity at the root of their most fundamental linguistic and perceptual interactions with the world. Such a rediscovery promotes an increased sensitivity to the possibilities inherent in any particular human situation, and thus increases human freedom. Even the most buttressed conceptual fortresses, and even the most incantatory speeches seeking to force one into unbecoming belief, cannot enjoy absolute rule when their own ground is disclosed to be the ever-shifting ground – the human ground – of metaphor.

Work Cited

Consigny, Scott. Gorgias: Sophist and Artist. Columbia, South Carolina: University of
South Carolina Press, 2001.

de Man, Paul. Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust. New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1979.

Gorgias. Encomium of Helen. In The Older Sophists. Ed. Rosamond Kent Sprague. Columbia,
South Carolina: University of South Carolina Press, 1972.

Grassi, Ernesto. Rhetoric as Philosophy. Carbondale, Illinois: Southern Illinois University
Press, 2001.

Heller, Erich. The Importance of Nietzsche. Chicago, Illinois: University of Chicago Press,
1988.

Krell, David Farrell. Infectious Nietzsche. Bloomington, Indianapolis: Indiana University Press,
1996.

Magnus, Bernd., and Kathleen M. Higgins. “Introduction to The Cambridge Companion to
Nietzsche.” The Cambridge Companion to Nietzsche. Eds. Bernd Magnus and Kathleen
Higgins. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.

McComiskey, Bruce. Gorgias and the New Sophistic Rhetoric. Carbondale, Illinois: Southern
Illinois University Press, 2002.

Nehamas, Alexander. Nietzsche: Life As Literature. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard
University Press, 1985.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. “On Truth and Lying in an Extra-Moral Sense.” In Friedrich Nietzsche on Rhetoric and Language. Ed. and Trans. Sander Gilman, Carole Blair, and David Parent.
New York: Oxford University Press, 1989. 246-258.
---The Will to Power. Tr. Walter Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale. New York: Vintage
Books, 1968.

Sallis, John. Crossings: Nietzsche and the Space of Tragedy. Chicago, Illinois: University of
Chicago Press, 1991.

Thomas, Douglas. Reading Nietzsche Rhetorically. New York, NY: The Guilford Press, 1999.

White, Alan. Within Nietzsche’s Labyrinth. New York, NY: Routledge, 1990.


Notes

1 For a helpful discussion of sophism as it relates to Nietzsche’s work, see Douglas Thomas’s Reading Nietzsche Rhetorically (especially 51-93). Thomas writes of sophism that it “marks an important transformation from the study of rhetoric as techne, the fairly straightforward study of particular structures and aspects of argument, to the study of rhetoric as imitation or style. Sophistic rhetoric became a means of imparting a style of rhetoric that challenged both long-held beliefs about the nature of the world, the physis, and challenged the moral foundations of Greek culture” (53).

2 A debate, moreover, that essentially takes place on two fronts: scholarship (usually occurring in philosophy departments) concerning Nietzsche’s work per se, particularly his perspectivism; and scholarship (usually taking place in English and communications departments) directly involving the sophists. Regarding the former, Nehamas goes so far as to claim that the problem of Nietzsche’s perspectivism is essentially the challenge confronting all readers of Nietzsche’s work (see Nehamas, 1). In one way or another, determining whether or not Nietzsche is an utter relativist or a relative relativist – and therefore what the nature of Nietzsche’s reinstatemet of the sophists might be – requires grappling with his perspectivism. In claiming that Nietzsche’s perspectivism maintains both that no single perspective is absolute and that nevertheless some perspectives are better than others, Alan White maintains a middle position (Nietzschean that he is, he calls it a Dionysian affirmation of this world) similar to the one attributed to Nietzsche in this paper (see White, especially 3-14). White nicely characterizes the two positions that he seeks to avoid: “I attribute to Nietzsche a perspectivism that avoids both the metaphysical extreme of objectivism or positivism – the insistence that we make epistemic progress by relying on facts while avoiding interpretations – and the postmetaphysical alternative of relativism or idealism – the claim that there are no facts, there are only interpretations” (11). On the other front, debate about the sophists has raged within the humanities ever since the social turn in rhetorical studies, “a turn toward social constructionism and (social) epistemic rhetoric” (McComiskey, 5), took place in the 1970s and 1980s. As McComiskey puts it, “The political commitments that… scholars brought to their disciplines, as well as their concern for recovering marginalized voices in the history of rhetoric, made the sophists an obvious and rich object of analysis… In what had come to be known as ‘the sophists’ – those ancient antifoundationalists, champions of democracy, teachers of rhetoric – many scholars found a friend in the fray, ancient validation for the arguments they wanted to make about contemporary rhetoric” (5). Scholars championing the sophists as anti-foundationalists remarkably similar to many contemporary intellectuals include John Poulakos, Sharon Crowley, Susan Jarratt, and Victor Vitanza. While these (and other) scholars self-consciously blur the line between historical interpretation and historical appropriation – a line that they may indeed argue does not actually exist – Edward Schiappa, among others, argues that sophistic rhetoric as many scholars understand it is actually a “mirage—something we see because we want and need to see it – which vaporizes once carefully scutinized” (5). Regardless of whether or not its historical validity is interrogated, a “new sophistic rhetoric” has been embraced by many scholars. McComiskey succinctly summarizes three essential assumptions of the new sophistic rhetoric: “first, knowledge(s) (that is, epistemologies) can only be understood within the defining context of particular cultures; second, rhetorical methods rely, at least in part, on probability, affect, and kairos; and third, this relativistic rhetoric of the right moment supports democratic power formations that depend on the invention of ethical arguments” (13). For a more detailed discussion of controversies within Gorgianic studies specifically, see below.

3 Of Nietzsche’s posthumously-published manuscripts from the period 1872-74, “On Truth and Lying in an Extra-Moral Sense” is the most well-known and influential. As Magnus and Higgins point out, “The stock of “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense” has risen in the eyes of many scholars over the past few decades, primarily because it analyzes truth in terms of metaphor… The essay’s striking images have also inspired reflection and commentary from contemporary literary critics” (30). Unconcerned as it is with the later Nietzschean notions of will to power and eternal return, though, “On Truth and Lying” by no means exemplifies all the twists and turns of Nietzsche’s thought in toto; nevertheless, it undeniably sums up Nietzsche’s specific ideas about rhetoric and the nature of language. As such, it proves ideal for the present inquiry, not only because the topic of rhetoric overtly brings Nietzsche into an implicit dialogue with Gorgias, but also because “rhetoric” is in many ways the nexus of contemporary academic debate about the nature of ethics, truth, language, and culture: if postmodern theorists celebrate a “new sophistic rhetoric” in which linguistic inventiveness can hail culture into being, foundationalist reactionaries hearken back to Plato’s sentiments in such dialogues as Gorgias and The Sophist as a means of claiming that rhetoric, and hence postmodernism, is nothing more than relativistic opportunism.
4 It should be noted that Gorgianic interpretation is an especially problematic endeavor because the surviving texts of Gorgias are fragmentary at best and are often transcriptions, citations, or paraphrases written by later commentators. Scott Consigny, in Gorgias: Sophist and Artist, claims that two distinct modes of reading Gorgias have arisen in response to the particular hermeneutical aporia presented by the problematic status of Gorgias’s surviving texts (see especially the chapter “Seeking the Sophist,” 1-35). On the one hand, the “subjectivist” or rhapsodic interpreters such as Eric White argue that “Gorgias sees reality as a Heraclitean flux in which every unprecedented kairotic moment is apprehensible only through subjective intuition” (Consigny, 27). Objectivist interpreters, on the other hand, argue that Gorgias most fundamentally espouses rational argumentation and the development of a scientific approach to logos. In the objectivist view, Gorgias works against traditional associations of logos with magic and witchcraft. Consigny, influenced particularly by contemporary postmodern pragmatists such as Rorty and Fish, proposes a third interpretive approach: “In order to avoid the Scylla of objectivism and the Charybdis of rhapsodism in our attempt to escape the hermeneutic aporia that we face in seeking Gorgias, I suggest that we adopt a model of interpretation that may be characterized as pragmatic, conventionalist, or ‘communitarian’ – a model adumbrated by Protagoras and developed more recently by such scholars as Hans-Georg Gadamer, Kenneth Burke, Richard Rorty, and Stanley Fish… In this model of interpretation, there is no original and determinate text to be discovered, for texts themselves are fabrications made available through the use of hermeneutic conventions. That is, there are no ‘uninterpreted texts’ that exist apart from, and prior to, interpretations. Since the texts themselves are available only through the conventions and procedures of the interpretive community, it is only within these interpretations that an author’s thought becomes available, and there is no external entity or meaning that the interpretations represent” (17-18). Consigny’s approach, which articulates the necessity of grounding one’s arguments within a specific interpretive community, undoubtedly has affinities with the “middle way” I trace in this paper. However, whereas my middle way relies heavily on a “tropist” approach to philosophical rhetoric, Consigny, Rotry et al. tend to rely more on an argumentative approach to rhetoric (for the “tropist”- “argumentative” split, see endnote number four below). By emphasizing image and metaphor, a tropist approach ultimately claims that the tropological nature of discourse exists even prior to its embodiment within particular interpretive communities. In other words, a tropist approach emphasizes the individual process of ingenious discovery arising out of the fundamentally metaphorical ground of human existence, thus claiming that particular discourses are “discovered” within the metaphorical dynamics of the world per se rather than “thought up” within the logical repartee of intellectual communities.
5 The Nietzschean/Gorgianic middle way as I present it here has strong affinities with what Timothy W. Crusius, in his Forward to Ernesto Grassi’s Rhetoric as Philosophy, calls the tropist approach, as opposed to the rhetoric-as-argument approach, to philosophical rhetoric. Crusius helpfully outlines these two “paths” characterizing rhetorical studies: “Philosophical rhetoric has taken and continues to take one of two paths, already well worn by the time the Sophists were contending with Plato and Aristotle. On the one hand, we have rhetoric as argument, represented in recent thought by Chaim Perelman, Stephen Toulmin, Wayne Booth, and James Crosswhite, among many others. For them, rhetoric is informal reasoning about issues that arise in a radically contingent and uncertain world, especially public issues, where, if sweet reason fails to address difference, contention translates all too readily into power politics and the use of force. In a world armed to the teeth and always at war or on the edge of war, one need not strain to defend a rhetoric of reason. On the other hand, we have the “tropists” of modern rhetorical theory, who see the power of language as residing more in image and metaphor than in argument. Were it not for Kenneth Burke, whose thinking is tropist…Grassi would have no serious competitor on the ingenium side of recent rhetorical thought. As it is, the two must share the stage and continue to inspire resistance to the seductive narrowing of rhetoric to informal reasoning. Rhetoric is much more than a rhetoric of good reasons; if formal reasoning depends on ingenium for its beginning points, informal reasoning surely depends on ingenium no less” (xvii-xviii). As is evident from Crusius’s discussion, Grassi locates image and metaphor as primary for the inventive faculty of ingenium (for Grassi’s discussion of the notion of ingenium as it derives from Cicero, see Grassi 8-10; for his discussion of metaphor as the basis of rhetoric and philosophy, see especially 32-34). Without ever explicitly mentioning Nietzsche, Grassi throughout his Rhetoric as Philosophy articulates a tropological conception of human perception and communication that is remarkably similar to Nietzsche’s claims in “On Truth and Lying” (see, for example, Grassi, xv, 33, 61, 65, and 89). What Grassi’s amazing little book does so successfully is trace the intellectual genealogy of the placement of metaphor at the center of human life from Cicero and Quintilian through the Italian Humanists (Pico, Bruni, and others) to Vico. All of these thinkers, according to Grassi, view metaphor not as secondary or added to a non-metaphorical primary reality, but as constituting the human reality of life in the world. Rather than serving as a possible embellishing tool of reason, metaphor as conceived by the line of thinkers Grassi discusses is actually the fundamental ground of reason. Grassi argues that without the inevitably metaphorical first principles (for the claim that all first principles are metaphorical in nature, see 33) that rational thought needs to carry out logical demonstrations (proofs) – first principles that are ingeniously “discovered” rather than rationally proven – rational thought could not do its work (see especially 21, 44, 62).


6 For a provocative discussion of Nietzsche’s style, which, in its reliance on images and metaphor, is described as “the grand style… of creative self-affirmation and world-affirmation” (60), see David Farrell Krell’s Infectious Nietzsche, particularly 56-82.

7 Two fruitful discussions of Nietzsche’s conception of language occur in Erich Heller’s “Wittgenstein and Nietzsche” (in his The Importance of Nietzsche, 141-157) and in Paul de Man’s “Rhetoric of Tropes” (in hisAllegories of Reading, 103-119).

8 In unpunlished lecture notes contemporaneous with “On Truth and Lying,” Nietzsche explicitly claims that all language is both rhetorical and metaphorical (poetic): “language is rhetoric, because it desires to convey only a doxa [opinion], not an episteme [knowledge]” (23, brackets Gilman, Blair, and Parent); “What is usually called language is actually all figuration… the tropes are not just occasionally added to words but constitute their most proper nature” (25).

9 John Sallis’s Crossings: Nietzsche and the Space of Tragedy, especially 9-42, investigates in the context of a detailed analysis of The Birth of Tragedy the way that, for Nietzsche, images possess the ability to open up the specificity of the world in a particularly human manner.

10 In a similar fashion, Grassi points out the disguised metaphoricity operative in the ostensibly purely rational realm of logic (i.e., the realm of the scientist and many a philosopher): “One problem, however, seems yet unsolved, namely, that an essential moment of rhetorical speech is metaphor. Can we claim that the original, archaic assertions on which rational proofs depend have a metaphorical character? Can we maintain the thesis that the archai have any connection with images as the subject of a ‘transferred’ meaning? Surprisingly enough, perhaps, we can speak about first principles only though metaphors; we speak of them as ‘premises,’ as ‘grounds,’ as ‘foundations,’ as ‘axioms.’ Even logical language must resort to metaphors, involving a transposition from the empirical realm of senses, in which ‘seeing’ and the ‘pictorial’ move to the foreground: to ‘clarify,’ to ‘gain insight,’ to ‘found,’ to ‘conclude,’ to ‘deduce.’ We also must not forget that the term ‘metaphor’ is itself a metaphor; it is derived from the verb metapherein ‘to transfer,’ which originally described a concrete activity” (33).

Seamus Heaney's 'Death of a Naturalist'

Question(s): Is digging possible for a dead-naturalist?; or: How to dig from above the ground?; or: How can Antaeus best avoid his “elevation, [his] fall”?; or: Can the work of poetry (“I rhyme / To see myself, to set the darkness echoing”) turn up an imaginal ground when the poet himself is a physically ungrounded, struggling Antaeus?; or: Can poetry catch the fleeting sound of a mythical landscape (“the squelch and slap / Of soggy peat”) when the poet’s ears are plugged by a map of sociopolitical categories?; or: How does poetry proceed in/respond to a climate of what Yeats calls “intellectual violence”?

Despite its ostensible status as primarily a volume of ars poetica – a kind of imaginative excavation that simultaneously investigates and demonstrates the craft of poetry – Heaney’s Death of a Naturalist reverberates with the above variously articulated question. Though the violence in Northern Ireland to which Heaney would overtly respond in North was still a few years away when Heaney wrote Death of a Naturalist, latent political tension and a history of cultural dislocation were present in the soil worked in Heaney’s first volume of poetry. To put it another way: In Death of a Naturalist, Heaney is digging imaginary gardens of peat with real explosives in them. In response to a potentially volatile political situation, Heaney uses his squat pen to “dig” through personal and collective layers of memory in service of uncovering/creating a “personal Helicon,” a mythical Ireland that can serve as an imaginative ground for wandering – and increasingly threatened – Antaeuses: those for whom the oppositional, absolutist, grid-like logic of political ideology is not adequate for responsibly negotiating the contingencies of human life. As such, Death of a Naturalist reveals a characteristic of poetry missed by those critics who charge Heaney with irresponsibly shirking the political realm in some of his work: namely that, by creating

an order… true to the impact of external reality and… sensitive to the inner laws of the poet’s being… An order where we can at last grow up to that which we stored up as we grew. An order which satisfies all that is appetitive in the intelligence and prehensile in the affections (From “Crediting Poetry: The Nobel Lecture, in Opened Ground, pg. 417),

poetry touches upon a fundamental human activity – imagining reality – antithetical to violent political movements that require fixed views of reality in order to proceed with their bloody work. In short, poetry redresses the falsely narrow vision of political ideologies that view the world in static us-them/right-wrong terms.

Many of the poems in Death of a Naturalist both affirm the poetic vocation and express doubts as to its efficacy in a non-literary, gun-filled world. In “Digging,” even as the poet’s pen powerfully evokes three overlapping layers of time, bringing together in a single lyric moment three generations of diggers in the Heaney line (pardon the pun); and even amid the stunning onomatopoeia of “the squelch and slap / Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge” (note the placement of “edge” at the end (edge) of the slightly enjambed line), the poet hints that his work with words comes out of a felt lack, as if digging with a pen is somehow less “manly” than digging with a spade – “But I’ve no spade to follow men like them.”[1] The crisis of the poem turns upon the spade-less poet’s endeavor to find a way to “follow” ancestors at once personal and collective, ancestors who by digging into peat and bog are working a pre-political landscape, a mythical Ireland, an imaginal terrain. The final stanza provides an affirmation of the poet’s ability to work this terrain with his pen so as to unearth images of sensual specificity that nourish the collective inhabitants of a landscape. The poet discovers that joining his ancestors in digging occurs precisely through his ability to commemorate their – and his – activity: the poet digs by digging into the process of digging. The last three lines of the poem echo the opening stanza, with one change: “snug as a gun” in the first stanza gives way to “I’ll dig with it.” Thus at its end the poem both echoes its beginning and responds to it in such a way as to bring about a sense of resolution. One wonders: what else could the poet have done with his pen besides dig, and does the alternative to digging relate to the gun-like quality of the pen? In other words, is the declaration that “I’ll dig with it” a decision necessitated because the opening stanza obliquely raises a more violent alternative?

“Digging,” like Death of a Naturalist as a whole, poetically renders poetic craft. Part of this poetic rendering involves making thematic a tension concerning the role the poet can (should? must?) play when confronted with the threat of a form of violence that seeks to circumscribe personal memory and mythical landscape within reductive, factional categories. A distinction between, on the one hand, the attempt to dig into the reality-constructing wellsprings of the imagination, and on the other, the attempt to map reality rationally in the service of hierarchical sociopolitical projects (is this what a gun-like pen does?), is tentatively represented in Death of a Naturalist.[2]

---

[1] Granted, this line could be read in other ways. Instead of revealing an insecurity, or at least an uncertainty, in relation to poetry’s role(s) in the world, it may display the opposite sentiment. Much depends on how one reads the phrase, “men like them.” Based on the poem as a whole, which appears to express a sense of awe toward these digging men, I reject a reading that would see a derogatory quality to the poet’s assessment of his digging predecessors.

[2] In order to develop this notion I would need to spend more time with the poem “Death of a Naturalist” in particular. Violence – both in the forced dislocation of the frogspawn and in the resulting vengeful response of the frogs – plays a more overt role in this poem. Removing the frogspawn into a classroom to observe the burgeoning tadpoles echoes the violence of constructing/ manipulating sociopolitical categories. Also, “Antaeus” appears to touch upon the incipient violence involved in the abstracting, lifting-off-the-ground movement of “map thinking.”

Li-Young Lee's "This Room and Everything in It"

“it had something to do / with death… it had something / to do with love”: The Eroticism of Memory in “This Room and Everything in It”

Li-Young Lee’s “This Room and Everything in It” explores human memory as inherently erotic, in other words, as grounded in the restless vicissitudes of human desire. The act of memory figured in Lee’s poem involves the desire to transcend desire so as to reach a state of perfection in which the fundamental connection between love and death can be remembered. In the end, though, desire slips through memory’s fragile constructions and resumes its pre-rational primacy in the “room” that is human life.

The principal trope at work in “This Room and Everything in It” centers upon the ancient art of memory, the practice of utilizing a multifaceted, imaginatively complex topos in which to store various items or facts wished to be remembered. The memorial topos, in addition to featuring a “room” of some sort – an internal dwelling through which the person practicing the art of memory could move in imagination, associating the items to be remembered with the unchanging characteristics of the room – also commonly involved a fully developed cosmology in which various divine figures were utilized as mnemonic objects. This ancient art reveals the inherent bi-directional connection between imagination and memory: humans imagine so as to remember and remember so as to imagine. In Lee’s poem, however, the art of memory, “the one thing I learned / of all the things my father tried to teach me” (49), proceeds in a seemingly inverse manner. Rather than starting with the general and unchanging, and imaginatively associating concrete particulars with it, the speaker in the poem starts with fleeting, individual erotic moments – the very moments that one would think would need to be remembered rather than would serve as the imaginative ground for an art of memory! When the speaker proclaims that “I am letting this room / and everything in it / stand for my ideas about love / and its difficulties” (49), the room and everything in it is not an architectural but an erotic space:

I’ll let your love-cries,

those spacious notes

of a moment ago,

stand for distance.

Your scent,

that scent

of spice and a wound,

I’ll let stand for mystery.

Your sunken belly

is the daily cup

of milk I drank

as a boy before morning prayer. (49)

In the traditional art of memory, various “ideas about love,” personified as gods or goddesses, would often serve as mnemonic devices; in Lee’s poem, though, ideas about love are the items that the poet wishes to remember: specifically, “distance,” “mystery,” and some idea figured in “the daily cup / of milk I drank / as a boy before morning prayer.” By reversing the associative direction of the art of memory, Lee’s poem seems to suggest that if memory itself arises out of desire, then desire can only be remembered in the form of “ideas” that allow memory the means of getting beyond its own ground so as to articulate it.

The speaker’s art of memory ostensibly comes about so that “one day, when I need / to tell myself something intelligent / about love, / I’ll close my eyes / and recall this room and everything in it” (50). On a deeper level, though, the speaker’s activity seems to be in service of fixing (i.e., making permanent) the exultation of desire that is possible in physical love: “My body is estrangement. / This desire, perfection.” In other words, the speaker marshals various “ideas about love” so as to remember the longed-for self-oblivion of physical love: the speaker longs to remember that at times of physical passion he is capable of forgetting himself. This is the “greater idea” that the speaker seeks to inscribe in and through his various ideas of love. If memory succeeds for a moment in remembering the mystery of physical passion – a mystery that “ha[s] something to do / with death… something / to do with love” – soon enough the memory is gone and must be re-discovered. This necessity of re-membering physical passion stems, according to the insight offered by Lee’s poem, from the inherent eroticism of memory, from its inseparability from human desire.

Now I’ve forgotten my

idea. The book

on the windowsill, riffled by wind…

the even-numbered pages are

the past, the odd-

numbered pages, the future.

The sun is

God, your body is milk…

useless, useless…

your cries are song, my body’s not me…

no good… my idea

has evaporated… your hair is time, your thighs are song…

it had something to do

with death… it had something

to do with love.

By the poem’s end, memory appears scattered, forgetful of or at least blurring its prior associations: both the lover’s cries and thighs become song. Desire seems to have collapsed the formerly clear ideational associations that memory had made vis-à-vis physical passion, and thus desire must in a sense remember itself anew.

Poetry Sunday

Today I'd like to honor the great Lawrence Durrell, that mercurial "assassin of polish," by sharing two of his better poems. "Bitter Lemons" speaks for itself, while "Style," which I've often used in my teaching to introduce freshman to the study of poetry, is a delightful bit of ars poetica.

BITTER LEMONS

In an island of bitter lemons

Where the moon's cool fevers burn

From the dark globes of the fruit,

And the dry grass underfoot

Tortures memory and revises

Habits half a lifetime dead

Better leave the rest unsaid,

Beauty, darkness, vehemence

Let the old sea-nurses keep

Their memorials of sleep

And the Greek sea's curly head

Keep its calms like tears unshed

Keep its calms like tears unshed.

STYLE

Something like the sea,

Unlaboured momentum of water

But going somewhere,

Building and subsiding,

The busy one, the loveless.

Or the wind that slits

Forests from end to end,

Inspiriting vast audiences,

Ovations of leafy hands,

Accepting, accepting.

But neither is yet

Fine enough for the line I hunt.

The dry bony blade of the

Sword-grass might suit me

Better: an assassin of polish.

Such a bite of perfect temper

As unwary fingers provoke,

Not to be felt till later,

Turning away, to notice the thread

Of blood from its unfelt stroke.

The Return of Led Zeppelin

Critics and fans alike are universally praising as a rousing success the most anticipated reunion gig in rock history, Led Zeppelin's ostensibly one-off performance Monday night at the O2 in London. Joined by the son of deceased drummer John Bonham, the three surviving members of the original quartet romped through a two-hour set and miraculously managed to live up to the mythic expectations of both aged Zep-head baby boomers and youthful converts. In an age dominated by bubble-gum pop and innocuous computer-manufactured sound -- three-minute shots of catchy mediocrity to import into one's iPod -- there's undoubtedly something exhilarating about the Robert-Johnson-on-acid primal thunder of Jimmy Page (it's easy to forget, when marveling at the sheer muscularity of Zep's recorded output, that the band features only one lead/rhythm guitar player!) and the libido-unloosed pomp of Robert Plant. And face it, for sheer spectacle value, a Zeppelin gig at this stage of the game is hard to beat: Can Robert Plant, now a grandfather, still pull off wailing about giving every inch of his love? Can Zeppelin, the band whose mammoth popularity paved the way for every Spinal-Tap rock-band cliche, overcome the seemingly inevitable fate of self-parody? (That the Led Zeppelin mythos has reached absurdly large proportions, observe that Wikipedia has an entire entry devoted to the infamous shark episode).

Apparently the answer to both questions is yes, as "Whole Lotta Love" exhilaratingly exploded from the stage during the band's first encore, and "Stairway to Heaven" -- a song whose hyper-overexposure has transformed it from mystical ineffability to pretentious comedy -- actually somehow sounded fresh. I can comment on all this because, like an estimated half a million other people, I watched the morning-after fan-filmed clips that dutifully appeared on YouTube -- only to be removed by Warner music group, then placed back on, then removed again, ad infinitum. And this brings me to the real crux of what I want to say about Zeppelin. In the wake of this overwhelmingly successful return, as they face immense pressure from fans and critics alike to take the show on the road for a world tour that industry execs estimate would be the biggest tour in rock history (the band would reportedly earn a minimum of 300 million dollars), Plant, Page, and Jones once again confront the paradox of Led Zeppelin: from the beginning of their fame in the late sixties, the band's explosive popular success has been both a response to and a perversion of what is truly special about Led Zeppelin.

In the midst of the psychedelic late sixties and early seventies, drug-drenched hippie self-exploration and social activism merged with a sudden pastoral fantasy of return -- decidedly not a Rockwellian return to conventional values and comforting archetypes, but a mystical and myth-soaked longing to uncover the hidden roots of culture in the marginal, the problematic, the strange (what Greil Marcus, writing about Bob Dylan's Basement Tapes, calls "the old, weird America"). Bob Dylan likely set this pastoral turn in motion, rebelling against the prescribed role of social savior with scandalously-plugged-in high modernism (Highway 61 Revisited, Blonde on Blonde), and then, as if rebelling against his own rebelling, secluding himself in rural upstate New York with his touring band (the band that would later become The Band) and plunging into obscure blues and folk material, and the Bible. A critique of a psychedelic hippie culture that itself was becoming conventional, the music that Dylan and The Band made in the basement of Big Pink (among other places) sounded as scratchy and strange as the mysterious, remarkably influential six-album Anthology of American Folk Music put together by Harry Smith in 1952 (Smith, by the way, whose parents read Madame Blavatsky and described themselves as pantheist theosophists, was a lifelong occultist, and his work as an ethnomusicologist attempted to locate within forgotten American folk and blues recordings a nascent mystical spirituality). Out of the occult laboratory of that Big Pink basement ultimately came The Band's debut, Music From Big Pink, one of the greatest albums of the sixties, an album -- along with the bootlegged Basement Tapes -- that was heard by British folk-rock groups and in turn inspired their own culture-specific pastoral creations: most notably Fairport Convention's Liege and Lief and the Kink's Village Green Preservation Society. Taken as a whole, the pastoral turn that arose out of and to some extent in rebellion against psychedelia (nota bene: drugs still played a decided role in various bands' pastoral explorations -- witness The Band's Robbie Robertson describing the Basement recordings as "a period of reefer run amok") led to some of the most moving, inventive music of the period, even if the pastoral turn itself would inevitably become all-too-conventional and hackneyed (two words: The Eagles).

Tracing lines of musical influence is of course a critical abstraction, as is naming as "pastoral" a no-doubt multifaceted phenomenon in late-sixties music. But, since every perception and insight in the world at large is made possible only by perceptual/intellectual "fictions," so an engagement with music history must proceed by means of critical fictions. Regardless, the above digression was necessary because I believe that Led Zeppelin is indeed most fruitfully appreciated when located within such a pastoral line. "Led Zeppelin" is what happens when American folk and blues influences (Blind Lemon Jefferson, Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters, etc., etc.) are blended with hippie psychedelic sensibilities, British/Celtic pastoral mysticism, rockabilly, classical music, and 1970's excess. There is thus a cultural and imaginative depth to Led Zeppelin that highbrow rock critics of the 70's frequently overlooked precisely because the band was so annoyingly popular (nothing bothers highbrow critics -- this one included -- like commercial success). Of course, Led Zeppelin's depth is not primarily a lyrical depth -- one does not find much sophisticated verbal wit in Zeppelin -- but neither is the strange, mystical allure of early American blues and folk recordings -- an allure codified by the likes of Harry Smith -- based on intellectual verbal sophistication. Indeed, the best of American rhythm and blues is decidedly a folk phenomenon, exuding a carnivalesque melange of coarse sexual innuendo, earthy imagery, and common-man idioms that intellectualists of all periods seem irresistibly drawn toward. Led Zeppelin, like the American folk-blues tradition as a whole, appeals to the thinking man by offering a non-verbal poetry that is based on an energy -- primarily of the earth, of the body -- that points to the same pre-linguistic mystery that, paradoxically, language both arises from and reaches toward. Pushed to the limit, thinking turns into poetry, which turns into music, which, if expressing both the roots and wings of human yearning, rocks.

Pre-linguistic mystery is of course the traditional concern of religion, and, interestingly enough, a common characteristic of the musical strand I am here outlining is its reliance upon spiritual traditions of anti-tradition. If Christianity is after all based on the Word, in other words, on the attempt to spiritualize linguistic appropriation of mystery, the marginal, heterodox spiritual influences at work in the blues-folk-rock tradition tend to the hermetic, the alchemical, the gnostic -- the attempt to use the raw materials of the imagination and the world itself to reveal the hidden spiritual depths that transcend language (including the generative language of the Master Linguist, the All-Good Creator God). Lest you think this far-fetched, as if I'm here artificially importing a scholar's interest in the occult into rock history, consider the fact that, in the early 70's, Jimmy Page, the mastermind behind Led Zeppelin, owned an occult bookshop and publishing house in London -- Equinox Booksellers and Publishers -- that specialized in alchemical lore and the Kabbalah. Furthermore, according to Wikipedia, "Page owned the Boleskine House, the former residence of occultist Aleister Crowley." In other words, Page, whose guitar mastery has frequently been associated with black magic, demonstrated during the peak of Led Zeppelin a more than passing interest in the occult.

All of these facets of Page, Plant and company tend to get obscured and even perverted by Zeppelin's massive popularity: the blues tradition of graphic sexual innuendo becomes a crude expression of adolescent, misogynistic machismo; a legitimate interest in the occult becomes easily-parodied airy (empty) mysticism; the energizing depth of the music is flattened out because of excessive airplay. Page and Plant themselves seem aware of this. Indeed, check out the various interviews of Page and Plant available on YouTube (e.g., Plant on Charlie Rose). If anything can dispel the tendency to reduce Zeppelin to the challenged mental capacities of many of their stoner, head-banging fans, it's the shocking articulateness of the two men at the center of the band: these are wise men who would make fascinating dinner companions. So, would a massive world tour further pervert what is special about Led Zeppelin, or somehow clarify it? I suspect the former, and it would seem so does Robert Plant. When asked shortly before the big reunion concert about the prospects of cashing-in with a world tour, Plant remarked: "The whole idea of being on a cavalcade of merciless repetition is not what it's all about."

One thing is certain: If Led Zeppelin's mass popularity remains a misunderstanding and perversion of the band's actual complexity, the group's enduring appeal after all these years results because there is more to Zeppelin than proto-heavy-metal screeching.

On an internet forum that I happened upon, a voice of caution spoke up to calm the frenzy of enthusiasm being expressed in the wake of the Zeppelin reunion concert. "Sorry, people, but it's not possible to go back home," the voice soberly warned. "I used to like Led Zeppelin, but then I grew up. You should too." This warning is to the point, though it misses something. It of course isn't possible to make it back home, and part of one's maturity is to recognize this hard existential fact. Nevertheless, if the recent return of Led Zeppelin proves anything, it's that home, even if forever unreachable, is still there -- an English castle shimmering in the mist, full of "fairy-goddess devil women" (to quote the recent LA Times piece about Zeppelin), wailing blues guitar, and the primal energy of sexual and spiritual mysteries. If you squint really hard, and remain open to the occasional "bustle in your hedgerow," you can see it.

Incomplete Transactions: Marianne Moore's "When I Buy Pictures"

Incomplete Transactions: The Meditative Gaze in “When I Buy Pictures”

In Poetry and Criticism, Marianne Moore borrows from Joseph Conrad in an attempt to articulate the complex matrix of language, perception, and imagination that constitutes the human soul as an inherently creative reality inventing fictions in and through which to recognize both the world and itself:

“Seeing, and saying;—language is a special extension of the power of seeing, inasmuch as it can make visible not only the already visible world; but through it the invisible world of relations and affinities.” The world of the soul? Deficient as it is to define the soul, “creativeness” is perhaps as near a definition as we can get. (in Costello, 137)

For Moore, seeing and saying are part of one indissoluble imaginative act; rather than language functioning to report upon an already constituted experience, language exists as the experiential ground of the ever-circulating “relations and affinities” beneath all human fashionings of the “real.” Objectivity and subjectivity merge, for Moore, as saying it as one sees it becomes inseparable from seeing it as one says it. Language thus serves as the means of connection to oneself, others, and the world, even while it prohibits, due to its intermediary status, any direct, univocal, static knowledge.

The creative base of perception finds expression not only in the meta-poetic musings of Moore’s critical essays but also in her overall poetic project. Indeed, that prefix meta- becomes redundant, as Moore’s poetry is always simultaneously reflecting and reflecting upon its reflecting. An example of this self-reflexivity is Moore’s “When I Buy Pictures,” a poem that in its form and content demonstrates the doubleness, duplicity, and “creativeness” inherent in perception.

In the context of “When I Buy Pictures,” the concrete act of buying a picture becomes a trope for the act of perception itself. More specifically: the notion of buying a picture as a means of owning it functions as an analogue for a certain kind of perception in which appropriation of the thing perceived is the ultimate goal of the perceiver. The quest to master a concrete object through the human act of perception is, for Moore, not close enough to the ambiguous truth of the actual transaction between self and world. Instead, the opening lines of the poem serve as a foil for the notion of ownership implied in buying pictures:

or what is closer to the truth,

when I look at that of which I may regard myself as the

imaginary possessor,

Being an “imaginary possessor” of a picture – a perception – is quite different from literally possessing it; it implies an unavoidable go-between separating self and world, so that imaginary possession (possession of something by or through the imagination) becomes the most complete act of possession/perception possible. Though an object can be approached, approximated, and enjoyed in its unmasterable otherness, it can never be fully owned by the human subject who buys it. Also important in these opening lines are the two simultaneous forms of looking presented by the speaker of the poem. The speaker describes both looking at an object and looking at herself looking at it: “when I look at that of which I may regard myself as the / imaginary possessor…” In these lines “look” and “regard” occur as two parts of one complex act of seeing in which the speaker discovers both herself and an object – discovers them not in their separateness but in the mysterious place where they collude and collide. Of course, a third form of looking going on in the poem involves the reader’s gaze into the language that, through its simultaneous mirroring and projecting, contains the other forms of looking and makes imaginary possession a “visible” reality.

Does this imply a Romantic form of solipsism in which the human self swallows up the outer world in the act of perception (buying and eating both at once in a kind of capitalistic cannibalism)? The speaker of the poem, in elaborating the nature of her looking, appears to suggest this:

I fix upon what would give me pleasure in my average moments:

the satire upon curiosity in which no more is discernible

than the intensity of the mood,

The “intensity of the mood,” the flights and fancies of the speaker’s subjectivity, constitutes the limits of the discernible. However, this Romantic form of vision is immediately contradicted in the lines that follow, thus subtly bringing into question the precise location of subjectivity. Is mood a quality of a person or of a thing? Does the speaker fix upon the intensity of the mood

or quite the opposite – the old thing, the medieval decorated

hat-box

in which there are hounds with waists diminishing like the

waist of the hour-glass,

and deer and birds and seated people;

The speaker of the poem moves from regarding herself looking to examining the thing itself looked at, in this case the “medieval decorated / hat-box.” This quick, somewhat contradictory movement from one form of looking to another is common in Moore’s poetry. The move from the intensity of the mood to the “old thing” presents a shift that resists easy accommodation (appropriation) by the reader eager to understand the poem’s twistings and turnings in a logical manner. The poem presents two contrasting ways of seeing seeing that nevertheless cannot be torn asunder. To put this within the content of the poem: the speaker can only perceive herself seeing, and experience the mood attendant upon this act of seeing, in and through the concrete hat-box that she sees; and vice versa: the hat-box is only seen because she can regard herself looking at it. The intensity of the mood thus resides both in the speaker and in the hat-box itself. But there is more to the hat-box, and more to the poem, than mere epistemological musing.

Unlike the formal syllabic structure of many of Moore’s poems, “When I Buy Pictures” features unstructured free-verse that approaches prose. Also, unlike Moore’s best known poems, her complex meditations upon various animals (sleekly subtle ones like the jerboa and the plummet basilisk), “When I Buy Pictures” appears to focus more overtly on perception itself as the object of the poem. Due to these characteristics of structure and content, it is tempting to take “When I Buy Pictures” as a kind of philosophical treatise, as poetic theory thinly disguised as poetry. However, the odd list of things that follows the intrusion of the hat-box into the poem works against abstraction and creates the pleasure of bafflement that Moore prizes: the bafflement of the reader confronting the enigmatic movement of the mind amid the things of the world:

it may be no more than a square of parquetry; the literal

biography perhaps,

in letters standing well apart upon a parchment-like expanse;

an artichoke in six varieties of blue; the snipe-legged

hieroglyphic in three parts;

the silver fence protecting Adam’s grave, or Michael taking

Adam by the wrist.

Alas, Moore’s bestiary steps into this poem as well – from the earlier-mentioned hounds, deer, and birds to the description of the hieroglyphic as “snipe-legged”; and the “literal biography” is written on a parchment-like expanse – parchment originally refers to the skin of a sheep, goat, or other animal, prepared for writing on. For Moore the animals of the imagination figure into so-called literal life, and perhaps the imagination itself can be figured as a subtle animal leaping and bounding amid the interstices of human perception and language. And then comes Adam, the first human charged with bringing language to bear (so to speak) on his perception of the animals.

This complex list, introduced after the dash following “or quite the opposite,” serves as an antidote dashing the subjective mind’s illusion of mastery over the things it perceives. The list of things demands of the mind numerous associative leaps to make sense of it. As described above, the list can lead to considerations regarding the relationship of the literal and the figurative; in addition, Adam’s grave and “Michael taking / Adam by the wrist” introduces an allegorical dimension relating to the fall and to Adam viewing the history – the “literal biography” – of humanity. How exactly, though, does all this relate to “an artichoke in six varieties of blue”? Here the poem frustrates intellectual maneuvering. The meanings circulating around the list of things are potentially inexhaustible and the associations forever incomplete, though at the same time they are precisely delimited by the things found in the list. In the end, the reader is left with the things staring back at him, aware of the inherent double vision that constitutes human perception. The blue artichoke, the snipe-legged hieroglyphic, and the silver fence prohibit the poem from being reducible to diagrammatical philosophical assumptions; indeed, their insistent stare makes the poem itself a totem object provoking questions rather than answers to the enigma of human perception. No single meaning or conclusion inheres in the poem, though it appears to urge readers to look and look again, to look into one’s looking so as to see one’s reflection in the things of the world. It does this through language, which serves as a medium for seeing into seeing without disrupting the puzzling and provocative fluidity of perception.

In line with all this, the poem continues:

Too stern an intellectual emphasis upon this quality or that

detracts from one’s enjoyment.

It must not wish to disarm anything; nor may the approved

triumph easily be honored –

that which is great because something else is small.

Here Moore grounds perception (or picture looking/buying) not in understanding but in enjoyment: the eye responds to beauty rather than logical consistency. Further, Moore implies that the ultimate failure of intellectual understanding provides the enjoyment inherent in the act of looking (and reading). The elusiveness of the things of the world creates the enjoyment that sparks the interest to look at them and formulate this looking in language. In addition, Moore anticipates deconstruction by at least thirty years in seeking to displace any standard interpretation (“the approved / triumph”) invisibly based on hierarchical ordering (“that which is great because something else is small”).

The final lines of the poem brilliantly embody the quiddity of poetic looking and the double-gaze inherent in perception:

It comes to this: of whatever sort it is,

it must be “lit with piercing glances into the life of things”;

it must acknowledge the spiritual forces which have made it.

If the perception that Moore favors is “‘lit with piercing glances into the life of things,’” it therefore involves looking at an object while simultaneously seeing the object looking back. This double look in turn involves the imagination, which provides associations and fills in the gaps between the always elusive, never-finally-graspable things of the world. This process of imaginative vision is revealed in content and process in Moore’s pithy line: though the quotation marks enclosing it mark it as a source lifted from another context (Moore’s notes confirm this), they also mark the line itself as double, capable of existing in this context even while it can be lifted into another one. In other words, the line itself looks back at the poem, and therefore the reader, through its quotation marks.

“When I Buy Pictures” is a tour de force enactment of the kind of vision Moore is engaged in repeatedly throughout her poetry. Perhaps more overtly than in other poems, however, it also demonstrates the similarity between the poet’s project and the reader’s reading of it. Language as an organ of perception connects both writer and reader as they seek to glimpse the movement of the mind in its engagement with an ever-fleeting world in which it is always immersed. This act of imaginative perception through language involves a spiritual dimension – “it must acknowledge the spiritual forces which have made it.” Looking into the things of the world to glimpse the fleeting sparks of spirit that animate them and mysteriously connect them to the human requires a meditative gaze content with partial knowing. Moore contrasts this meditative approach to the world with the hard, level gaze of ownership that is blind to the piercing glance of its own subjective fantasy of objectivity looking back at it from the uncontainable things of the world.

Works Cited

Costello, Bonnie. Marianne Moore: Imaginary Possessions. Cambridge, MA: Harvard

University Press, 1981

A Dirty Saint

I've just stumbled upon an astonishing eulogy that Leonard Cohen delivered upon David Blue's untimely death in 1982. For those of you who don't know, by the way, Blue, whom I've been listening to recently, was a folkie who came of age in the same Greenwich Village scene that spawned Bob Dylan. Though typically viewed as a mere Dylan wannabe (Blue's albums in the sixties undeniably sound like they're trying to sound like Blonde on Blonde), Blue is somewhat more complicated than that -- if Blue is indeed imitating Dylan, his peer and friend, he's after all imitating a master imitator. Regardless, for an introduction to Blue, check out the title cut from his These 23 Days in September (1968), a song that masterfully utilizes a strategically-placed sitar part to evoke in words and music an occult-reading, candle-lighting Durrellian heroine (troubled and sexy, and no doubt smelling slightly of patchouli).

Cohen's eulogy, as a eulogy, stuns me. I'll certainly be writing more about Cohen in this blog, but for now this unexpected find serves as a fitting introduction. Here is a part of it:

David Blue was the peer of any singer in this country, and he knew it, and he coveted their audiences and their power, he claimed them as his rightful due. And when he could not have them, his disappointment became so dazzling, his greed assumed such purity, his appetite such honesty, and he stretched his arms so wide, that we were all able to recognize ourselves, and we fell in love with him. And as we grew older, as something in the public realm corrupted itself into irrelevance, the integrity of his ambition, the integrity of his failure, became for those who knew him, increasingly appealing, and he moved swiftly, with effortless intimacy, into the private life of anyone who recognized him, and our private lives became for him the theaters that no one would book for him, and he sang for us in hotel rooms and kitchens, and he became that poet and that gambler, and he established a defiant style to revive those soiled archetypes.

What a thrill to read a eulogy that, rather than relying on saccharine-drenched platitudes, evokes a flesh-and-blood human being striving for a little bit of complicated transcendence. Granted, an artist is here writing about another artist (and thus inevitably also about himself), but we are all of us artists of a sort, and covetousness, disappointment, greed, appetite, ambition, failure, defiance -- this is the stuff of the human condition when looked at unflinchingly, the prima materia inseparable from purity, honesty, integrity, intimacy. (I'm getting these interrelated sets of terms straight from Cohen's words.) This is not Bill Bennett elegizing a puritanical conception of virtue that cuts the latter set of highly ethical attributes away from the former set of problematic qualities, for, in Cohen's book of virtues, greed and appetite can never be wrested away from purity and integrity. As Cohen's lyrics do so well, this little eulogy plays a serious game with language so as to open up an experience of the amoral, ever-shifting ground of human gravitas. One comes away feeling a bit more alive, which, paradoxically, also means a bit closer to death. Indeed, it is of special note that Cohen's words come in response to the death of a friend. In a culture that treats death either as a dark enemy to be exercised or medicalized away, or as a dogmatically understood otherworldly highway to eternal bliss, it's no doubt important to remember that "death is the mother of beauty," an un-deconstructable mystery much larger than any system of thought that seeks to contain it. To walk around with one's eyes and entire body and brain open to death -- one's own and the person's across the room -- may be the major means of approach to all that can be momentarily majestic about human nature. It may be, as Cohen's words imply, a significant way of falling in love, and of recognizing oneself in the process. And if we never, while alive, escape the painful struggle with the tension that Cohen finds in David Blue, perhaps an ethically responsible life manages to embrace such a complicated alchemy of human desire, an existence on the front lines of one's own life. Anyway, there's some comfort in knowing that, in death, one's own greedy, defiant purity can be seen, precisely in its reckless failure, as a kind of nobility.

Here's Cohen these days, in two pictures I've pilfered from a blog created by some young admirers wishing to memorialize an evening with the man and his current muse, the singer/songwriter Anjani (seen in the second picture). Need I mention that, where Thanatos goes, Eros is never far behind.