Southern Bookman

Farewell Alex Karras, with memories of George Plimpton and "Paper Lion"

I just happened to see a web page report that Detroit Lions and later TV star Alex Karras has died. I associate Karras, the Lions' all-pro defensive lineman in the1960s, with one of my best childhood reading experiences, George Plimpton's "Paper Lion."

My parents subscribed for a time to the Book of the Month Club, and one of the hardbacks that arrived in a form fitted cardboard box was Plimpton's account of trying out for quarterback with the Lions. The zany Karras, who took to playing made up comic Nazi characters to ward off training camp boredom, was a star of the book, one of the first hits in the emerging literary sports-book genre. I can still remember the book's dust jacket, with a photo of the shaggy-haired Plimpton in his Lions uniform, No. 0, as I recall. Plimpton discussed his humiliation at trying to play quarterback for the Lions, who good naturedly accepted him, finishing with an account of his actual appearance in an exhibition game. The book was one of the first "New Journalism" works I read and remains one of the best.

Karras later starred in the movie version of the book, launching him on his acting career highlighted by the TV show "Webster." In the show, he and his TV wife adopted a black kid. I have a few impressions of the show, including that I had a mini-crush on the woman who played his TV wife.

I also knew Karras from my father's subscription to Sports Illustrated; he along with the Packers' Paul Hornung was suspended for a year by NFL Commissioner Pete Rozelle for gambling ties. That was one of the big sports stories of the early '60s. I also recall Karras from another memorable childhood experience, watching on Thanksgiving Day as the Lions upset the undefeated Packers, totally dominating the Pack in one of the most amazing sporting events of my youth. Back then, the NFL always delivered unexpected excitement.

 The Packers went on to finish that season with only one loss. I don't remember if they played in the first Super Bowl that year, or whether that came later, and just winning the NFL championship was the thing. While I liked the Packers, the Bears and other NFL teams, I really loved the AFL, to me the most exciting football ever played.

When I was a kid reading Plimpton's account of trying out for the Lions, little did I know that Plimpton was the Paris Review's editor, and that I would later have a lifelong adult readership of the journal. At several times in my life, beginning in my college days, I have subscribed to the PR, and have continued reading it ever since. I've read many memoirs about Plimpton's New York and Paris literary days, but my  favorite  memory of him will always be as the New York writer seeking to play quarterback for the Lions. Farewell, Alex, who came to life in Plimpton's book, a great literary character as well as a great player and a fine comic actor.

An Affecting Portrait of Robert Lowell, New England Society

A few weeks ago, The New Yorker ran a piece by a writer I'd never heard of, Sarah Payne Stuart, about buying houses in the old, history-drenched town of Concord, Mass. One of our most memorable vacations included a stay in Concord, where the first shot of the Revolution was fired, and where Emerson, Thoreau and the Alcotts lived. Stuart delighted me with her lilting, ironic-funny voice. I did a Google search and discovered that she was a member of Robert Lowell's family and had written a memoir about him and his relatives called, "My Cousin, Once Removed."

I ordered the book on Amazon; sorry, independent booksellers. Despite its unimaginative, vanity press-sounding title. the book is a valuable contribution to Robert Lowell studies. As a longtime lover of Lowell's poetry, fascinated by his tortured, manic-depressive life, I savored each word of Stuart's memoir. Along with a sympathetic-repelled portrait of Lowell, she also amusingly slices up Thoreau's work, along with the Concord tourist hype surrounding him. I'll never think of Thoreau in the same way again. Her wry resistance to Walden romanticism is a bracing, if eventually secondary, part of the book.

Stuart, whose claims of not understanding Lowell's poems are a frequent refrain, deftly devastates his work, especially his early, clotted poems. While highly affectionate about Lowell, picturing him as an emotionally pampered, fragile genius at family gatherings, she shows "Bobby" as a perpetual lost adolescent, if that far advanced emotionally. While she shows glimpses of Lowell, nicknamed "Cal" for either Caligula or Caliban, as the self-centered bullying brute oft depicted, her final passages reveal him as a tender, compassionate man, especially with female members of his family. He is shown having a particular kindness to younger kinfolk, such as Stuart herself.

The author's subtitle about madness, money and Lowell's family is apt; money and madness are the poles of the family's long decline, although Stuart's generation, while losing the family inheritance, shows a new creative energy. Lowell's often incapacitating disease was a family curse, at least of the old New England Lowell and Devereux families, if not of the Winslows who married into them. Stuart gives fascinating glimpses through generational studies of all three interconnected families. Stuart's own mother, Lowell's first cousin, like Lowell also spent time in mental hospitals, and Stuart's brother also inherited the mental imbalance. Along with bittersweet laughter, Stuart shows the pathos of such gifted people continually struck by crippling mental breakdowns. Her brother, called Johnny here, is the gifted musician John Payne, who played on Van Morrison's "Astral Weeks," and performed with other musicians and now operates an innovative music-education center in Brookline, Mass. Johnny, who shared time with Robert Lowell at the upper class mental hospital McLeans, was later thrust into the crueler public hospital Mass. Mental. A series of electric shock treatments ended Johnny's breakdowns, along with his higher creativity; when Stuart points out that Lowell's breakdowns continued until his early death, I wondered why electroshock wasn't tried on him, although it might have crippled his late burst of poetic power.

Along with her brilliant insights into mental illness, Stuart shows deep understanding of the dynamics of "old money." Most of the money in the book belongs to the eccentric "Uncle Cot," who married Stuart's Aunt Sarah, a major character in the book. "Uncle Cot" is not a blood member of the family, but is a central figure in its existence. With Stuart's mother achieving a personal liberation through opposition to the Vietnam War, and Stuart and her brothers showing a 1960s swing to the left, Uncle Cot ends up leaving his fortune to a museum instead of the new generation, although the museum keeps most of his artwork and furniture in storage. Stuart gives a heart rending cry about the loss of the family wealth: couldn't we have said to Uncle Cot that we were just kidding? 

The history of the tragic-comic families, if sometimes confusing with all of the similar first names, is a fine corollary to Lowell's own "Life Studies." Stuart, a novelist, gives a memorable gallery of characters, especially the families' strong-willed, eccentric women, particularly Aunt Sarah and Lowell's mother, Charlotte. Stuart's mother, Jackie, is another heart-rending force in the narrative. New England and Boston society and its long decline are memorably reflected in the personal lives of Stuart's relatives, with whom she ruefully claims kinship. The author expertly balances the inner geometries of different marriages, including her own, and father-daughter-son relationships. While deftly skewering her family's pretensions and personal foibles, she also shows a fierce loyalty, borne of long traditions and culture as well as blood. 

Stuart is one of the all-too-rare writers these days who understands the power of understatement, the well-chosen right word. At the end of summer, I'm happy to have discovered a new writer whose work I'll continue to anticipate. Her final paragraphs are one of the most beautiful, heart-breaking endings I've encountered in quite a while. Stuart's portrait of Lowell, his tortured wives Jean Stafford, Elizabeth Hardwick and Lady Caroline Blackwell, and his family will make re-readings of his poems even more enriching. Published several years ago, and recognized as a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, Stuart's book deserves recognition as a classic family history and memoir.

A Trip to San Francisco

I've just returned from that exquisitely literary city, San Francisco, where I quickly made my pilgrammage to the Beat cathedral, City Lights Books, in a racy North Beach area. My son accompanied me, and I proudly showed him Jack Kerouac Alley next to Lawrence Ferlinghetti's book-jammed spot. Seeing Saint Jack's sign and standing in the soft West Coast light, I felt a momentary wash of emotion, a mourning for the lost days of freedom and hope that Kerouac captured.

Inside, my son was amused by the sections devoted to radical politics and writing. I found a book on Jimmy Rodgers, the old Mississippi singing brakeman, surprised that my interest in old roots music would be met by City Lights, which I place in another literary/intellectual/artistic realm than country and western. Goes to show the universality of the City Lights collection, quite an anachronism these days, but quite common at independent bookstores back 30 years ago.

City Lights is also an excellent press; and I purchased a nice City Lights poetry anthology. After making my purchases, I saw a new book by the great guitarist Ry Cooder, a short story collection called "Los Angeles Stories," published by City Lights, but didn't buy it right then. Later, at another bookstore, this one located on Second Street downtown, I did buy it to take home with me.

With all of its tomes on anarchism, socialism and the like, City Lights is a capitalist place. I pointed out to my son a book on type and fonts that I had read, checking it out of the library, and he, a type wonk, decided to buy it, then complained over and over about its $30 cost. 

My son wasn't impressed when we returned outside and I pointed out to him the nearby Hungry I, once the center of the cutting edge standup comics like Mort Sahl and Lenny Bruce. I was happy to see the old spot, assuming that it still gives a forum for comedians, poets and musicians. A few days later, we happened on a cool spot called Melt, where we listed to jazz for several hours from two different bands, the first a trio and the second a packed tightly together group with piano, bass, sax, guitar, two drummers, and a guy playing trumpet and French horn. Each group had a musician playing standup bass, a wonderful instrument.

The spirit of Dashiell Hammett and Sam Spade floated in the cool bay breeze when I sat at a sidewalk spot drinking coffee and saw a sign above a storefront advising that here was the office of a private eye. Our companion, a resident of the neighborhood, said the P.I. had left a few years ago, but in my mind I was already forming the detective novel about the place. San Francisco is one of those magical places that inspires writing. 

Buzz Bissinger's "Father's Day"

Buzz Bissinger's "Father's Day" presents an engaging portrait of Bissinger's severely disabled son, Zach. The "Friday Night Lights" author's book recounts a cross-country trip Bissinger made with Zach several years ago. Bissinger says he suggested the trip in an effort to grow closer to his son, who suffered brain damage when born prematurely. Zach, whose twin brother born three minutes earlier has achieved a normal life, has profound intellectual weaknesses yet possesses an eerily omniscient memory. He's able to remember years later complete details of what happened on a certain day in the past.

Bissinger has little original to add to the road narrative template, repeating well-worn cliches about the uniformity of American places along the interstate and the freedom of the open road. His attempts at colorful figures of speech turn purplish, and often feel forced. The ride is short on true drama: in one incident, Bissinger loses and refinds a camera bag, with Zach's help. This doesn't exactly rival Tolstoy. In response to Zach's desire to return to remembered places from the past, the route is haphazard, going from Philadelphia to Chicago and Milwaukee, south to the Odessa, Texas, of "Friday Night Lights" fame, then to an ill-considered stop in Las Vegas and the finale in Los Angeles. The places remain flat and indistinct. Through it all, Bissinger recounts his own failings and successes, and childhood memories.

The book gains comic and dramatic force from Bissinger showing his impaired son as often more mature and competent than him. Bissinger is unflinchingly honest in presenting his own weaknesses. The interplay between the author and the son carries the book, although at times the emotional register doesn't reach further than the "I Love You Man" sentiments of the old beer commercial.

With all of the "Father's Day's" weaknesses, the book possesses a compulsive readability. Zach, with his unfailing optimism, interest in others, desire for independence and mysterious savant's memory, is a highly attractive character. Bissinger succeeds in affirming the power of love and family and the triumph of the human spirit. 

Barbara Ras' "The Last Skin" a Masterful Collection

Barbara Ras' "The Last Skin" (Penguin Poets) wanders along a changing landscape of moods, impressions and memories. Her control and mastery of material reveals a poet with a clear, strong conception and technical execution of each poem.

The dominant theme of the book is the poet's haunting by the death of her mother. Her mother is remembered with a mixture of grief, regret, sympathy, anger and acceptance. Along with her intense feelings about her mother, Ras also delves into political commentary, travel narratives, tender and humorous poems about love and marriage, and memories of experience.

She shows a variety of strategies. At the beginning of the book, the poems have the conventional framework of discrete, connected sentences. Toward the end of the book, poems are breathtakingly composed with single, disgressive sentences, giving pleasure akin to watching a tightrope walker. As a reader, I enjoyed walking with her through these poems, as if in midair. As with many contemporary poets, her work at times resembles prose broken into lines. At her best, her poems reach a deep poetic fusion of language and feeling.

Part II of the book is a series of poems about a trip to Lake Titicaca, described as a shimmering body of water between Peru and Bolivia.  While at times showing too much of a travelogue flavor, the poems pulse with a longing for the simplicity and innocence of a Third World culture. The complexities of her life, including her grief for her mother, intrude upon her desire to freely enjoy the lake's beauty and the native people's less encumbered lives. The poet sees the modern world's growing threat to the lake and the people's culture. She also recognizes her own need for contemporary comforts.

Following this, the book returns to personal poems of regular existence. The opening and closing sections serve as bookends for the Lake Titicaca section, with the first part revealing details of her personal life and the last one returning to these themes, with more of a turning toward the outside world.

The book finishes strongly, with an impressive series of poems that mix humor, regret and the endurance and comfort of love. "Exercising a Verb Seldom Used in the First Person" moves from the world and its objects to personal feelings about her parents. It's a strong poem that ranges from the wryly satiric to intensely felt extemes of anger and forgiveness. Also standing out are the amusing "Adjourd'hui," which looks at biology and marriage; "Ventriloquism," which examines the mysteries of consciousness and memory," and "Once the Ocean Takes You," a meditation on the contradictory fragility and power of the natural world. Closing the collection is "Washing the Elephant," the rich poem of metaphorical daring and emotional power that introduced me to Ras when I read it in the New Yorker.  

"The Last Skin" is the work of a poet who deserves widespread attention. Her third collection, following "One Hidden Stuff" and "Bite Every Sorrow," is the work of an accomplished, assured writer. I'll avidly look forward to reading her work in the future.

A Birthday Poem From Lamar Wilson

My former AJC colleage sent word that today, March 17, St. Patrick's Day, is his birthday, along with a link to a poem of his published on the Poetry Society of America journal. He will receive his MFA in poetry from Virginia Tech.  Lamar's stories of his family and childhood in a rural part of Florida interested me greatly, and his fine poem draws upon that heritage. I share it with you.   http://www.poetrysociety.org/psa/poetry/crossroads/ars_poetica/marvin_white_l_lamar_wilson/

From New York to Atlanta and Home

An unexpected midwinter visit to New York City left me full of literary and spiritual longings.

At a memorial service for my late brother in law, the rabbi had read the beautiful verses from Ecclesiastes, "to every thing there is a season." Then, he'd chanted the Kaddish. Even though I didn't understand Hebrew, the words filled me with the beauty of music, while giving me an understanding of their meaning on a deep, visceral level.

In late afternoon, I walked through snow-covered Central Park, recalling the words of Holden Caulfield and others about the beautiful greenway. The park was full of people, enjoying the sunshine and the cold, crisp air. I walked over the St. Gaudens' monument to Gen. Sherman, recalling Robert Lowell's "For the Union Dead," inspired by St. Gaudens' statue in Boston honoring Col. Shaw's black regiment. St. Gaudens was also connected to another literary favorite: he did the tomb of Henry Adams' wife, Clover. Looking at St. Gaudens' Sherman Statue in the Grand Army Plaza, near the old Plaza Hotel, snatches of Lowell and Adams swirled through my mind. Of course, I couldn't help remembering that May afternoon, beaten down by a grueling tryout at The New York Times, when I'd walked to Central Park from Times Square and witnessed a beautiful woman walking down the sidewalk, one of the loveliest visions of my life.  

With dusk giving the city a crepescular afterglow, I took the subway downtown to the West Village to join my friends Tim and Pui for a poetry reading at the Cornelia Street Cafe. When I emerged from the West Fourth Street Station, I received that jolt of energy and excitement of the village, again recalling that first time long ago when I'd first visited New York. t the cafe's cozy downtown space, hearing Donald Lev read, I traced the Old Testament cadences, the hunger for the word and music, through his poems. "To Every Thing There Is A Season."

Headed back uptown, enjoying the company of new friend Norman  for part of the journey, I again felt the conflicting joys and sorrows of the great city. My wife's family's loss of Woody, the man who loved to knock down walls and rearrange the furniture. Language and memories. Art and change. Love and literature. I got out at 96th Street and walked to the hotel through the swirling snow. Through the mist, I could see the ice-filled East River, Robert Moses' FDR Drive, the towering edifice of the Triborough Bridge. In the hotel, I enjoyed a glass of red wine, served by the young Latino woman who'd been there every night. Her warm, bright smile reminded me of an old insight: God's greatest miracle is the human face.

Early the next morning, we left New York. As we sat on the runway at LaGuardia, waiting for our place in the takeoff queque, I looked out at the gray horizon, barely able to make out the Atlantic, across which so many had come seeking new lives of freedom. At last, the plane climbed into the sky.

Back in Atlanta, the snow that had covered the ground when we left had melted away. A few stubborn snowmen still stood here and there. By week's end, bright, cool weather had arrived. I'd discovered another reading adventure, "The Possessed: Adventures With Russian Books and The People Who Read Them" by a woman named Elif Batuman. Apparently, she'd been writing for some time for The New Yorker. Although I religiously read the magazine every week, I'd never read her pieces. I looked forward to delving into her essays on reading and how books enrich life.

Before reading Elif though, I wanted to finish Scott L. Mingus Sr.'s "The Louisiana Tigers in The Gettysburg Campaign, June-July 1863" (LSU Press). In the bright afternoon sun, I sat on the front porch and read about the Tigers' valiant but ill-fated charge up Cemetery Hill in the dusk and moonlight of July 2, 1863. As I read, my attention was diverted by crows cawing and flying among the high treetops of the pines in our yard. Again, I returned to the exploits of Brig. Gen. Harry T. Hays and his boys from New Orleans, Baton Rouge, Alexandria and elsewhere, when I heard a splashing. A small bluebird was enjoying the waters of the birdbath. When it shook its feathers, the cascading water sparkled in the late afternoon light.

Emily Grosholz on Poetry, Mathematics, Philosophy ... and Garrison Keillor and Honey Crisp Apples

I met Emily Grosholz, professor of philosopy at Penn State University and a distinguished poet and essayist, at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, where I was in her poetry workshop in 1991 and 1992.  In the first year, the inaugural of the writers’ conference, she read my fledgling poems, and I was grateful for her kindness and instructive suggestions. Along with her deep learning in philosophy, poetry and matematics, I was delighted to discover that she is also well-versed in baseball, and if I remember correctly, tennis. We also shared anecdotes, stories and information about our then young families. I remember as well her calm, quiet presence in the workshops, which she conducted along with two roaring lions of American poetry, Howard Nemerov the first year, and John Hollander the second.

Over the years, I’ve followed Emily’s work in The Hudson Review, where she is an advisory editor. Her work in the the journal displays an astonishing versatility, including poetry, essays, criticism and travel pieces. The autumn 2009 issue includes Emily’s probing essay on the poet Anne Stevenson. The issue also includes a poignant poem by Stevenson about teaching her sons to swim at Walden Pond. I particularly enjoyed the poem because I  in the summer of 2008 visited the site of Thoreau's cabin on Walden Pond, amused and impressed to discover that the pond is a public swimming beach, as Stevenson evokes.

With my warm memories of Emily,  I asked her to participate in a Southern Bookman interview, and she graciously agreed. I have decided to run her response in two sections that to me constitute two separate essays that I am pleased to share with The Southern Bookman's growing group of readers. In the first, which apply to my first four questions, she intersperses personal experiences and witty observations with wide-ranging thoughts on poetry and philosophy. In the second section, she presents an in-depth consideration of the relationship between poetry and mathematics 

One other thought: In the spirit of Emily's allusions to different texts, her citation of Aristotle’s comment that “a swallow does not a summer make”  reminded me of Robert Lowell’s reference to this in his poem “Fall 1961,” which can be found in his “For the Union Dead.” Looking back at Lowell’s poem, I found it still relevant to this troubling “Fall 2009.”

 Part 1: On Philosophy and Poetry, and Walks Through Fields

1. As a philosopher and poet, what do you feel is the relationship between philosophy and poetry?

2. To follow up on the first question, you are also an accomplished editor, essayist and critic. Such varied interests are said to be rare in our age of specialization. What is the source and inspiration for your versatility?

3. Your comments in your essay on the poet Anne Stevenson in the current Hudson Review well-expressed my reactions to many of your poems. A quote stands out: “A lyric poem’s or a sonata’s action on the world and in the world has various effects; the circling back of time is one of them. Speak, memory, or sing.” In re-reading “Shores and Headlands” and reading some of your poems I found online, I was struck at how your poems often evoke a first-person narrator or self recalling events in the past in a present moment of seclusion; as you said in regard to Stevenson, your poems make the past present. How do you think your comments on Stevenson apply to your own poems?

4. After Sept. 11, 2001, many in the United States sought solace in poetry. Do you believe that philosophy can provide similar understanding and insight into such overwhelming events? One of my favorite poems of yours is “Nietzsche in the Box of Straws,” in which a cook understands the narrator’s explanation of Nietzsche, affirming the relevance of philosophy to average people.

 

Barnes & Noble has a new series of modestly priced hardcover books they call, “Rediscovers,” which “brings back into print books of special merit in history, literature, philosophy, religion, the arts and science.” One of them, no doubt included because of Darwin’s bicentenary, is “Darwin’s Century” by Loren Eiseley, whose meditations on natural history, “The Immense Journey,” forever changed my understanding of reality when I was still in high school. Only two books in the series are written by women, Suzanne Langer’s "Philosophical Sketches," and Frances Yates’ "Theatre of the World,"  though one, writings by Roland Barthes, is edited by Susan Sontag.  Finding them in the series led me to look for Langer in the online Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, where she is missing, though there is a nice essay on Ernst Cassirer, whose “Philosophy of Symbolic Forms”  inspired her best work.

The reason I mention this series is because it includes George Santayana's “Three Philosophical Poets: Lucretius, Dante, Goethe," which also inspired me in high school, though I have since lost my dog-eared paperback copy, and so was glad to pick up a new one at Barnes & Noble, where I went to buy Garrison Keillor’s latest book for my eldest son Benjamin, who is studying classics and mathematics at the University of Chicago. He wasn't home for Thanksgiving, so I sent him a book instead of a turkey, as well as two packages of  hawthorn-berry tea. The only place in town  where I can get that kind of tea is The Granary, a health food store run by Lena Scholton, a friend of mine who is Finnish and grew up in Helsinki. I just submitted a poem to George Core for The Sewanee Review about saying goodbye to my eldest son as he flew off to Chicago in September, after taking a long walk with him in the fields that happen to stretch between my house and Harner Farm (whose orchard produces the best apples in the world — honey crisp is the variety) and The Granary.

I gave Lena a copy of my “Letter from Helsinki” when it was published in The Hudson Review a couple of years ago, because I wrote it in part on the basis of good practical, architectural, and gastronomical advice Lena and Hudson Review Editor Paula Deitz gave me. I was also inspired by four philosophers whom I know and talked to there: Jakko Hintikka (also a logician), Matti Sintonen (also the father of a rock star and a businesswoman), Osmo Pekonen (also a mathematician) and Jyrki Siukonen (also an artist and former rock musician).

Finally, apropos this morning’s errands, a review of a new biography of Cassirer that Paula Deitz and Managing Editor Ron Koury persuaded me to write is coming out shortly in The Hudson Review, and so is a poem about walking in the fields at night with my other children, directly inspired by Loren Eiseley: it evokes the last ice age, and ends with a large tree completely covered in fireflies. Note that my prose style here echoes Garrison Keillor. It is after all Saturday (“Prairie Home Companion” day) and I've recently returned from the Twin Cities, where I visited my best friend from high school, Ruth Geyer Shaw, who is a botanist and an evolutionary geneticist, and whose novel statistical method expounded in her three latest co-authored papers (also inspired by her statistician brother Charlie and informed by her mathematician husband Frank) constitute the case study of a philosophy of science paper I'm giving in Louvain, Belgium. I wrote a poem about her and her plantlets (then Salvia lyrata, now Echinacea angustifolia, with Arabidopsis thaliana in between) that appeared in my second book "Shores and Headlands.” I spent all morning, before I went out to do errands, reading Charlie's newly minted essay “A Philosophical Look at Aster Models” written for people who only have some college level statistics. So you could say that I find solace in poetry and philosophy in everyday life.

However, following Keillor, I have wandered away from George Santayana. Over the years at Penn State, I have been able to teach the philosophical poems of Lucretius, Dante and Goethe, as well as Boethius, and quite a bit of Plato and Aristotle. Here is how I think the relation between poetry and philosophy shapes up in the work of those two Greek philosophers. (I won't give my speech about Lucretius, Dante and Goethe, however, because you can read about them in Santayana's book, though I do disagree with him here and there.) As everyone knows, Plato banished the poets from the ideal city described in “The Republic,” where the kings are philosophers, sort of like the United States ever since last winter, except that we elected ours and he’s from the law school at the University of Chicago, not the philosophy department. However, right in the middle of “The Republic,” Plato presents the famous simile of the Divided Line, which provides a schema for the structure of each dialogue, including the one it shows up in. Good philosophizing takes you (a small group of interested parties) up the Divided Line, from the realm of gossip and rumor, populated by shadows, echoes, and myths, to the realm of  common sense, populated by ordinary physical objects: stones, trees, cows, people, chairs, houses. Philosophy being what it is, we don’t stop there, but continue up from the realm of  Becoming into the Realm of Being, moving via the realm of mathematics (inhabited by figures and numbers) to the realm of philosophy (inhabited in one sense by the Ideas or Forms, though in

another sense they are off the Line). Because a Platonic dialogue does not end in a conclusion, you have to somehow connect the top of the line with the bottom and start all over, and what  connects the top and the bottom is… myths! The Platonic myths are the most gorgeously poetic parts of the dialogues, and the most important. So go figure. Also, Platonic dialogues are sprinkled with quotes from Homer.

Most of this I learned from my fellow University of Chicago philosopher, Paul Kahn, now director of the Schell Center for International Human Rights at Yale Law School. He was inspired in turn by his teacher Herman Sinaiko. (If you go to the University of Chicago magazine online (November-December 2009) you will see Herman wearing a “Herman Sinaiko is a Rock Star” T-shirt, which is the title of a Facebook group set up in 2005 by former students; wearing a T-shirt is completely atypical of him because he always wears turtlenecks and doesn't talk about himself when he's teaching.) Paul's wife, Cathy Iino, was my best friend in graduate school, when we were in the same poetry writing group, and is now the mayor (technically, the first selectman) of Killingworth, Connecticut! I hope that she is elected to a second term, and then runs for the Senate, ousting Joe Lieberman, and then for president, so she can be our first Asian-American and woman president. I also learned about the Divided Line from Jamie Redfield, who was my Greek professor at the University of Chicago, and is writing a book on Plato and Socrates, where he argues that Plato is not a philosopher in the ordinary sense because he never comes to conclusions, and perhaps not a philosopher at all! Perhaps he is a poet. There are poems for Cathy (homesick, from Germany) and Jamie (scholarly, from a library) in my first book of poems "The River Painter. "

Aristotle is another matter. I read the “Nichomachean Ethics” together with the "Rhetoric” and the “Politics" on the one hand, and the "Poetics" on the other. Another of my former teachers, Eugene Garver, has written a number of distinguished books on Aristotle, and in a recent e-mail wondered how I see connection between the "Nichomachean Ethics" and "the Poetics." The connection I see is only the obvious: poetry is (according to Aristotle) the imitation of human action, and he gives us the schema for narrative: beginning, middle, end, as he gives us the schema for argument: premise, premise, conclusion. And ethics is the study of how human action can be virtuous, which requires us to focus on character, the second most important term in “The Poetics,” after plot. (I wrote an essay about this in Midwest Studies in Philosophy, whose latest issue is devoted to poetry and philosophy, and begins with a poem by John Ashbery!)

Aristotle shows that when tragedy arises, the deed is either done or not done, and, done in ignorance or done knowingly; the main issue in “The Ethics” is the question of the relation between knowing and doing. Socrates claims that if I could only know what is right, I would do it; vice is ignorance. Aristotle shows at length that character is built up over a long period of time by repeated actions, taken in the midst of the repetitive patterns of social life, and changes just as slowly, so that though I may know the good, I may be unwilling to do it if my character is ill-formed. He also observes that happiness depends not only on virtue but also on good luck; tragic heroes are doomed not only by flawed character but also by misfortune. So for Aristotle, there’s not much tension between philosophy and poetry, though oddly he himself never writes poetically (and the textual basis for his philosophy is lecture notes), except occasionally: “One swallow doth not a summer make.” That reminds me of a philosophical poem I just wrote, and a good philosophical joke that I sometimes tell my undergraduates (usually I am the only one who laughs at it) because it is not off color; however, there is not enough room in the margin to write it here.

Part 2: On Poetry and Mathematics, Empson and Housman

 

5. According to your Penn State Web site, one of your projects is “mathematics and poetry” in which you say poetry stands in the same relation to the humanities as  mathematics stands to the sciences.” Could you go into this further?

When I applied to the University of Chicago 40 years ago, I said that my topic was poetry and mathematics, and almost as soon as I arrived, my adviser David Smigelskis put into my hands Scott Buchanan's wonderful "Poetry and Mathematics." It gave me permission to structure my intellectual life in the way I wanted, and has guided me ever since; the book I plan to write one of these years, "Mathematics and Poetry," will be an answer to his, one that has been in preparation for many decades.

 

My apprenticeship has been three monographs and an edited collection of essays on the history and philosophy of mathematics, and four books of poetry and more than 50 items of literary criticism —essays and essay-reviews. A couple of years ago, I wrote what will become one of the proposed book’s initial chapters, “The Uses of Periodicity in English Verse,” published in The Hudson Review, which like the “Letter from Helsinki,” can be found on FindArticles. One chapter may address texts written by Leibniz and Goethe (apropos the Italienische Reise that changed the life and work of each); another may be about the way in which abstract form brings the finite and the infinite into relation in the work of Rilke and Hilbert; another might be about temporality, and the way it both resists and lends itself to representation by mathematical form and by narrative.

In any case, the book “Mathematics and Poetry” must have two dimensions. One is epistemological. Human understanding hovers between the timeless realm of concepts, propositions, and arguments that stand in inferential relations tracked by logic and rhetoric, and the historical realm in which discoveries are made and projects framed on the basis of earlier results and in light of as-yet-unsolved problems. A name or concept pulls something that exists out of the flux of time, and by imposing the universal on the particular gives it a kind of local immortality. (This happens quite a bit in Dante’s “Divine Comedy.”)

 

Arguments organize thoughts so that they can be rehearsed and examined; narratives organize human actions so that they can be revisited and their meaning reconsidered. A scientific experiment on the one hand and a theatrical drama on the other deliberately represent situations both as having happened once — physically or dramatically real — and as meant to be repeated — universally true. In mathematics and poetry, the tension on this duality is especially strong. The study of mathematical knowledge and poetic knowledge is therefore central to philosophical epistemology; the dialogues of Plato testify to this. My work in the philosophy of mathematics take its inspiration from the 20^th century European tradition that begins with Poincaré, Hilbert, and early Husserl, and tries to explain mathematical rationality as an interplay between logical necessity and historical contingency. My literary work locates human action and utterance at the crossroads between the constraints of moral law and the fatal accomplishments of history, and the free play of artistic form and anarchic will, always imagining”what if...?”

The other dimension is aesthetic. Art (including poetic art) and mathematics characteristically generate beautiful forms that express human action on the one hand, and on the other hand the stable systems and dynamic processes of nature. In my book “Representation and Productive Ambiguity in Mathematics and the Sciences” (directly influenced by William Empson’s “Seven Types of Ambiguity”), I examine how demonstrations proceed when they occur, as they so often do, at the intersection of heterogeneous domains. When one domain is brought in to augment the resources of another, each with its own tradition of representation, the result is the combination, superposition and metamorphosis of a variety of modes of representation that often produce new mathematical entities. I call into question standard accounts of theory reduction (because I argue that reductive strategies do not reduce the number of idioms that express a problem situation, but rather multiply them, and that is why they work well), and moreover present striking examples of constructive ambiguity. What Empson shows so brilliantly, how poets exploit the semantic field of dictionary definitions or a given spectrum of cultural associations, also holds true for the mathematician.

So, for example, the ellipse in Proposition XI of Newton’s “Principia” must be read as a trajectory, as a figure derived from Euclid and Apollonius, as a dynamic nexus determined by a central force and (after the work of Leibniz inspired by Newton) as the solution to a differential equation; its internal articulation must also be read as both finite and infinitesimal. The proof of the proposition hinges on Newton’s exploitation of the controlled ambiguity of the ellipse.

In poetry, the line embedded in stanzas and organized by rules of meter and rhyme (or studied violations of them) creates a formal counterpoint of superimposed periodicities that deepens and complicates what it means. Thus in a poem a thought is suspended at the end of a line even if it is also continued, by enjambment and grammar, on to the next line, or by the logical structure of an argument to the next stanza. This formal construction of ambiguity, which exploits aural patterns of repeated sound and beat, grammatical structure, poetic lineation, metrical structure and logical structure, shows that a poem is not just a string of words but a two-dimensional, planar array which composes a rich plurality of modes of representation.

In the essay on Housman mentioned above,  “The Uses of Periodicity in English Verse,”  I show that this formal ambiguity mirrors the ambiguity of human intention: whenever we act, we are aware of what we might have chosen but in fact did not choose, and those unrealized possibilities remain with us as part of the meaning of  what we did. We act at the crossroads of necessity and freedom, and of the visible and the invisible. And poor Housman: his whole life was lived among the unrealized possibles that Spinoza denied and Leibniz multiplied, making them infinitely infinite in all those possible worlds that are not the best, like ours. This reminds me of a poem I wrote when I was in Jerusalem many years ago, visiting the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, and suddenly realized that Voltaire misunderstood Leibniz. Leibniz’s claim that this is the best of all possible worlds is not naïve optimism, but is rather a tragic insight: God had the choice to create this world, with all its suffering, or not to create anything at all. So he made us, because existence is better than nothingness, and then he had to live with and through us, our errors, our troubles, our tragedies, and our periodic beauties.