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 20th 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.
