Southern Bookman

A light on John Berryman's spiritual side

The Catholic intellectual journal Commonweal miraculously reappeared at the Barnes & Noble a few weeks ago, along with the Times Literary Supplement. I hadn't seen either publication on the newsstands for years, and their reappearance sparked my flickering hopes that print culture was not in rapid decline. Alas, the TLS quickly disappeared, and when I inquired, the clerk, with the gravity of an undertaker or a doctor with bad news, said "we are no longer carry it." Not enough buyers, he said. However, Commonweal remained.

The other day, I at last picked up a copy, to read an article on the new translation of the Catholic liturgy, which will be imposed upon us in November. The old English liturgy has been the once recited at Mass since the 1960s, when the Latin Mass passed away in the days of Vatican II. I'd read an article in The New York Times about the new translation, which sounded awkward, convoluted, tone deaf, unmusical, etc., if allegedly accurate.

Unforunately, I found the Commonweal piece on the new liturgy as dull and wooden as the new translation itself is supposed to be. Luckily, though, I found a moving article on John Berryman and his late "Eleven Addresses to the Lord."

The article recounted Berryman's struggles with alcoholism and despair and how a conversion experience in a a rehab center had led to the "Addresses." Tragically, the conversion didn't take, not did the alcoholism cure, and Berryman killed himself by leaping off the Mississippi River Bridge in Minneapolis.

Elizabeth Kirkland Cahill's piece places Berryman as one those spiritual seekers who swerve between great doubt and great faith. His "Eleven Addresses to the Lord," found in his 1970 "Love & Fame," one of the first poetry books I bought as an adult, reflect that conflict. Cahill doesn't even mention Berryman's best-known work, "The Dream Songs," with which he is saddled. It's one of the masterpieces of his generation, but its popularity has taken away attention to Berryman's other work. It's refreshing that she concentrates on his religious poetry.

Many of the poets of Berryman's generation were known for their personality extremes. While Berryman wasn't medically diagnosed as manic depressive like his sometimes admirer Robert Lowell, Berryman showed all of the erratic behavior and mood swings of his peers. 

Berryman's longing for religious grace and spiritual healing was among his most admirable features, along with his handling of the vernacular as a poet and his depth as a scholar and critic. Thanks to Cahill for examining this side of him. The piece made me wish for a "Collected Poems" of Berryman, as has been done for Lowell. Editions of "Dream Songs" abound, but I would love to have all of Berryman's work collected in one place.

 

Garry Wills' Effervescent Adventures

I've read many of Garry Wills' books and articles over the years, finding compatible his mix of erudition and clear writing. I especially liked his book on Lincoln's "Gettysburg Address," in which he explored the rhetorical sources of the great president's work. Another favorite was his small biography of St. Augustine. However, I was disappointed by later works on the Gospels and Jesus' life. These books, although showing Wills' deep learning and strong Catholic faith, I found difficult to read. Whether Wills' talent to keep me absorbed in difficult material had faltered or whether my concentration abilities had declined I cannot say with certainty; probably a bit of both.

One day, I heard Wills interviewed on "The Bob Edwards Show" about his new book, "Outside Looking In, Adventures of an Observer." Wills was captivating in discussing his memoir, based on his reminisces of characters he had encountered during his dual life as a journalist and academic. Wills claimed himself an outsider because he was an academic doing magazine journalism for Esquire's Harold Hayes and the National Review's William F. Buckley and a journalist in the academic world of Northwestern and other schools. Despite his high success in both realms, he didn't really feel like he was really a "member" of each guild. While a a strong Catholic, learned in classic Greek, who recites the rosary every day, Wills also feels apart from the Catholic faith, in opposition to papal doctrines, which he discounts with deep historical knowledge.

The Wills interview made me want to read the book. I searched for it in a Borders in San Francisco, but it was absent from the bio section, although a computer search claimed it was in the store. Then, I found it in my familiar neighborhood Borders. At first I resisted, the went ahead and bought it, one of the few books I've purchased in several months, finding my library excellent in offering new books.

I consumed the somewhat slight book in a couple of days. Like recent memoirs of Larry McMurtry, the Wills' book shows evidence of quick writing and superficiality, yet that very lightness makes it entertaining. Wills encounters a diverse cast of characters, from Jack Ruby to obscure MLK lieutenant James Bevel, to Jimmy Carter, Richard Nixon, James Hoffa, and others. The book gives a quick and accessible history of political and literary culture from the 1960s through today. The most vivid portrait is of William F. Buckley, showing his zany energy and charm. Also captivating is Wills' account of his relationship with his wife Natalie. "Outside Looking In" was like a letter from an old friend, with whom I share a similar outlook. Yes, I understood perfectly Wills' frequent feeling of being "Outside Looking In."

Memories of Newman and Gissing

The July 30 Times Literary Supplement, with pieces on John Henry Cardinal Newman and George Gissing, brought me back to one of my most memorable college courses, "Victorian Autobiography."

I retain a memory of our attractive and energetic professor, a young scholar whose name I cannot recall, lecturing to us in her starched shirts and sensible, knee-length skirts. She enjoyed having our small class meet outdoors, and my memories remain strong of sitting on the grass in the cool spring, or perhaps fall, air and discussing Dickens, Thackery, Carlyle, Trollope, Butler and Newman and Gissing.  Not only did we read straight autobiographies, such as Newman's "Apologia" and Carlyle's "Sartor Resartis," but autobiographical novels such as Dickens' "David Copperfield."

Something about Gissing's gloomy outlook and unsparing examination of London's lower classes drew me, and I wrote my class paper on him, reading his classic look at the metropolis' bleak publishing scene, "New Grub Street," along with other novels and studies of him. 

The TLS had a review of a new academic edition of Gissing's first novel, "Workers of the Dawn," the first of a series of Gissing novels to be republished. Also appearing in the issue was an exerpt from a Gissing article from 1902, in which he criticized a critical study by Swinburne on Dickens. The literary columnist NB also had an amusing item about a row between the author of a new Gissing biography and the secretary of the Gissing Society.

Ever since those college days, I've kept up with Gissing studies and news. Although I found his novels hard going, including "New Grub Street," I was fasinated by his story. Gissing was a classics scholar at Oxford who ruined his career in a scandal involving a young prostitute, and was forced to eke out his living for years as a literary hack and struggling novelist, although he eventually found success and is considered by some enthusiasts as one of the top novelists of his time.

Newman, who will gain beatification from the Catholic Church when Pope Benedict travels to England in September, also fascinates me. The leader of the "Oxford movement," Newman had a long spiritual journey leading to his eventual leaving the Anglican faith for the Catholic Church. If the church can document a miracle or two, Newman will become a saint. His great spiritual writings make some consider him the best English stylist of the 19th century. A memorable, if highly unreverential portrait, of Newman can be found in Lytoon Strachey's "Imminent Victorians."

The TLS included a searching review of a new biography on Newman, as well as a in-depth commentary on Newman's thought and writing. Another strong article looked at the thought of another noted Catholic convert, G.K. Chesterton.

Gissing and Newman represent two poles of British society of the Victorian through Edwardian era. Newman is an intellectual giant upholding the tradtional faith against the assaults of science and modernity. Gissing is the modern existential man, buffeted by wrenching economic and social changes and forging new ways of perceiving the world. Thanks to the TLS for stoking my interest in them, and reviving memories of those sunlit classes from long ago.

 

 

Donald Revell: A Poem Is An Utterly Intimate Communication

      

I met Donald Revell (left) at the Indiana Writers’ Conference at Indiana University. Then early in his poetry career, Revell electrified the conference with a series of lectures on poetry and aesthetics. His dynamic talks presented a fresh vision of the transcendent power of poetry as an ecstatic way of looking at the world.

   As I recall, the late Bill Matthews was a workshop leader at that conference, providing a vibrant counterpoint to Revell’s lectures. In a few brief days, Revell and Matthews dazzled me with the magic of poetry.

Afterwards, I followed Revell’s career through several poetry collections, a series of columns in the American Poetry Review, and two collections of his prose work that echoed many of the themes from his Indiana talks.

    The essay collections “Invisible Green” and “The Art of Attention, A Poet’s Eye” were based on a broad knowledge of philosophy, literary theory, poetry and history. With each collection, his poetry grew in experimental daring and technical power, fulfilling his early promise and securing his place as one of the most original and dynamic voices of his generation.

  In preparing for this interview with him, I looked again at his early standout collection of poems, “The Gaza of Winter” and rediscovered that he had autographed the book for me at Indiana. On June 25, 1992, he said in his dedication, “I hope we meet again.”

     Alas, we haven’t met since, but have reconnected through this Southern Bookman interview.  

   

1. I was entranced by your concept of poetry and reading as “friendship.” Could you define what you mean by this?

For me, a poem is an utterly intimate communication, probably best understood as something whispered by the poet to his poem. (My poem is the only audience I can actually imagine.) Hence, the friendship, as friendship is a sacramental and disruptive intimacy, like a poem. Jesus forsook his family in favor of friends, and he required his friends to do the same.

2. In “Invisible Green” and “The Art of Attention, A Poet’s Eye,” Henry David Thoreau and Guillaume Apollinaire are seen as major influences, or “friends.”  Do you see them as similar or different?   Thoreau proposed the sanctity of "walking;" Apollinaire proposed the sanctity of errer, i.e. of walking around Paris with no destination. I hope to follow.

3. You often describe feelings of ecstasy in reading and writing poetry and in experiencing life and nature.  At the end of “Invisible Green,” you speak of “mindfulness.” Are ecstasy and mindfulness related? Are they religious and mystical in nature, the basis for a broad approach to living?

   In ecstasy I believe we find our mind, i.e. our New Mind, and perhaps a good word for such mind is God.

 

4. In “The Art of Attention,” you describe your growth as a poet from your more formal earlier work to freer, more experimental later poems. In what directions is your poetry moving at present?

Just now, I am looking for a language of humanity's aftermath, trying to make poems in which there is no difference between an alphabet and clouds in the sky.

 

5. I enjoyed your “Homage to John Frederick Peto” and commentary upon the poem in the April issue of Poetry. The poem reflects your affection for an earlier America, the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries, when the country was growing economically, industrially and artistically. You see it as a youthful time of  hope and optimism. Although from an earlier time, your vision of Jefferson looking down upon the Shenandoah Valley embodies this ideal of peace and harmony. Has this been irrevocably lost, and could it be recovered?

I have no hope for the former United States. The peace of the valleys has been irrevocably broken and the shorelines drenched with oil. Yet there are times....when I read Jefferson, when I revisit the Shenandoah or walk in the Green Mountains of Vermont or climb far into the Red Rock country of the Mojave…I hear the old music, I feel the ruined peace.

 

6. I was touched by your portrait of your father in “Invisible Green.” You say there and in the April Poetry that your father was unable to read but wanted you to. Was your father able to witness and enjoy your literary success?

   My father would have had no notion of nor any use for success. He loved his children, creme de menthe, and listening to opera on a gaudy Victrola late into the night.

 

7. You’re a poet, critic/philosopher, translator, reader and teacher. How do these relate to each other? What brings you the most satisfaction?

My satisfaction, when I can feel such a blessing, comes from having been of some help to younger poets. If I have any future, it is they.

Roy Blount's "Translator's English" and the Birth of Terrorism

Tin House continues its good work in its new issue (Volume 11, No. 2) with Cassandra Cleghorn's interview of Roy Blount Jr., the incarnation of Samuel Johnson or perhaps H.L. Mencken. Like those giants, Blount happily writes for money in a variety of genres while adhering to the most exacting standards. Also like them, he's a serious student of the English language, while maintaining a non-specialist's joy of discovery. In the interview, he calls it "shade-tree etymology."

...In talking with Cleghorn, a poet and a senior instructor at Williams College, Blount revisits his excellent book on English usage and words, "Alphabet Juice." He shows his pride at his versatility by mentioning that he's written about Yogi Berra for Sports Illustrated, Pauline Kael for the Atlantic, and Ray Charles for the Oxford American. The wide-ranging, at times elliptical, interview gives an intriguing portrait of a restless, probing, creative mind. 

...I'm looking forward to perusing the rest of the magazine, which also has a story by the fine writer Antonya Nelson, poetry by D. Nurske and Dorianne Laux, an essay on Afghanistan by the excellent Ana Menendez, and a piece by Roxana Robinson on "Kentucky Bread."

...The Jan. 4 New Yorker included a strong short story by the Nigerian writer Uwem Akpan. The Jesuit priest's story, "Baptizing the Gun," has a predictable major plot twist, but gives a vivid picture of the chaotic energy of the teeming Nigerian capital, Lagos. The conflicts between Western technology and political philosophy and the city's tribal loyalties, engrained customs and primitive social conditions are etched with comic, poetic language and zany, wildly imaginative situations.

The story inspired me to repair to the local library and put a computer "hold" on Akpan's noted short story collection, "Say You're One of Them." The computer told me that out of roughly 10 copies of the book in the Atlanta-Fulton County library system, only one was available. That was an encouraging sign of broad readership of an important book: I wondered if that meant that it is being widely assigned in the city's high school English classes. I was also interested to see that the one copy available was at the Carver Homes branch, serving what was once one of Atlanta's most desperate housing projects, although a major effort has been made in recent years to alleviate conditions there. I would think that residents of the community would find much of interest in Akpan's work, and I hoped that the book's availability there wasn't a sign that it is being neglected there. No matter what, I punched in my library card number, punched the send button, and placed the hold. I will look forward to the library's friendly computerized voice mail message telling me the book is ready for me to pick up.

...Roy Blount, in the Tin House interview, cites English writer Alan Furst's comment that he wanted to write in "traslator's English," as if it had been translated from another language. Blount says this means that it can, in turn, be translated readily into other languages. At first, I didn't know quite what to make of this, but then thought of the work of Akpan and the Pakistani writer Daniyal Mueenuddin, both of whom use English as their primary language and studied in American writing programs. Their English retains the exotic flavor of their native cultures, giving their works the flexiblity and color of what might be thought of as "translator's English." Joseph Conrad, for whom English was a second language, is one of the pioneer masters of that branch of the language.

...Speaking of Conrad, a look back at his works would expand understanding of the  forces that led to Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab's attempt to blow up a Northwest Airlines plane on Christmas Day. The stresses of colonialism conveyed by Conrad continue to influence developments like radical Islamism. Dostoyevsky would be another writer worth studying for insights into terrorists' psyches. In books like "The Devils," Dostoyevsky wrote about well-educated, indulged youngsters like Abdulmutallab being seduced by violent action in the service of extreme ideologies. What we know as terrorism had its first incarnation in Dostoyevsky's late 19th century Russia. His young intellectuals, caught between the forces of rapid development, feverish ideas and a primitive culture, turned to atheistic anarchy, the precursor of the Bolshevik revolution. But like radical Islam, the political ideology offered a messianic, narcotic, unambiguous solution to spiritual emptiness.

The New Yorker's "World Changers"

Following Wednesday's post, I received my New Yorker "World Changers" issue late in the afternoon. The articles look interesting, but I don't feel the excitement generated by the special fiction issue, which "World Changers" replaces. Showing that it's not yet part of the magazine pack, as I rashly said Wednesday, the New Yorker displays its usual low-key philosophy, not printing the phrase "World Changers" on the cover. Javier Mariscal's cover "New World, with illustrations of cartoon people with big ideas in their hair, subtly conveys the idea; the theme "world changers" is not encountered until the table of contents. Another magazine, such as the Atlantic, would have blasted the theme in big, glaring colors on the cover. Perhaps the New Yorker is more of a subscripton-driven magazine not screaming for newsstand sales.

The articles will undoubtedly draw me in: a glance through the issue shows that they will tell of relatively unknown people doing important, vital work. One thing I really love about the New Yorker is how I'm slowly drawn into such articles after initially thinking I'm not that interested. The issue does give a lot of gifts for we fiction/book fans, including Helen Simpson's short story "Diary of an Interesting Year," a piece by Louis Menand on a new biography of Koestler and Joan Acocella's review of Peter Ackroyd's retelling of Chaucer's "Canterbury Tales." Among poems, Roger Angell rings in with his end of the year verse on people and events of 2009. Such poems were once a staple of magazines, but Angell is about the only one left who has enough working sense of meter and rhyme to carry it off.

I was also happy to see a piece by Fen Montaigne on how global warming is affecting Antartica. The piece is distressing, but I was glad to catch up with Fen. A few years ago, our daughters played on the same Tophat soccer team, and I always looked forward to our game-time conversations. Now he's senior editor of the Web magazine Yale Environment 360.

In another followup to Wednesday's post, a reader commented that Don DeLillo's recent  "Dostoyevsky at Midnight" in the New Yorker is in fact a discrete short story, not part of DeLillo's forthcoming novel "Point Omega." This was welcome news, somewhat easing my worries about the short story's decline, as expressed in Wednesday's post. It's encouraging that a writer like DeLillo would see relevance in the form.

I found "Dostoyevsky at Midnight" an engaging story. The sentences' style marked a departure for DeLillo. I couldn't quite explain it, but the sentences appeared more classical, measured, slowly unfolding than the packed, snapping, electric sentences of his novels. I enjoy both styles. With the theme of college students discovering and engaged with the world, the rich descriptions of snow and the isolated town and the mysterious professor of logic, the story reminded me a bit of Tobias Wolfe. I'll look forward to "Point Omega," since a new DeLillo novel is generally a must-read.

Speaking of The New Yorker and writers, the New Yorker's Book Bench segment of its Web site has an interesting conversation between Lydia Davis and fans across the world. Lydia makes some insightful observations about craft, inspiration, commitment to work. I was going to give a book lover I know "Gate at the Stairs" by Lorrie Moore as a Christmas present, but now I may switch to Lydia Davis' "Collected Stories."   Or, give them both.

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.