At 1:07 AM +0100 15/6/03, Dominic Fox wrote:
>Dear me but rational cleanliness doesn't half get a bad rap nowadays. I did
>like this poem, but found myself taking issue just about here. I would have
>said that the enormities of the "unwindowed nameless room / where the world
>is scrubbed back to nothing" belong not to reason but to wickedness, in the
>sense Jean-Luc Nancy gives the word in _The Experience of Freedom_: the
>*desire* (I underline "desire") to obliterate, the rage of being against its
>own freedom. Reason might inhabit or be inhabited by this rage, but it might
>equally well articulate freedom, be freedom's instrument.
Dear Dominic
I have no quarrel with Reason, per se: Geoffrey Hill also talks about
the via media, the just mean, and if my attitude on reason lies
anywhere on a spectrum, it is there. But I think it's quite clear
(or it ought to be, and it's a fault in the poem if it is not) what
kind of "rational cleanliness" I"m referring to: the impoverished
apocalyptic imagination which decides (rationally) that since the
world is such a mess, it's best just to destroy everything and begin
again, or the kind of rational ordering of statehood which
characterised Sparta, or any totalitarian state. Hence Pol Pot and
YearZero, &c. I think human messiness, and the sweet reason which
stems from the imaginative understanding of that, vastly preferable.
Best
A
--
Alison Croggon
Blog
http://alisoncroggon.blogspot.com
Editor, Masthead
http://au.geocities.com/masthead_2/
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