I like your snap too, Anny, and find your questions, Ken,
"Guilt as a way to ward off what kind of paralysis if not a
sort of moral inertia? Guilt as better than the absence of
intensity?" very interesting. That sort of argument for
guilt as a kind of 'better-than-statis-state' as if it had some
saving quality, which does seem very Catholic. But on
the other hand, I wonder as I do with all 'saving' qualities,
if they don't create the very predicament from which
one must be 'saved.' For instance, isn't guilt a kind of
paralysis in itself? and is it better than the absence of
intensity or a substitute for it, like those complex feelings
which catch up all other feelings in their various intensities
in a net? If I am feeling 'guilty' for having stolen a peach
from my neighbor's tree, ala Augustine, I am probably neither
eating it nor giving it back and so the intensities of those feelings
that attend the eating of it or the giving of it back are all
muted, submerged in the paralysis of guilt which neither
feels nor does anything but feel itself. Isn't it like ennui
or angst, (any of those feelings that is a 'state' more than
a feeling), thought to be so symptomatic of modern life that a protagonist
may be characterized by guilt or angst etc. and not feel
anything else, the complex state precluding other feeling
which for all that it may be real or intense or various is
not so attached to oneself, though perhaps it's that one's
sense of identity is attached to it?
Well, I know this is far from the poem, I'm just wondering,
it has occurred to me lately that I don't really understand
guilt. And thanks for the snap, Anny, and I'm glad you got
the Comfy Chair, Ken,
Best,
Rebecca
Rebecca Seiferle
www.thedrunkenboat.com
-----Original Message-----
From: Kenneth Wolman <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Nov 19, 2003 7:56 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: snapshot
Much here to fascinate. Really almost a moral drama, greatly
understated. Guilt as a way to ward off what kind of paralysis if not a
sort of moral inertia? Guilt as better than the absence of
intensity? Love this:
>you end up discovering
>
>the same old riddle
>
>in the middle of your intention
I read simple acceptance of a cycle. Maybe that is me. "Intention" seems
in this context a profoundly Catholic word--intentions, desires,
interrupted by repetitive uncertainty. This is how things are. Even guilt
is something to be accepted as a moral good.
>your guiltiness
>
>protects against daily repeated paralyses
Yes--guilt turned in another light, the better-than-stasis state. Almost a
subversive poem that reduces me to jagged phrases.
Ken
-------------------------
Kenneth
Wolman http://www.kenwolman.com
http://kenwolman.blogspot.com
"Sometimes the veil between human intelligence and animal intelligence
wears very thin--then one experiences the supreme thrill of keeping a cat,
or perhaps allowing oneself to be owned by a cat."--Catherine Manley
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