----- Original Message -----
From: "Dominic Fox" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Wednesday, August 10, 2005 5:32 PM
Subject: Re: Poetry and spiritualisation
There's spirituality and spirituality. I don't go for the
luxuriating-in-the-divine-plenitude stuff, particularly, because it
strikes me as offering a kind of false consolation (or "cheap grace",
to borrow a phrase). But you can have my George Herbert when you pry
it out of my cold, dead fingertips.
Anything remotely New Age makes me barf. Andrew Duncan has a good line
in a piece on Gavin Selerie:
"Clearly, if the author is associating with people who believe in
fortune telling, it would be rather rude of him to disbelieve in this
and cognate brands of addle-pated nonsense. Hence use of the
irrational is a kind of stalking-horse. If you don't trust the
testimony of the people with you, you are authoritarian and
centralising in mentality. It's the kind of attitude test by which
that kind of person decided whether you were acceptable as a
companion."
There is simply no point at all in arguing with such people, since the
more carefully you refine your argument, and the more forcefully you
press it, the more of an utter bastard they think you are just for
thinking and talking in what they perceive to be an inhumanly cold and
unyieldingly vindictive fashion. Even attempting to deflect the claims
pressed upon one ("Swallow this. It's good for you") with what one
hopes are urbane and witty deflationary gestures is likely to lead to
sour looks and accusations of harbouring a sarcastic and disrespectful
attitude.
So there is a certain "spirituality" in poetry, also, which is really
there to keep the disputatious at bay, to create a sort of safe space
within the poem for cozy addle-patedness. It's a warding charm against
the always potentially divisive exercise of intellect, and where you
see that charm being brandished it's a pretty sure bet that some
species of complaisant anti-intellectualism is not far behind.
Dominic
Dominic! These are words to cherish. I despise New Age mindlessness almost
as much as I do the religious mindlessness it mimics. Here's a recent poem
about both, and about the situation you mention in your fourth paragraph.
Thanks!
Language Poem
There's a look. Flying over
a flyover state, you see it on
the face of a fundamentalist
you start to talk to - avoiding a
predictable movie, book
or thought - then realize:
fundamentalist. And wearily,
inevitably you invoke basic
logic, science,
historiography, and get
the look. In the mid-Eighties,
I taught at a thing called
Northrop University. Saudi and
United Arab Emirates
students got nominal degrees in
engineering so that they could go home
and sign off on work by
anonymous hired engineers; meanwhile
they could play for two years
in the stripclubs and bars near LAX.
I pretended to teach them English.
During breaks we discussed
their beliefs. "Islam
is complete," they said. Concerning
women, they said that Islam protects
women. When I tried, with
infinite circumspection, to unpack
"completeness" or "protection," they gave me
the look. Elsewhere in
California, and
not only there, you'll encounter
New Age types; and if, really working
gentleness, eye contact,
etc., you say "What
'energies,' exactly?" -
or let them do your chart
and prove how right it is,
then tell them all the dates and locations
you gave them were wrong - you'll see it. It's
remarkably similar when
the ruling class allows a
brother thief to be slapped above
the wrist:
he stands beside his lawyer
who says they will appeal, even
cries because his client is
a saint, a victim . and there
again, in the fox-sloth
eyes beside his: the look. -
Or try to teach evolution to
some kids, or anything to others. It's
hurt, of course, with
admixtures - I'll get you for this,
this can't be happening - but, basically,
childlike
hurt. Friday nights
I swing by the University
to pick up Croce.
We enjoy the bars and cafés and
windowshopping along Montana
and Sunset. Why him? No
particular affinity; I need an idealist
or rationalist, I can't stand the others any more.
The judgments that we give
when we judge an action to be foolish
or wicked, a statement false, a work of art ugly, are
all metaphorical. In delivering them
we do not mean to say
there is an existence called error,
ugliness, foolishness, but only that
there is a given existence and that another
is wanting. He's glad of
the company - has been dead fifty years, and his
philosophy was never very alive, but
he's kind enough to puff sagely on
his pipe and say, "It's an age of transition." It isn't.
|