Peter, you mention "scarce returns" (a common and immediately recognisable
phenomenon, perhaps not even urgently in need of specification); partly I
would attribute to the judgment "scarce", as it -should- occur rather
than as it merely -might-, the capacity of an instrument - that's to say,
recognition of an inadequate reward (or culturally 'adequate'
insufficiency, either way) should involve a consistent judgment
always capable of being incited in the quickest possible reaction.
Negative judgment (constructive dismissal, rather than hospitable
indifference) should, by this token, be always latent in reading, and
therefore always produce (through the persistence of that latency) a
condition of preparedness: a reader should be positively -prepared-, and
not just neutrally able, to react with disappointment. This would seem to
be the surest access to relevant (1) re-appointment, the desire for which
is itself what firms up the (least contingent) belief in any work having
any value. The passage described, from dis- to reappointment, seems
quickened (de-circuited) if urged by a kind of reparatory compunction;
that this 'passage' is itself, when traced to its outermost pointfulness,
merely a subcategory or even (more merely) an -example- of compunction,
seems only ambiguously compelling, to me. There might be less of the
Christian than this, at least as it is manifested as a reaction with a
practical bearing (sundry shades of 'triumph' might easily replace
remorse).
The question arises: would a poem heighten the quality of its
significance, were it able to have anticipated the danger of such an
unhindered latency (rather than the simple possibility of failing to
please) and to have aroused it -deliberately- - to have comprehended the
possibility of its own -quickest- constructive dismissal, and to have
acted upon itself fashioning this comprehension as an implied spectacle of
interrogation? This is a question for me, and not a rhetorical one;
balanced with the possible accuracy of such an active comprehension, is
the almost opposite reaction - the decision rather to act -despite-
comprehending quickest susceptibility. This would not be to exit from the
ratrace, of course - any order of contempt for dismissal is eminently
able to be dismissed - but it would be a kind of comment or announcement
about that ratrace and also about the impossibility of exiting. If I were
really sprightly, earnestness nowise impeded, I might say that a synthesis
of these two reactions to comprehension is lovely in prospect; but how to
conceive of a synthesis that really -is- one, and not merely the semblance
of synthesis consisting of rapid fluctuation between one reaction and the
other, is a tough pistachio (perhaps empty. Though, did you ever suck
pistachio shells? they taste not of pistachio, but of pistachio
lingering).
MUCH more needed,
K
(1) I suppose what I'm groping after here, is that the quality of
disappointment arising from a preparation to be disappointed is different
from that arising 'naturally', though perhaps only (and this, I hope,
rather clinches the imperative) in -degree-. 'Natural' disappointment has
the flavour of Nietzsche's criticism of the Romantics, that naivety is
basically a paradox, and is negative; because not prepared for adequately
(or, perhaps, honestly), its issuing sense of reappointment is of inferior
urgency.
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