except pursued by embarrassment -----Original Message----- From: Dominic Fox <[log in to unmask]> To: [log in to unmask] <[log in to unmask]> Date: Wednesday, August 10, 2005 10:33 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