On Unreadable Writing

© Edward Moore 2015

Someone -- I can't remember who, for the life of me -- once wrote that all novels are really letters aimed at one person. As it happens, I believe this.~ Stephen King

Several times I have tried, and failed, to write a novel. The reason is not for lack of an idea, nor for lack of facility with language. My problem is my inability to use language to show, rather than merely to tell, a story. Having spent the greater part of my life in the field of philosophy and related studies like patristic theology and textual criticism, my method has been to unravel knotted threads of discourse and lay them out straight for my reader. My work has been the telling of the various tales of Platonism, Gnosticism, the more problematical thinkers among the Church Fathers; in this, I did not show but told -- for every philosopher knows that language is the house of being, as Heidegger once said, and that a definition that is not rigorous and precise is no definition at all. And if one is a Platonist, one will avoid degrading the noetic realm by dragging its concepts down to the realm of re-presentative material. So, whenever I set out to write a novel or a short story, I soon become aware that I am explaining every character's actions, providing detailed analysis of motivations, and never permitting my characters to come to life and to act. What I love most about fiction -- the creation of atmosphere and personality -- I have not been able to achieve. The magic that I admire in writers like Tolkien, Somerset Maugham, Isaak Dinesen, Huysmans, and Donna Tartt (to name a few), which consists in drawing characters and scenes so vividly that unique faces appear in the mind, scents and sounds enter the olfactory sphere without any conscious conjuring on my part. In the works of these writers, the people and worlds being described are already there, and I am encountering them, instead of being told about them. I would revise Gore Vidal's statement that a story is what it tells and no more, by repacing "tells" with "shows." For the background of the characters, their motivations, their emotions, their vices and virtues, only become effective as art when they do not come alive for the reader, but rather enter the reader's mind as already existing. Lovecraft wrote, in "Some Notes on a Nonentity," "[I] insist on reproducing real moods and impressions. ... I never write when I cannot be spontaneous -- expressing a mood already existing and demanding crystallisation." This is precisely what I, as a trained philosopher and theologian, am unable to do. Yet this literary handicap of mine is useful, I think, when it comes to that most problematical of literary genres, criticism.

"Uncanny" critics, according to J. Hillis Miller, engage in a fair amount of eisegesis that is sufficiently grounded in the text to lend an authoritative air to the interpretation, and then permit the criticism to take flight, barely tethered to the text. As I have discussed at length in my essay on Lovecraft, "A Nighted World As Mad As I," works of fiction that encourage the reader to bestow meaning by a co-operative or "demiurgic" manner of interpreting the various tropes -- a style of reading / interpretation / criticism that permits the reader a creative, as opposed to a merely receptive, role -- occupy a higher literary sphere than those barely readable or unreadable texts comprised of authoritative narration. The general subjective / objective dichotomy, manifested particularly in the author / reader distinction, is blurred and smudged by the moist finger of the creative reader. "In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts," wrote Emerson in Self-Reliance, "they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty." In this context Emerson noted the works of Plato and Milton, and the Bible. Yet how is one supposed to relate to and provide a proper critique of works that are not simply second- or third-rate, nor even poorly composed to the point of distraction, but to works that are so bad that they are, literally, unreadable? Should the conscientious critic ignore such works? Or should she take on the unpleasant task of discussing such works for the sake of an effort to correct what is wrong with so much contemporary -- and near-contemporary -- 'literature'?

Arche-centrism, or giving primacy to the prime -- that is to say, the belief that by returning to origins one has a chance of grasping the essential -- may be outmoded in philosophy and critical and cultural theory, but it still aids us, I posit, in the effort to rid our multifloriate language of obfuscating accretions. It is with this end in mind that I have translated some Anglo-Saxon, or "Old English," poems into modern English: the Wanderer, Wulf and Eadwacer, Waldere, and Deor (available at http://steliasseminary.academia.edu/EdwardMoore). Pleased with the manner in which our language lends itself to imitation of the ancient verse forms, I set myself -- in the case of the Wanderer, which I re-titled "Thus Spoke the Earth-Strider" (after a passage in the original) -- the challenge of rendering the translation in a modern verse form. As I explain in the introduction to the translation:

I have rendered [the Wanderer] in a verse form of my choosing; one that neither attempts to reproduce the original alliterative half-line (impossible for contemporary uninflected English) nor to imitate it in some sort of hybrid concoction that would likely be an assault on the ear. Instead, I have relied upon the old faithful loose iambic -- agreeing with Robert Frost that "in our language ... there are virtually but two [meters], strict iambic and loose iambic" ("The Figure a Poem Makes") -- arranged in stanzas of five lines with one concluding half-line (more or less). This is an unabashedly modern structure, unknown in the Anglo-Saxon world, but done for the sake of art. I believe (I hope!) that I have succeeded in achieving the only purpose of meter: to make one want to read the poem aloud (as all ancient poetry was).

Not only did I succeed in adhering, with seeming effortlessness, to the loose iambic structure -- keeping hypermetric lines to a minimum, and then often intentionally, to vary the rhythm -- but I also managed to imitate, without sounding silly, the alliteration of the original.

Thus spoke the earth-strider, ever mindful

Of merciless slaughter, dire destruction

And the downfall of his dearest kinsfolk:

A tally of my cares I often recount

In solitude before the rising sun.

Such is my lot.

("Thus Spoke the Earth-Strider," II. 7-12)

This type of historically conscious, and conscientious, discipline for the sake of our common vehicle of expression has led me to a renewed appreciation of the powers of the English language and of those who draw upon its full potential in their novels, short stories, essays, and poems. Yet I have also grown increasingly sensitive to writing that is labored and repetitive, disordered, inarticulate (unintentionally mixed metaphors, convoluted syntax), lacking originality or that is the result of the writer simply trying too hard (absurd or overused analogies, humorless clichés, excessive name dropping, et cetera). While my ultimate goal is to aid in the proliferation of the former, it is with the latter -- what I am calling unreadable writing -- that I will concern myself here.

Fortunately, unreadable texts often announce themselves early, in some cases, as early as the epigraph. On the front page of her unreadable novel Carthage, Joyce Carol Oates includes an hubristic if predictable quotation from Crime and Punishment, and a statement from an "American Iraq War Veteran." So we learn two things, before we even start reading the novel: 1) Oates still has Dostoevsky on her mind (and has the balls to place the Mad Russian alongside her own dubious novelistic self in the reader's mind); 2) Here is yet another novel attempting to cash in on the public affection for "our heroes." Already, at that point, I did not feel like reading the book. But I did. And I discovered something about unreadable books -- they truly are unreadable! This is not just hyperbole on my part. My mind actually shut down, completely, in authentic zombie fashion -- and I was stone cold sober! -- at approximately page 60, after seemingly endless pages of repetitive, italicized emotion busters that seemed to have been copied directly from Oates's notebook. Here is a representative sample (note: this is the fifth time in nine pages that the italicized phrase "missing girl" has been used):

Kincaid was a friend of the Mayfield family, or had been. Until the previous week he'd been engaged to the missing girl's older sister. The father had tried to see him: just to speak to him! To look the young corporal in the eye. To see how the young corporal looked at him. The father had been refused. For the time being. The young corporal was in custody. As news reports took care to note No arrests have yet been made. How disorienting all this was!

Indeed. Diorienting and annoying. And it goes on for 482 pages. As every writer knows, maintaining interest in a third-person narrative is difficult; in the wrong hands, the tale easily degenerates into a journalistic style account. A writer who wants to be read and remembered must not simply tell a tale, he or she must show the reader the persons and events that make up the story (I realize that I am repeating myself here, and italicizing; but this is not a novel, and I am the only character speaking -- and I've renounced any claims to the title novelist.). One of the "don'ts" in this regard is authorial intrusion into the narrative. Quite simply, to maintain the effect of immediacy -- and showing not telling -- the only voices that should be heard in the narrative are those of the characters. Now apart from the annoying repetitive italicized phrases and telegraphese prose style, Oates's Carthage simply does not contain any likeable characters. It is not sufficient for an author to tell us that so-and-so is a stand-up guy, or that such-and-such radiates warmth and happiness; we must see these things, these people, for ourselves. I never cease to be amazed at the manner in which morals and ethics retreat when faced with an authentically drawn fictional character. Consider Alex in A Clockwork Orange. If he had been presented by any other method than first-person narration, he would not have come across as morally equivocal -- indeed, we would never have been able to like him. Oates's Cressida is at best an odd young woman -- at worst, sinister -- with no real positive qualities to make one care, one way or the other, if she lives or dies. So Carthage is not only an annoying novel, written in bad, quirky prose; its main character is dispensable.

From the earliest times, until recently, the main characters in works of fiction were aristocrats or warriors, often both. The epic of Gilgamesh; the Iliad and Odyssey; the great tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides; the historical books of the Hebrew bible; the Aeneid, et cetera -- all were concerned with the trials and tribulations of the high born. But when the modern era gained momentum, writers began to represent the lower classes, and the novel as we know it -- concerned with ordinary people, just like us -- was born. Alas, it has taken a long time for writers to realize that ordinary people are simply not all that interesting, and that fiction about vampires, werewolves, and zombies appeals to the contemporary mind more than fiction about construction workers, home health aids, and florists. F. Scott Fitzgerald's preoccupation with the American aristocracy of the early twentieth century, however, did not help him to produce likeable characters, nor to write readable novels. While it is fashionable, nowadays, to at least praise The Great Gatsby, I will stick to my rapiers and place Fitzgerald's entire novelistic oeuvre firmly in the unreadable category (I do like his short stories in Babylon Revisited). The novel that is the worst -- so bad it is painful -- is This Side of Paradise (1920). Opening the book to a page chosen at random, one is guaranteed to find a stilted, history book dry passage containing at least one ridiculous metaphor or analogy. Here it goes ... A-ha! Check this out:

Amory wondered how people could fail to notice that he was a boy marked for glory, and when faces of the throng turned toward him and ambiguous eyes stared into his, he assumed the most romantic of expressions and walked on the air cushions that lie on the asphalts of fourteen. (bk. I, ch. 1)

A simple exercise, to demonstrate the weakness of third-person narration in general, and the wilting badness of this passage in particular, is to re-write this inelegant sentence in the first person, sans the silly metaphor. Observe:

Strolling along the crowded thoroughfare, I put on my best romantic mask, and met the ambiguous eyes of the passersby. It seemed to me impossible that these people should fail to notice my light-hearted step and to conclude, Here is a young man marked for glory!

When the first-person narration is used, the reader is treated to a more intimate experience than is possible with third-person. Indeed, the main reason I seek out fiction is to get a break from the rigors of philosophy, history, and related disciplines, which form the bulk of my research.

The human sciences are, at the highest level, impersonal. Therein lies both their strength and their weakness. A philosopher composing a treatise is occupying the realm of concepts, and he sees the history of ideas laid out for him from the vaguest beginnings to the most bafflingly complex contemporary conclusions -- conclusions always ready to be superceded by new research. Yet when the philosopher wishes to express his or her deepest personal views, she will choose fiction. Of contemporary novelists, Donna Tartt is the most philosophical one that I have encountered. The finale of The Goldfinch -- when the main character, Theo, is reflecting upon the vicissitudes of the eponymous painting by Fabritius, the inanimate protagonist, as it were, of the entire novel -- is a chrysostom song celebrating personalism, and like a great symphony the entire novel was building up to that grand climax. Here it is:

[I]t is a glory and a privilege to love what Death doesn't touch. For if disaster and oblivion have followed this painting down through time -- so too has love. Insofar as it is immortal (and it is) I have a small, bright, immutable part in that immortality. It exists; and it keeps on existing. And I add my own love to the history of people who have loved beautiful things, and looked out for them, and pulled them from the fire, and sought them when they were lost, and tried to preserve them and save them while passing them along literally from hand to hand, singing out brilliantly from the wreck of time to the next generation of lovers, and the next.

Of course, it is not only the painting that is being referred to here; "beautiful things" means also beautiful people, people capable of inspiring and experiencing great love. This is the core concept of personalist philosophy, and Theo's education in and by beauty and love is what raises him above an aristocrat, in every sense of that term. The themes of love and beauty in Donna Tartt's novel are painful, in the way that love of a beautiful person is painful -- one cannot seem to ever get close enough to the beoved, and the distance, however small, is the cause of seemingly infinite pain. The pain of longing. But this is healthy; the intensity of desire reminds the soul (metaphorically speaking) of its divine origin. We have lost our wings, as Plato said, and are seeking to re-grow them and fly once again to our true home: the realm of perfect beauty and love. I can think of no literary theme superior to this one. That being said, if one is going to write a novel about inferior experiences, one must create compelling characters and include some deep insight into areas of human existence that are not often illumined. Fitzgerald's major insight was that people with money are in fact different from those without it; but they have problems which, at the end of the day, are just as destructive of happiness as the problems faced by unmoneyed folks. Hemingway tells us that he was sad when he learned that Zelda, Fitzgerald's wife, had cheated on her husband with a French aviation officer. Hemingway couldn't understand how Fitzgerald could still share a bed with Zelda. Hemingway, for all his tough-guy posturing, was a sensitive soul, who cared about others, and considered infidelity a betrayal. Self-centered people, in my experience, do not have a problem with infidelity -- either committing it or being the cuckold -- for self-centered people live only in and for the present. To commit adultery is to live for the present; to be the cuckold is to be absent from the present. For the truly self-centered person, whatever happens in his or her absence is irrelevant, it is like it never occurred. The moral and ethical life of a self-centered person is rather simple, cut-and-dry. Of course, it does not offer much in the way of material for good novels.

The desire to escape. At its best, fiction takes us out of this world, places us in a realm either better or worse than this one, and dazzles us with persons and events so far beyond our ordinary run of experience that we forget time and place and responsibilities and merge with the fictional realm. If the writer is especially astute and capable, we may even be treated, unwittingly, to some type of moral lesson or perhaps simply a re-affirmation of what is essential to us as human beings. Tolkien's magisterial Lord of the Rings is the finest example of responsible escapist fiction. A goodness and beauty that is meant to be shared by everyone but owned by no one is the theme of the great trilogy. The glory of Middle Earth, under attack by a malignant entity seeking to control everyone and everything capable of goodness and productive of beauty, is familiar to us, for it is the undying realm of childhood, effortlessly populated by all that we hold dear. There are many levels on which to read Tolkien's masterpiece, but the most timely is, in my opinion, the ecological level. Without being didactic, Tolkien inspires us to be good stewards of nature. Everyone who has read the books, or seen the films, will remember the Ents. Although I had been raised to have a deep concern for the environment, when I first read LOTR at age 14, I was inspired with a renewed zeal for protecting all plant and animal life. There are, of course, many other moral and ethical "pieces" in LOTR, not least Gandalf's eloquent anti-death penalty statement and Sam's moving encouragement to Frodo to endure in the face of seemingly insurmountable obstacles, for we are all part of a story, and the story will only continue if we endure -- and prevail. William Faulkner said much the same thing in his Nobel Prize speech. Other excellent writers of fantasy include Wiliam Morris, E. R. Eddison, and Lord Dunsany. It would be helpful, here, to distinguish fantasy, as practiced by these classic writers, from utopian fiction, which I will get to in a moment. Thomas More coined the term, utopia, and it does not mean "good place" -- rather, it means "no place" (from the Greek). There is irony in the very term, and it is frequently lost on people with little or no literary background, especially a dunderhead like George Lucas with his "Edutopia" initiative (I'm angry at him for giving Star Wars to Disney) or Wawa with its "Coffeetopia." Before discussing utopian fiction, and one of its unreadable practicioners, we would do well to spend a moment on horror, or dark fantasy.

The supreme master of horror -- or the weird tale, or dark fantasy -- is Howard Phillips Lovecraft. To the left and right of him, and each just barely a head below, stand Edgar Allan Poe, and Thomas Ligotti. There are many reasons for Lovecraft's supremacy, not the least his philosophy of composition, so difficult for a lesser writer to put into practice.

Spectral fiction should be realistic and atmospheric -- confining its departure from Nature to the one supernatural channel chosen, and remembering that scene, and phenomena are more important in conveying what is to be conveyed than are characters and plot. The 'punch' of a truly weird tale is simply some violation or transcending of fixed cosmic law -- an imaginative escape from palling reality -- hence phenomena rather than persons are the logical 'heroes'. (Lovecraft, "Some Notes on a Nonentity")

This is precisely what Lovecraft accomplishes in his best tales, and Poe and Ligotti rise to this level occasionally as well. For all of his archaisms and unabashed displays of linguistic virtuosity, Lovecraft is capable of weaving a very homely tale of terror. In The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, for example -- a novella that I consider to be his masterpiece -- Lovecraft sets the scene in his beloved hometown of Providence, RI, and begins by describing the nestled tree-lined streets, steep to the point of near verticality, and the antique houses settled comfortably on plots of what was once colonial farmland. The increasing age of the town, as one proceeds from the top of the Hill down toward the ancient waterfront, seems quaint and even cozy at first, but Lovecraft gradually unsettles his reader, by revealing, in slow deliberate stages, the dark primal secrets of a man who once called Providence his home -- and is returning to do so again. I recall, as if it were yesterday, my own trek down the precipitous hill to the waterfront, where I thrilled to discover dark and narrow Doubloon Street and then, watching as the setting sun worked its faery magic on the hillside, turning the Christian Science dome into "a miracle of rare device," I suspended all disbelief and reflected upon the career of Joseph Curwen and the choking mystery of necromancy. There is no moral or ethical lesson or affirmation to be drawn from The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, or indeed from any of Lovecraft's works; for his concern was with atmosphere and phenomena -- and with what he called an "indifferentist" philosophy. This intellectual dimension is what places Lovecraft on a higher plane than most practicioners of escapist fiction. Neither aristocrats nor dairy farmers interested Lovecraft, not even when they are engaged in adulterous affairs. "I could not write about 'ordinary people' because I am not in the least interested in them," he wrote.

Without interest there can be no art. Man's relation to man does not captivate my fancy. It is man's relation to the cosmos -- to the unknown -- which arouses in me the spark of creative imagination. The humanocentric [sic] pose is impossible to me, for I cannot acquire the primitive myopia which magnifies the earth and ignores the background. (Essay from 1921)

As an atheist, Lovecraft did not believe in supernatural entities. The horrors of his mature tales were aliens, beings more highly developed than humans, but still perfectly natural, in the wider, cosmic scheme of things. As an atheist myself, I can attest that while I -- like every so-called normal human being -- am subject to the buffetings of emotions and sensations like love, anger, joy, sorrow, fear, arousal, et cetera, I remain, at the rational level, fully aware that these are but bubbles in the vast sea of humanity, and that humanity is a tiny evaporating puddle in the infinite desert of nonbeing. Lovecraft knew this well, and he knew that an authentic response in the face of nothingness was fear. Like Poe before him and Ligotti after, Lovecraft knew that the philosophical limit of art is nihilism -- and the supreme form of nihilism is decay in the face of the insupportable knowledge that we are ontologically nothing. So why bother with an utopia?

The "problem of happiness" remains even if one accepts Lovecraftian nihilism or, better put, indifferentism -- the belief that the universe doesn't give a damn about us. Whatever the universe thinks or doesn't think about us, the fact remains that we give a damn. Construction of an ideal society in the face of cosmic indifference appeals to those who see such an act as hopelessly heroic. And who doesn't admire a tragic hero? Aldous Huxley's novel Brave New World is justifiably and deservedly a classic, but its value is not literary but ideological. The world of this novel is not one in which a single cosmic law is violated, as in Lovecraft's tales, but rather the entire work is one nightmare vision in which human reason has turned on itself. Huxley wrote that "reality, however utopian, is something from which people feel the need of taking pretty frequent holidays." Indeed, and one does not read utopian fiction in order to escape or take a vacation from reality; one reads such works for the sake of a preconceived notion, to experience the notion in action, so to speak. Conclusions logical and illogical are drawn, and one is left wondering if the exercise was worth the paper. Huxley himself, in his 1946 foreword to Brave New World, wrote that the novel's "defects as a work of art are considerable; but in order to correct them I should have to rewrite the book ... And so, resisting the temptation to wallow in artistic remorse, I prefer to leave both well and ill alone and to think about something else." If the author has so distanced himself from his work, how is the reader expected to approach the work with receptive mind. Of course, no amount of receptivity will permit one to remain warm and open when faced with identical eight-month-old babies being wheeled around on a dumb-waiter. But that is the point. The brave new world is sickeningly inhuman, as is so much of our own world. Which is why the novel is still considered timely by many readers. But the damned thing is unreadable. I've read as much of the thing as my mind permitted; the longing for a good human villain, however, was overwhelming. Give me Alexander De Large any day.

My happiness, or lack thereof, will inevitably affect my reception of a novel, or indeed any work of art. This is not a deep insight but a simple observation. When I write anything, be it a philosophical essay, a piece of criticism, or one of my many ill-starred attempts at fiction, I am conscious of writing with a particular person in mind -- a very special person who once upon a time broke my heart. When I read a work of fiction I seek points of similarity with my own exeriences. The closer the story is to my own life, the more I enjoy it -- or perhaps, if the story is not a happy one, if it conforms to some of my own sad experiences, I gain no small solace from the knowledge that others have similarly suffered. Lucian Taylor, in Machen's semi-autobiographical novel The Hill of Dreams, is a foredoomed young man who believed that he had found happiness in the ideal realm, and that the ever shifting realm of appearances held his beloved and him captive -- a state of suspension that could only be alleviated by and through the beauty of art and dreams. That the logical conclusion to this Platonic style of existence is inevitably death -- for which philosophy is but the practice -- is the tragic element in this tale. Not tragic, perhaps, for the reader with his or her mind firmly anchored in the becalming bay of the common. For better or worse, my life has been, from my well-remembered youth onwards, an endurance test that would make Beowulf and Breca look like chumps.

Castor and Pollux, presented musically by Jean-Philippe Rameau, serves as an apt segue from this piece to the next, which will be a reflection on The Arabian Nights and "orientalism." In closing this somewhat disconnected series of outbursts about unreadable writing and writers and the outstanding stuff that makes so many look so bad, I will simply state that my life has been, and remains, that of a mortal seeking immortal things. Precisely, a mortal seeking an immortal love, a changeless angel who will never turn on me, will never stop answering the phone or coming to visit -- will never tell me that she has met someone else. As the lush strings of the Orchestra of the 18th Century kindle the dead air left behind in my apartment after the exit of yet another promising goddess, I cannot help but reflect mournfully on the desperate nature of my quest. In my private tragédie lyrique I shall sing of her lush red hair, the arboreal brown eyes, exquisite lips and the delicate bones of her tiny lily-white and blue-veined feet ... I shall recall that I helped her dye her hair, lovingly massaging the red dye into her thick heavy hair; I shall recall gazing into those warm eyes as I gasped her name; I shall bring to my mind the taste of her ruby lips; I shall tremble at the memory of her low-toned laughter as I kissed the tender soles of her feet ... Does she feel loved? Even now, as she reclines in another man's arms? It is a terrible thing to have no memories of adorable women that are not saturated with pain.

A Pacifist Atheist Reflects Upon ...

Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Heretic: Why Islam Needs a Reformation Now (New York: Harper Collins 2015)

© Edward Moore 2015

patristics@gmail.com

The notion that Islam started out as a Judaeo-Christian sect is not only not surprising to me, but makes perfect theological sense -- especially if one places the religion of Allah in a Gnosticizing milieu. In her outstanding new book Heretic: Why Islam Needs A Reformation Now, Ayaan Hirsi Ali alludes briefly to some studies published in the 1970s by John Wansbrough that argue for Islam's derivation from a pre-existing Jewish-Christian sect or sects (p. 95, and note 19). The Christological and Trinitarian debates that raged throughout the Christian world, from the earliest times through the ascension of Constantine and only settled into an uneasy consensus after the seventh ecumenical council in the eighth century, produced innumerable sects, the vague beginnings of some of which are traceable to the second century when Gnosticism flourished. It is not hard to imagine Allah -- the God "beyond being" to whom Christ and all other divine or semi-divine beings are subordinate -- finally being elevated to the status of the only God, and all other entities in the Christian pantheon demoted to angels or prophets -- blessed and / or human, but in no way divine, that attribute belonging to Allah alone. Indeed, to this day, most Christians -- even those teaching in seminaries -- are incapable of providing a coherent theological definition of the Holy Trinity. The early Muslims simply said, no such thing. There is one God, Allah, and Muhammad is His prophet. Jesus and the rest were prophets teaching at an appointed time in history, but in no way bearing eternal authority. While Islamic theology is elegant in its simplicity, this elegance has settled into a rigidity that ignores human progress and remains, as Hirsi Ali makes clear, rooted firmly in the seventh century. By contrast, the rather confused theology of Christianity -- the more mainstream sects adhering to the conciliar definition of Christ as fully human and fully divine (yet still without a clear demarcation between Monophysitism, Monothelitism, and 'orthodox' Duophysitism); the fringe offshoots describing Christ as a demi-god of sorts, or else as a human man adopted by God (rejuvenating an ancient heresy) -- has allowed that religion to modify its approach to dogma in light of unfolding human history. For example, while most Christian denominations condemn homosexuality as a sin, there is not a single recognized branch of that religion that calls for the death sentence for homosexuals. Shariah law does. And the sentence is often carried out.

To this day, Christianity is given little or no credit for advancing the concept of the person (hupostasis) as a "unique, unrepeatable entity," carrying dignity and auctoritas by the mere fact of existence. This definition was formulated and clarified in the great Trinitarian debates, and came to be applied not just to the uncreated and eternal persons of the Trinity, but to all persons creating in the "image and likeness" of God. On the practical, social level, this development had an immense impact. The ditch-digger and the centurion were seen as equal in the eyes of God, and therefore treated (at least theoretically, and for the most part practically) as equal before the law. The great codex of Roman law compiled during the reign of Justinian is a direct result of this re-thinking of the person as having value in his or her own right, by the simple fact of existence, and not solely in relation to family and state. In a chilling recounting of a contemporary shariah murder, Hirsi Ali tells of a Muslim father living in Phoenix, AZ, who crushed his twenty year-old daughter beneath the wheels of his jeep as punishment for the "sin" of wearing makeup, liking boys, and listening to Western music. This young woman did not die instantly; she suffered horrifically as her crushed body slowly suffocated her. Later, a woman in her thirties, praying at a local mosque, told a Time magazine interviewer that the man's murder of his daughter was "right," for what she had done is not permitted in "our religion" (p. 167). Totally subordinated to the religion of submission, this poor girl had no value as a person, in the eyes of her fellow Muslims. An Arizona jury sentenced the loving dad to thirty-four years in prison. Any rational person will consider this sentence to be far too light.

Lest anyone think that I am championing Christianity over Islam, let it be known that I am an atheist who believes that all religion is superstitious foolishness at best -- at worst, wilfull murderous ignorance. I only bring up the historical reality of Christianity's great contribution to humanist philosophy -- the concept of the person -- in order to show how a religion grounded in ancient, outmoded styles of thought and discourse has been able, over the centuries, to accommodate itself to the advancement of free thinking humanity and the ever more tolerant and humane societies that we are attempting, especially here in the West, to develop and maintain. Tolerance and humanitarian concern and, yes, anger is what motivated the protesters who marched and, yes, looted and destroyed, in outrage against police brutality and what amounts to state-sanctioned murder. It would be wonderful if the zeal of shariah law could be applied to our dealing with so-called law enforcement officers. Shariah law, based on the Koran and the examples set by Muhammad in the hadith, goes back to the eighth century and prescribes "punishments" such as crucifixion, burning alive, amputations, and beheadings. The "crimes" that lead to these punishments are usually "moral" in nature: apostasy, adultery, theft. Yet crimes of a vastly more serious nature, here in the West, such as police officers -- men and women entrusted by tax-paying citizens with the task of maintaining a safe environment for all -- shooting unarmed persons, and then receiving little or no real punishment, seem to me to demand a shariah-like application of emotional justice. There is rational justice -- impersonal weighing of evidence and application of predetermined sentences -- which has gone off the rails in favor of uniformed murderers, and to the detriment of the genuinely poor, neglected, and persecuted members of our society. The lack of emotional justice -- the drawing upon compassion for the helpless, and a clear understanding of the mental decay that is the result of a life of desperate struggle for survival -- is what has led to the riotous outbursts in Baltimore and other cities in our nation. A young Muslim woman getting a rim job from her boyfriend not only does not deserve to die, she deserves a hearty congratulations. A police officer who has shot to death an unarmed man deserves far more than a prison sentence. I shall leave it at that.

My disgust at Western systems of governance is highly personal; my disgust at Islam and its terrorist stormtroopers is more ... academic. Perhaps that is why I am able, in my less emotionally stable moments, to see some hearty reason in shariah, and even in the terrorism that has so shaken the West since 9/11. Quite frankly, there are people in the United States who are simply too dumb to live; there is no way to have a real debate with self-satisfied consumers of "whatever," and it is impossible to change the minds of those whose mantra in the face of our dehumanizing world is "It is what it is." Such people have already made up their minds to accept unquestioningly whatever falls in their way, and only to take up arms -- literally or metaphorically -- when ordered to do so by those in power. These passive appendages of society then berate those who have the conviction and courage to stand for an ideal. They call the Islamist fighters "whackos" and "monsters" and with an unreflecting sense of superiority feel themselves worthy of a society that they had no part in shaping. The young men and women who run off to join the Islamic State are not lunatics nor are they less-than-human (although some of their actions are indeed monstrous); they are brave human beings fighting for an ideal. We may not wish to embrace that ideal, but it is there. While I can agree to an extent with Hirsi Ali's analysis of the religious -- as opposed to economic -- basis for the jihadi movement, I feel that it is left to the genuine thinkers among us to look at both the East and the West with clear critical eyes. In a nation (the USA) in which a promising young African-American student -- if he manages to make it to adulthood without getting shot in the back by a cop -- can see his hopes for higher education and a successful career go up in smoke if he is caught with a small amount of weed, is it any wonder that hatred of the enforcers of asinine laws are hated and made into targets? The police have done it to themselves. This is not to say that violence is an acceptable method for achieving and maintaining civil rights. Dr. King taught us well that peace is the answer. (I know this sounds like lip service, but anyone who knows me well can attest that I am a dedicated pacifist.) But it is difficult for one who has lost everything, and is alone in a friendless world, to look kindly upon the peaceniks who seem more like apologists for the status quo than true defenders of the oppressed.

Commanding right and forbidding wrong. Western political systems attempt to do the latter, but refrain -- in the lofty name of freedom -- from attempting the former. Which is as it shoud be. Yet we know that there are segments of our society that find comfort and even, in extreme cases, a certain sexual gratification, in being told what to do. Men, and occasionally women, who enjoy being dominated usually do not allow that bedroom practice to spill over into their practical lives -- yet the deep-seated desire to let go and permit another to hold of the wheel is a strong psychological motivator and must be kept at the forefront of consciousness, where it can be checked -- for the sake of one's self and the larger society. "Every woman adores a fascist," wrote Sylvia Plath. Indeed, and Sylvia's serrated blade sarcasm in "Daddy" makes it quite clear that she felt that women who get turned on by violence-besotted uniformed men deserve to have their identities violently torn from them. I know a certain woman -- we dated several times in my uproarious youth -- who to this day allows her socio-political views to be shaped by her sexual attraction to high-and-tight-headed men in scrotum-squeezing uniforms. One of our last conversations before what is now, it seems, a permanent estrangement, was about Snowden and the NSA. She took the side of our government, and I, of course, that of Snowden. I sat and attempted to hold back my vomit as this otherwise well-educated and competent professional woman degenerated into a teeny-bopper cheerleader for the good ol' US of A and its barrel-chested angels of death. At the larger societal level the constant (and dreadfully tiring) celebration of our "heroes" fighting and killing overseas sets in a gentle pleasing light the horrors of war, and downplays the primitive -- indeed primordial -- brutality that is always seething below the thin encrustation of "civilization." Many people in the United States of Amnesia (to borrow Gore Vidal's apt phrase) are a mere executive order away from shedding their cloak of humanity and returning to the state of predatory beasts. The real heroes are and have always been the pacifists. We (male pacifists) have less luck wooing the ladies than the shaven-headed killing machines, but the ladies we manage to successfully court are often the most eligible bachelorettes -- or the most desirable of barflies. Pacifists lament the inability of a rational form of government to command right, while at the same time opposing efforts to command anything. The paradox is that most liberals are convinced of the moral and ethical rightness of our positions, yet we paradoxically attempt to impose our views on society through political and "grass roots" actions, monitoring of "hate speech," et cetera, while at the same time demanding limits on government intervention in our private lives, such as wire taps and cameras in public spaces. I would love to be able to effectively command police officers to use restraint when making arrests, but I oppose the proliferation of cameras, which would aid in monitoring police behavior.

Inconsistency should not worry us. As Emerson wrote, in Self-Reliance: "With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do ... if you would be a man, speak what you think to-day in words as hard as cannon-balls, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict everything you said to-day." Life is not static, and any religion that refuses to change with the times is doomed to become a monument to a dead past. One need not persecute, with war or words, such a religion; for such a religion is already doomed. Concern for consistency, a belief that God created human beings to think, believe, and do the same things from the beginning to the end of time, is indeed a belief for small minds. Small minds are dangerously seductive, for they pose no discernible challenge. They seem easily controllable, when they are actually the ones doing the controlling by virtue of their constant need for oversight and attention. Strong persons often enjoy bossing around weak, stupid persons. But we need only recall Hegel's master-slave dialectic to understand who is really in control here. I know a very attractive (physically and intellectually) woman who is attracted to very dumb men. The smallness of the minds of her lovers is more or less balanced by the largeness of something else, and that is all she cares about. I know a certain man who is attracted to immature women, and he doesn't mind insulting his own intelligence with stupid conversations if it means gaining access to something else. I know several people with tiny minds who love the lofty spaciousness of a church, and find comfort therein. I know a man with a large and expansive mind who lives in a tiny apartment and is content, so long as he learns something new every day, and retains the ability to change his mind. "The will to a system is a lack of integrity," as Nietzsche wrote. Silly people love systems, and systems support the meager aspirations of silly and inconsequential people. This includes our so-called democracy -- for the rulers of this country are as much concerned with maintaining the status quo as so-called radical Islamists are concerned with maintaining a seventh-century interpretation of the Koran.

The ancient Gnostics had a valuable insight into human existence. They divided humanity into three main types: the "spirituals" (those having a direct connect and line of descent from the highest spiritual or intellectual reality); the "soulish" (those divided between the intellectual reality and the lower, material realm); and the "materials" (those of the lowest order, living only in and through base matter). Islam divides humanity into three types as well: the Muslims (receivers and followers of the final revelation of Allah); the "people of the book" (Jews and Christians who still cling to the old prophecies, but are nevertheless "children of Abraham"); and the infidels (those who do not submit, in any way, to the commands of Allah). The main difference is that the Gnostic division of humanity proceeds from the largest-minded people to the smallest; in Islam it is the reverse. For the Gnostics were the most liberal of ancient Christians, admitting all manner of "revelation" (including pagan philosophy, mythology, Mystery cults, astrology, and alchemy); they created an inclusive environment in which no knowledge was deemed unworthy of the "spiritual" person, all experience was valid and nothing, they maintained, is harmful to the person who is aware of his or her home on high -- and this includes liking boys and music, and wearing makeup. It was only the "materials," those who are aware of nothing but the olfactory organs and the glands, that the Gnostics considered as beyond hope. Even the "soulish" people had a chance, if only they managed to turn their attention from worldly to eternal, intellectual things. In our day and age, it is the "materials" who accomplish the great things, like healing and preventing disease, and inventing new ways to lessen the impact of human proliferation on our shared environment. In the eyes of Islam, however, the truly holy are those who maintain their lives in a seventh-century style, and see everything through the lens of an ancient text which, although composed in the early 600s of the Common Era, actually has its roots in the Bronze Age. Until the small-minded ones at the "top" develop the humility to attend to the rational critique of their religion offered by those large-minded ones at the "bottom" -- the infidels! -- Islam will remain a monument to a dead past. Unless, of course, ISIS manages to restore the Caliphate -- which is looking increasingly likely.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali reveals herself as a person with a large mind, more than capable of admitting change. She also comes across as a patient person, especially when she recounts her Harvard seminar and the Islamic fundamentalists who disrupted her as she tried to conduct a Western-style, open and rational dialogue. The book, Heretic, is a worthwhile read. It is very serious, lacking some of the comic relief that one usually expects in self-reflections on a weighty topic. So the book is definitely as heavy as its topic. Well-researched and cited, this volume will appeal to academics and the educated layperson alike.

An Unstable Buffet

© Edward Moore 2015

It is unhappily your disposition to consider what you have as worthless -- what you have lost as invaluable.

~ Lady Byron to Lord Byron

Pardon, at the outset, the titular pun, and self-conscious allusion to Hemingway's A Moveable Feast -- unless, of course, you find these sufficiently charming or amusing to motivate your reading of this little piece. And the quote from one of Lady Byron's letters to her unstable and destabilizing husband, while not especially profound, is, I think, a gentle and valuable reminder to attend to what is on one's plate or -- to use a phrase from Burroughs -- to see what is on the end of one's fork. The present is, however, the worst place to remain. Brief attention to the moment is necessary for the success of any project, such as writing or sex, for without an unimpeded view of the words or the body in front of you, nonfelicitous accidents revise the past and splinter the future into innumerable and unmanageable possibilities. Which is why I feel that everyone aspiring to be a writer or a lover, or both, should see to it that he acquires an addiction (preferably booze) and spends at least a little bit of time in prison. Allow me to explain.

When one is pleasantly buzzed -- not dead drunk -- re-interpretation of the past becomes a duty, to one's emotional and intellectual health, as well as a pleasant and nearly effortless act of private creativity. When one is sailing gently the wine-dark sea, every port of call is a return to a place that is instantly recognizable yet bustling in the midst of a rejuvenation project. One is then as young as one's memories and, despite the haze of noontide and the shifting outlines of the "external" world, as clear-thinking and capable an agent as one could possibly hope to be. To change metaphors, when one is sufficiently enspirited, with the deftness of a virtuoso pianist improvising a cadenza, one trusts in the foundation of the composed piece to lend stability to the unpredictably emerging variations, and in one's own inspiration (courtesy of true down-to-earth spirits) to weave any false notes subtly into the musical texture, to produce a drama of unintended consequences which, when the last note is struck, will strike the listener as wholly intentional. (This last cumbersome sentence is an example of a cadenza-like approach to writing that is not, perhaps, pleasing to the reader, but certainly fun for the hung-over writer.) In other words, then, the past can be a source of personal myth-making, a sort of ur-text of one's life that can be endlessly glossed, allegorized, emended, deconstructed, or expanded into seemingly endless tema con variazioni. For the person who experiences, in the face of his past, a profound and complex depression born of missed or squandered opportunities, self-sabotaged loves, public and private humiliations, et cetera, the ability to re-craft and re-interpret -- like an Alexandrian commentator on Aristotle -- these dark damning lines into epic or romantic monuments of a life that is, in any case, inescapable, becomes a bulwark against the buffetings brought on by that charred imp of the pit known as Conscience.

So much for the past. Like a good buzz, one cannot remain with it forever. Eventually, a brief oblivion ensues, followed by a re-emergence into a blighted dawn where one is welcomed by the precise, predictable, and implacable torturer known as delirium tremens. Every time I fall victim to DT, I wonder if it will be my last; for with every alcohol-fueled, revisionary sojourn into my past, I re-enter the present aged if not wholly sobered, exhausted with the effort of demiurgic struggle with nearly chaotic mental matter, and fated to watch my effortlessly reinvented past and self assume once again their true form. In an essay on "Late Works," John Updike wrote that "The past in one sense recedes but in another gains in interest as the writer ages and the stage of the present empties of decisive action." This is true if the writer -- or indeed anyone -- is permitted to recollect the past in tranquility, and is not subjected to continual buffetings produced by, and productive of, actions both decisive and indecisive. But how many of us are ever afforded that luxury which Wordsworth considered the source of the finest poetry? In this era of ceaseless and inescapable talk, text, and web -- and now of wrist watches that literally zap us to attention -- tranquility and its attendant daydreams seems to be no longer in demand. The past -- as a nice place to visit for a few, a source of pain and regret for many, and a mine of material for the exquisitely rare type of person known as creative -- is consequently failing to receive its proper share of attention. Few seem to notice that insalubrious dwelling in the present is akin to the DTs. When I am suffering from that dreadful extreme of withdrawal, all of my senses are sharpened -- painfully so. My nerves are taut and I am ready to spring at the least possible stimulus. Time virtually stands still as I await a maddening cycle of waiting for the possibility of waiting for something that is nothing but a Blanchot-esque waiting for the wait itself. The physical sickness goes virtually unnoticed as the gentle seductive fingers of insanity begin to stroke me into a morbid, hallucinatory "little death" during which I lose both past and future in an ecstatically static present. But postmodern stylistics aside, and to put it in plain prose, people who live in the present are very often nervous wrecks, for they have no point of reference, no ability to "ground" themselves with the aid of temporal place markers. I knew a certain woman, for example, who simply could not handle a wasted day. If she and I happened to spend a morning and a greater part of the afternoon in love's embrace, you could be assured that the evening and a good part of the night would be burned away in a frantic effort to "catch up." She would fire up the computer, send off hurried and harried emails, blaze through the house on a cleaning spree like Durtal's housekeeper in Là-Bas, and finally collapse exhausted, the pleasant afterglow of lovemaking a distant memory. Living with the conviction that every waking moment must be crammed tight with purposeful activity is almost a guarantee of an early death -- it is most definitely a guarantee that people will find you insufferable, impossible ... unloveable.

Now in prison one is forced to accept wasted days -- many of them. But there is a saying: "Do the time, don't let the time do you." Anyone who has spent even a small amount of time in the pokey knows exactly what that means. A person who is already used to self-reflection will fare rather well in an environment of pointless activities (cards, chess, dominoes, television re-runs, circumambulation during yard time, et cetera), for the real activity for the introspective person will always be the quest for personal meaning. Prison acts as a buffer against the onslaught of the outside world, and provides one -- whether one wants it or not -- with the essential solitude for a sojourn into one's past. The person who has a rich and varied past -- equal parts (almost) joy and suffering, love and hate, sickness and health, and so on -- will emerge from the big house with a determination to "arise, or be for ever fallen." I am writing here of myself. Remembrance of past happiness -- triumphs, loves, discoveries -- kept me sane in prison, and motivated me, upon my release, to venture into unknown territory for the purpose of adding new material to my future past. Poignantly, I sought to distance myself from certain memories that I shared -- and share -- with a woman for whom I will always feel the deepest love by creating new memories of a vastly different type. This involved, initially, a restorative return to earlier, youthful passions that were not shared with my beloved, and in the pursuit of which she had no part and, therefore, no tainting effect upon those memories. Building upon memories of a time before my beloved had entered my life, I was able to re-enter the "free" world rejuvenated and prepared -- so I thought -- for brand new experiences that I would work into the ongoing narrative of my life without any painful references or flashbacks to the one who abandoned me. So my past, purged of pain, became entangled intimately with my present. The bafflingly wide diastêma or caesura created by the selective Lethe-draught, the attempt to exorcise the mnemonic phantom of my beloved, became a scene of playful experiments with alterity.

A good friend asked me one afternoon, as we strolled down a quiet residential street in Philadelphia (bad memories, brownstones, brittle stuff everywhere), why I like Hemingway. Not the novels so much, I explained, but some of the short stories, and especially the flowing, jubilant, and non-condemnatory reminiscence entitled A Moveable Feast. In the tiny preface, Ernest wrote: "If the reader prefers, this book may be regarded as fiction. But there is always the chance that such a book of fiction may throw some light on what has been written as fact." No characters emerge as "real people" in this reminiscence (I won't call it an autobiography), rather they are depicted as agents of certain actions and carriers of atmosphere. Ezra Pound (one of my faovrite poets) is written up in absolute terms. "Ezra was the most generous writer I have ever known and the most disinterested." Knowing what I know of Pound, "disinterested" is a strange adjective. Perhaps Ernest meant that Pound's devotion to an American literary renaissance, a rejuvenation of the bristling hot-wired spirit of conquest that motivated Poe, Emily Brontë, Lovecraft and some select others, led him to separate his emotional life from his escriturial life. Tripartite Pound -- the lover (he loved deeply two women: his wife, Dorothy, and his life-long mistress, Olga Rudge), the linguistic virtuoso, and the thinker of things ideal (the fascist) -- outdid Hemingway in the arena of moving, shaking, and getting arrested. Hemingway was easily frightened, as the memoir makes clear. Pound was as sure of himself as a child is of getting dinner (to use Emerson's cutesy analogy). Ernest bragged and killed animals, got a hard-on watching a bull fight, never really satisifed a woman (I know this because he who boasts is he who cannot make the lady moan) and wrote prose so bad it is good. Pound made the ladies swoon, tasted the gift that only a woman can offer, never did any real violence to anyone. Sure, he was a bit of a loon, but he captured his own mind in the epic Cantos. He takes his place on the eternal shelf. Hemingway, old Ernest (with his kitties and shotgun), wrote with a sense of duty, a job getting done, no tossed-off phrases for the sake of a good line. Describing Wyndham Lewis, Ernest simply stated that Lewis's eyes are those of "an unsuccesful rapist." I don't want to write like Hemingway, but I wish I could if I wanted to.

Philadelphia is a place for loose-limbed artists. If you get hit, you let the punch roll off of you, your body swings and flops from side to side during the buffeting, usually because you are drunk. Walnut Street where we kissed passionately on a blazing July afternoon ... the Reading Market, where I placed my hand below and brought it up scenting of promise and a long night ... the Museum, explaining to the heroined she-devil that a triptych is part of an altar, et cetera -- hard and wild the whole time. What have I written? Works about Church Fathers, some petty panache stilted stuff about Heidegger to please my ex-wife (who hates me with a pitchfork type torture brutality hatred), some poems, and more than a few essays to pack off the day and let sleep roll over me without regret. Prison and alcoholism. On my table stands a large bottle of gin. Some cigars. To drink and smoke and hope that this rambling prose work will be read by someone capable of granting a dinky wish: tweet it. Why? The absurdity of existence is expressed well here. I am kind of crazy about a certain lady I've recently met. She has dark hair and dark eyes, a smile that emits centuries of femininity in a flashing moment. A laugh that invites, hands that throw warmth to the center of my body, ears peeking out from luscious black hair, demanding gentle nibbling.

Will I ask her to go to the Whitney with me? Or maybe just for a lunchtime bite? Of course not. I will continue to tap words onto this screen. And regret everything, from the embrace, the farewell kick, the razzle-dazzle shedding of self that is HOPE (such a sadistic lascerating rusty knife wielder) only to see her again on Monday. Smile. Recite a line from Tennyson. Hell, snort a line. It's only 11:41.

Invitation to guest bloggers

Greetings Readers (assuming I have any):

I believe it is time for me to branch out from the dilettante, "art for art's sake" pose, and engage with contemporary issue in politics, social justice, ethics, and yes, art. Ayaan Hirsi Ali recently published a fine book, Heretic: Why Islam Needs a Reformation Now (2015). A review of this volume might be a great place to start. Of course, in this age of police shootings of unarmed men (invariably black), state-sanctioned spying and even murder, to name just the most disgusting American pastimes, the possible topic(s) for the would-be guest blogger are well-nigh inexhaustible. Now here is the rub: One need not agree with my bleeding heart, liberal self to get published in The Aristocrat. One must simply write an intelligent, well-argued, and hopefully provocative piece. If this new format works out, we might soon be talking dollars and cents -- as in royalties. So, if you are interested, contact me with your proposal and a brief biographical cover letter (optional). Send all proposals, queries, and suggestions to: patristics@gmail.com. Regards, Edward Moore, S.T.L., Ph.D. Editor-in-chief

The Consolation of Decay

A Review of The New Annotated H. P. Lovecraft

© Edward Moore 2015

patristics@gmail.com

Perhaps I am not the only reader of literature in this age of boilerplated textese writing who has grown tired of reading about persons. Contemporary literature abounds in a seemingly inexhaustible supply of tragedy-surviving, disease-overcoming, marginalized, disenfranchised, and sometimes petrified (to the point of needing a ghost writer) authors who feel -- rightly or wrongly -- that their story needs to be told. At the level of the purely fictional we have a few bright lights: Donna Tartt, Michael Gruber, and the protean Thomas Ligotti are the three that immediately come to my rather selective and eclectic mind. These writers manage the rare feat of utilizing atmosphere as much as characters for the impact of their tales. They waste little time (for the most part) dwelling on the minor details of their characters' lives, demonstrating instead the manner in which actions that culminate in an almost fateful or -- shall I say it? -- predestined outcome resonate not only within the climate of a single character's life, but extend to all of humanity, even the cosmos. In Ligotti's case (and I am speaking of his tales of horror or dark fantasy) the actual character(s) in his tales very rarely gain our sympathy; instead, Ligotti's focus is on what Lovecraft has termed the "cosmic" element, that overwhelming violation of the natural order that renders the august person as insignificant as a grub being stung to death by a predatory wasp. Such pessimistic writing appeals, alas, to very few people these days. As humanity, instead of maturing, seems to remain in a perpetual state of pre-adolescence, tales that express a genuine philosophical pessimism, a bold atheistic gaze at the face of a blind cosmos that fascinates even as it devours, are a rare find in today's literary stockpile. Therefore, the recent publication of The New Annotated H. P. Lovecraft (ed. Leslie S. Klinger 2014, with introduction by Alan Moore [New York: Liveright]) is a most welcome publication.

I must mention at the outset that I am irritated by references to Lovecraft as a "pulp" writer who somehow managed to gain "staying power" despite his numerous literary shortcomings. Complaints abound over his excessive use of adjectives, for example. But is this technique really "unliterary"? The overrated twentieth-century critic Edmund Wilson, for example, summed up Lovecraft's achievement with these words: "Lovecraft was not a good writer. The fact that his verbose and undistinguished style has been compared to Poe's is only one of the many sad signs [sic] that almost nobody any more [sic] pays real attention to writing." Wilson, apparently, was among that group of "almost nobodys." Indeed, this syntactically challenged "dean of American critics" dismissed, with a shocking lack of prescience, the first volume of Tolkien's magisterial Lord of the Rings, preferring instead some now forgotten work by James Branch Cabell. When we recognize that English is a gloriously polyphonic, or perhaps polylogoic, language, capable of sustaining several moods and meanings in a single line or phrase, Lovecraft's love of the evocative adjective seems less a fault than a maximum utilization of the power of our most poetic language. Take, as a random example, this passage from Lovecraft's early tale, "The Hound," about two ghoulish connoisseurs of the morbid:

I cannot reveal the details of our shocking expeditions, or catalogue even partly the the worst of the trophies adorning the nameless museum we prepared in the great stone house where we jointly dwelt, alone and servantless. Our museum was a blasphemous, unthinkable place, where with the satanic taste of neurotic virtuosi we had assembled an universe of terror and decay to excite our jaded sensibilities. It was a secret room, far underground; where huge winged daemons carven of basalt and onyx vomited from wide grinning mouths weird green and orange light, and hidden pneumatic pipes ruffled into kaleidoscopic dances of death the lines of red charnel things hand in hand woven in voluminous black hangings. Through these pipes came at will odours our moods most craved; sometimes the scent of pale funeral lilies; sometimes the narcotic incense of imagined Eastern shrines of the kingly dead, and sometimes -- how I shudder to recall it! -- the frightful, soul-upheaving stenches of the uncovered grave.

Not a single false note is struck here. The prose scans in places like poetry; certain phrases ("neurotic virtuosi"; "kaleidoscopic dances of death") lend a feverish, maniacal atmosphere that is not mere description but an actual state of claustrophobic obsession captured in words that the reader cannot escape. It is, indeed, all about atmosphere, as Lovecraft himself declared, in his essay "Some Notes on a Nonentity" (1933): "Spectral fiction should be realistic and atmospheric -- confining its departure from Nature to the one supernatural channel chosen, and remembering that scene, and phenomena are more important in conveying what is to be conveyed than are characters and plot."

Very few writers are capable of holding their reader's attention when the tale is not focused on a central character, for whom we are meant to care, or somehow develop an interest or fascination. As a reader, I find it very difficult to care about a character with whom I am unable to identify, or at least empathize. I found myself identifying with Durtal in Là-Bas by Huysmans, a novel that is more about atmosphere and phenomena than persons. And a more recent work -- and of a very different type -- Michael Gruber's The Return had me empathizing with the main character, Richard Marder. This latter work, however, was expertly plotted, with well-developed characters, fine dialogue, vivid scene-painting, and genuine suspense (not the telegraphed suspense of "junk lit"). Yet as much as I enjoyed Gruber's novel, I will not return to it -- for the tale has been told and there is no more to tell. To Huysmans, on the other hand, I have returned time and again, for the atmosphere is such that I find a temporary home in its pages, with characters who represent ideas far less than actions. The novel (or story) of ideas finds few readers in our age, for voyeurism has replaced genuine human interest, as witnessed not only in the realm of entertainment ("reality" shows and the like) but also in our "culture" at large, from rampant recording of every minor detail of one's life through digital media, to NSA spying, to police surveillance cameras being installed -- with very little protest from the zombified public -- in towns across this never-very-great nation. For a sensitive few, this inescapable world demands more than just a philosophical critique, even if the critique comes from decent or fine writers. What is really needed is an authentic escape -- by which I mean a responsible escape -- from what should be viewed as an intolerable mode of existence.

Escape into a realm of fantasy, like Middle Earth, is an uplifting experience, promoting optimism and the core virtues of loyalty, honor, and friendship. But as much as we love Frodo, Sam, Gandalf and company, we know that they do not represent life in our age. Rather, they give us humanity (including hobbits, elves, dwarfs, all of whom are human types) not as we are, but as we ought to be. As much as I love Lord of the Rings, I am aware that as literature it is not authentic escape, for its origin (as Tolkien himself pointed out) is in the "fairy story," which inevitably contains allegorical elements, going back to Spenser's Faerie Queene and other mediaeval morality tales. In the work of Lovecraft, we get a heavy dark dose of cosmic reality. We are alone in this universe (at least for the time being, until we encounter life elsewhere), and unless we subscribe to the obsolete but unfortunately still thriving religio-superstition of our anachronistic age we have nothing to hope for, nor to fear, after death. The existential anguish produced by this realization either leads one to make the Kierkegaardian "leap of faith" or to simply accept life as "absurd"; and the only escape from anguish born of absurdity is to embrace the freedom of that situation. As Sartre put it, in Being and Nothingness: "In anguish I apprehend myself at once as totally free and as not being able to derive the meaning of the world except as coming from myself." Such anarchic solipsism is unsustainable, and we know that Sartre eventually found his own answer to the problem of an existentialist ethics by converting to Marxism. With better faith, I think, Lovecraft converted his view of the aimlessness of life and the random combustions of the cosmos to the realm of dreams, where amoralism coupled with a creativity in league with ontological chaos produced a dark literature that is not pessimistic but, to use Lovecraft's own term, "indifferentist."

Lovecraft was very clear about his lack of concern with morality and ethics. In the cosmos at large, he stated many times, human laws, emotions, desires have no significance; "good and evil, love and hate, and all such local attributes of a negligible and temporary race called mankind, have [no] existence at all" (letter to Farnsworth Wright, July 5, 1927). Many will likely consider this a disturbingly irresponsible stance; especially in our own time, and in this country, where mass incarceration, police brutality, erosion of privacy, the barbarism of capital punishment, theocratic politicians, and a continuous defecation on our Constitution and the natural environment -- to list just a few "ills" -- have all made it difficult to utter the word "democracy" without a cynical smirk. Yet that magic word art -- spoken at the right moment, when nerves are raw and minds are ravaged or else numbed by the blind perpetuation of those who think with and through glands and cloaca -- still has the power to remind us, however dimly, of the great light of intellect that has burned throughout ages darker than our own. All great art is simultaeously an escape from the self and into the self -- or rather, into those parts of the self that all-too-often remain in shadow. Lovecraft confronted his shadow self in dreams and waking reveries, and was able to sense the dark substrata of mundane existence. But it was not enough for him to merely sense a "crawling chaos" beneath the apparent solidity of human lives and institutions. The challenge was to create art out of this cacademoniac hupokeimenon. Far from being the "hack-writer" that the grammatically aggrieving Wilson claimed he was, Lovecraft had a very clear sense of his mission as an artist. In "The Defense Reopens" (1921) he wrote:

It is not [the artist's] business to fashion a pretty trifle to please the children, to point a useful moral, to concoct superficial 'uplift' stuff ... or to rehash insolvable human problems didactically. He is the painter of moods and mind-pictures -- a capturer and amplifier of elusive dreams and fancies -- a voyager into those unheard of lands which are glimpsed through the veil of actuality but rarely, and only by the most sensitive.

Lovecraft's sensitivity to landscape and architecture is well-known. As Klinger points out in his forward to The New Annotated H. P. Lovecraft, in "The Festival" "the town of Kingsport becomes an even more important 'character' then the nameless narrator" (xlvii). Written in 1925, this tale still has the cadences of some of the earlier prose poems, like "Ex Oblivione" or "Celephaïs" and opens with a lush, almost sublime atmospheric evocation:

I was far from home, and the spell of the eastern sea was upon me. In the twilight I heard it pounding on the rocks, and I knew it lay just over the hill where the twisting willows writhed against the clearing sky and the first stars of evening. And because my fathers called me to the old town beyond, I pushed on through the shallow, new-fallen snow along the road that soared lonely up to where Aldebaran twinkled among the trees; on toward the very ancient town I had never seen but often dreamed of.

Note here the use of the verb "writhed" in reference to the willow trees, already lending ominous sentience to an otherwise commonplace natures scene. Also, the road "soared" up to where Aldebaran (or Alpha Tauri, as the note helpfully explains) twinkles among the trees. Lovecraft has subtly blurred the distinction between land and sky, placing us, as it were, directly in a dreamlike state. This is exquisite writing, and compares favorably with the disorienting perspectival shifts and non sequiturs one encounters in Kafka, for example (I am thinking especially of his barely readable The Castle).

Lest one think that indifference to petty human concerns in favor of poetic devotion to dreams and fancies is the sum of Lovecraft's contribution to literature, I would draw attention to his masterpiece, the novella The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, exhaustively and accurately annotated by Klinger, and provided with some beautiful photographs of the relevant sites mentioned in the story. In Part II: An Antecedent and a Horror, Lovecraft displays more than a layperson's knowledge of colonial American history, as well as the literature of alchemy, sorcery, and astronomy/astrology circulating in that period. I have heard several readers of Lovecraft say that they simply skip over the long lists of books with Latin titles that he includes for "verisimilitude." As the notes amply show, these books are not mentioned haphazardly, but reflect the type of alchemical or pseudo-scientific interests of not a few people in that age, and help the reader to get a sense of just what was happening in Curwen's catacombs. One note that I would have liked to see expanded a bit is 46, on Hermes Trismegistus. There were two types of Hermetica, the "scientific" or "astrological," and the "philosophical." The latter contains several texts of a Gnostic nature, notably the Poimandres, dealing with a disruption in the intellectual godhead from which darkness descended upon the world. Whatever entity Curwen called upon at his last extremity may have been one of the products of the Gnostic Demiurge, the ignorant and imitative craftsman of the material cosmos, estranged from the intellectual realm because of his arrogance. In fact, it seems likely that Lovecraft had at least a rudimentary knowledge of Gnosticism (from the texts available during his time) reflected in the "blind, idiot god" Azathoth.

On a personal note, it was pleasant to recall my first visit to Providence, Rhode Island, in 1993, on a quest for the sites mentioned in The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, most of which I located without any guidance. And what a thrill it was, as I strolled along Benefit Street, to recognize "The Shunned House," with its high cellar and steep lawn! I took the very same walk that Charles took, pausing near the river to gaze upon Stamper's Hill as the last rays of the dying sun cast its majestic glow on that mystical old town. Strolling back up the hill to the Bed & Breakfast where I was staying, I felt at one with Lovecraft, as lame as that might sound. But I was young, only nineteen, and reveling in the joy of discovering the first author from whom I gained inspiration. From the very first tale I read by Lovecraft -- "Beyond the Wall of Sleep" -- I knew that I was destined to become a writer. Examining his manuscripts and typescripts at the John Hay Library, under the watchful eye of a very pretty librarian, I discovered just how romantic scholarship can be. The life of a writer and academician need not be a lonely one. Indeed, the notion that Lovecraft was a recluse is not entirely accurate. He may have had his reclusive moments, especially during intense periods of creativity, but he admitted at one point to "finding psychological solitude more or less of a handicap" (letter to F. C. Clark, March 9, 1924). How true that is! As I had dinner with that lovely librarian at the fine seafood restaurant on the river, talking enthusiastically of Lovecraft, Providence, Renaissance art, and many other things, I found it hard to imagine that there is a "crawling chaos" beneath the bright solid earth upon which we all tread. It took many years -- and many heartbreaks -- to find out that Lovecraft was right. "Loathsomeness waits and dreams in the deep, and decay spreads over the tottering cities of men" ("The Call of Cthulhu").

* * * * *

In addition to the copious and ever-helpful notes by Leslie S. Klinger, this volume contains a useful little Introduction by Alan Moore, for the sake of those who require a bit of preparation and perhaps a touch of warning before delving into this remarkable American literary genius. The selection of stories is not disappointing, but as is to be expected, there are some that I was sorry to se excluded; for example, "He," and "The Rats in the Walls." But that is a minor complaint. In any case, one can easily find these stories online, and it might be rewarding to do some research for one's own annotations. The Appendices are helpful and fun -- The Faculty of Miskatonic University -- and the budding Lovecraft scholar will benefit from the Works and Revisions appendices. This hefty tome belongs on the shelf -- or better yet, open on the desk -- of every Lovecraft enthusiast, and indeed, anyone interested in true literary dark fantasy -- or "horror," if you must.

Pound and Slams

© Edward Moore 2015

The art of letters will come to an end before A.D. 2000.

~ Ezra Pound

Conspicuous by the absence of an entry devoted to him -- in the recent A New Literary History of America, ed. G. Marcus, W. Sollors (Cambridge: Harvard University Press 2009) -- is the expatriate but still American poet and scholar Ezra Pound. One need not seek too strenuously the reasons for this exclusion. Most people with an interest in literature know of Pound's rather buffoonish but still revolting anti-Semitism (later repudiated, rather too late, in a statement to Allen Ginsberg: "the worst mistake I made was that stupid, suburban prejudice of anti-Semitism"); his admiration for and support of Mussolini before and during World War II, which resulted in Pound's arrest and indictment for treason; and his unrelenting devotion to his own idiosyncratic conception of fascism (despite later lame attempts at retraction, he nevertheless gave the fascist salute upon his return to Italy in 1958). This potent cocktail of political incorrectness (to put it mildly) has been sufficient to place Pound on the outskirts of contemporary literary criticism and history. That said, I find it curious, if not hypocritical, that the editors of A New Literary History of America had no qualms about devoting a section to Malcolm X, who before his conversion to mainstream Islam preached that whites are of the devil's race, that he would welcome a race riot, and declared violence an acceptable way to deal with whitey (among other unsavory -- at least to rational persons -- "ideas"); even after his so-called conversion he still used the phrase "by any means necessary" -- which it does not take a linguist to read as a rubber stamp for violence against whites. The dubious literary quality of his "autobiography" was deemed by Marcus and Sollors sufficient reason to devote an entry to X, while relegating a vastly more important and influential literary figure to a few scattered references.

The many poetry anthologies that I have consulted either include a mere smattering of Pound's early work, such as the well-known "In a Station of the Metro" or "The Garden" -- short uncontroversial stuff, easily digestible by students -- or exclude his work altogether. Harold Bloom, in his anthology, at least displayed intellectual honesty by stating outright his disdain for Pound as a human being; but Bloom still provided a brief essay on the poet and an unrepresenstative poem from Cathay. So, if an original, difficult (but rewarding), and highly influential poet is cold-shouldered by contemporary academia for his odious political and social views, one is justified in feeling that the writer in our age -- like the writer of 150 plus years ago -- must meet certain moral and ethical expectations if he is to be honored by posterity. There is no better way for the writer to achieve this desired acceptance than by dealing with topics that speak of or to a group holding some sort of moral high ground -- for example, oppressed ethnic minorities, or wounded veterans, or victims of abuse (especially the sexual kind) or any other "marginalized" group one can discover or create. Deeply personal writing is generally ignored if it does not speak to -- or better, for -- a group whose members can identify with the writer and claim him or her as "one of us." But an introspective and deeply sensitive writer, one who is -- for better or worse -- preoccupied with his or her own attempts to impose meaning upon the litter of impressions, emotions, and responses that constitute daily life, will avoid any identification with a group, in order to maintain originality and -- most importantly -- that increasingly commodified boon of life known as individuality. For the intellectual, personal experiences are filtered through and by a tradition, captured in writing, to which he or she is heir (as T. S. Eliot explained in his famous essay, "Tradition and the Individual Talent"). By reading works of the past, and seeking therein a common existential theme with which one can identify, the first step is taken in the construction and management of a personal meaning, which the conscientious writer will in turn communicate to posterity. While it is impossible to read everything, the truly creative person will choose carefully the collection of works that will serve as a standard for expressive excellence; he will not permit a group to choose these works for him. Just as every person is -- in the terms of classic personalist philosophy -- a unique, unrepeatable entity whose inner life is radically unknowable by the "other," so the collection of past works that serve to ground the writer in his or her own private tradition are equally -- in the interpretation given to them by the developing writer -- unique and unrepeatable. Writing, and all art, demands privacy and autonomy of thought -- until the moment the work is unveiled to the world.

Using his "ideogramic method," Ezra Pound selected from his vast reading material (as well as artworks, news reports, music) anything he found to be significant or germane to his concerns of the moment. He then used these occasional pieces, if you will, as ideograms, i.e., symbols to present and illuminate ideas, without extraneous comment. As Pound himself put it: "The artist seeks out the luminous detail and presents it. He does not comment." This compositional style led Pound to produce what many have felt to be works of excessive and unnecessary obscurity. As one of Pound's biographers, Humphrey Carpenter, remarked, the ideogramic method "consisted simply of selection rather than analysis. He would pick out items -- works of art, lines in a poem, pieces of music, snippets of news, whatever happened to catch his attention and seemed to relate to his current obsession -- and hold them up for attention as if their significance were self-evident" (A Serious Character: The Life of Ezra Pound [New York: Delta 1988] p. 170). This method dominated Pound's style during the 1930s and '40s, and remained later on, as he began to struggle to impose some sort of form or over-arching theme upon the megalithic volume of Cantos that had accumulated throughout his life. Here is an example from one of the more "obscure" Cantos (53):

Then an Empress fled with Chao Kang in her belly.

Fou-hi by virtue of wood;

Chin-nong, of fire; Hoang Ti ruled by the earth,

Chan by metal.

Tchuen was lord, as is water.

CHUN, govern

YU, cultivate,

The surface is not enough,

from Chang Ti nothing is hidden.

According to Carpenter, in this Canto, as in many others, "Ezra assumes that the reader already understands the main outlines of what he is trying to convey, and gives only surface details without explanation of their significance" (A Serious Character, p. 570). To the charge of excessive obscurity, and of not giving the reader of his poems any guidance in arriving at a meaning, Pound responded that he did not aim for obscurity, but rather demanded a real investment of thought by his readers, amounting to a sort of co-creatorship. As early as 1921 he told Thomas Hardy that "I am perfectly willing to demand that the reader should read [my poems] as carefully as he would a difficult latin or greek text." As for Canto 51, it is quite clear that a pregnant empress is fleeing from some danger with the aid -- it seems to me -- of elemental forces governed by demi-gods. There is certainly mystery here, and this poem does "resist the intelligence / Almost successfully" (Wallace Stevens, "Man Carrying Thing"), yet this resistance lessens "as the audience begins," in the words of Gertrude Stein, who succinctly (though with her trademark sloppy syntax) describes the relation of writer to reader:

When you are writing before there is an audience anything written is as important as any other thing and you cherish anything and everything that you have written. After the audience begins, naturally they create something that is they create you, and so not everything is so important, something is more important than another thing ... ("What are Master-pieces and Why Are There So Few of Them")

In other words, the writer will include in his work anything and everything that he feels to be meaningful; but the reader, who has not the same emotional and intellectual attachment to the work as the writer, will exclude whatever seems superfluous, for the sake of rescuing and cultivating the parts that are -- to use Pound's term -- luminous.

Preference for the written over the spoken word led Pound to include actual Chinese ideograms in several of his Cantos, and even at one point a musical score. A slow and careful deliberation on the part of the reader was clearly intended, for the meaning that Pound packed into each piece requires readerly dedication to unpack. That this unpacking involved the reader in the creative process was Pound's intention, and his great contribution to modern poetry. A reader expecting to have his hand held as he navigates the Cantos will be disappointed, indeed, his time will be wasted. As Basil Bunting put it, in a poem likening the Cantos to the Alps:

There they are, you will have to go a long way round

if you want to avoid them.

It takes some getting used to. There are the Alps,

fools! Sit down and wait for them to crumble!

("On the Fly-Lead of Pound's Cantos")

Ever impatient with academic, analytical interpretations of poetry -- indeed, of all art -- Pound did not seek to provide, along with the typical poetic tropes and symbols, what I. A. Richards called poetry's "prose sense, its plain, overt meaning" (Practical Criticism, part I). Pound, who claimed to have always struggled with prose, did not see the point in writing poetry if, after the metaphorical dust has settled, one is only left with plain meaning. Setting two poetic statements side-by-side, with no explanation, will not simply produce a third statement or idea, but rather will "suggest some fundamental relation between them" (in the words of Fenollosa, a compiler and translator of Chinese literature whose work Pound was given to edit after the former's death). As much as Pound seemed to enjoy (sometimes) reading his poems aloud, he knew that their real impact would only be achieved when the reader sat and studied the poems as one would a classical text. Very few people do that nowadays, preferring instead the immediate impact of a performance over the gradual unfolding of a work of discursive art.

I recently listened, via a popular online media site, to recordings of several of my favorite poets (Pound included) reciting their work. What struck me more than the readings themselves were the comments posted by other listeners. A well-known and admired poetic performer, Dylan Thomas, was berated as "pompous sounding," "lacking guts," while Sylvia Plath was regarded less for her work (and her reading of "Daddy" chilled me to the bone) and more for her suicide (one lout posted his opinion that Sylvia was a "whiny whore" -- such is the level of insight to which one is often treated in the pandemonium of the Internet). T. S. Eliot's rather placid reading of Prufrock (a 1943 recording) did disappoint me, and others. However, Ezra Pound, whose bombastic recitation of Hugh Selwyn Mauberley -- exaggerated brogue, excessively rolled 'r's, improperly pronounced Greek -- met with general approval, even admiration. Very strange, thought I, this approbation of a recitation of a poem that only unfolds its multifloriate effects through slow careful reading and re-reading. Apparently, it was Pound's eccentric performance, not the content of the poem, that pleased the listeners, several of whom commented at some length -- one "poster" described Pound's almost self-parodic recital as "lofty, dignified" (go figure). It was at this point that I came across a reference to something called a "poetry slam." I did the requisite search and am now somewhat familiar with this phenomenon (apparently there are "story slams" too).

A "poetry slam" is quite simple. Poets sign up at these events, which usually take place at a coffee house or some other such "artsy" place, and are given a certain amount of time to recite their poetry to the audience (all of whom, one would expect, are poets themselves, or at least consider themselves such). At the end of the event, prizes are given. One can accumulate prizes at the local, regional, and national levels, at which point one gains laureate status in that world. I assume -- having yet to attend one -- that the "winners" of these events are not necessarily the most technically polished poets, nor the ones whose work is the most aesthetically and intellectualy nuanced, but the ones who manage to establish a "stage presence" and to use successfully the age-old technique of the sophist, summed up so well in a lyric by Ian Anderson of Jethro Tull: "I may make you feel, but I can't make you think" (Thick as a Brick). Tapping into the energy of a group is not what poetry is about. A poet is not a performer or entertainer, but an artist. That distinction has been lost today, in an atmosphere of critical laxity in the face of "people coming together." When people come together and the distinction of persons is obscured, we indeed see only one giant face that grimaces or smiles in unison with the nameless particles of which it is composed. This is the sort of behavior one encounters at sporting events, or more to the point, at a professional wrestling match, from which the term "slam" is obviously taken, and intended to invoke that hokey (but admittedly fun) atmosphere. At such events the crowd behaves in predictable ways, depending upon which wrestler happens to be in the ring, a "good guy" or a "bad guy." The crowd cheers or boos on cue. The wrestlers talk trash, then bash each other which fists and chairs, and yes slam each other. The predetermined outcome of the match "hangs in the balance" as the audience, disbelief dutifully suspended, cheers and jeers the whole thing on. It's all a lot of fun, and one sees some excellent performances and comes away feeling most adequately entertained. But it is not art -- and that is OK, for it doesn't claim to be. Poetry "slams," on the other hand, claim to give "artists" a chance to "have their voices heard." This in an environment where everyone is a poet or would-be poet seeking to grab the spotlight for a moment and get that prize and the bragging rights that go with it. I wonder how an authentically critical response can occur in such an environment. It seems to me that it would be rather like a bad conversation, in which each participant is waiting for the other to finish speaking so he or she can spout in turn. No one in such sad social ping-pong matches ever pays a stick of attention to what the other is saying; the one is merely awaiting his own turn to serve.

Now as I admitted, I have never been to a "slam," nor do I have any desire to attend one, much less participate. At this point my reader will surely object that, lacking the experience of a "slam," I do not know of what I am speaking (writing). I can only reply by comparing what I have read of "slams" to what I have experienced in a very similar venue. Years ago, when I was a much younger man, I went with my folk-rock band, The Bag Snatchers, to an "open mic" night at a local coffee house, and encountered the atmosphere I described above. It was a waste, for no one actually listened to anyone else's music; all were too hyped up over their own turn to perform. No one gave any feedback; applause was uniform until a scantily clad female bassist and her hunky singer-guitarist boyfriend (I assume) took the stage. Of course, no one heard the music. The applause was deafening. As Kierkegaard put it, "the crowd is untruth."

* * * * *

Later in his life, pushing eighty, Pound (suffering from depression and other medical problems) began to reflect upon his legacy, specifically what he had intended as his magnum opus, the Cantos. In a 1966 interview with Daniel Cory he dismissed that work as "botch." Lamenting the fact that he did not read enough, nor come to know important things -- necessary, as he put it, to accomplish successfully a work like the Cantos -- Pound demonstrated his awareness of the problematical nature of the ideogramic method:

Ain't it better to know something about a few things if you're trying to do a work like the Cantos? I picked out this and that thing that interested me, and then jumbled them into a bag. But that's not the way to make ... a work of art.

Despite his own harsh judgment of his great contribution to literature, notable individualists and not a few great poets demonstrated their ability to engage in co-creatorship with Pound, and to bestow meaning upon the luminosity of the Cantos in the best and only truly artistic way possible: to write more poetry. Ginsberg, visiting Pound in 1967, told the old master that "the sequence of verbal images [in the Cantos], phrases like 'tin flash in the sun dazzle' and 'soap smooth stone posts' -- these have given me, in praxis of perception, ground to walk on." As Pound persisted in denigrating his accomplishment with phrases like "stupid" and "irrelevant," Ginsberg responded with a personal statement that expresses precisely the relation of writer to reader necessary for the emergence of meaning:

I'm a Buddhist Jew whose perceptions have been strengthened by the series of practical exact language models scattered through the Cantos like stepping stones, because, whatever your intentions, their practical effect has been to clarify my perceptions.

The clarification of perceptions through language models -- this is the genesis of poetry, of all fine writing. It sounds so simple, but we have seen how Pound, eager to capture all the luminous moments of his own aesthetic perceptions, produced a work that has inspired, yes, the elite among writers, and has caused no small difficulty for the less creative readers who have attempted the Cantos. Indeed, the Cantos were a torment to Pound himself, proving that, whatever value a reader may assign to the Cantos -- and to Pound as a person -- his authenticity as an artist should be beyond doubt. For of the Cantos he wrote, "Let those I love try to forgive / what I have made." And on a more positive note, he urges the readers of his Cantos "To be men [we would nowadays write "human beings" or "persons" or some other less gender specific noun] not destroyers." There are many ways to destroy. Allowing yourself to be absorbed into, and diluted by, the group or the crowd is perhaps the slowest but also the most effective way to destroy your most precious possession, individuality. And when that goes, creativity goes, and the artist disappears -- or rather, she becomes an entertainer.