Telescopes

A few posts back, I wrote about my brief attempt at writing poetry as an undergrad. I mentioned that an attempt at Spenserian stanza that had been subsequently discouraged by my professor and was, in turn, revised into what was supposed to be a sestina. Well, I've decided to submit both poems here. Is the more Spenserian poem too ridiculously Romantic, too lofty in its aims? Does the sestina version lose anything by its irreverence? You decide!

The first poem—"South Africa's New Telescope"—is really my second ever attempt at writing poetry. It came basically towards the beginning of the quarter. It's revision—"Telescopes"—is the last. As I'm writing this, I realize that I haven't really tried to write any more poetry since. Maybe I'm too busy. Maybe I lack the motivation. Who knows? At any rate, the subject matter might need some context (if you're New Critical enough to think that poems should stand on their own, feel free to skip the remainder of this paragraphs): as a new poetry student without any idea of how to come up with things to write about, I turned to the New York Times, in which I found an article about an endowment for South Africa to install an extremely powerful new telescope. According to the article (as I recall it) some were excited about what that meant for the sciences in South Africa while others were a bit more critical of the program. Anyway.

(Dis?)Enjoy:

South Africa’s New Telescope

South Africans, tell us, what starry realm
Will you unearth? This is the Western scold:
“Though freshly blessed, does it not overwhelm
Your hearts to stare into the heavens cold?
You live on Earth; mysterious lands unfold
Within the reaches of your lowly sod.
Why strive to know the lifeless secrets told
In ageless past, by magi seeking God
Astronomers with theories seldom (often?) flawed?

“We doubt,” they tease, “you'll ever find some new
Dimension—surely heav’nly figures glide
Throughout their course to black abysses (true,
They need to move or else they will collide!)—
Or, like Copernicus, on some noontide
Declare the sun, bright Helios, the heart
Of our small galaxy. Our daily guide
Provides our center but is just the start,
One tiny piece, we know, of which we are a part.”

Stay true! Remain devoted to your goal,
That noble dream of staring through the skies,
And know the universe (or some black hole)
Contains some quiet marvel for your eyes.
Join with the ranks of men, who, with surprise,
Will jostle from their slumber, unaware
And unprepared. Your swift and sudden rise
Will elevate you with a gentle care
To highest fame, a signal of your future fare.

So much for that. Here's the other:

Telescopes

What good is it to have a telescope
If just to stare into the sky above?
Astronomy is such a slippery slope!

All human-kind tries more and more to cope
With life by turning to dry science. But
What good is it to have a telescope

When star-gazing has never offered hope?
The empty void of space is void of love.
Yet in astronomy, that slippery slope,

We place our trust because we know we owe
Our knowledge of the solar system to
The observations of a telescope;

Without it we know nothing. And although
There’s really nothing new for it to prove
Astronomy remains a slippery slope.

So where’s the worth in understanding how
The universe is bare oblivion?
When we have too much faith in telescopes
Astronomy is just a slippery slope.

Well, I've never shown my poetry to anyone outside of my class before, so, I'm going to go now before I absolutely embarrass myself.

Red + White ≠ Pink

I just finished reading G. K. Chesterton's Orthodoxy. It was a good read, but Chesterton doesn't really impress me very much as a writer. Maybe that's partly due to my just having finished a class on Victorian Britain. When I read Chesterton in the context of other Victorians, he doesn't really stand out that much to me. His writing even borders on annoying at times through his incessant use of puns. Almost every paragraph seems to be trying too hard to be clever.

That said, he has some incredibly thought-provoking ideas. Chesterton had his finger on the pulse of his times, and he seems very perceptive in his ability to notice things that are so often ignored, as often at the turn of the C20 as they are at the turn of the 21st.

I've always had an uneasy relationship with the idea of post-modernism, especially it's suggestion of relativism. Seeing everything in different shades of gray is problematic when we have an idea of black and white existing separately. But it seems so sound: Kant gave us subjectivity, the poets gave us layers of meaning, different interpretations, the Enlightenment and science gave us the dream of objective truth.

Chesterton's responses to the questions that ended up being so post-modern—especially how those questions are answered in Christianity—are refreshing. Here's one take:

"As we have taken the circle as the symbol of reason and madness, we may very well take the cross as the symbol at once of mystery and of health. Buddhism is centripetal, but Christianity is centrifugal: it breaks out. For the circle is perfect and infinite in its nature; but it is fixed forever in its size; it can never be larger or smaller. But the cross, though it has at its heart a collision and a contradiction, can extend its four arms forever without altering its shape. Because it has a paradox in its centre it can grow without changing. The circle returns upon itself and is bound. The cross opens its arms to the four winds; it is a signpost for free travelers."

Chesterton delights in the paradoxes of Christianity. He does not try to resolve them by blending them together. Nor does he try to understand them as a dialectic, perpetuating and being perpetuated by each other. He lets them exist co-separately. He says that Chrisianity keeps contrasting ideas—like life by way of death, like a celebration of celibacy and of family, like courage and modesty—and it keeps them "side by side like two strong colours, red and white, like the red and white upon the shield of St. George. It has always had a healthy hatred of pink."

Most strikingly, he suggests that "Christianity is a superhuman paradox whereby two opposite passions may blaze beside each other." When I read passages like this, I feel a thrill, and I am grateful to Chesterton for putting it into words. I feel like some unresolved problem that I have been working through just got a little bit closer to a solution of sorts. But I have such a difficult time imagining how that solution might look in the real world.

That separate colors may remain distinct yet wholly combined is a paradox that we see every day, but, for me, continues to be veiled in mystery. Maybe the solution is to embrace the mystery while embracing the truth, as well. Is that a paradox?

Ezra Pound was an Indie Rocker

There have always been things about the indie aesthetic that have been fascinating to me. I don't really mean to imply fascination in the sense that I'm able to remain critically distant from the movement, or that I'm on some sort of pseudo-anthropological mission to understand the intricacies of indie culture. Although I may not "look" indie, my tastes in music and art are, I feel, very much along the same lines that characterize independent art.

What I mean is that I've always been drawn to the way indie engages with and reacts to the cultural "norm" around it. There especially seems to be an ongoing tension between staying on the fringes of popular culture and being absorbed by it. I can't speak for indie kids elsewhere, but, for me, this tension is central to what makes the whole indie experience appealing.

I realize that I've used the variants of the word "indie" several times now, and maybe I should elaborate on what I think the term means before going on. For me, "indie" seems to be pretty much the same thing as what was referred to in the 90s as "alternative." But while "alternative" seems to have been attached to a certain sound, indie seems to expand beyond musical genre. In fact, it has extended beyond music itself. Indie is cultural (think hip-hop), and is really countercultural. Overall, indie seems to be defined by what it is not—mainstream, commercial culture.

The core of the indie aesthetic, I think, is to embrace that which is not easily accessible by others. Bands produce independent records, or sign to small companies not under the control of a major label, in order to exercise artistic freedom and let their creative muscles flex without being worried about what will sell the most albums. Artists that come to mind for me are Broken Social Scene, Danielson, and Sufjan Stevens. None of the three are representative, but they make my point. Sufjan, who has been pretty successful by indie standards, still has only a marginal percent of the general market share.

But that's just the music. The same applies to film, literature, fashion, art, &c. Regardless of what our tastes are, I think a lot of us share this desire to have our own "private" appreciations that others just don't get.

What really strikes me about the whole indie thing is that it is predicated on being esoteric. And that's the way the indie kids want it. There's a certain thrill that comes with the knowledge that I appreciate forms of art that other people can't "handle." Maybe it makes me feel more artistic myself to know that I have more "sophisticated" tastes. Maybe I just like to feel like a snob. At any rate, its esoteric nature generally turns out to be more frustrating than rewarding. I surround myself with obscure references and strange orchestration, and then complain that I can't find anyone to share my tastes. Many just aren't willing to do the work it takes to understand how good Sufjan really is.

The ridiculous thing about all of this is that I really don't want too many people to share my aesthetic after all. I like that others don't get it and I do. The more commercially acceptable "my" artists become, the less I feel drawn to them. I like the idea that the secret is mine, and, when I have to share it with others who don't understand it the way I do, I can't help but complain about how solitary I am in my artistic interests. But I want to keep the secret nonetheless.

As far as I can tell, the whole thing is a modern invention. It's certainly post-Enlightenment, at any rate. To my mind, it found it's first high point in the High Modernism of the early C20. In a knee-jerk reaction to C19 art (just try reading Victorian poetry!), writers like Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, &c., decided that they were going to create art that would kick our butts. Art was getting too "popular," so this gang set about making art that forced their readers to really work for it—like quoting long, untranslated passages of Dante in his original Italian, or adapting obscure Chinese poets. Like Danielson, the effort to really appreciate Pound or Joyce repelled all but the most dedicated readers. Joyce famously said that it took him 10 years to write Ulysses and it should take us 10 years to read it. And—like the indie kids—that's the way they wanted it.

The irony is that I've never liked Pound. He's too much work for me.

What's the Deal with Creativity?

Creativity is a funny thing. It strikes me as very odd that some people should be naturally blessed with creativity while others of us are completely robbed of it. For some reason, I seem to have found myself dropped into the latter group. I certainly would like to be able to flex some creative muscle, but any attempt to do so invariably seems to come up short.

I think that some people might roll their eyes when I say that, but I certainly feel it to be true. It's not that I'm not talented, but that I'm unoriginal with the talent that I do have. I'm pretty decent as a musician, but my musical abilities never really seem to amount to anything more than interpretation of songs that have already been written by someone else. I'm a literary critic, but I'm almost completely incapable of writing anything literary myself. Just like I do with music, I take other people's ideas and re-interpret them myself.

I can't figure out why this should be the case, and it's extremely frustrating to me. Why should I be robbed of the muses that bless so many other people? I think that the frustration is due, in part, to the fact that I really have a desire to create.

I think of C.S. Lewis' argument from desire, where he claims that our desire for joy is evidence of an afterlife. We long for things than can be attained, Lewis argues. Whatever our appetites desire—food, water, sex, friendship, &c.—can be satisfied in some way in this world. Our desire for joy, however, lacks the possibility for real fulfillment in this life, and Lewis claims that this points to the reality of an afterlife—a heaven—that will fulfill this desire.

I don't really want to get into whether I think that Lewis' argument is sound or not, but it makes me think about my own desire to create. Here is a deep longing that appears to lack fulfillment. And, unlike joy, and don't expect an afterlife to provide the solution to my creative impotence.

So, why can't I create? In order to figure my way through my frustration, here are some reasons that I think my own artistic creativity may be stilted:

1. Maybe I'm just not creative. I have to get this one out of the way. I don't really buy it. I think we're all creative in different ways; those ways just need to be realized. That doesn't mean I think we're all talented—people can be creative and still create weak art—but, at least initially, the creative impulse is there for everyone.

2. Maybe I'm too critical. This one has been hanging over my head a lot lately. I have pretty discerning tastes in all different types of art: musical, literary, film, visual arts (such as photography and painting), &c. I'm certainly not delusional enough to think that everyone is going to share my tastes (they don't), or that my tastes are better than others' (they are), but my opinions about what constitutes good art and bad art are strong. Could they be too strong, forcing me to abort any of my own creative projects as inferior before I give them the chance to see the light of day?

3. Information overload. We obviously live in a media-saturated society. TVs, iPods, Al Gore's Internet, all seem to be happening in front of me at one time or another. Is there too much "noise" happening around me that I can't hear the muse?

4. Allison at the Dead Letter Project has written about a lack of sincerity affecting her own poetry. In this post-post-modern age, sincerity seems to be very much frowned upon. The problem this creates for Allison (and for me) is that most of what I feel compelled to share artistically comes from a sincere place. Of course I have a goofy side, but I'm not driven to communicate that in the same way. I think back to a poetry class I took as an undergrad in which I tried to write a poem (in Spenserian stanzas, no less!) about astronomy in South Africa. My teacher took one look at my "Thee"s and "Thou"s and my reference to Copernicus, and said, "Um, yeah, you can really only write a poem like this if you're being really ironic." I ended up hacking the poem into a sestina that I didn't really like as much, and threw in an irreverent spirit to help my grade, and my teacher approved. But I was forced to compromise the spirit that I had originally intended for the poem. Could this unacceptability of sincerity be squashing my creativity?

Or, maybe I just need to kill my TV...