what is poetry

     “The Poetess“ (1940)

           Joan Miró

                 _____

when Aristotle “proceeds to declare the 
parameters of “Poetry” for the ages“, his
definitions of the various poetic 
“manner[s] or mode[s] of imitation” 
have already been established, his 
categorizations are not unlike Darwin’s 
categorizations of the species during
a much later age, Aristotle was a natural 
scientist much more than he was our 
notion of an abstract philosopher, he 
traded in facts rather than in the 
esoteric musings that Plato, for 
instance, pursued, Virtue, Justice, 
the Good, his conclusions were more 
verifiable

Kant, incidentally, is also famous for 
following a similar form of investigation
as he attempted, nearly, for most, 
inscrutably, to categorize the elements 
of our faculty of understanding

a side story

Kant had stated that at birth we already 
have within our perceptual framework 
implicit understanding of space and 
time, these are not learned through 
experience but are already 
incorporated within us, he said

many years ago, coming out of a 
week-long coma, not knowing where
I was but alone, at that point even
just my consciousness, cause my 
body, were it there, would’ve been 
under the immaculate white sheets 
I could see that would’ve been 
shielding my legs

I looked around, could gather motes 
upon rays of light that were entering 
from what appeared to be a window 
on the right, behind sheer white 
curtains stirred by a soft breeze,  
whirling the shimmering particles 
alive in the light before me like 
miniature spinning galaxies moving 
at the pace of their own infinity

there was no sound

white walls around me stood utterly
still in the purview of my perception,
a door, also white, stood opposite 
me on the opposite wall

where am I, I wondered, could this 
be heaven, an afterlife, I might’ve 
died, I thought, marvelling, no fear, 
regret, nothing other than curiosity, 
absorption, fascination

I tried to answer my question, where 
am I, two dimensions, I figured
after having watched Terence Stamp 
exiled by Marlon Brando to a flat 
intergalactic window pane in 
“Superman“, I hadn’t excluded this 
eventuality, however ingloriously 
transcendental, as a possible 
outcome, I might be in a world with 
only two dimensions, height and 
width, no depth yet without more 
investigation, experience 

ergo, Kant, I concluded, was wrong, 
our knowledge of space is not inborn 
but a product of time and thought like 
everything else 

later, the white door on the far wall
opened, and a nurse walked in, also, 
incidentally, in incandescent white,  
and I understood I was alive

Aristotle suggested that our original 
double instincts towards poetry were 
our propensity to imitate, children 
imitating their parents’ even 
idiosyncratic mannerisms, for
instance

and rhythm, repetition, preludes to 
order, coherence

those two

poetry, I read, is expression
reflecting the heartbeat, essentially,
in all its myriad representations

Richard  

“Meditations”, Book 3 – Marcus Aurelius‏

“If thou workest at that which is before thee, following right reason seriously, vigorously, calmly, without allowing anything else to distract thee, but keeping thy divine part pure, as if thou shouldst be bound to give it back immediately; if thou holdest to this, expecting nothing, fearing nothing, but satisfied with thy present activity according to nature, and with heroic truth in every word and sound which thou utterest, thou wilt live happy. And there is no man who is able to prevent this.”

“Meditations“, Book 3, 12

Marcus Aurelius

_________

the idea of the virtuous man, or the
interpretation of Marcus Aurelius of
such a person, goes back of course to
Socrates by way of Plato, 427 – 347
B.C., who’s ideal was primarily
political, what to achieve within a
political order, rather than a private
meditation, an advice rather than
a contemplation as in Marcus
Aurelius, 121 – 180 A.D., 550,
not inconsequential, years later

other moral perspectives meanwhile
applied, Epicureanism, for instance,
notably, after which the stranglehold
of Christianity produced not philosophy
but dogma, for a subservient and,
biblically labeled, fallen people,
nearly fifteen hundred years spent
trying to figure out how many angels
fit through the eye of a needle,
essentially, how many irrationalities
could prove the existence, and
authority, of a mandated God

René Descartes inadvertently in this
very quest, but not before 1637, put
an end to that, introduced a new, and
revolutionary, perspective, “I think,
therefore I am“, which put the individual
instead of the Church in the driver’s seat,
this, if it didn’t bring on the Renaissance,
at least gave it a significant push

but because of his famous scientific
method, studies afterwards in what
we now know as the humanities
became more empirical than
specifically moral, how do we
perceive rather than how do we live
according to what is right or wrong,
Nietzsche‘s “Beyond Good and Evil“,
1886, reoriented that investigation,
as it happened, ominously, in an age
where any kind of god had become
irrelevant, Beethoven would be
transformed into a Hitler, an
uncomfortably fateful Übermensch,
Superman

now philosophy is concerned with
language, what do we mean when
we say what do we mean, and can
anybody understand that

our closest moralist, our modern day
Marcus Aurelius, is at present Miss
Manners, whom I wholeheartedly
recommend

as well as, of course, Marcus Aurelius

Richard

psst: Miss Manners‘ question and answer
format, incidentally, is not at all unlike
what Plato does in his Socratic dialogues,
she just has a larger, more flip audience

Nemo – “Ennead I” by Plotinus (13)

 

Date: Sun, 17 Mar 2013 19:04:56 +0000
To: Richibi’s Weblog

From: comment-reply@wordpress.com
Subject: [New comment]“Ennead I” by Plotinus.

 

Richard,     

 

You wrote, “my experience is that I cannot know even dimensions before I formally deduce them,”

That is a unique experience. Einstein came to the same conclusion when he developed the Theory of Special Relativity, though perhaps he didn’t have quite the same experience. You both beheld the same underlying reality, although you expressed it in different ways.

Plato’s Absolute, i.e., which is Beauty, Goodness and Truth in One, is immanent. It is distinct but not distant from us, and every soul can ascend to it by reason and intellect. There are different types and levels of beauty, in the human body, in nature, in the universe, in science and art, literature and music. One doesn’t have to be a “Superman” to see beauty or create beauty. Every life is an artistic activity. Every individual is an artist.

The concept of Absolute by no means deny or diminish the freedom of individual existence. On the contrary, the more diverse and free the individual existence, the better and fuller it manifest Absolute Beauty. For instance, Beethoven’s Ninth, unless each member of the choir and orchestra plays his/her best part, the beauty of the symphony cannot be manifested nor experienced by the audience.

Unlike Kant who believes that the noumenal is unknowable, Platonists reason that the noumenal and the phenomenal correspond with one another (sort of like the way an image in the mirror corresponds to the original), since they are both derived from one and the same intelligible reality. Because of this “correspondence”, it is possible to do science. We have been able to predict with accuracy the movement of the stars and other events occurring in nature; Because of this “correspondence” between our consciousness and the outside world, it is possible for us to interact with other people and the world

 

you say, Nemo, “Plato’s Absolute, i.e., which is

Beauty, Goodness and Truth in One“, which

seems to me anachronistic, a premature

conflation with Christian, however implicit,

thought, I don’t think Plato would’ve had a

Trinity, whatever for in a society replete with

a variety of quite serviceable, not to mention

glorious, deities

 

when you speak of “[e]very life“, “[e]very

individual” being “an artistic activity“, “an

artist“, what about animals, insects, trees,

do roses perceive their own beauty, these

are lives, even creative, even inspiring ones,

though I draw the line at inspired, I suspect

they don’t consciously know it 

 

therefore “Beauty, Goodness and Truth” are in

the eye of the beholder, no, as we ask in

French, and the beholder is our own human

only, it appears, incarnation, blessed as we

are, for better or for worse, with

self-consciousness, ““Superm[e]n”” need

not even, but only superfluously, apply  

 

the Tree of Knowledge bore the fruit of

which all of us have partaken, for better or

for worse, by our very nature, and we’ve

created a poem around it in order to

understand

 

it has been mighty, if flawed

 

 

about mirrors, when I yearned for word

from above, or from wherever, I understood

I’d have to forego my entrenched scepticism

 

under the influence of Sartre and Camus,

the Existentialists, whose ideas dominated

the Western World, and my university years,

however nowadays incredible, a time when

Van Cliburn, a Classical music pianist, 

would return from a sealed Communist

Russia, no less, to a New York ticker tape

parade, a more idealistic time than our

present more rapacious, morally bankrupt,

apparently, epoch, I’d believed in Being

and Nothingness, and the corollary Absurd,

I was alone in an indifferent Universe

 

to assume spirits, an extraterrestrial entity

who might be responsive, would require

an act of absolute faith, a profound

disorder in my otherwise determinedly

rational perspective

 

but I had no choice but to succumb to

even irrationality, I knew, for any chance

of grace, you need to believe in miracles

to experience them  

 

need I say that I found that transcendence,

I called it crossing the Bridge of Faith

 

where everything was the same but

different, Nemo, like crossing through a

mirror, like Alice, and discovering another,

infinitely more enchanted, however

numinous and otherworldly, world   

      

 

Richard

 

 

 

Nemo – “Ennead I” by Plotinus (9)

 

---

Date: Wed, 6 Mar 2013 16:20:33 +0000
To: Richibi’s Weblog

From: comment-reply@wordpress.com
Subject: [New comment] “Ennead I” by Plotinus

 

Richard,

You wrote, “I am at the most aware of only one thought, that thought being that
something is thinking,”

Unless you argue that something can think without a thought, there are at least two thoughts here. First, the awareness that something is thinking. Second, if something is thinking, that something is thinking a thought. As you said, “consciousness of my consciousness”. There are two “consciousness”:

There is a thinker who is thinking a thought, and there is an observer who is thinking of the thinker. If the thinker and the observer are the same, the thought becomes an infinite recursion, like an image reflected in two parallel mirrors. This is partly why I said people who speculate this have way too much time, in fact, only eternity would suffice.

the world and everything in it is in the eye of the beholder

Where is the beholder himself, if everything is in his eye? Does the world exist when the beholder closes his eye?

 

 

you’ve grasped the Cartesian dilemma,

Nemo, the solipsistic circumference – see

“This is the census“ again on that last

series of sibilants – that defines our, not

eternal, as you suggest, but very “mortal

coil“, our incarnate cage, or soul, if you

prefer, where “one man in his time plays

many parts“, or woman, solipsistically

and fatally, however remarkable, or

even historic, their contribution

  

Plato died, Proust died, either leaving

merely ephemeral ideas and, however

celebrated and honoured, dust

 

it is a frightening, and sobering, conclusion,

we cannot escape the prison of our reason

but with the key alone of our imagination,

for everything beyond the logic of that first

statement is conjecture, the play of our fears

and desires 

 

something is thinking, I think, then identify

with, become the vessel of, that idea, or, if

you prefer, that thought

 

that thought is still a conjecture, but it has

an immediacy you can’t deny, it is your

entire, quite literally, reality 

 

but any other thought is of course also

conjecture, just without the manifest

incontrovertibility of the idea of one’s own

existence, my orange might be your red,

but I’ll never be you, or what I interpret as

you, which is not at all how the other guy

sees you either, my lens is merely my

picture of the world, what is real 

 

reason has done a great job of holding it

all together for most of us, but it rests

fundamentally on the wings of our fallible,

of course, imagination, but for the absolute

apparently miracle of mathematics, which

seems to subsist even without our

speculation, popping up like signposts

everywhere, an existential guardian angel,

Pythagoras, maybe, was right  

 

not even dimensions, Nemo, I woke up

after a week in a coma, a car accident, in

a white room, quiet, empty, with only what

seemed like motes floating on a ray of light

coming in from a window, still, ethereal, and

perhaps, I wondered, part of a new afterlife,

who knew, I couldn’t assume I was alive, I

only knew that I existed in an unfamiliar

environment  

 

height, I reasoned, and width, I thought,

were evident, there are at least here two

dimensions, and calmly contemplated

the possibility of the same exile the villains

had felt early in “Superman“, cast away in

their two-dimensional prisons

 

Kant was wrong, I concluded, we do not

assume time and space as initial certainties,

I don’t have depth yet   

 

later a nurse came in from the centre of my

frame creating at least the impression of a

third spatial element, after which I

concentrated on getting better

 

that my first thought was of Kant after a

week in a coma has remained for me a

searing example of my essentially

cerebral proclivities, be they ever

nevertheless so fundamentally

unsubstantiated, I think that’s a riot

 

 

“Does the world exist when the beholder closes

his eye“, you ask 

 

who knows

 

though I would think so

 

 

Richard