Sing Song Sans Sense

What a rotten mental day, sing-song verses never stopping, rapping, rapping, rapping, never stopping-- inside my noggin and driving me nuts.  Yuck.

Actually, it wasn't such a bad day most of the day.  I got up, lit my pipe, had coffee, found my feet, stood poised over my notebook...  Nothing.  Okay, so it's going to be a blob day.  Such days happen.  I read a lot, did diddle work that needed to be diddled done, and in the evening went out for my walk along the river.  I had missed several days.  Fall had advanced.  It was splendid.  Walking back to my truck in the dark this line came to mind: "The rough Fall foliage / of mild late Autumn".  Not bad.  No poem behind it, but not a bad line.  Then this:

Of immense value, this reawakened life:
New blood, new heart, in time new mind...
But of what nature and continuance uncertain.

Not bad.  It might in fact be something that could be connected to the first line.  Conceptually the idea would be that the new life was coming in the Fall, just as life was dying, rather than in the Spring, when new life would be forming.  The oddity of that backwards imaging would create an automatic tension...  Whatever.  I got in my truck and drove home.  That's when I read an odd letter from a friend who had excitedly just discovered that government can make money by severely taxing the rich.  He seemed to be bouncing.  That's when I wrote my own odd reply:

My, you sure do have the envious heart of the thief.  Every thief is pure in heart, you understand, their motives only the best.  They rather love themselves, you understand, they take only from those who have more than they need... But break into a home, tax the rich... a thief is a thief is a thief.

And that's when I realized the sing-song had hit.  It continued about two hours, and man, did I write a lot of really really bad verse.

Moral:  Verse is not poetry.  Poetry is perception, expressed in verse, in some form.  Or as I've otherwise written: "Poetry is perception, a thing perceived in such a way as not to be expressible in any way other than as a poem.  --Strong feeling, given gift, will finally be a poem."

Always the impulse has to be feeling, never meter, sound, or some intended form.  I wonder if anything good can come from the sing-song impulse?  I might write down one of the ones I did, later, and see if anything can be made of it.  --Still have that sing-song'y sense in my brain.  Yuck.
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A number of ideas came to mind while I was feeding my mice.  I sketched on them: many lines, many bad.  I may for the first time be "constructing" a poem, --what I talked of yesterday.  If it works out I'll put it down.  Tomorrow.  Not at all good yet; the concept is good.

To Construct a Poem

Just wrote this one straight out a few minutes ago:

The first beauty I ever lost
was the beauty of my Grandparents farm.
They sold it.
I couldn't believe it.
Twelve years old.

A little wooded valley, perfect,
high hills on every side, except
the side of deepest woods
that on and on for miles
along the river went.

My dog and I and rifle
walked those woods.
At eight we first began our hunts,
at eight we brought game home,
and everyday we found new lands
and built America.

They sold it.
Gramp's arm was gone.
In winter up the winding drive
a quarter mile to road, too much
scooping for that age'd arm.
They sold it.

I was last to join the
car that last drive out
--upon the hill and out of sight
they honked the horn.  --I,
yet in the woods below,
shot seven shots across the water;
why seven I don't know-- and somber
with my dog went up to them.

Those seven shots...  For many times
those seven years I've not forgot, and
many times I've dreamed...
A rail line passing through,
a village built...
It's my woods.  Lost.
Lost woods, lost youth, lost permanence.

I had a fairly strong feeling, but no sense of a structured poem.  I had intended to rework it on the blog, showing the various versions, and commenting as I thought I found insight as to how this kind of construction happens.  Oddly, having typed it out, it seems okay the way it is...  I will make some comments later.
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The poem was written "correctly", that is, in terms of how I think I particularly do poems.  I was pacing, began thinking of matters of loss, thought particularly of this early loss, felt the pain keenly, and so started to write.  The exceptionally prosaic first two lines should indicate that at first I had no sense of the poetry of the thing, though I did recognize I was going to put it in poetic form.  I had no sense of its structure.  But then I wrote it straight out and it was fundamentally okay just as I put it down.  I suppose the structure was simply the story, it's not as if I haven't been through this moment a billion times.  And the language was rhythmic because that's the way I think when the sense of poetry is on me.  So I guess it really was written the way I seem to write all my poems: the first line, and everything else following.  The poem was "there" right from the first, I just didn't have any sense of it being there because it hadn't just been discovered by my brain, it's been there most of my life.  --So not much to be learned as to construction as a willed manufacture.

My sense of rhythm?  I have it, I don't know what it is.  I know it's informed from all the prose I write, and in prose I have only one rule: b follows a.  That is, the second half of the line must balance with the first, and the second line with the line preceding.  It's only a felt matter of what's appropriate, but in prose that's certainly enough, because in prose, rhythm (and sound) is certainly far secondary to sense.  Sense always is of most importance, but in poetry rhythm and sound take on far more importance.  I seem to have a reasonable sense of what works, I don't have any conscious set of rules.  --And no set of rules seems to be forming.  I will pay attention, and see if something sometime comes to mind.

On construction.  What I had thought I would be doing was something akin to writing a tune.  I wrote tunes only one summer once in my life.  I developed a procedure.  I would walk, thinking about things.  I would soon be thinking pretty much of only one thing.  A mood would form.  I would be humming and singing sounds to myself.  Pretty soon a tune would form that would accord to the mood, then I would simply write words as lyrics that expressed the subject and fit the tune.  Worked pretty well.  Only time I had an annoying problem was once when I had a cold and couldn't sing, so just imagined the tune in my head.  I did get a pretty good tune ( and pretty extensive and complex); but when my voice came back I discovered it was way beyond my register, both top and bottom.

This is somewhat the way I thought  would do this poem.  I would have a general sense and feeling (emotion) about what I wanted to do; I would "hum to myself" many words, sketching here and there; and pretty soon would have a poem expressive of the mood, which I would then tighten a bit and cut to create some sense of flow.  That still may be a legitimate way to do a poem.

I still have no clear sense of what I intend as structure.  I note I seem never to have more than four beats to a line.  I do seem to establish a pattern for a few lines, then break it.
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Damn!  She's racking up more points.
She's got the most by far already.
Torment!  Damn!
Why won't she write!?

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Tea Party to a Microbiologist

Dear J,

"I just have never done well with politics, perhaps because of my Irish irrationality..."  You have never done well with politics because you have never studied politics, and because you're surrounded by academics, who have never studied politics either but who are very convinced of their own opinions.

"I wonder if some of the people in the Tea Party movement are interesting to talk with."  No, they won't like you; that's because you've never studied politics (or Shakespeare) but are very certain of your own opinions.

I love the Tea Party movement.  It's a movement of intelligent, informed, honest, freedom loving people against unintelligent, uninformed, dishonest, totalitarian people, all of whom are very certain of their own opinions, who have not read Shakespeare, and who want to boss other people around.

You might begin to see that I'm developing a theme.  The elites have become disgusting.  I mean all colleges and universities, the scientific community, Hollywood, the media, bureaucrats, philanthropic organizations, and almost all politicians.  In reference to the scientific community --I've pointed this out to you again and again-- their failure to argue that the science behind climate change is bogus makes them laughingstocks.  They are corrupt.  There is no way they can any longer expect respect from any honest man (not as institutions or organizations, and certainly not the leadership.)  They've been corrupted by dollars.  They no longer do science, they do grants.  You get your money from the government, you think what the government tells you to think... and then since you're an academic you persuade yourself that what you believe is because you are so very wise.  Honest people have had enough.  That's why there's a Tea Party movement.

I don't think you have any idea how corrupt our universities have become (and everything elite in general).  I don't think you have any idea how easily the average citizen recognizes that corruption.  I bet you even think the average citizen is wrong.  All academics think the average citizen is wrong.  They have no self-awareness of how far they have fallen.

I repeat the same thing to you a thousand times.  I don't think there's any chance you're ever going to understand, but this is a hopeful time.  A great contempt has developed, and that's just very very good, because the elites have made themselves contemptible.  For an absolute certainty this contempt is good for the individual, because it's an accurate perception.  Whether the contempt will be enough to destroy the universities as they now exist I don't know, but hopefully there will be movement.  Sixty years ago the universities were not as foul as they are now; and it's only in the last ten that the sciences have caught up with the corruption of the arts.  People do get sick of stink, even in universities.  There might be some cleansing, and some of it might be internal.

And as I've said, I've repeated this again and again and you aren't going to understand.

For myself, I've never been more optimistic about America, and it's not something I foresaw at all.  I had thought America could only gain excellence again if excellent ideas were taught, but that's very hard.  It seemed impossible.  I've spent a lifetime trying to get an education, and I'm having difficulty, and I want an education.  How do you educate some dope at a university who doesn't want an education but is just very content with being very certain of his own opinions?  Well of course, you can't.  But you can just dismiss them as insignificant, and eventually replace them with others.  That may happen.  That contempt might create something vital by destroying something moribund is what I hadn't foreseen. 

Anyway, it's a hopeful time.  The probability is that the Republicans will come in in great numbers.  Then they will "compromise" (after all, the leaders are present members of the elite, and are just as corrupt as any other elite).  And then there may be a third party and a vast political shake-up.  There could be state successions.  Things could become violent, touching on civil war.  Could be.  We haven't had a good internal war in a long time.  Maybe it's time to give it a try again.  --Oh, and there will never again be a black President, and the new racial separation will probably never close.


See you,  --M

PS,
I might put this in my blog because it's a theme I've been hammering.  --Of course this up-swelling of contempt has all been stimulated by the debt and the exceptionally bad recent governance, but the contempt for rotten culture and scientific malfeasance --the general contempts-- have always been there, it's just that now those contempts have been inflamed and so everything contemptible may feel the effects.

How Many Writers to Pop a Revolution?

I make the argument that this last dead century is a pit, not a descent; that if the reigning culture can be destroyed, tradition can resume; we can have good writers again.  I don't consider our daily, living, American culture unwholesome, I consider our cultural elites diseased.  If the elites can be destroyed, health will return, and I believe those elites can be destroyed just by the public breaking out in a laugh.  Everything done by our "serious set" is self-evidently crap.  There is no following, except among the "serious set".  If they become laughing stocks, how long will they desire to be laughed at?  What if the funding drys up?  It's funding that supports crap, funding through government and private institutions.  Government programs can be defunded by an enraged public; private institutions can be made to have second thoughts, if enough of the public makes clear their contempt.

This is an argument I've made my entire adult life, that there is nothing good out there among the "serious set" (though a lot of genre is good); that everything from the "serious set" is meant only to offend; that offense is considered excellence (the only possible way these people can be excellent); and that it's all possible as dominant only because of dominant funding; that it all starts with the universities (supported by their graduates, who have never read Shakespeare and anyway couldn't begin to appreciate him); and that the only reason it continues is because it is so massive and pervasive that it is able to lock out all antagonistic input.

Right now I make this only as an observation, rather than as an extended argument.  It certainly is true that there's nothing good out there.  The questions are:

--Can the elites effectively be mocked?
--Can their lock be broken?
--Are there men out there who can write?
--Is there a public that can appreciate?

And I suppose the most important question is: What in ethos is necessary to produce good literature?  It does seem to necessitate all three; elites, writers, public.  It's only the elites that for sure are crap, I expect that there are writers, and there would quickly be a ready public.  Tea Party Tea Party.  I have such hopes, because this is a rising up of contempt, and contempt is the only proper appreciation of our present high culture.

How many good colleges and universities are there out there?  Hillsdale College seems fine.  There must be two or three more.  That's not going to constitute a very large population.  Universities and colleges, fundamentally all of them, are government structures; without government funding they collapse.  But there is tenure.  With tenure they're fossils, they can not be changed.  Can government be changed?  Can government simply defund?  To simply defund, to tie funding to tuition; that is, to the market place, would certainly change the nature of what is taught.  With parents as the market place it's impossible that educational quality wouldn't improve.  --But this is a bit long term in terms of simply getting some good novels out there.

Conservative non-fiction does very well.  Why should not a conservative novel, one expressive of traditional values, also not do well?  It would not do well among critics, it should do well among the public.  Who reads novels?  With "serious novels" only the "serious set", because nobody else will read stink, but those people don't define who reads novels, they only define who reads present novels.  If a serious, traditional novel were written with a Tom Clancy capacity for story, if it were published and pushed by a number of people, it could be successful; elite condemning opinion would be ignored, simply because the elites are coming to be ignored.

So, how many people to make a revolution?  If Fox can succeed, a serious decent novel can succeed.  There's not much money in it, but it can succeed.  It can succeed because the gate-keepers have lost their ability to snottily shame.  In the present climate it would not take many men to make a revolution, just a number who have decided it's time.  Tea Party Tea party.  It could happen.  --Make it twelve.

(Note: I'm not considering the ethos that can create great literature, only the ethos that can support good literature.  --The gate-keepers have to be by-passed.)  (Art has been rotten longer than literature, literature rotten longer than film.  They all have reached rotten.)

Poems Got Legs?

Still exploring the possibility that this impulse toward poetry has legs.  --Yesterday morning, pen poised over notebook --which is what I do every morning after my first cup of coffee, just on the chance I might have an idea-- what I did was not write down an idea or analysis but some "verse".  Verse is in quotes because it seemed more a mental disposition than any need to express an emotion.   The verse is questionable:

The green flower blooms near death.
After the rose there only are thorns;
without the rose, there only are thorns;
better the rose than only the thorns
but better thorns than death.
   It's wealth to write.
   But if not Homer,
   Why not Galt?
    If not to write,
    Why poor?
    Why rich?
Better the green stalk flush
Than a dry stalk withered.

I know what this means, I don't know if it was worth writing... except, as in everything, something is better than nothing, and maybe I did learn.  I do concentrate, that should mean development.

Later in the day, driving many miles out of town, the snippet of yesterday (that had no poem behind it) did reform itself (pretty much unbidden) as a legitimate poem:

Out of the woods but
still in the meadow.
How far yet to a green grass
firm to the stride, and known?

Legitimate, but minor.  This does argue that snippets are worth putting down, but also argues that it's only force of feeling that can make the mind do a good poem.  --It also might argue that "force of feeling" (by which I mean pain) might make the poem seem good just because a successful poem is a temporary release from that pain, and that release itself might be the judgment that the poem is good?  --I actually don't think so.  I think force of feeling is gift.  Presuming a poem can be written at all, it's the force that makes the poem.  --(I have diddled a bit with these as I typed them up and they are improved, so there is such a thing as simple skill.)

(I referenced Homer, by-the-way, because he was seen not as the beginning of Attic culture, but its culmination; none before him were preserved.  I still have the thought that the last century has been only a pit, but not a descent.  I still see it possible that Western culture can pop back up, that we can resume, that we can have good writers again.)
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The little Fraud
is an evident fraud,
defrauding only frauds,
but harming all:
fools, frauds, and freemen.

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Sunrise Century

The Tea Party's still on my mind.  I think I'll define it as a revolt of contempt against the visible elites.  Those visible seem to encompass pretty much anybody who has any position of influence, a very few conservative standouts excepted. These elites have assumed authority for themselves, their purpose being aggrandisement of self and class; their attitude towards all those not themselves, contempt.

The marvellous thing about contempt is that it's always mutual, and what's happened with the spiteful over-reach of the last two years is that Americans have now seen that contempt.  There's no longer any effective pretense of "for the children", it's "take it and shove it".  The contempt so clear, contempt's returned.  The conceptual underpinning for the Tea Party revolt is Constitutional limited government, but the energy, the anger, hopefully the staying power, is contempt for those who have appointed themselves masters over those who merely wish to be left alone to live their lives.

The significant thing is the contempt.  Any rebellion merely based on concepts or policy differences can be co-opted, but you can't co-opt contempt; once it's formed it's not going to leave.  This is why this movement may last a generation.  It's class-warfare, where class is not economics but attitude, and each hates the other.  How good how good is that!  And the class now newly despised can not change, their self-identification depends on their need to have a class to which they can feel superior.  Lose that contempt for that class, lose all sense of self-worth.  But it's been noted now, and once noted it can't leave, so the war is on and there will be resolution.  --When I say the elites can't change I mean of course individuals.  The class itself, over time, can change because new blood can enter; and as well, those silent and marginalized, with this new citizen support may now find voice, and thus can somewhat mitigate the tone of the class as a whole.

I'm immensely hopeful.  The intellectuals of the West have made themselves trash, but the intellectual heritage of the West is immense.  The current class has made itself negligible through an inflated ego-separation from that past, defining themselves as superior by defining the past as insignificant.  Their entire production has been "new".  It has to assiduously be new, other wise it will lap with the past and that past will be seen as superior.  But the past was true, so necessarily all that is new must be false, that's why it's crap.  There is no wholesome American who does not see that, because all those wholesome have a sense of the true (even if not an expertize).  This is why the esteem socially granted the elites will be like the legitimacy granted authoritarian government: at some point everybody finally recognizes they agree each with the other: This government is filthy rotten to the core; and at that moment authority disappears, government falls.  Splat!  Exactly this will happen to what passes now for our present high culture.  Perhaps in a year we can get rid of a century of "Piss Christ".

We'll see.  But if there is collapse we're not then in a hole.  We're not the Soviet Union.  We're the West, especially, we're America.  There is so much powerful that can be drawn on from the past.  We can be students again!  Get rid of the disease and in short order health might again blossom.  I see this as a possibility.  This may be a sunrise.

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A good article on the same theme, which though not considering the psychological underpinnings, well states the poor training given our elites as to those philosophies and values that make possible such a democratic experiment as America.  Last paragraph summation:

Those who doubt that the failings of higher education in America have political consequences need only reflect on the quality of progressive commentary on the tea party movement. Our universities have produced two generations of highly educated people who seem unable to recognize the spirited defense of fundamental American principles, even when it takes place for more than a year and a half right in front of their noses.

That defense of course is of limited constitutional government, and in general of those values that classically have been understood to produce the virtuous self-regulating citizen.

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Is there any value in a snippet that comes in a moment but has no sense of a poem behind it?

Out of the woods but
Still in the meadow
On it will go how long?

Have you ever tried to scan a line
With Albaquerque
in it?

Both could be manufactured into poems; the first is about escape, the second about nothing (though suggesting something funny).  Each could be made complete.  But with no sense of a larger poem already behind either, would the result be worth the candle?  Maybe I'll try it as an experiment.  ...I've tried a number more lines on the first.  They're all silly.  It seems that if there's no poem right off there's no poem at all.

Tomorrow I will consider how many men it takes to start a cultural revolution.

Doldrums, Let Me Count the Ways...

It's better to write bad poetry than absolutely nothing at all.

My intellect seems very private,
It shyly hides from me.
It hides so well
It seems it's gone...
I wonder.
..........

Does she love me does she not,
I've been there.
Will she write or will she not,
I'm there.

It seems there is no brain.
Not true.  It's there,
But hanging in the waft
Of only yes or no--
The single thought it knows--
Twisting.

I could look left,
I could look right,
I could turn upside down.
If then I choose I'd get it right,
It would be one,
Or maybe not.
Twisting, twisting, twisting.

This has got to stop.  This is the most time I've ever wasted in my life.  Waiting.  Yuck!  Can't I get in a fight or something?  Then at least I'd be doing something.  --Sometimes I feel like the dog who might catch the car.

This poetry impulse is interesting.  It does seem that poetry is a way of perceiving, it accords with something structured in the brain, it's not mere artifice and convention.  The first proof is satisfaction: exactly the same idea expressed in prose does not satisfy in the way as does that same idea expressed in a poem.  The second is that often poems simply "come", they're simply there as suddenly expressive of the presently dominating emotion.  Virtually all my poems of the last few months (my "poetic episode") have been of that nature.  All of a sudden there's the first line, and everything else follows.  With the appearance of that first line there's always the sense that "the whole poem is there", although there's never a certain sense of just what it is.  Sometimes it can be written straight out, in the matter of a minute; sometimes it may take ten, each next line coming slowly but with a sense the line was always there,found finally; always merely a line uncovered, not one created; something finally apparent not through effort, but patience (and some focus).  If this is so, then it's the structure of the brain doing the work, and not an achieved artifice.  --And anyway, in my case, it can't possibly be artifice.  I don't write poetry, and have no developed skills.  Yet what finally comes is a poem.  It's can't be training, there is none.  It has to be the structure of the brain satisfied.

But there was the above poem.  I was just sitting waiting for the mail.  My general concentration was horse-crap.  I started to write the poem as a way to pass time.  It didn't come like the others.  It came slowly, with many drafts, fairly topsy-turvy, but finally it was a poem, and it did express the unease and anticipation I felt  --far better, by a long ways, than similar words I'd already put down as prose in my notebook.  --I conclude that in this case that the brain merely hadn't yet done its work.  This isn't a sharp emotion, it's only a disturbing one.  Perhaps it's just that the brain hadn't yet been compelled to face an emotion that for the most part I try simply to not note at all.  Yet finally something satisfying was completed.  It had structure --though it accorded to no known structure; what it did accord to though, was to that peculiar perceptive capacity which is the poetic, and which is determined by the structure of the brain itself.  So finally it was a poem, and gave the satisfaction of a poem (the temporary release from the unpleasant tensions of this particular emotion).  It was, finally, what prose is not.

I think I'm stating the obvious, that poetic form is innate, not cultural; it's perception, not artifice.  Still, though obvious as it is, it's a new perception for me.

So?  So what?  It does seem that each brain has its own talents. My only talent seems to be the expression of an immediate emotion (perhaps it would be categorized as "the lyrical").  Whatever, although it's never been a part of my ambition I may have discovered something of value,and so may do many more.  Anything that gives such satisfaction has to be worth doing.  --But I have absolutely no conscious concept of what constitutes a poem; I have no aesthetic.  I should work on that.

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If there's a hunger for communion,
Does that hunger mean it's true?
Though hunger can't create it can perceive,
Thus hunger can establish God exists;
So hunger can establish that on earth
(If good for heaven why not earth?)
That there exists that one communicant.
(Actually, "Proof by Desire" is not a proof, but instead, given
the loving and seeking nature of God, a plausibility.  Confused
thinking aside, I am unable not to hope on earth the plausibility.)

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May be starting on my first poem that's not just an encapsulation of the moment's feeling but instead is the expression of a concept I don't yet understand.  The idea would be that the understanding would come through the work on the poem, something I've never done (though I did to a degree in the sonnets I wrote when I was nineteen; I remember the last one as being of exceptional value.)  I think there is something in me now that's felt.  The meaning of such a feeling is normally discovered through analysis, the restatement and restatement and restatement of the feeling/concept until by slow accretion of small insights something solid is finally achieved.  Such a developing concept can be revisited for weeks, or days or months, abandoned, resurrected years later and worked on again.  The only difference this time is that I might try to make the process a poem instead of analytic prose.  Maybe.  This is an idea of the last hour, so I don't know if it will last.  --I haven't gotten very far so far, despite a lot of scratching:

I'm not sure what's real on earth
If Heaven's but a fraud;
But if it's true that Heaven's real
And everywhere is all that's real
How could it be that earth
Would not have Heaven too?

I'm not prepared to defend this concept, I don't even very well know what it is, but it's certainly connected to the idea that the transcendent as it exists in men's minds is real, and so through application must have some real expression.  In the deepest things, while certainly there can be death and tragedy, there simply can not be bitter disappointment; something, somehow, still has to exist.