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Sunday, July 25, 2004

I've been thinking a lot about Jonathan Mayhew's assertion last Monday that "human nature" is an ideological construct and about Henry Gould's post last Tuesday on the difference between Modernist/post-modernist/avant garde approaches to form and those of at least some of the New Formalists or metrists in general. At the time I wrote what probably seemed like a snippy comment at HG Poetics, saying that Henry is more comfortable with metaphysics than I am. I apologize for that apparent tone, and now I realize that that's not really the issue anyway. Before I explain what I think the issue is, let me say that I do not in any way speak for the New Formalists. Most of them don't know who I am, and I've never spoken about any of these things with any who do know me except Fred Turner, and that was thirty years ago, when he and I both had very different notions about poetry and philosophy than either of us have now.

It's ironic, possibly tragic, that some artists and some philosophers lost their nerve and began to deny the possibility of anything but arbitrary reference between human intellection and the world at precisely the time when it began to be possible to explore the actual nature of that relationship, when physics and biology began, for the first time, to shine light onto the foundations of our existence in ways which did not depend on the individual or cultural history of the man or woman holding the flashlight: "Everything is relative" is a bizarre misunderstanding of Einstein's work, which showed that observers form any arbitrary inertial frame could reach identical conclusions about the motions of the physical systems being studied — and it certainly doesn't matter whether a particular observer is a 60-year-old female atheist at Stanford University in California or a 25-year-old male Sunni Moslem at the University of Lampang in Indonesia. Certainly that light reveals a strange world, often counter to our intuitions, but that is nothing new. Though a misquote, "Credo, quia absurdum" is so commonly cited that it reveals a deep divide between matters of faith and our ordinary perception of the world, and though Aquinas believed we are made in God's image, that certainly didn't for him entail complete understanding of the mind of God.

What is new is that biology, and in particular recent work in evolutionary psychology, explains the gulf between our everyday perception and our conceptions of the underlying reality. "She's God and you're not" doesn't tell us why we're pretty darned good at negotiating those aspects of the world which matter to survival and reproduction but indifferent or blind to things at non-human scales of space or time. But in evolutionary terms, it simply doesn't matter that a leopard is mostly empty space. What matters is avoiding being eaten. Some elementary math is good for that, and therefore some counting isn't too hard for us or for a number of other animals. Partial differentiation of systems of non-linear equations is pretty tough.

And what matters for poetry in all that is that the new sciences do not invalidate our intuitive understanding of the non-human world or of each other's actions. In fact, they provide a strong argument for expecting that intuitive understanding to be correct most of the time in the ways that matter to our ordinary lives, and even shed some light on how and why we make the mistakes we do. More importantly, understanding language to be part of our evolved toolkit supports our natural belief that our speech refers to that part of the real world that matters to us.

It's quite remarkable, in fact. For the first time, our deepest conceptions of the world support our ordinary understanding even as they show its limits. That's bad news for the School of Phlogiston, for the children of Jorie, for the Oulippeans, and for post-modern theory in general. Disruption of ordinary language doesn't jolt us out of our ordinary perception: unless it's clear that some kind of game is being played, it merely convinces most of us that the speaker is crazy or incompetent. (Even in Zen, "Before enlightenment, chop wood and carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood and carry water.") If there is a game, the rules have to be clear enough to be grasped quickly but complex enough to sustain interest, and, unlike what we expect of poetry, we don't normally expect games to apply outside their artificial worlds (game theory in economics and psychology has little to do with the games we play for fun).

But though most of us want poems to be more than self-referential toys, a poem is not its paraphrasable sense, nor an experiment, nor a way of thinking or feeling. It's a way of saying something about the world in such a manner that other people find it memorable and moving. Meter is a powerful tool to those ends, though hardly the only tool available. What but pride, prejudice, or mistaken theory could persuade a poet never to use it?


For much of the last year, the workstations which the developers on my team were expected to use literally sat in the shower. I had a hard time filling up the days at work, and I did a lot of thinking which showed up in this blog or in poems. Well, the computers are out of the shower and on desks now, and I'm pretty busy trying to make up lost time. I come home tired and without a running start, so the blog has returned to its previous pace of 10-15 posts a month. It's likely to stay at the lower end of that range.


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