The Instauration Part 2

Quartered Quartets

There are lots of approaches toward Four Quartets.

But here's another one: look at (for instance) lines 1-3 in "Burnt Norton", lines 91-93a in "The Dry Salvages", 47-48 in "East Coker" and lines 127-128 in "Little Gidding". (Note the order I'm using -- I, III, II, IV.)

Now, think about an old literary device called "chiasmus." Hard to do in English, but that didn't stop Pope, Milton and Tennyson from trying it anyway. I found no literal examples of chiasmus in Four Quartets. But, look at those quotes. Think about pressing grapes or compressing a document on a personal computer.

Here's another: look at the quotes from Heraclitus that preface the poem. They are not easy to translate. For one thing, they are in a very old dialect of Classical Greek; for another, they are conversational and leave out (understood) words the way we do when we talk now..

Then look at where these quotations come from: a work by a German classical philologist who was breaking new ground when he collected those pre-Socratic fragments. Doktor Diels even uses some English-type words in his groundbreaking book's title -- very 19th-Century-unscholarly, it seems to me.

It also seems to me T.S. Eliot chose those quotes from that particular scholarly work for a number of specific reasons. He's not only sounding "modernist" by prefacing his poem with some thematically-meaningful yet untranslated Greek (even spelling 'Heraclitus' in progressive-philologist fashion), but he's also giving future interpreters of Four Quartets (us, in other words) a few additional clues as to his actual intent.

Blues in Question

I listed A Buddhist Bible by Dwight Goddard as a source for Mexico City Blues. Jack Kerouac may not, however, have left a one-to-one "skeleton-key" correspondence between the Mexico City Blues and A Buddhist Bible. He surely read many things about Buddhism, perhaps in articles or pamphlets, and these may hold more direct references.

But here is a possible clue: "merudvhaga" in the 1st Chorus of Blues. It looks like a Sanskrit or Pali-type word, but I suspect it's not. My tiny amount of Sanskrit (of what I can recall of it) tells me "vh" is not a letter in that language. But, obviously, "dh" is (it's one of three or four kinds of "d's" -- Sanskrit has a big alphabet).

So, as an experiment, I searched the 'net for "dhvaga" -- got back "Did you mean 'dhvaja'?" A "dhvaja" is a type of victory banner, one of eight "auspicious symbols" in various East Indian religions, including Buddhism (that's right -- the first 'd' is a 'd' and the second one is a 'dh.').

Then I searched for 'meru' -- and got back Mount Meru -- a sacred mountain that figures centrally in various East Indian cosmologies, including some Buddhist.

Was the author, say, on board a tall ship when he wrote this? On board a train passing a signal flag? Do we have a metaphor buried in this malapropism? (Note: the (?)name 'Merudhvhaga' that appears in the 40th Chorus got me nothing on Google.)

While later references in the poem like "Amida" check out, others, like "Santiveda" don't ('Shantideva', maybe?), and I'm starting to be persuaded that at least some of the many obscurities in Mexico City Blues may be actually deliberate (or at least semi-deliberate) clues that can be deciphered in this quasi-philological manner.

As another hint, "Acadian/PureLand" may reveal two things: where Kerouac was coming from ("Acadia" was the name of a place in New France) and where he wanted to go ("Pure Land" Buddhism has some similarities to Zen, but it’s separate and more for the working-class person. Both came from China, I’m told. Any time you have the "I Was First No I Was Both Are Right Neither Were" type of situation, you're possibly looking at a common ancestor.).

I hope all this helps.


Done and (nowhere nearly) done

I read Idylls of the King, much in the same way and at about the same pace as I described for Paradise Lost.

But going from Milton to Tennyson (in poetry terms) feels at first a little like going from Henry James to Harry Potter, but, the further I read, the more complex the poem became and the longer I lingered over the text.

The first book, "The Coming of Arthur," is largely a blank verse rewrite of the first book in Malory's Morte D'Arthur. I say "largely" with some trepidation, because it's actually a composite from lots of sources, including the author's rich imagination and careful character painting. In fact, I remember thinking when I finished "The Coming ..." that I was glad I'd read the first book of Morte beforehand. I might have gotten really confused otherwise.

Also, Tennyson's version of Merlin's prophecy, as I recall, is nowhere in the first book of Malory's story, at least as written. There are some other elements that are also different, and all these together make all the difference as the book progresses.

Morte D’Arthur is one very nuanced and textured tale. Its demands on the reader are sly but persistent. You can glide over reading this book, but you'll likely be missing a lot if you do.

Lord Al comes off as a little stuffy to a modern reader like me, but once you understand where he's coming from (Victorian High Culture) and the audience he is writing to (ditto), it should not be an unmanageable transition.

The only thing I found annoying was Tennyson's consistent use of the word "past" as a verb. The King and Lancelot and Co. all "pass" instead of "come" or "go," so much that when you get to the last book, it’s less a nuisance and more of a theme. His spelling of the word is what kept throwing me: I'd have to re-read the line every time until I finally figured out what was going on.

The copy of Morte I used was a Penguin Classic edition, and its notes were excellent.

Don't miss out on the Dedication and the epilogue ("To the Queen"). I read them only after I'd finished the main text -- both are essential for author's context, but, like me, you'll probably need the Penguin editor's notes to both.

There’s another aspect to Morte that also places it in The Top Ten -- many of sections have something in them I'd written about in "The Art of Definition." Remember when I tried writing a poem in "songform"?

Merlin's prophecy, for instance, is in a bardic triad (more like "chantform," I would think. Is "chantform" a word? I doubt it.). Several songform poems elsewhere in the Idylls are set in important places, as well. I feel Tennyson's work here can be profitably studied by poets looking for tips on this subject.

More Notes on a Legend

Some may be put off by the post-Chaucerian English of Morte D'Arthur. If so, or even if not, good old Bulfinch had a volume three: The Age of Chivalry. You may recall I recommended his better-known The Age of Fable for the many classical references in Paradise Lost.

Thomas Bulfinch's English is much more accessible than Malory's, and his narrative summarizes things in a much more linear flow. (Malory is pretty linear, too -- but in very small bits. Overall, his story jumps around some.)

Old Bulfinch may be just the ticket for many seeking a handbook on Arthurian legend, or as preparation for reading Idylls. I passed on the chance to buy a reprint of The Age of Chivalry some 15 years ago and kicked myself since. When I was writing about Milton, I mentioned that Gustave Dore produced plates illustrating many scenes from Paradise Lost. The same is true of Idylls.


Our Keystone

One thing about The Top Ten is that it covers many poetic styles: the verse of Four Quartets and Mexico City Blues does not resemble Idylls of the King, for instance.

The problems with so-called ‘modernism’ and its antecedent movements in the 20th Century have some proclaiming that modern poetry (especially recent) is missing something: "not as good as" ... "not for most people" ... "not what (fill-in-blank) likes ... " et cetera.

The "thank Lawdy" AB English degree I got in 1977 has left me with this: the answer lies in "posts." Allow me to explain what I mean (and remember, I got a C in Expository Writing, so ... .)

"Modernism" is usually cited as the creation of four men: Darwin, Marx, Einstein and Freud. The revolution in thinking contained in their best-known books swelled a sea-change in Western culture, something that dissipated after World War I -- a cultural period sometimes called "postmodernism." (OK, that's one "post.")

This cultural period produced much searching and questioning but not too many results, sort of like examining a nose from a piece of shattered sculpture and trying to decide what the rest of the statue may have looked like.

The decades that followed the Great War erupted in a massive economic boom/bust -- and its corresponding cultural inhale/exhale -- that set up the chaotic storm/struggle of World War II. The welcome Allied victory had its downside: an even more destroyed social, economic and political aftermath -- culturally known as "post-post-modernism." (That's two.)

But the spread of nuclear weapons invented during the war plunged the world into a Cold War -- resulting in a cultural hold-your-breath-and-wait-for-the-end attitude -- that lasted until the Berlin Wall fell. Another interim period began -- let's call it "Fin de Siecle Redux" (at least if your grasp of foreign languages is as crude as mine is).

The events of 9-11-01 prompted a cultural gasp, ending that last interim period and beginning yet another global conflict -- with the cultural damage spreading like the wake of a blasted deep-sea oil derrick. So, now we have "post-post-post modernism?" (That's three.) Come on! How many "post"mortems do you need to see that a cultural mindset has collapsed and vanished under the very waves of time and space it claimed to redefine?

Most of Western High Culture set sail a long time ago: biologists figured out that Darwin was right about evolution but fell short on how it works, psychologists (and fellow psychiatrists?) decided Freud was right about the existence of a subconscious mind but wrong about how to treat many of its problems, and social scientists realized economic inequity may more often result from international monetary policy than from Marx and Engels's dialectic prophecies.

Some philosophers also have gotten on board with physicists to study being itself in a new light (or a new/old light -- more on that someday: for now, let's not get tied up in some "string theory").

Most of these revisions to "modernism" apparently have passed without notice among the art traditionally seen as humanity's bellwether -- poetry. Modern poets published nowadays seem stuck in what's sometimes called a "cultural malaise" -- their own little island? Are they lost?

I'm not necessarily including the laureates of the latter 20th Century here: Heaney, Paz, Montale, et cetera (some people are just really good swimmers!). I'm more addressing The Club (discussed in a section in The Rogue Sonneteer called "First Base").

I also realize what I've posted here is very generalized. It's largely summed from what I've snatched from lectures I've heard and books or articles I've read in college and since, so -- again -- I'm not a qualified authority on anything. At best, I chart my course measuring by the rule of my crooked thumb.

But that thumb-rule tells me a wavy crossroad lies before us, which I suppose prompts the perennial question: "Where do we go from here?" I think clues may lie in those buoyant signposts extending from the shore we left so long ago on this light-and-dark dappled (sometimes even nauseatingly wobbly) checkerboard of time and space.

I believe we're looking for a tower -- one with a light in it. That's why I call this The Instauration. Because we may need to find new land and build a tower ourselves. Those other guys did it (The Top Ten) in their day, and we may need to do the same.

Pomp? Probably. Or maybe moxie. Deciding which, my friends, is where you come in. I think I see something way, way over there.Land?


Beginning Scientific Afternotes

"If the history of Western thought has anything to teach us, it is the protean nature of all theories, including evolutionary theory. Scientific theories can be and are rejected, but this process is far from easy. Any criticism of the synthetic theory that turned out to have some substance was subsumed in a modified version of this theory. Instead of being a weakness, this ability to change is one of the chief strengths of the synthetic theory of evolution. As in the case of species, scientific theories evolve."

From "History of Evolutionary Thought" by David L. Hull: the first of ten Overview Essays in Encyclopedia of Evolution, Oxford University Press, Mark Pagel, ed., Vol. I (2002), pp. E15-16. See article "Neo-Darwinism" in Vol. II of this Encylopedia, to which Hull's essay refers the reader, for additional information on synthetic theory. See also overview essay "Macroevolution" by Stephen Jay Gould for detailed summary, in Vol. I.

"Much attention has rightly been given to Marx due to the groundbreaking work of The Communist Manifesto. However, he also wrote another monumental piece, Das Kapital (1867), an economic criticism of capitalism originally penned in German. In this work, Marx focuses on the concept of surplus value and highlights that the fundamental injustice of capitalism is that it encourages employers to create profits at the expense of the employees. The economic theories outlined in Das Kapital influenced numerous followers and helped generate the science of economics. To economists, the name "Marx" has a wholly different meaning than it does to political scientists. ... While Marx wrote a great deal about social and economic conditions endured by working populations during the 19th century, his legacy is still incredibly strong today in philosophical, sociological, and political thinking."

from "Marx, Karl" by Ian Morley in The Encyclopedia of Politics, Volume One: The Left, Rodney P. Carlisle, ed., SAGE Publications, Thousand Oaks: 2005, p. 303.

"Although Freud believed that he was a mere observer and was reporting accurately on his observations, he did not follow traditional scientific methods in his work. He did not generate hypotheses and test them independently, and most of his clients were middle-class women. Neither did he test people on any standardized instrument or scale. He based his ideas on conversations that he had with patients, which might have been enlightening, but were not systematic or scientific. Thus some critics would argue that all of Freud's theories are in doubt. Despite these criticisms, Freud's work continues to attract interest, and many psychologists still practice in the manner that he advocated, although many do not.
"Freud's influence is also felt in research. Numerous researchers are currently working on studies examining defense mechanisms, for example, and the evidence suggests that these devices do exist, even though they may differ in important ways from Freud's original descriptions."

from "Psychoanalysis," by Joseph M. Boden in History of Psychology, Volume I, Alan E. Kazdin, editor in chief, Grolier Educational, Danbury, Conn.: 2002, p. 65. Also see "Freud, Sigmund" by Raymond E. Fancher in Encyclopedia of Psychology, Vol. 3, Oxford University Press: 2000. Latter article includes bibliography of works from among Freud's modern critics, as well as his defenders.

"Einstein's publication of his general theory in 1916 essentially brought to a close the revolutionary period of his scientific career. In many ways, Einstein had begun to fall out of phase with the rapid changes taking place in physics during the 1920s. Even though Einstein's own work on the photoelectric effect helped set the stage for the development of quantum theory, he was never able to accept some of its concepts, particularly the uncertainty principle. ...
"At the time of his death he was the world's most widely admired scientist and his name was synonymous with genius. Yet Einstein declined to become enamored of the admiration of others. He wrote in his book, The World as I See It: 'Let every man be respected as an individual and no man idolized. ... '"

from "Albert Einstein" by David E. Newton in Notable Mathematicians From Ancient Times to the Present, Robin Young, ed. Gale, Detroit, 1998, pp. 158-159.