Death Slam

Allen Grossman

At the end of the obituary of Allen Grossman (“Allen Grossman, a Poet’s Poet and Scholar, Dies at 82,” NYT, 6/29/14), Bruce Weber  cites one of the deceased poets critical works, The Sighted Singer: Two Works on Poetry for Readers and Writers. Grossman is quoted as saying: “Poetry is a principle of power invoked by all of us against our vanishing. The making of poems is a practice—a work human beings can do—in which civilization has invested some part of its love of itself and the world. The poem is a trace of the will of all persons to be known and to make known and therefore, to be at all.” Pretty cool, huh? Sure what Grossman is saying about poetry could also be said about many human endeavors. Having children who remember you after you’ve died is one. The therapeutic encounter in which the psychiatrist or analyst becomes the repository of memory is another, albeit a more fragile one since the vessel may predecease the source of existential material with which it’s being filled. Nothing is immortal. In billions of years when the earth dies, it’s unlikely Shakespeare’s sonnets will be preserved in some form of celestial ether. However, sure poetry is a bulwark against oblivion, with great poems rising like cream in the vortex of time, to the point where they actually achieve the illusion of immortality. And on a democratic note, don’t even human beings who have never heard of the metaphysical poets or read Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent," have their fifteen minutes of fame? Don’t everyone’s s-mails, e-mails, don’t their inadvertent utterances, their cries of pain or joy, at one time or other, rise to a certain level? Doesn’t everyone, in the course of their miserable lives, write at least one great line of poetry that would have lived after them if it had been recognized?

Pygmalionization

Pygmalion and Galatea by Falconet (1763), photo by Alex Bakharev

In “The Secret Auden,” (The New York Review of Books, 3/20/140 Ed Mendelson quotes the following passage from a lecture Auden gave on Shakespeare’s sonnets, “Art may spill over from creating a world of language into the dangerous and forbidden task of trying to create a human being.” The essay is a brilliant meditation of Auden’s character in which seemingly erratic and selfishly indulgent behavior belied a deeper generosity. But the subject here is love which as we know doesn’t abide the reality principle, depending as it does on idealization. How else can instinct navigate the shoals of consciousness? Mendelson writes about Auden and his lover Chester Kallman, “He had begun to sense that he had caused the break between them by trying to reshape Kallman into an ideal figure, an imaginary lover who he valued more than the real one. What Auden had thought of as love for the younger man had been infected by libido domanandi, a lust for the power to transform him into someone else.” Personality is a subject that can drown the words of a brilliant poet in jargonese. But Eliot’s famous remarks about the impesonaity of the artist in "Tradition and the Individual Talent” not withstanding Mendelson’s quirky view of Auden turns out to be an exception in the often turgid world of literary biography. It’s a form of poetry in and of itself. And his observation about Auden’s relationship with Kallman makes one think in general about the nature of love. Eliza Doolittle finally rejects Henry Higgins in Pygmalion. All his work has gone for nought, but in actuality doesn't this transformative process goes on in most relationships in which the self is often shaped by its interaction with either the expressed or subliminal wishes of others?

The Influence of Anxiety

Franz Kafka

Harold Bloom wrote a famous book called The Anxiety of Influence. The subject was really the weight the past holds over the present. Eliot also wrote Tradition and the Individual Talent which treated a similar subject in terms of the impersonality of the artistic sensibility. But what about a tome called The Influence of Anxiety or The Anxiety of Anxiety? In order to sell, the book would have to deal with some famously anxiously individuals, Kierkegaard in philosophy, Bergman in film and Kafka in literature, but such a book would probably derive its greatest power from dealing with the average Joe. After all anxiety is a great motivator. In Manhattan children grow up anxious and they read the anxiety on their parents faces when their early rejection from pre-schools presages a long life of pink slips and unfulfilled dreams. They face further anxiety when they grow into adolescence and realize the symbols of male and female sexuality they see in advertising, films and television have little to do with their actual anxiety fraught interactions with the opposite sex (this is one of their first experiences of meta-anxiety or the anxiety of anxiety). Later in life they will go through anxiety about the fate of their IRA’s or retirement plans, realizing that in a bull market theirs has the singular distinction of having been managed by a bear. Anxiety comes in big time when they themselves become parents, burdening their own children with the task of living out a parent's unfulfilled dreams—a task that most children deal with by openly rebelling against the unreasonable expectations that have been placed on them. Bloom’s The Anxiety of Influence was an important book, but The Influence of Anxiety will be a blockbuster that'll make its author rich enough to pay for an unlimited supply of serotonin reuptake inhibitors.

Rivers (Not Larry)

And Quiet Flows the Don was a novel by the Russian novelist Mikhail Sholokhov. Remember it. You’re likely one of the few. But rivers have been great sources of inspiration both to artists and plain folks. Moses was floated down the Nile and the rest is history. In a similar life saving intervention Romulus and Remus were sent down the Tiber and ended up founding Rome. The River Liffey running through Dublin was a source of inspiration to Joyce and "riverrun" is the first word(s) of Finnegan's Wake.  The Thames inspired Eliot’s Wasteland (“Sweet Thames, run softly, til I end my song"). The Vlatava river, the longest in the Czech Republic, would eventually carry Vaclav Havel's coffin. The Danube is so ubiquitous a source of inspiration that one hesitates, for fear of sounding obvious, to make the citations.  We have the temperamental Arno, whose waters flow down from the gentle hills which surround Florence and there’s the Hudson, without which there'd be no Hudson River Valley or Hudson River School of painting. A New Curve in the Ganges: Mohatma Gandhi’s Study of Hinduism was a book by Arvi Scharma and finally let’s not forget the Mississippi without which we probably never would have heard of a fellow named Mark Twain.