Two Scales of Reality

In the past couple of years, I have seen a number of what can only be called rants against the poetry subculture. While I generally agree with the moral critique contained in these rants, I cannot agree with the tone they adopt or the activism they explicitly or tacitly advocate. Let me explain where, exactly, I disagree.

There are two relatively distinct "levels" or "scales" which operate in philosophy. There is the scale of the whole of humanity, and the scale of the unique, individual human. These levels are obviously related, but the kind of relation which obtains between the two scales is not as simple as it seems at first. One is inclined at first to say either that humanity is comprised of individual humans, or perhaps that humanity contains individual humans. Thus, human history in general will be more or less the aggregate of the histories of particular humans, and the will of the people (to borrow a page from Rousseau and Jefferson) is a generalized aggregate of the wills of every individual concerned.

Despite the intuitive appeal of this position, it is ultimately untenable. The idea of synergy (or Fuller's "synergetics") insists, in simple terms, that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. In fact, the difference in dynamics between these scales, despite their obvious relatedness, is extreme. Take a complex social or political event or activity, say, the underground railroad before and during the Civil War. One could prepare a sweeping treatment of the social, political, economic, and even biological factors which contributed to the development and success of this phenomenon. But such a treatment would convey little of the fear, righteous indignation, the hope, and even the thrill experienced by the individuals who either carried out or were carried by the railroad. Likewise, to take a handful of individual's accounts of their own experiences in connection with the railroad might succeed in expressing all the passion and intensity of those experiences, but the epic drama of the railroad, which requires a complex social, political, and economic contextualization, would be lost in the hum and flutter of personal thoughts and feelings.

Less anecdotal proof of the importance of this distinction lies in how the past several centuries have seen the fracturing of the sciences into branches which are often divided more or less by differences in scale: psychology vs. sociology; accounting vs. economics; particle physics vs. cosmology; biology vs. ecology; etc. In each of these pairs, the same general conceptual material is under study, but in one the cases of individuals are studied, and in the other cases of whole populations are studied. Thus, we know that the behavior of a population is, although analogous to the behavior of individuals, not derivable from the behaviors of its constituents. A psychologist who (let us assume for the sake of argument) analyzes and understands, exhaustively, every member of a small village will still be unable to predict with any substantial accuracy the outcome of, say, a village election. Likewise, using the tools of sociology and population biology, one might be able to predict how many individuals of some population are going to get cancer, one cannot, using the same scientific tools, predict which individuals are going to get it; one would have to turn to medicine, rather than epidemiology. These disciplines use different assumptions, different methods, different concepts and distinctions. In short, a difference in scale demands the use of an entirely different intellectual tool-set for its study and treatment.

Interestingly, while many of the physical and social sciences have split along these lines, I cannot think of a single example in the humanities which has done so. While it is certainly true that history, philosophy, literature, political science, and the arts have become more interested in the human individual as such over the past 200 years-one might even say that, to at least some extent, this new focus has created the human individual (cf. Michel Foucault's The Order of Things)-these disciplines, if and when they have become divided, have not divided themselves along the fault line of scale. If anything, they have divided themselves into schools of methodology, all of which nevertheless continue to treat the same subject matter. I do not want to suggest that the humanities ought to adopt the intellectual tool-sets of the social and physical sciences. It seems clear, however, that the idea of synergy, and therefore the insuperable dynamical leap between scales, is no arbitrary methodical or instrumental distinction. While every discipline ultimately chooses its own tool-set, which choice ipso facto sets forth certain problems as interesting and solvable and other problems as uninteresting and/or unsolvable, I would submit that embracing the idea of synergy and the distinction between scales would help the humanities to set aside certain pernicious confusions and misapprehensions.

Taking Ourselves Out of the Hands of the Gods

Daniel Quinn's book, Ishmael, provides insight into one of these difficulties. His book is both a reasonable oversimplification of our culture's history, and a strong critique of our culture's tendency to be overbearing and self-righteous. His primary distinction, refreshingly, is not that tired old saw of the irreconcilability of East and West, but rather between those cultures which struggle to take their destinies into their own hands, and those cultures which choose to stay (poetically enough) in the hands of the gods. This distinction, despite its simplicity, lies at the very center of our culture's self-image.

If one travels back along the history of the so-called humanities in our culture, one eventually ends up in the Italian Renaissance and Giovanni Pico Della Mirandola's Oration on the Dignity of Man. In this evocative and compelling speech, Pico irrevocably knots human dignity to human freedom. Specifically, he argues that humans are dignified by the fact that they are free to ascend the scale of being toward God, or descend until they are lower even than beasts. It is hard not to agree with this idea; not only is it true to experience (who has not felt, in one ecstatic moment, like a god? who would deny that to be "inhuman" is to more despicable than even the most wretched animal?), but it now also carries the weight of several centuries of arguments, examples, and ideologies which have been alluviated atop it. The idea that humans are free to choose their destiny, perhaps even obligated to choose it, is entrenched.

Pico's is not a bad idea; it is, in fact, a really good idea. But it has problems-big problems. Specifically, it tempts us to assume that, because God has made us free, God has empowered us to take what we will of the universe, to do what we will without care or consequence, because if something breaks, we will be able to "fix" it. In short, this idea breeds an overweening belief in self-reliance, arrogating to humans the authority to make and/or break the world. As though if we were to do so, we would be the only beings affected. At the heart of our culture is the idea that we must take our own destinies into our own hands, make our own way, forge ahead using only our own native talents and resources. And above all, we resist and resent the idea that we ought to entrust ourselves to the hands of the gods (which is the meaning of Faith).

This arrogance naturally overlooks the facts. While one individual human might come to control his own "reality" to some extent (though perhaps only, like Sisyphus, to the extent that he is able to change his attitude about his given situation), this control is subject to the conditions of the world. And no person or group of person controls, or can control, the world. Pico's idea is probably best taken as a spur which pushes us to lift ourselves up to a higher moral and spiritual level. Certainly it is not a call for the deposition of God, if for no other reason than that we would make lousy replacements. Humans may be free, and we may be dignified by that freedom, but it is simple foolishness to think that we are "in control."

Further, it seems that many people, believing that freely made human choices can control human destinies, take it one step further and believe that freely made human choices can control our social reality. While I am not advancing the ludicrous proposition that we ought to surrender in the face of social evils, I am arguing that we are not "in control" of our culture or society. Despite the obviousness of this lack of control, I so often hear a kind of pathetic whining about how we need to "take responsibility" for the things our culture is doing, "take responsibility" for what's happening in society right now. I admit up front that we are morally bound, in the strictest sense imaginable, to try to right the wrongs that we have ourselves perpetrated, helped to perpetrate, or let happen. This whining, however, seems to mean not that, but rather a kind of "taking responsibility" which amounts to making an intentional, conscious choice to act in manner that will remake reality into something better. This position appears to me to be little short of utterly bizarre.

While a person can make certain choices about what he does within a culture and society, and about his attitude toward life, he has absolutely no reason (logically deduced, personally experienced, or otherwise) to believe that his choices or actions will "push" culture or society in some small but important way in the direction of his presumably good intentions. Even the most private and personal choices are subject to the Law of Unintended Consequences-which means only that the effects of current actions and events on the future cannot be reliably estimated. Reality is infinitely more complex and interrelated than we can imagine, replete with layers upon layers of simultaneously operating causes, meanings, and destinies. Even with a single individual, it is in principle impossible to predict whether or not a radical change in her personality is right around the corner, or how she will feel about some issue in the near future. So how much infinitely more our uncertainty where a multitude of individuals are involved.

So, there is freedom for the individual. She can choose. But this freedom is circumscribed by the inherent unpredictability of the universe. She can act, but she can never know for certain what consequences her acts will have (ignoring for the moment simplest operations like pressing the car accelerator or other immediate mechanistic effects). But there is at best only a limited and unpredictable no "freedom" for an individual who seeks to influence society, and certainly not in the sense of our being able to choose what it will do, which is what I take most people seem to mean in saying that one ought to "take responsibility" for one's culture. In misunderstanding culture this way, we have anthropomorphized it.

Although culture has a certain life, it is more like fire than an intelligent human in the sense that fire, given certain conditions (namely, fuel, oxygen, and heat), will burn. Within a certain range, changes in those conditions will result in a concomitant change in the flame-burning certain metals, for example, changes the flame's color, adding more fuel and oxygen increases its size, etc. Outside this range, changes in these fundamental conditions result in the fire's death. One controls fire then, by controlling the conditions which make it possible and which sustain it. Culture, likewise, changes as its conditions change-but where fire has limited physical conditions, culture has a set of physical, intellectual, and spiritual conditions which is virtually limitless, especially since that set of conditions is itself changed by changes in culture. This means that changing one condition of culture changes not only the culture itself, but what that culture needs in order to survive. This dynamic complexity means that while one person, or even a group of persons, might change one of the conditions of a culture, that very act will change the culture's dependence on that very condition in an unpredictable way. It is not merely that the conditions of culture are multifactorial-they are also adaptive.

The Poetry Subculture

As regards the current poetry subculture (I am thinking of it most specifically as defined by Dana Gioia's Can Poetry Matter?), it has appeared in its current form because of certain general cultural conditions. Some of these conditions include the proliferation of MFA programs, which churn out an immense number of supposedly qualified poets every year; the general modern condition of alienation and loneliness, which means that people are hungry to express themselves; the tradition of industrial prosperity in the US and Western Europe which has given an unprecedented number of people an unprecedented amount of leisure time; the democratization of the arts, which means that the gap between "popular art" and "fine art" or "high art" has diminished radically; and above all the advent of the professional poet, who may, for professional reasons, disconnect herself from all those things which do not feed her poetry. Of course the practice of poetry has become a subculture; it has become so because it could. Of course most poets are mediocre; most of everything is mediocre-even most poems written by the "greats" are mediocre. And of course those of us who value excellence in poetry feel helpless and frustrated in the face of this subculture; this is in part because we subscribe to this deeply engrained idea that we can shape things after our liking, even on a societal and cultural level, if only we would envision a better future and work really hard to make that vision become a reality.

Mediocrity may be the ugliest thing that exists; it is the mentor of evil and the undertaker of joy, faith, and love. It would be foolish, however, to harbor serious ambitions to change the poetry subculture as it now exists, even if it is mediocre. I resent the implication, present in certain rants against prevailing poetic mediocrity, that we poets ought to feel responsible for this subculture. We did not make it-most poets I know do not even want it to be this way-we simply find ourselves in it. Further, none of us, not even all of us together, could change it so that it fits some image of what a poetry subculture ought to be. Any action that poets undertake, as individuals or as a group, will impact the culture in a dynamically unpredictable way. The development of the poetry subculture is not merely the aggregate of the developments of all the poets that comprise it, but something greater than that sum-a synergistic, tectonic cultural movement which occurs beyond the analysis of partial contributions. In short, it is something which remains, in principle, out of our hands.

1) While I agree with the existentialists on many points and am enthralled by the luster of their writing, I am increasingly appalled at the utter lack of humility engrained in the idea that we "make" our destiny and/or our reality. We certainly participate in it, but make it? This is precisely to deify humans.

2) Nor, in fact would we ever even want to try to be in control. A "controlled" society is precisely one in which whatever notion we do have of political freedom must be stamped out. Orwell's 1984 is the epitome of such a perfectly controlled society.

© Jonathan Powers

II

Interview with Dana Gioia, excerpted with permission from Litkit, January 2001: http://www.georgejr.com/98/iviews/gioia.html

"Q. So. "Can Poetry Matter?"

A. I hope so. The title of my essay was deliberately provocative because I wanted to ask fundamental questions about the role of poetry in contemporary American society. I would not have written the article had I not believed that poetry had permanent value.

Q. What exactly is that value?

A. Poetry is our most concise, powerful, and memorable way of using words to describe our existence, not only to one another, but to ourselves. As long as people are alive, they will need what poetry offers, even if they don't read it. I can't imagine a civilization in which the ability to use words in this kind of intense and enduring manner would not be important."

Q. What does poetry need to do in order to matter, not just to those who are already involved with poetry in some way, but to a general audience? Or even to a general culture?

A. I have a lot of experience in talking about poetry and reciting poems (not just my own poems, by the way) to nonliterary audiences. It may sound terribly optimistic to say, but I find a tremendously warm and appreciative posture in these audiences. In some ways they are more receptive to poetry than academic audiences, because when someone reads them Frost or Auden, they are delighted. I can't tell you how many people have come up to me and said, 'I never knew I liked poetry this much.' Or, more often, they say, 'You make me remember how much I loved poetry when I was younger.'

The literati of our culture have not done a good job of bringing poetry to common readers. Common readers are not necessarily unintelligent readers. Common readers are your family, your friends, doctors, lawyers, ministers, and teachers. Surely the major trend in American poetry, in sociological terms, during the 90s has been the expansion of the audience for poetry outside of the university. That has been a great good.

Until quite recently few poets ever wrote for anyone but the common reader. So what the common reader responds to is what traditionally has been in poetry. Poetry is not an intrinsically intellectual art. It's bizarre that at the end of the 20th century we think of poetry as an elite, academic, intellectual exercise. Poetry throughout most of human history has been something that was written to appeal to most reasonably intelligent people. And so what the common reader responds to in poetry is what poetry exists to do. Poetry is a way of memorably addressing the complete human being."

© Dana Gioia

III Commentary by C.E. Chaffin

Since, as Mr. Powers points out, individual choices change cultural conditions, we can change culture, although the law of unintended consequences may make something different of it in the flow of history.

But there is a third option: To hold up the best of the past as a signpost to what is 'good' is a valuable and culture-preserving action. To venerate Homer, Dante, Coleridge's "Rime" or Eliot's "Prufrock" is to embrace a standard that has been achieved and thus may likely be again, leaving us on the lookout.

As for the poetry subculture, like baseball, it includes everything from 'A' minors to the majors. Yet unlike baseball, everyone who writes poetry can, if they wish, try to play in the majors by dropping an envelope in the mail, whereas a bush league player will never have the chance to bat against Pedro Martinez unless he rises to 'AAA' and is called up at the end of the season.

Yet in poetry, what defines the majors? Mainly reputation by prizes, including the National Book Awards and the Pulitzer in America, and of course, globally, the Nobel. And how does one become considered for such prizes? Through sustained critical acclaim for book-length works, usually pre-validated by "respectable" literary journal credits.

The problem with the poetry subculture, as I see it, is a devolution of standards in the interest of expression, where, particularly in open-mike/spoken-word venues, people are praised for expressing themselves without regard to craft. And a strange censorship obtains in these democratized venues; as in Hollywood, you cannot say anything bad about the production, else you will be summarily ostracized for dampening the enthusiasm of the many.

The craft of poetry is hard; even to write good comic verse, like Ogden Nash, one must be verbally gifted. To write good poetry, like Keats or Frost, one must be not only verbally gifted but able by force of language to permanently impress a vision upon the reader.

The problem of individual mediocrity is simple; a good poet can recognize a great poet, perhaps, but a very mediocre poet, who by definition does not deserve the label, cannot see why her poetry is mediocre and another's great. It's the same with fledgling guitarists who pound out three chords with feedback but cannot really appreciate the elegance of a Hendrix arrangement, as in "Little Wing." In short, it takes a very smart person to imagine someone smarter, and a good poet to recognize someone better.

I was greatly relieved to happen upon a term for most mediocre poetry, namely Karaokepoetry, which helps divide real poets from the wannabes. Here the matter of scale obtains. Most of those who scribble and recite are deluded by the joy of self-expression into thinking they are the equal of any. Their synergistic group dynamic demands that all poets are equal, though featured poets at spoken venues are slightly more equal than others. Yet the "featureds" I have heard who have not published seriously, excepting vanity chapbooks, in the main write badly, but are nevertheless held up as examples to other illiterati. This cultural fire then fans the flames of poetry festivals and slams, where those who promote such events are often the same who are honored. I think of our own local Long Beach Poetry Festival, where I have applied two years running for a reading slot but have been rebuffed, whereas the MFA students are routinely included, as well as the Long Beach State professors, though my publishing credits exceed those of most of the professors.

It is unrealistic to expect a lack of self-interest where poetry promotion exists, but the further out one ventures from respected literary journals (call them "academic" if one wishes to be prejudicial), the more insider status becomes a requirement for inclusion. The emperor's retinue will never see him naked.

Despite these handicaps, some good poets arise from these lower echelons and transcend them. But how can we know who is deserving?

The short answer is by anthologies. When the national slam champion appears in the Norton Anthology of Post-Modern Poetry, some legitimacy must be admitted to their claims. However, it takes twenty-five to fifty years for such judgments to be made, so in our own time we are handicapped by subjective controversies untried by history. And even history makes mistakes, as Eliot proved when he rehabilitated the Metaphysical Poets.

On the other hand, great poetry is usually created by individuals, each as unique as their approach to the craft-gifted, disciplined and visionary. This is what Harold Bloom means by a difference in kind, not degree-or in G.M. Hopkin's words, "When I behold the greats, I hear a still, small voice saying, 'Go thou and do otherwise.'"

In the history of poetry, like art, individuals like Coleridge, Poe, Rimbaud or Eliot have all had a greater influence on the genre than the sum of any identified subculture of poetry. The subculture may create the conditions for greatness, but greatness is an exception that can also occur without exposure to the subculture, as in the case of William Blake or Emily Dickinson. So a subculture of poetry may even be an impediment, at times, to greatness.

Yet when we hold up the Greats as an antidote to the mediocrity of democratization in poetry, as typified in Bukowski, we invite the ire of the vast majority of those who call themselves poets, and are constantly accused of elitism and unfairness. This didn't bother Eliot, who said, "Poetry has always been for the elite." The older I get, the more comfortable I am with his assertion.

Yet I admit this point: Even if we confine ourselves to top tier poets like Heather McHugh and Les Murray and John Ashbery, etc., it is still immensely difficult to predict what place they shall have, if any, in the future history of literature. And in a very real sense, as Mr. Powers so eloquently argues, we have no control over this.

Shakespeare is everyone's favorite example of literary genius, particularly because what scant biography we have about him paints him as a middle-class businessman more interested in the success of his theatre group than any place in literary immortality. Yet no one stopped to think about how great he really was until after his death, when fans hurriedly put together the first quarto of his plays, some apparently already lost to posterity. I doubt any contemporary writer of Shakespeare's age could have predicted his monumental stature today. His contemporaries could only notice that he was good.

Today's egalitarian, capitalistic, consumer-driven culture, so bankrupt that life has become art in shows like Survivor, lacks any reliable, recognized cultural elite as in the days of Eton and Oxford/Cambridge hegemony in England, for instance. So one may either conclude that good poetry is still for the elite-or that poetry has been re-defined and broadened to mean any expressionistic ramblings written with line breaks rather than in paragraphs. That's why I find it useful to think of the gulf between karaokepoets and real ones. But how can one tell the difference?