Chasing the Truth, by All Means. Part 1.

It was not possible for man to know himself and the world, except first after some mode of knowledge, some art of discovery. The most perfect, since the most intimate and intelligent art, was pure love. 

The approach by love was the approach to fact; to love anything but fact was not love. 

Love was even more mathematical than poetry; it was the pure mathematics of the spirit.

Charles Williams: Descent into Hell. p69.

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Okay, you probably read that and sighed. Or, read it twice or thrice, which is my hope!

This quote reminds us that to use our minds in the loving pursuit of knowledge is an act of worship...and that to honor anything that is less-than-true is to commit hellish idolatry. But, what really kicked my cranium was the last line--that to love is to enter into an equation--my mind on one side, and truth on the other.

What's this jazz about "...love more mathematical than poetry"? Has anyone in the history of humankind ever called poetry mathematical? Really?

Makes me fall deeper in love with poetry, real poetry, poetry written by honest seekers of truth. And, helps me to see why I hate some poetry (and some modern art): they're not seeking truth, they're just deconstructing with no interest or intent to reassemble the pieces to find truth--they like the fact that they've reduced something to sharp little shards of meaninglessness.

I think I blogged about the 81 page book of poetry where I understood only three or five pages...or, I kinda thought I might have understood them, perhaps? That author can be commended only for getting someone to print his stuff. Probaly goes over big at Berkeley.

Phoo.

That said, I think deconstructing in order to reconstruct--cool. Be it architectural elements or somebody's philosophy or a corpse on the autopsy table--we take stuff apart, learn, and build deeper truths from what we've learned!


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Charles Williams is a favorite author--he was one of the "Inklings," completing that famed trio with C. S. Lewis and Tolkien, sharing many the tale and pint at the Eagle and Child Pub there in Oxford. (Son Daniel told me it was also known as the "Bird and Baby" or the "Fowl and Foetus.") Williams wrote tales that match Stephen King for weirdness but omit the gore.

On reading Homer's ILIAD.

On reading Homer's ILIAD

I take some small pride in having read

   a tale that speaks of doom and dread,

a tale of warfare, love, and death

   tale of gasping, dying breath.

I traveled back in time, you see

   to Grecian warfare, breathlessly

describing gore with all due diligence

   and though some fought with innocence

the Gods descending, meddling

   their selfish agendas peddling;

heroes dying, some surviving

   mankind's lot: ever striving

Fighting fate, fighting doom

   all within my living room

I shut the book, pent breath release

   I'm back home, and all's at peace.

----(dls...if you hadnae guessed.)

Okay, that's my take on the Iliad. I found it repetitive and dull, breathless and flowery, overblown and underplotted. I found it tedious to read and exciting to look back at--I just read a story that's some 2,700 years old!

I feel enriched and wiser, more in touch with some of the deeper roots of western culture. Hmm, I guess the doc was right--I swallowed the tart-tasting medicine and it really was good for me.

Here's Robert Browing's take on THE ILIAD:

robert browning "development"

http://www.telelib.com/authors/B/BrowningRobert/verse/asolando/development.html


After reading Browning's poem, I'm all the more pleased to have read this epic tale, since the Iliad plays a part of our history and culture, on which modern literary roots feed. To whit: the movie TROY, 2006, was a retake on the Iliad.

Thinking as a writer--hmm...I looked at the book first of all from a modern viewpoint: hence, my harsh critique above. However, if I step outside our modern context and try to view it in its own context, as much as is possible from a distance of 2,700 yrs...well, it's epic! In the original Greek, it had meter but did not rhyme, yet, the mark of an educated man was the ability to recite the Iliad (and its sequel, the 400 page Odyssey) from memory!

Boring analysis, perhaps, but that's what I'm learning. And, doggone...it's fun!

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"It was Homer who formed the character of the Greek nation. No poet has ever, as a poet, exercised a similar influence over his countrymen. Prophets, lawgivers, and sages have formed the character of other nations; it was reserved to a poet to form that of the Greeks."

Poetry, it's good for me! Or, is it?

Poetry is the hallmark of exalted life--it is our intended/natural speech. It is because we are broken that we must speak prose.

 

-G.K. Chesterton

 

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Well, do you agree with old GK?

Why?...or, why not?

As for me...I'll let ya know tomorrow.



comments below.

(altho the Smothers Brothers sang, "Let's fuggetabout tomorrow, for...tomorrow never comes...here we are!)


Clearly, GK Chesterton had either a high view of poetry or a low view of humankind's current status...or both!

When I read good poetry, that is, something that's polished to a high sheen, not merely an ensemble of words that rhyme...it does beat prose all to pieces. Here's a fav:

Nothing Gold Can Stay

  by Robert Frost

Nature's first green is gold, 
Her hardest hue to hold. 
Her early leaf's a flower; 
But only so an hour. 
Then leaf subsides to leaf. 
So Eden sank to grief, 
So dawn goes down to day. 
Nothing gold can stay. 

Something that's got more than one layer of meaning, something where not only the words but the thoughts rhyme, now THAT is poetry.

I think of the scene in Lewis' THAT HIDEOUS STRENGTH where the various eidola are descending into Ransom's house, and the humans are swept up into ecstatic utterance beyond their own capacity to utter or (previously) to even understand--now, that was poetry. "They all agreed that it was the most, the best..." if only they could have written down those words.

So, I agree with Chesterton...if our words flowed like those of the great poets, we'd need to be renewed, rejuvenated, somehow rebooted ... hmmm, sounds nigh-theological.

I Imagine, therefore, something is!

PHANTASY

"Remarkably, in the ancient traditions, the imagination or "phantasy" was considered a sense. In that psychology, in the detailed summary of Robert Burton's 1620 Anatomy of Melancholy, in addition to the outward senses of sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch,
we have three inward senses: the Common Sense, Memory, and Phantasy. Burton stated:

Phantasy, or imagination...is an inward sense which doth more fully examine the species perceived by common sense, of things present or absent, and keeps them longer, recalling them to mind again, or making new of his own.

This old idea of imagination as a sense that produces "monstrous and prodigious things by recombining and re-forming the more orderly perceptions of memory and the other senses. As in dreams, the ingredients are familiar but the new reality is not."

--from: Robert Pinsky's SINGING SCHOOL: Learning to Write (and Read) Poetry by Studying with the Masters. 2013. pg 148.

. . . . . . .

I like "monstruous and prodigious things" --guess that's why I write fiction and poetry and am a Stephen King fan...and a Dean Koontz fan...and CSLewis and Tolkien and Asimov and...you get the drift.

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I traveled far and wide today

   I did not take a cab

I took neither bus nor car

   nor trip on substance from a lab.

I rode in comfort, but not by train,

   nor boat nor aeroplane.

Departure...arrival--by seconds parted:

   Yes, I got there, as soon as I started.

No luggage, no seatbelt,

   and no need for "security,"

I arrived by conveyance

   of eld, not futurity.

Yes, book in my lap

   and others beside

I tip my cap

   to my magical ride.

--DLS 11/9/13