Lyric and Bondage

Professor Richard Strier's talk on this topic was about the simple thesis that the idea of psychological bondage is central to the tradition of lyric poetry, not only in its subject matter but in the very nature of its form as well. In lyric poems, we are faced with what seems an opposition between freedom and constraint, but as we interrogate the poems further, this opposition comes to seem misleading. The poems, from Petrarch on, yearn for freedom, though they're more explicit about what they want freedom from (to borrow Isaiah Berlin's terms) than what freedom, sheer and absolute, would allow them to do or to be. The poets on the other hand consistently and freely choose constraint - whether the constraint of loving someone, of loving God, or of writing within the severe constraints of the sonnet. And ultimately, these constraints prove more fruitful than the unimaginable state of pure freedom. The constraint of relation to a biological other produces offspring (a good answer if your kid is asking where babies come from), and that of relation to a spiritual Other produces growth. Similarly, the constraints of literary form produce works of art; as Robert Frost said, writing poetry without form is like playing tennis without a net. Perhaps freedom itself is a misleading concept; Luther thought so, since free will is impossible for humans who must either be enslaved to the devil or to God. Our freedom is limited by the fact that we are free to choose, but we are not free not to choose. The history of lyric poetry, almost in opposition to its own protesting voice, suggests that the free choice of constraint is what makes the world turn.

Life and art in The Winter’s Tale

Last night I was lucky enough to hear Professor Richard Strier, head of the School of English and Divinity at the University of Chicago, give a public lecture on The Winter's Tale. He started off by telling us that literary value was something real and demonstrable, which was tremendously refreshing after years of being told by critics that it wasn't. He went on, in his wry and erudite manner, to make a case for the great literary value of this unusual play at the tale end (sorry) of Shakespeare's career, based on its substantiation of the thought that life (contra Renaissance in general) is better than art.

A strange mix of tragedy, comedy and romance, the play has a view of nature as benign and of natural, biological life as something to be celebrated. Against this is the warping proclivity of the human mind which unravels when it breaks its tether to real things in nature. To wit King Leontes, maddened by jealousy, convinced of an imaginary affair between his wife Hermione and his friend, recoils from nature, particularly its components of play and sexuality, and assigns pathology to its rhythms and workings, rather than to his own deluded state of mind. His “diseased opinion” threatens to destroy everything around him, including wife, friend, son and baby daughter. They are saved by the resistance of one Camillo, a usually faithful retainer, and by the redemption in the second half of the play, mostly by his now grown daughter Perdita, of the things he has maligned: nature, sex, play, affection, fancy.

The extraordinary and ambiguous scene at the play's close, where a statue of Hermione (looking mysteriously older) comes to life, brings to its climax the rivalry between art and life that runs through all the earlier scenes. Her living person is worthy of the love and worship her statue, as art or as icon, was patently not, and her resurrection confirms the irrepressible and beautiful fact of biological life. After sixteen years of living with the loss he inflicted upon himself, Leontes has wife and daughter restored along with his mental health, which, in this play, constitutes a correlation between what's in his mind and what's outside it. We are left with the question of whether Shakespeare intended to exalt life above art, or whether, by doing so artfully, he really intended the opposite. Professor Strier thought (in contradistinction to many other critics) that Shakespeare in fact wanted to affirm life above art, and art was simply his medium for doing so. To privilege art, he concluded, was idolatrous, and in general artists are much less idolatrous than critics.

A late ramble

Sunday started off chilly and grey, but the morning dissolved into one of those warm blue afternoons of heart-bursting loveliness. At around 5, somewhere between the glory of day and the luxury of twilight, I went for a walk. It's a secluded place, not as well-trodden as some of Canberra's other walks, nor quite as untrodden as one would like. The path winds along beside a sheltered arc of the lake through tall autumnal trees giving way, here and there, to still pictures of water, mountains, and more distant trees.

Such a walk on such a day made me wish I had more poetry in my head. No doubt an Anne Elliot or a Fanny Price would have had no trouble summoning hundreds of apt lines, but on these occasions I always feel more like Bertie Wooster:

Something something something I
Something something something by...

I could blame my school; indeed I blame them very much for not teaching me Latin or Greek. But past a certain point, one has only oneself to blame. I could in my spare time devote myself to a program of memorisation, but on a lovely afternoon, I'd rather go for a walk. And maybe there's something meritorious in not having memorised a prescriptive catalogue, not having to sift through that database to find the best that has been thought or said, not having to think or speak at all.

Yet I find this state of sheer inarticulate being eludes me as well. Instead of nothing, my head fills with fragments and snippets of the thought and spoken, and not even the best of those. Perhaps I'll blame the internet, for outsourcing knowledge and downgrading it to information. Why should I retrieve words from my head when I can retrieve them more efficiently from my laptop? Perhaps I should take my kindle on these walks, but surely that would defeat the purpose.

Which brings me back to why I walk at all. I don't think I go looking for what the poets wrote about. It works the other way: the poets infest the landscape, in more or less known ways. Poetry nerd that I am, I seem incapable of pure experience, unmediated by verse. But then, so did the poets.

A leaf that lingered

I got home one day in this first week of Autumn to find awaiting me the complete poems of Robert Frost (conveniently, bound in one volume) which turned out to be my Christmas present from Ben. We are reading through them one at a time, and this one, “A late walk,” was one of the first we read. I chose it today because of the resonance of a gift carried and a fallen leaf.

When I go up through the mowing field,
The headless aftermath,
Smooth-laid like thatch with the heavy dew,
Half closes the garden path.

And when I come to the garden ground,
The whir of sober birds
Up from the tangle of withered weeds
Is sadder than any words.

A tree beside the wall stands bare,
But a leaf that lingered brown,
Disturbed, I doubt not, by my thought,
Comes softly rattling down.

I end not far from my going forth
By picking the faded blue
Of the last remaining aster flower
To carry again to you.

More from the Book of Tea

In case you wondered, as I did, who Niuka was, here is Kakuzo's account:

The Taoists relate that at the great beginning of the No-Beginning, Spirit and Matter met in mortal combat. At last the Yellow Emperor, the Sun of Heaven, triumphed over Shuhyung, the demon of darkness and earth. The Titan, in his death agony, struck his head against the solar vault and shivered the blue dome of jade into fragments. The stars lost their nests, the moon wandered aimlessly among the wild chasms of the night. In despair the Yellow Emperor sought far and wide for the repairer of the Heavens. He had not to search in vain. Out of the Eastern sea rose a queen, the divine Niuka, horn-crowned and dragon-tailed, resplendent in her armour of fire. She welded the five-coloured rainbow in her magic cauldron and rebuilt the Chinese sky. But it is also told that Niuka forgot to fill two tiny crevices in the blue firmament. Thus began the dualism of love - two souls rolling through space and never at rest until they join together to complete the universe. Everyone has to build anew his sky of hope and peace.