a colleague chastises

A Colleague Confesses
 
Now that we've gotten along as office mates
For three semesters, I don't mind letting you know,
In confidence, that the poems and stories we're teaching
Are less important to me than they are to you.
However beautiful in themselves, they don't uplift me
As meditation uplifted me when I was a disciple.
To be sure, I gave up the discipline after a year,
Unable, finally, to empty my mind enough
For the kind of higher harmony with the void
Enjoyed by the few who become enlightened.
Now, in my fall-back mode, I try to content myself
With working at harmony with the world.
 
I want to know what it's like to be other people
And am always practicing, weekdays with students
And colleagues, weekends with strangers.
Even in the car alone, on a Sunday drive,
I move my lips with the preachers on the radio
As I imagine what longing pushes them forward.
As for the satisfied, what right have I to judge them,
To declare they shouldn't be happy
With the raises they've earned or the holiday reservations 
They've called in early enough to book the rooms
They covet, facing the ocean?
 
I wouldn't konw what to say if they asked me
Point-blank about the life I believe they're missing.
As for the books we're teaching,
I think I respond to their plots and characters
As fully as anyone, but I have to confess
I don't regard them as throwing much light
On the world beyone the page. True to experience,
Now and then, the best ones, maybe,
But not to something experience merely hints at,
Something more spacious and longer lasting.
 
It seems odd that the books likely to last
Can only acknowledge that nothing lasts but wishes.
Am I leaving out something that stories and poems
Help you see clearly?  Spell it out, if you think so.
I'm only too set in my ways to listen.
 
-Carl Dennis

A good friend of mine sent this poem to me, and I await to hear his motivations. Still, when I read it I was bothered enough by its cynical message to write the following analysis:

My favorite line: "It seems odd that the books likely to last/ Can only acknowledge that nothing lasts but wishes." I agree that human desire exceeds the temporality of biological life, natural cycles and systems, etc. I take this to be a truth, but not the only truth literature can express, as the old, jaded narrator of the poem seems to suggest. 

Not to play devil's advocate on purpose, but I'm not a fan of this poem because I disagree with its narrator. I find myself unsympathetic to his "confession" to what I'm taking is a younger colleague who still believes in the "power of words" (not that I disagree that there is an evolution from youthful belief to elderly skepticism). What I disagree with is the (Matthew) Arnoldian assumption underlying this poem that views culture as the modern replacement of religion. The narrator "confesses" that he can no longer believe in literature as something that can uplift him and provide him (spiritual) enlightenment (albeit Eastern enlightenment, which I also have a problem with...). I think that one perhaps begins to read literature as a replacement of our parents's religion, but I do not think this is or should be its primary function. I believe that literature is a source of enlightenment in the Western tradition, a way to become philosophical, critical, and knowledgeable about society, history, human beings--the "nature" of this world, if you will.

Thus, I greet the shift to social concern in the second stanza as a move in the right direction, and I generally agree that literature pales in comparison with real life experience with other people. I can expose my students to all sorts of literature to make them appreciate diversity, multiculturalism, etc., but it's not the same thing as traveling abroad, doing work in hurting communities, conducting field research, etc. Yet, the second half of this stanza turns purely ideological (in my estimation), as the narrator shifts from "empathizing" with other subjective positions to a religious (Christian) position of not judging them (as if to know all is to forgive all--if that's true, only God can forgive, no?). Although I've given plenty of thought to what makes preachers and the citizens of Richistan tick, I do not believe that they should not be judged. And I think that literature provides plenty of criteria for the evaluation of others. 

When the narrator begins stanza three by confessing that he would not be able to tell the rich what is missing from their life I would agree, but I think he misses the point. He sounds like a failed preacher here, unable to tell people what will make them happy, what will fulfill them. Although no one can tell another person what will make them lastingly happy (let alone tell themselves!!), I can surely tell someone what WON'T make them happy, or more to the point, what actions of theirs are hurting themselves, others, society, and the world. I've learned that sense of social judgment (and justice) from literature, an aspect of literature completely missing from this poem. Alas, I think the poem remains narcissistic, a confession of someone who is looking to literature for self-fulfillment, self-enlightenment, self-verification but can't find it and thus resents his office mate who supposedly can. (I'd probably have a problem with this office mate as well, mind you.)

In sum, a professor is bitter that literature no longer fulfills its Arnoldian role, and he is too set in his ways to explore how else it might function. 

the gulf stream

Winslow Homer The Gulf Stream (1899)

I'm beginning this blog again, more than a year after its predecessor - immanent critique - fell far short of immanence with its measly four entries. Graduate school intervened like a hurricane and sent its author out to sea, but there's no need to narcissisitically reader-response my subjective experience into Homer's narratively-rich painting (although the writhing sharks serve well to symbolize several aspects of grad school).

I knew of this piece before stumbling across it recently. Lo and behold, it has taken on a whole slew of new significations in the context of my dissertation, which will explore the representation of so-called natural disasters. In regard to those portrayed in this painting, Homer said, "The boat and sharks are outside matters of very little consequence. They have been blown out to sea by a hurricane...the unfortunate man who now is so dazed and parboiled, will be rescued and returned to his friends and home, and ever after live happily."

Perhaps Homer's ironic tone is in response to the offended sensibilities of a bourgeois class who only wishes to look at the world through rose-colored lenses. On the other side of this coin exist the disaffected, those dark but well-secured dopplegangers who read the painting romantically as symbolic of man's utter aloneness in the universe. Not that I disagree with the latter sentiment; more to the point, I wonder what exactly are we looking at when we see this dazed and parboiled man?

Peter Wood answers with the kind of questions I'm interested to ask in my dissertation. His book Weathering the Storm: Inside Winslow Homer's Gulf Stream considers the historical context of the painting, the world of the Black Atlantic. Seen in the socioeconomic context of slavery and colonialism, the post-storm seascape takes on significant political connotations. Although the hurricane seems to be subsiding, its residual effects, as symbolized by the choppy water, the water spout on the horizon, and the broken vessel, suggest that the tumultuous weather of the past remains with us today. Wood directs our oft ahistorical gaze to the "sugarcane stalks protruding from the boat's hold," the dialectical image that connects the signifier of the shirtless black man to the referent of plantation slavery - "capitalism with its clothes off." With gaze historically redirected, Homer's painting oscillates with ambivalence. Assuming that the "unfortunate" man is an ex-slave, is freedom for a former bondsman akin to being left to fend for oneself in a modern world more savage than ever thanks to the unfulfilled hope of Reconstruction, the failed attempt to create a new symbolic order after the Haitian Revolution, and our leaders' inability to envision proper reparation?

Many have commented on the look of defiance on the face of the paintings sole human figure. In spite of the condition he finds himself in, the unfortunate man stoically squints in the opposite direction of his ship's course. He is caught between a rock and hard place, literally. White water rushes over a coral reef behind him, and the swarm of sharks circle below. And, of course, the possibility of rescue as depicted by the barely visible ship on the horizon, offers little in the way of optimism that this story will end the way Winslow jokingly said it would.

The story, undeniably, is the story of modernity - the nightmare of imperialism and the dream of enlightenment. Paul Gilroy argues that to comprehend modernity and the double-consciousness it indelibly produces, we have to think beyond ethnicity and nationality to the diasporic space that ushered in the modern world. To capture this space, "the rhizomorphic, fractal structure of the transcultural, international formation [he calls] the black Atlantic," Gilroy presents the image of the ship (4). He writes:

[Ships] refer us back to the middle passage, to the half-remembered micro-politics of the slave trade and its relationship to both industrialisation and modernisation. As it were, getting on board promises a means to reconceptualize the orthodox relationship between modernity and what passes for its prehistory. It provides a different sense of where modernity might itself be thought to begin in the constitutive relationships with outsiders that both found and temper a self-conscious sense of western civilization. (17)

We like to believe we have severed ties with the past, but its tempests continue to torment us.