Shyness and Ardor

Recently, the Politics Department at UCSC held a remembrance for Jack Schaar.

Schaar, legendary teacher, commanding lecturer, prose stylist.

He was the last of the great Puritans.  A Calvinist, exalting of pastoral communitarianism.  An anti-federalist in the style of Kropotkin, and an American patriot.  His heroes were Winthrope, Hawthorne, Twain, Faulkner and Melville.  He was as likely to advise students to live on farms as he was to usher them into PhD programs.

Along with Sheldon Wolin, Norman Jacobson, Hannah Pitkin, and Michael Rogin, Schaar cultivated the "Berkeley School" of political thought in the 1960s, which emphasized radical democratic participation in political process and community.

He was well known for advocating humility.  Often, at the start of a new semester, Jack would advise his students not to hastily dismiss an author or text.  Rather he asked them to approach reading with "shyness and ardor."

Inviolate Curve

Today I've been reading Hart Crane.

Crane opens his best known epic poem, "The Bridge" with an epigraph from the Book of Job.  It reads: "From going to and fro in the earth, and from walking up and down in it."

My favorite section of the poem comes from "Atlantis:"

"Through the bound cable strands, the arching path upward, veering with light, the flight of strings..." 

A.R. Ammons, "The City Lights"

When you consider the radiance, that it does not withhold
itself but pours its abundance without selection into every
nook and cranny not overhung or hidden; when you consider

that birds' bones make no awful noise against the light but
lie low in the light as in a high testimony; when you consider
the radiance, that it will look into the guiltiest

swervings of the weaving heart and bear itself upon them,
not flinching into disguise or darkening; when you consider
the abundance of such resource as illuminates the glow-blue

bodies and gold-skeined wings of flies swarming the dumped
guts of a natural slaughter or the coil of shit and in no
way winces from its storms of generosity; when you consider

that air or vacuum, snow or shale, squid or wolf, rose or lichen,
each is accepted into as much light as it will take, then
the heart moves roomier, the man stands and looks about, the

leaf does not increase itself above the grass, and the dark
work of the deepest cells is of a tune with May bushes
and fear lit by the breadth of such calmly turns to praise.

Secret Histories of the Arab Spring

Mohamed Bouasisi: the Tunisian street vendor who self-immolated on 17 December, 2010 in protest against the corruption of the Ben Ali regime. Bouasisi’s suicide would soon become a symbol. He was martyred. And his martyrdom marked a founding moment of the Arab Spring.

Self-Immolation has an incredible history. So too does fire.

Gaston Bachelard writes that “Fire smolders in a soul more surely than it does under ashes” (13). Fire: “…from the sight of the great blaze of fire shining against the night sky and extending out over the broad expanse of ploughed fields.”

Boehme anticipates Bachelard: “Our life is as a fire dampened, or as a fire shut up in stone” (Incarnatione).

For Norman O. Brown, “The choice is between partial incorporation and total incorporation (integration). Participation (playing a part), or fusion. Total incorporation, or fusion, is combustion in fire” (Love’s Body, p. 176). Love is all fire (179). “To be aflame at every point. To be alive is to be burning.”

Of course, Bouasisi was hardly the first martyr of the Arab Spring. Before him there was Bradley Manning. Manning’s leaked classified diplomatic cables exposed a range of illegitimate dictatorships in Northern Africa, Western Asia and the Middle East. The publicized cables made formerly repressed private sentiments publicly recognizable. Popular unrest soon translated into fervorous revolutionary upheaval.

Manning's motivations stemmed from his disenchantment with Don’t Ask Don’t Tell. A wave of democratizing energies sweeping Tunisia, Egypt, Lybia, Syria, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Morocco, prompted by the US military’s policy on closeting gay soldiers.Manning: secret progenitor of the Arab Spring.

What is Anger?

Anger, like violence (violentia), is etymologically associated with explosive fire. Anger is combustion, fusion, an all consuming flame. Love is all fire, Augustine tells us, and so heaven and hell are the same place. Norman O. Brown takes this to mean that "the torments of the damned are part of the felicity of the redeemed."

Too Simple, Too Complex

"Paradoxically, while hardly anyone questions that the self-styled 'advanced industrial democracies' really are democracies, fewer still care to argue that 'the people' actually rule in any one of them, or that it would be a good idea if it did. For in societies where managerial rule is widely practiced, democracy appears as inherently crude and hence unsuited to the task of governing complex and rapidly changing societies. At the same time in those quarters, it is often declared that democracy demands such a high level of political sophistication from citizens as to make it doubtful that it can be mastered by Third World peoples. Thus democracy is too simple for complex societies and too complex for simple ones."

--Sheldon Wolin, "Fugitive Democracy"

Norman O. Brown: "There is Only Poetry"

At the end of Love’s Body, Norman O. Brown writes: “there is only poetry.” The whole statement reads: “The antinomy between mind and body, word and deed, speech and silence, overcome. Everything is only a metaphor; there is only poetry.” The passage concludes the book.

What can this mean?

For Brown, poetry seems to make seemingly disparate things appear as a whole. Differences dissolve into a common matrix. He’s thinking of Blake. Especially Blake’s fire. The all consuming fire. Holocaust, sacrifice, fiery oblivion.

In his tenth chapter, “Fire,” Brown qualifies: “The real fire, the chariot of fire, the Fiery Chariot of his Contemplative Thought. The real fight, the mental fight; poetry, a sword of lightning, ever unsheathed, that consumes the scabbard that would contain it,” (183). Like fire, poetry consumes its surroundings.

This is a creative destruction, as Schumpeter might have it. “Meaning is new, or not at all; a new creation, or not at all; poetry or not at all,” (248). So poetry consumes, and, in its consumptive act, it creates something new. Something emergent.

This creation seems always to be dialectical for Brown. “…in the resurrection, in the awakening, these two are one: poetry,” (266). No, not dialectical—at least not in the sense Kojeve has in mind—but more like the union of substance (in the sense Spinoza meant it), or like the chiasmus of flesh (as with Merleau-Ponty).

Poetry, not psychoanalysis, Brown said, is the art of healing (I’m sure Brown once said this, maybe in an interview). The only true thing about psychoanalysis, Brown quipped (following Adorno), are the exaggerations. For poetry things are different, at least the true things are. Poetry reveals the yoke that binds us. Better, for Brown, poetry is the bond, the nexus in which we all toil. (Nobby loved terms like “syncretism,” “mystical interconnection,” “polymorphous intercommunication,” and “unity,” of course he no less valued the flamboyant too-muchness psychoanalysis always talks about. In marrying the two, think of his felicitous phrasing: “We participate each other, connected as well as separated by a sea of death; living each other’s death, and dying each other’s life.”)

Brown’s poets included Dante, Keats, and Pound. He also liked Olson. In his “Projective Verse,” Olson writes that “a poem is energy.” Of course a poem, no matter how charged with energy its content, will not survive on content alone but through voice. Voice means something like style of thought. And this style, to sound a voice, bears an agenda: not simply to record the actual, but to continuously create the sensation of immersion in the actual. Poetry is near, common, low.

Some say also that poetry must do more. It must dislodge assumption, not by simply opposing it, but by dismantling the systematic proof in which its inevitability is grounded. Others say it must be cautious, ever-diligent not to mistake noble utterance for base perception.

For Brown poetry needed simply to be. Safeguarding the site where poetry can emerge, violently active, is everything. We must set buoys afloat to mark the spots of these sites and of their shipwrecks:

THE SEA MARKE

Charles Olson (recalling John Smith)

Aloofe, aloofe; and come no neare,

The dangers doe appeare;

Which if my ruin had not beene

You had not seene:

I onely lie upon this shelfe

to be a marke to all

which on the same might fall,

That none may perish but my selfe.

Brown may have been the ultimate buoy. His work attests to the wrecks of our time. But it also attends to the hope that is left in the aftermath: “Hope creates from its own wreck the things it contemplates.” And poetry is the beacon of this hope.