Imprecating the Muses

It’s a commonplace that the only good reason to dally with the Muses is because you are compelled to it. So said Rilke: “Can you avow that you would die if you were forbidden to write?”

Or as August Kleinzahler put it, “Unvisited, I do not live, I endure” — the last line of his poem The Goddess.

As before with other poets, I have been getting to know Kleinzahler, reading one poem as my first act each day. As with the others, one must tune in; but the reader is stupid (or the purpose of poetry is to be a tuning-fork). In this case, I may have skipped the title, and read the poem first as self-pitying; that didn’t sound like this poet at all. But the Muse as lover! Of course.

That made me think again about ‘The Tree’ (unfortunately not online anywhere I can find, but here are the opening and closing lines). The tree is moribund, ‘Pinch a branch to see if it’s quick / […] dogs / pissing at the base / birds nesting up high where leaves had been’

but that shield of bark
photons roam the grain of
and pathogens try to corkscrew into
only to fall apart and dry ...

because it would not bloom
because it would not die

the axman came

Rather than the ruins of a human being, isn’t this poem about a creative blockage?

Ontological furniture

I’ve never got properly to grips with what I might as well call English-language philosophy, but I still took against it as a young man, because of its apparent dryness and lack of ambition. It rubbed me up altogether the wrong way to read the likes of A.J. Ayer dismissing everything of interest as “nonsense”. A good friend of mine who is a philosopher listened to my Romantic philistinism with more respect, or at least patience, than it deserved. The grandfather of that spirit of modesty was Kant, who famously wrote of the “humble abode” of reason, its proper earthly sphere; and it was reading Kant that slowly made me get the point.

My revolt against what seemed a “new scholasticism” was founded on its ceding those important questions to mere opinion or fancy, but the refusal to make vain pronouncements isn’t tantamount to indifference. Recently I have been writing about the kairos. The whole point, if I may baldly summarise, is the absence of a heuristic: in many situations, which may be the most important ones, there is no right answer awaiting discovery had we but the faculties and wisdom to perceive it. We may need to imagine we have been guided by reason, and furthermore, that its conclusions are objectively correct, but in fact, the choice is ours to make, our responsibility, and if we choose with all the self-possession of a piece of rotten flotsam adrift on the tides, the consequences are still ours to bear and justify. If we choose from cowardice or spite, we will probably still call it prudence, and proceed on a more even keel by being able to believe it. Philosophy rightly, with sorrow, averts its gaze.

In a similar deflationary spirit, it is a commonplace that tyranny “just is” (the “philosophical” just, with its distinctive, slightly tense inflection) the absence of certain merely procedural safeguards, habeas corpus and the rest, because human nature is such that it is unwise to rely on the temperance or discretion of policemen, magistrates or bureacrats: they are licensed to use violence and compulsion, but under constraint, partial and imperfect as that is. In the same way, evil really exists, but it just is the absence of humanity, the insufficiency of aidos, “not quite liking” the abominable choice; it is not some ectoplasmic emanation or miasma, to observe it requires no fanciful metaphysical commitments, nor can it be told by strutting cinematic signs, vampiric pallor, a lunatic cackle or eye, Germanic shrillness rising in the throat. To borrow a word from a different context, it is banal.