Poetry

I’ve never delved much into poetry. I have a few favorite poems, such as T.S.Eliot’s “The Hollow Men,” that somehow speak to me, but I’ve never studied poetry or poems enough to understand the language. I accept that this is a shortcoming in my grasp of the deeper aspects of life, in much the same way as my lack of musical ability. I tend to rely on my left brain for what I consider knowledge. “Tis a pity,” as they say.

So I would probably not pick up a book of poetry to browse. But I do find myself reading other people’s reviews of books having to do with poetry. Last week, for example, I was reading Tamsin Shaw’s “Nietzsche: ‘The Lightning Fire’,” a review of a book by Krzysztof Michalski, The Flame of Eternity: An Interpretation of Nietzsche’s Thought, when I came across this paragraph:

Michalski follows Heidegger in holding that concepts, which we ordinarily employ to make sense of our world, in fact provide us with a very limited form of understanding, one that not only fails to capture the inexhaustible richness of experience and meaning but also shuts down our potential receptiveness to it.

It stopped me, for some reason. I’ve never read Heidegger, nor more than scattered bits of Nietzsche. Something (in my right brain?) told me to think more about this. I know that concepts and words often get in the way of understanding. To really know the world, one has to absorb knowledge in ways that words often cannot directly indicate. We constantly depend upon metaphor in trying to communicate with each other. It’s often said that language is nothing but metaphor. Everything stands for something else.

The concept “tree” for example, extracts similarities from numerous examples. It’s an abstraction. The word represents a concept, and according to Tamsin Shaw a concept necessarily has limits to which it can apply. We might modify the concept by adding more words, such as in “green tree,” and bring our audience a little closer to knowing what we are talking about. We’d never reach the end, with mere words, where they would know exactly what we know.

Farther down, Shaw gets me closer to what he is thinking:

Michalski aims to enlist Nietzsche in altering our sensibilities not through philosophical arguments but through something more like poetry, directing our attention to "the unknowable," employing metaphors bearing cultural and emotional meanings that cannot be reduced to analyzable abstractions.

And in the rest of the review, Shaw expands on this leaning toward what I understand as right-brain thinking. Some things in life are simply beyond concepts. Poetry can side-step conceptual limitations by suggesting rather than declaring.

If you hear someone telling you about a profound experience and can truthfully reply, “Yes, I know what you mean!” then you are taking from your own experiences some feelings and understandings and comparing them with hers—understandings far beyond the simple words passed from her to you.

In his book, Michalski takes 231 pages of words in an attempt to make us understand something about Nietzsche. I was frequently lost in trying to understand the words of Shaw, trying to make me understand what Michalski was getting at. But in that one paragraph, I saw a glimmer of something I could hold onto long enough to write some more words to myself.

I’ve downloaded an e-book of Thus Spake Zarathustra, one of Nietzsche’s more poetic works, and I’ll try to understand it using both my left and right brain, with the hope that I can begin to “capture the inexhaustible richness of experience and meaning” without shutting down my potential receptiveness to it.

Re: Tamsin Shaw, “Nietzsche: ‘The Lightning Fire’”, The New York Review, October 24, 2013

Communicating Feelings

I no longer consider myself “a photographer,” in spite of the many thousands of hours I’ve spent working in the craft, and in spite of the intensity with which I’ve felt connected to the process and its subjects. I guess it’s just too much for me.

I recently read a piece in The New York Review by Peter Galassi about a touring retrospective of photographer Garry Winogrand, in which Galassi said:

“Photography inescapably but surreptitiously transforms what it describes. If you want your picture to look the way the scene in front of you feels, you are likely to be disappointed, and no matter how the picture turns out everyone else is likely to assume that the camera simply copied what was there. But along with probable failure there is the rare chance of backdoor success: a fortuitous scene that never existed but carries the authority of reality copied by the camera.”

It’s that way, too, in writing. Maybe it’s that way in any creative enterprise. We are impelled to put something down that—we hope—feels the way we feel. Often, we can’t even articulate clearly what it is that we feel or why we have the need to express it. We are simply moved to do it. In a photograph, we try to capture a scene or an expression or a form that says something we want to say. If we could say it in words, we probably wouldn’t need to say it with the photograph. Sometimes it works, and we get a measure of satisfaction.

You see, I can’t even say that last paragraph and have it feel to me the way the idea feels. What Galassi is saying is that this is normal: there is but a rare chance of backdoor success. We’ve all responded in some way to the Mona Lisa, but is that what da Vinci felt? Once it’s expressed, it’s no longer ours, but the property of the viewer or the reader. Who cares what da Vinci felt? Perhaps out of curiosity, yes, but what we feel upon gazing at it may or may not be what he felt. It doesn’t change the value of it for us.

As I write my stories, I am telling them to myself. What others may get from them is almost beside the point as I write. I always hope that others will get something from them. If I have a practiced hand and eye, it’s more likely that others will be affected, but that’s simply because I’m using words and semantics that are common in my culture. If I don’t push past the boundaries of the usual, people will dismiss my work as “boring,” or “clichéd.” If I stray too far beyond them people will dismiss it as “unintelligible.”

But that’s not really art. Maybe art is really surprise. Maybe it’s like Galassi says: it’s that rare chance of backdoor success, the thing that affects others the way it affects the creator, even when he or she can’t say why it works.