Criticism of Poetry

Lyric criticism. The ideal of a poem as a brief text that must be unpacked into much greater verbiage by the critic. Platonic form: the haiku that generates Gibbon’s-Decline-quantities of prose exposition. Like an airbag; or one of those inflatable life rafts that explodes into stiffness and into which dozens of survivors can wriggle. As if literary criticism were a form of explosion inflation …

‘The mystic obscurity of illumination…’

Sun cataracts a whiteness
across the mirror’s glare:
all light and all blindness
folded together there.

The mortality of space

'Time is money'. Why has no equivalent adage been coined, 'space is money'? Is it because, although we know from practical experience how limited space is--how in other words demand always exceeds supply for property, real estate, freedom from crowds and so on--nevertheless our sense of space is shaped by a fundamentally metaphysical understanding of space as infinite? Whereas time is inflected by our purely personal understanding of time as finite, as bounded by our individual deaths? Why this should be I don't know. Perhaps we do think of ourselves residually as plains apes, with the whole world spatially before us; as Natty Bumppos, as Tennysonian Ulysses forever roaming with a hungry heart, moving across a landscape 'whose margin fades forever and forever as we move'. It would be cannier, surely, to think in terms of the mortality of space, a separate, unanological but just as real equivalent to the mortality of time.

It puts me in mind of the last lines of Paradise Lost, a poem that ends almost with a metaphysical trade-off of, on the one hand, topographical containment and unbounded time; and on the other temporal finitude and 'the world was all before them ...' spatial openendedness. To put it another way, when the infinite time is lost to mankind via Adam's sin, the boundedness of Edenic space is rescinded. Metaphysically speaking, time and space are together a zero-sum, or infinite-sum, game.

Two contrary positions

1. My strength is not your weakness. My weakness is not your strength. A strength that finds itself only by taking advantage of my weakness is no real strength. A grown man does not prove himself by boxing with an infant.

2. Strength is a relative, and not an absolute, term. It is always strength to do such-and-such, or strength in relation to such and such. My arm is strong compared to an infant's but weak compared to a steam-hammer. To say so is to make more than a literalist or merely descriptive statement; because understanding that there is no such quantity as a reified 'perfect strength' (any more than there exists 'perfect goodness', 'perfect love', or 'ultimate evil' -- all of these being relative terms) frees one from the tyranny of hating one's own weakness. One's weakness is a necessary part of one's strength, and vice versa.

Varieties of Light

1. Snowday. It is a hard sunlight smearing off the snow, giving the white fields an odd and scorched look.

2. Astronomy. The raw light of a blue star. The cooked light of a red giant.

3. Starburst. You're walking on a wet beach, the bald brown sand that the withdrawing tide has planed. A circle of dryness spreads, fringed with coronal threads, under the pressure of each of your planted footprints, and dies back when your foot leaves the ground.

On depression

They say that women forget the pain of childbirth. So do people who have lived through a period of happiness forget the pain of their previous depression. And when it returns it is with a startling oxymoronic combination of surprise and deep recognition, a sort of terrible returning home. Oh this again …

Jesus Christ as Lord and King

Once upon a time, of course, teaching people to think of Christ as Lord and King made sense, because it enabled them to relate their religious life to their actual social practice, in which obedience, loyalty to and love for an actual lord and an actual king were real features of life. Now, though, for a Western democratic citizen ‘lord’ and ‘king’ signifies two things: antiquity and, like, the fact that Jesus is really really elevated, or something, but in a way that is, like, symbolic and ceremonial rather than in a way that wields actual power in the world. As ‘monarch’ becomes a more and more outdated title, and actual monarchs becomes more and more obviously token figures, this semantic field will work more firmly as a shaping power in diminishing the potency of people’s conceptualisations of Christ. I’m amazed the Christian churches haven’t jettisoned it.

But then again, with what could it be replaced? Is making oneself a slave of Christ so incompatible with modern emotional and intellectual sensibilities that the very notion of the mastery of Christ becomes corroded? What about--Christ the President and Billionaire? Christ the Capo di tutti capi? Christ the Celebrity?

Not a terribly Christmassy thought, really.