 Cynthia Reeves, “Trying to Break Through,” 1984 winter grass all that's left of summer dreams imitation of Basho He didn't know if he was Chuang Tzu who had dreamt he was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming he was Chuang Tzu. Chuang Tzu Here we are all, by day; by night we are hurled By dreames, each one, into a sev'rall world. Robert Herrick the world dreams in us Gaston Bachelard, L’air et les songes We are asleep, but sometimes we wake up just long enough to realize we are dreaming. Wittgenstein This tendency to dream inventions clung to him all his life. J.B. McClure, Thomas A. Edison and His Inventions, 1879 Descartes’ Dream: Skepticism, the Denial of the Other, and the Book of Numbers On November 10, 1619, Descartes had three dreams. He was twenty-three years old, a soldier in the Thirty Years War spending the winter in Germany. He had spent the day shut up alone in a warm room. Earlier that day, “the thought appears to have flashed upon him … that the mathematical method … might be extended to other studies. The thought dominated his mind like a divine revelation. Three dreams followed. In the first he appeared to be lame, and forced by a tempest to seek shelter in a church. In the second dream he heard the sound of thunder and saw sparks of fire about him. In the third he opened at random the poetry of Ausonius, and his eyes fell on the words Quid vitae sectabor iter? (What way of life shall I follow?) The whole experience made such a deep impression on him that he vowed a pilgrimage to our Lady of Loretto. Whatever psychoanalytic interpretation one may put on the whole episode, there is no doubt of its profound effect on Descartes. He saw light.” (Encyclopedia Britannica, 1948, VII: 245)  René Descartes After Frans Hals - André Hatala [e.a.] (1997) De eeuw van Rembrandt, Bruxelles: Crédit communal de Belgique. Public domain.  In 1934, William Temple—then Archbishop of York, later Archbishop of Canterbury—wrote: “If I were asked what was the most disastrous moment in the history of Europe I should be strongly tempted to answer that it was that period of leisure when René Descartes, having no claims to meet, remained for a whole day ‘shut up alone in a stove’” (From Nature, Man, and God, quoted by Russell W. Howell, “Inerrancy: A Cartesian Faux-Pas?”)
A lot of ink has been spilled about Descartes’ stove. The following translation of Descartes’ account indicates he was shut up in a room with stove rather than inside the stove (but other translations put him in the stove): “The onset of winter held me up in quarters in which, finding no company to distract me, and having, fortunately, no cares or passions to disturb me, I spent the whole day shut up in a room heated by an enclosed stove, where I had complete leisure to meditate on my own thoughts” (quoted by Gil Bailie, “The Imitative Self: The Contribution of René Girard,” http://www.isi. org/books/content/386chap1.pdf. The link no longer works). The imagery—being “shut up” alone in hot room heated by an enclosed stove—is suggestive of a fundamental problem with his approach. The problem is revealed explicitly by Gill Bailie: Descartes was in search of certainty based on “unmediated knowledge, knowledge that one acquires by eliminating the mimetic influence of others, avoiding (or trying to) the epistemological corruption such an influence might have.” But “mimetic desire is what makes humanity what it is, a creature made in the image and likeness of an Other and endowed with a deep-seated and irrevocable desire to fulfill itself by falling under the influence of another. One could as well live without oxygen as eliminate the mediating influence of others, and Descartes’ efforts to do so anticipate the desperate self-referentiality of the modern self and its wistful efforts to experience its own ever-elusive authenticity.” The kind of certainty Descartes sought depends on the erasure, temporarily at least, of others—in solitude, without responsibilities for others, in an artificial environment. This kind of certainty is skeptical of the value of others’ opinions, emotions, examples, their lives even. They are like a virus to be avoided. Nature is excluded, God is excluded. Descartes’ self-imposed isolation and skepticism remind me of Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg’s treatment of skepticism in her study of the fourth book of the Torah, the Book of Numbers (see Bewilderments: Reflections on the Book of Numbers, Shocken Books, 2015). Zornberg notes (p. 14) that Numbers is “haunted” by skepticism: “We hear in the people's voice a persistent tone that is variously called massah, merivah, telunah, hit'onnenut—complaint, quarreling, bewailing, a querulous ground bass—that, beyond its specific targets, speaks of a failure to fully know their own experience and speak it for themselves.” I see parallels with Laman and Lemuel (skeptical figures in the Book of Mormon) who have “spiritual experiences”—or, better more accurately, encounter spiritual experiences generated by others, including an angel's intervention—that they do not acknowledge as their own; so far as I can remember, they never voluntarily “speak [about these experiences] for themselves.” “[I]n the wilderness experience,” Zornberg writes (p. 16) “the people cannot, perhaps will not, trust the basis on which they might acknowledge the Other, who is God, and who is at the same time all others. It is as though they can see or know nothing for themselves. In commanding a census, God asks them to account for the many others, to acknowledge that they count, to note their presences and absences. This is to take place in the wilderness, where skepticism undermines experience. The camp, numbered and ordered and bannered in tribal units surrounding God's Tabernacle, is to move through the wilderness as a gesture, precisely, of trust, of an almost flamboyant constancy and coherence.” Stanley Cavell (Philosophy the Day After Tomorrow, quoted by Zornberg, 15-16) describes the moral effects of skepticism: “I call skepticism my denial or annihilation of the other .... ‘How can I trust the basis upon which I grant the existence of the other?'... In the everyday ways in which denial occurs in my life with the other--in a momentary irritation, or a recurrent grudge... in a fear of engulfment, in a fantasy of solitude or of self-destruction—the problem is to recognize myself as denying another, to understand that I carry chaos in myself. Here is the scandal of skepticism with respect to the existence of others; I am the scandal.” I contrast the accounts of Descartes’ dreams and of his self-isolated ego--only the skeptic (the doubter) exists, which is a way of erasing the existence of others—with the life of faith in a covenant community (the church), where members bear each other's burdens and share each other’s suffering. Christian faith is deeply personal, but (writes Bailie) “it is emphatically not individualistic.” It is covenantal—a covenant between the person and God that places the person in a community of faith. To be individualistic is to risk shutting yourself in the stove of yourself. Cartesian Individualism and Lyric Poetry A long time ago, from some long-forgotten source, I picked up a definition of lyric poetry: the words of a solitary individual thinking aloud but overheard by readers. More recently, David Yezzi wrote, “[T]he lyric has become the go-to mode” in our age: “One finds, collected in book after book, an ever-expanding universe of short poems, typically by a solitary speaker, ruminating remotely on individual experience. Perhaps the brevity and pith of the lyric mode holds a special fascination for the information age: it’s Twitter-brief, a terse announcement of the personal, full of news that may, but more likely will not, stay news” (“The Dramatic Element,” The New Criterion, March 2010). A poem by Allen Grossman, the title poem of Descartes’ Loneliness (New Directions, 2007), has led me to consider how Cartesian individualism and skepticism provide the context—the intellectual and moral matrix—for the contemporary lyric poem as described by Yezzi. For copyright reasons, I won’t copy Grossman’s entire poem here. Below I paraphrase and summarize it, at the great risk of flattening and simplifying it. Please read it before proceeding. The liminal twilight tells the poet-as-Descartes, “Be assured! You are not alone.” But he is “not / convinced there is any other except myself / to whom existence necessarily pertains.” Like the historical Descartes, he interrogates himself about his own existence, but with a different result: he doesn’t even know whether “I myself possess any power” to “bring it out that I / who now am shall exist another moment.” This is going Descartes’ cogito one better: I think now, therefore I am now, but that doesn’t mean I’ll be here two minutes from now. But there may be a solution: since he has the idea of his continued existence but cannot find in himself the power of conceiving that idea, it must have come from “some other.” (This line of reasoning resembles traditional arguments for the existence of God.) But if “no such other can be / found toward evening,” then “do I really have / sufficient assurance of the existence / of any other being at all”? Further, though he doesn’t say so, does he have the assurance of his own continued existence? The ending is cryptic but it suggests the role of the imagination in conceiving our being, an imagination that requires others—the workman, the scaffold, the sign, the mark: I have been unable to discover the ground of that conviction—unless it be imagined a lonely workman on a dizzy scaffold unfolds a sign at evening and puts his mark to it. Grossman’s Descartes responds to the evening, but dismisses its assurance that he is not alone. What if this version of Descartes began to talk to the evening? A “Dialogue of Self and Twilight” might change the dynamic. Yezzi believes the lyric would be enriched by adding dramatic elements—opposing energies and points of view—to escape the solipsism (my term) of the lyric. Admittedly, Yezzi is interested in extending the range of the lyric, not in these philosophical considerations. The lyric is quiet and contemplative, “but the world is a loud and boisterous place, especially in urban settings. City-dwellers are less likely to notice the film fluttering in the grate [as in Coleridge’s “Frost at Midnight”] than the subway rumbling beneath their feet or a cheer emanating from the sports bar on the corner. City-scenes are populous not private, social not personal, polyvocal not interior. What is contemplative poetry’s answer to the voluble argument, the casual exchange, the marketplace, the mingling of the solitary ‘I’ with a crowd of others? If you are Keats, the answer is simply withdrawal” (Yezzi). As an example of what he means, Yezzi cites the reality addressed by the British Movement poets, described by Kingsley Amis as “realistic . . . close to the interests of the novel; man and women among their fellows, seen as members of a group or class in a way that emphasizes manners, social forms, amusements, fashion….” (quoted by Yezzi) I am not attacking the contemplative lyric, but I am wondering what the poetry of a people bound by covenant looks like. Not the poetry of the poet sitting on his back porch watching the evening fade on his lawn, but the poetry of the homeowner dickering with the landscaper, the husband and wife in tense discussion, the bishop (the LDS equivalent to pastor or priest) counseling with a troubled family, an angry and disappointed believer accusing God in prayer, and God’s response. I should like to write lyric poetry that understands the self in capacious ways, as described by J. Gerald Janzen in his commentary on Job (Job: Interpretation: A Bible Commentary for Teaching and Preaching, 46). Presbyterian Publishing Corporation. Kindle Edition. I have added paragraph breaks to facilitate reading on screen): “we do not exist in clear independence of our bodies; nor does our embodied awareness end with our epidermis. Our embodied self, which enters most intimately into our awareness in the form of visceral feelings, and which localizes itself in the form of pains and pleasures specific to regions of the body, also extends itself beyond the epidermis through our sensory impressions, beginning with that extended skin called our home, our ‘house’ (both our own family or ‘flesh and blood’, and our artificially fabricated skin, the dwelling which shelters us), and extends even to our personal possessions. “The artificiality of any absolute distinction between one’s body and ‘all that one has’ is disclosed in such experiences as the physical as well as inner existential shock of the death of a loved one. Our bodies feel that they have suffered a grievous wound. “The same sense of our extended embodiment is disclosed in such experiences as the theft of an engagement ring, which leaves one feeling physically assaulted and stripped; the accidental loss or malicious destruction of a longused fountain pen or other favorite tool leaving one with a sense of amputation; or the sudden alteration of a landscape through the razing of familiar buildings and the clearing of frequented woods, leaving one quite disoriented and denuded. “The hedge—the complex structure of reality comprising valued materials and material embodiments of value, within which life arises and is sustained and has particular meanings along with a pervading undertone of worthwhileness—exists at many levels, or rather in concentric circles, reaching from the microcosm of one’s own body through all manner of natural and social and symbolic orders to find its macrocosmic counterpart in that ‘firmament’ which in material fact or symbolic conception is the outermost bound of our lived world.” In other words, shutting ourselves up in a world limited to our minds as narrowly conceived by Descartes is a destructive skepticism that erases not just the “other,” but most of the self we are trying to understand. We are made of spirit incorporated into flesh—this combination is our soul, not the spirit without the body (Doctrine and Covenants 88:15)—and we are the children of God. All other humans are our siblings. Our sense of self includes the covenant community with other believers and our bonds with those outside the covenant community. It includes all creation not as a congeries of serviceable, manipulable, disposable objects, but as a gift from God. We are our best when we are open to others and to creation. According to philosopher William Desmond, “We are not self-contained subjects sealed off from the world ‘out there.’ We internalize, and we are drawn out of ourselves. We are, as Desmond says, ‘porous’” (Steven E. Knepper, Wonder Strikes: Approaching Aesthetics and Literature with William Desmond (p. 27). State University of New York Press. Kindle Edition). ***** Yezzi cites Hardy’s poem below as an example of a dramatic lyric. It consists entirely of dialogue; neither speaker is the poet. Thomas Hardy’s “Ah, Are You Digging on My Grave?” “Ah, are you digging on my grave, My loved one? — planting rue?” — “No: yesterday he went to wed One of the brightest wealth has bred. ‘It cannot hurt her now,’ he said, ‘That I should not be true.’” “Then who is digging on my grave, My nearest dearest kin?” — “Ah, no: they sit and think, ‘What use! What good will planting flowers produce? No tendance of her mound can loose Her spirit from Death's gin.’” “But someone digs upon my grave? My enemy? — prodding sly?” — “Nay: when she heard you had passed the Gate That shuts on all flesh soon or late, She thought you no more worth her hate, And cares not where you lie. “Then, who is digging on my grave? Say — since I have not guessed!” — “O it is I, my mistress dear, Your little dog , who still lives near, And much I hope my movements here Have not disturbed your rest?” “Ah yes! You dig upon my grave… Why flashed it not to me That one true heart was left behind! What feeling do we ever find To equal among human kind A dog's fidelity!” “Mistress, I dug upon your grave To bury a bone, in case I should be hungry near this spot When passing on my daily trot. I am sorry, but I quite forgot It was your resting place.” Posted 9 November 2024
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