the echoing wisdom of the teacher’s teacher’s teacher

I’ve tried, now and then, to read Aristotle for pleasure. I would get the odd, frustrated feeling that there really ought to have been something pleasurable going on, but that some magical thread essential to the activity of reading was consistently eluding me. Well, I’m trying to read the Nicomachean Ethics again. And this time I have been enchanted by the winding path book i traces. I think maybe I used to imagine that Aristotle was like a box, with minute specimens in compartments in compartments, but not alive (I don’t know where I got this idea, maybe I heard someone going on and on about “the categories” of understanding, or some such thing) … and didn’t fully trust or realize that his teaching might itself be “a being-at-work in accord with virtue,” a folding and unfolding in speech, enshrining and embodying an aim at the good: an aim to which the teacher is indeed entirely given, yet an aim too fundamental to be entirely his own.

Here is a small but beautiful example (and also what we call humorous, I think) of Aristotle’s awakening his listeners’ wonder. This is from chapter 4, which begins characteristically–”now, taking up the thread again”–marking the easy meanders of his discourse which nevertheless seem destined, as if attracted by something of great weight, to hit upon what is needful at every turning:

But about happiness–what it is–they are in dispute, and most people do not give the same account of it as the wise. Some people take it to be something visible and obvious, such as pleasure or wealth or honor, and different ones say different things, and even the same person often says different things; when sick one thinks it is health, but when poor, that it is wealth, and when they are conscious of ignorance in themselves, people marvel at those who say it is grand and above them. And some people believe that, besides these many good things, there is some other good, by itself, which is responsible for the being good of all these other things.

One delightful aspect of this passage is how effectively the examples draw one in to the argument. We imagine and try them out for ourselves “when sick one thinks it is health, when poor, that it is wealth” … and consequently, at the next turn, we find ourselves imagining as our own condition precisely what the argument indicates our condition to be … “and when they are conscious of ignorance in themselves, people marvel at those who say it is grand and above them.” We have thus, perhaps, been readied to hear the account of the wise: that “besides these many good things, there is some other good, by itself, which is responsible for the being good of all these other things.” Aristotle will go on to refute various superficial versions of this opinion, at the same time developing the marvellous and at times vexed perplexities it introduces. Yet here he gives this famous opinion of his teacher the place of honor; it is the prize and hope of those “who are conscious of ignorance in themselves”–a phrase we might take as a reverent self-reminder of the peculiar wisdom his teacher’s teacher was possessed of.

The Speed of Verse, II

So, why is speed needed to say poetry? It is the sound of sense waking up the latent agility of the tongue: “speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it to you, trippingly on the tongue.” It is attention to sharper contrasts, to multiplying facets, to a superabundant collation of angular things all at once–a big, strange and wonderful world: “whatever is swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim.” It is also awareness of and ministry to the ebb and flow, sad and happy, right and wrong, the tangle and loosening of the soul: “and quick-eyed love, observing me grow slack/ from my first entrance in …”

A dream, a mere enjoyment won’t do. In Vergil and Dante, we have poets that gave themselves to the labor of it. Yeats’ wrote of their kind of poetry,

Better go down upon your marrow-bones
And scrub a kitchen pavement, or break stones
Like an old pauper, in all kinds of weather;
For to articulate sweet sounds together
Is to work harder than all these, and yet
Be thought an idler, by the noisy set
Of bankers, schoolmasters, and clergymen
The martyrs call the world.

Of the works of such laboring poetry, Pound writes: “They are good art in the way the high mass is good art.” They are, in this way, unlike “songs that are apt to weary you after you know them.” Their poetry “must be conceived and approached as a ritual. It has its purpose and its effect. These are different from those of simple song. They are perhaps subtler. They [continue to] make their revelations to those who are already expert.” Nevertheless, as Yeats suggests, all this long labor is to achieve a speed in verse equal to a moment’s gathering or dispersal of things, its climax, anti-climax, or perplexity; equal to “times trans-shifting” … and so, like the mass, able to sing a modulating song to different times and seasons of the heart, to different occasions of speech:

A line will take us hours maybe;
Yet if it does not seem a moment’s thought,
all our stitching and unstitching has been naught.

In Vergil’s poems of “low Italy,” the Georgics, he writes how “human usage, examining itself, hammered out, little by little, different arts” of cultivation, husbandry, care … “searched out a grass with grain, and struck from the veins of flint the hidden fire” that Zeus hid away from men. He writes that without the aid of assiduous labor, “all things rush to the worse, and, let slide, get borne away, just like one who with all his upstream-rowing can scarcely push his skiff along beneath him and, if he relax his arm, the boat will whip him headlong in the sheer stream.” The glory of farmer belongs to one “who having provided tools for every necessity long before will mindfully bring them forth” at the critical time. And it is just the varying crisis of every moment that Vergil’s verse accentuates: “at last, what the late dusk star may bring, whence the wind drives clear the clouds, what the wet west wind is thinking about, the sun will give you signs.” “Rain never brought harm on the unforewarned; either the flying cranes have gone and fled it rising from the deepest valleys, or the heifer looking up to the sky has caught its breezes in her wide nostrils, or shrill sparrows gone flittering about the lakes, and in their mud the frogs croaked out the old complaint. … Not even, at night, girls plucking their measures of wool have been unaware of coming storm, when, on the glowing clay, they watched the oil fizzle, and crumbling snuff collect on the wick.”

At the beginning of our Canto, Dante likens himself to a farmer caught unawares by a false snow-fall “like some wretch ignorant of what can be done,” likening himself, perhaps, to those “rustics ignorant of the way” of the benighted age to which Vergil offered his Georgics. Vergil shows him what it means to “ponder as he labors,” to be

always ready for the step ahead.
So, as he lifted me up toward the summit
of one great crag he’d see another spur,
saying: “That is the one you will grip next,
but try it first to see if it is firm.”

Trying, testing what things are made of as they pass us by, the world gives us its edges and its contours and its cracks. … “This was no path for those with cloaks of lead”: the hypocrites, whose circle Vergil and Dante have just left, wear cloaks that seem gold, but inside are heavy with lead. Caring for and perpetuating the mere illusion of goodness is a thankless and life-sapping labor directly antithetical to the quickening care for what is real; here, there can be no pretending; only an actual, receptive, and bold contact with the surrounding world and the tasks it offers can ascend this path, contact that does not “spare one drop for dreaming.” Nor is it the escape of spirit from the “body’s heaviness,” but the translation of that weight into the life and power that already quickens it. It is as Jesus said, as if to the hypocrites, speaking to the unnecessary weight they carry, “the body is more than clothes.” And, we might add, life (and poetry) always also is and ought to be something more than dreams, which but “leave such vestige of themselves on earth/ as smoke bequeaths to air, or foam to water.”

The Speed of Verse

“What does one need to say poetry, Mr. Stanhope?” she asked.
Stanhope laughed. “What but the four virtues, clarity, speed, humility, courage? Don’t you agree?”
The old lady looked at Mrs. Sammile. “Do you?” she asked.
Lily Sammile shrugged. “O, if you’re turning poems into labours,” she said. “But we don’t all want to speak poetry, and enjoyment’s a simple thing for the rest of us.”
“We do all want to speak it,” Stanhope protested. “Or else verse and plays and all art are more of dreams than they need to be. They must always be a little so, perhaps.”

–Charles Williams, Descent into Hell

In that part of the year when the sun
begins to warm its locks beneath Aquarius
and nights grow shorter equaling the days,
when hoarfrost mimes the image of his white
sister upon the ground–but not for long,
because the pen he uses is not sharp–
the farmer who is short of fodder rises
and looks and sees the fields all white, at which
he slaps his thigh, turns back into the house,
and here and there complains like some poor wretch
who doesn’t know what can be done, and then
goes out again and gathers up new hope
on seeing that the world has changed its face
in so few hours, and he takes his staff
and hurries out his flock of sheep to pasture.
So did my master fill me with dismay
when I saw how his brow was deeply troubled,
yet then the plaster soothed the sore as quickly:
for soon as we were on the broken bridge,
my guide turned back to me with that sweet manner
I first had seen along the mountain’s base.
And he examined carefully the ruin;
then having picked the way we would ascend,
he opened up up his arms and thrust me forward.
And just as he who ponders as he labors,
who’s always ready for the step ahead,
so, as he lifted me up toward the summit
of one great crag he’d see another spur,
saying: “That is the one you will grip next,
but try it first to see if it is firm.”
That was no path for those with cloaks of lead,
for he and I–he, light; I, with support–
could hardly make it up from spur to spur.
And were it not for that, down from this enclosure,
the slope was shorter than the bank before,
I cannot speak for him, but I should surely
have been defeated. But since Malebolge
runs right into the mouth of its last well,
the placement of each valley means it must
have one bank high and have the other short;
and so we have reached, at length, the jutting where
the last stone of the ruined bridge breaks off.
The breath within my lungs was so exhausted
from climbing, I could not go on; in fact,
as soon as I had reached that stone, I sat.
“Now you must cast aside your laziness,”
my master said, “for he who rests on down
or under covers cannot come to fame;
and he who spends his life without renown
leaves such a vestige of himself on earth
as smoke bequeaths to air or foam to water.
Therefore, get up; defeat this breathlessness
with spirit that can win all battles if
the body’s heaviness does not deter it.
A longer ladder still is to be climbed;
If you have understood, now profit from it.”
Then I arose and showed myself far better
equipped with breath than I had been before:
“Go on for I am strong and confident.”
We took our upward way upon the ridge,
with crags more jagged, narrow, difficult,
and much more steep than we had crossed before.
I spoke as we went on, not to seem weak …
–Dante, Inferno, Canto XX

Equality

Friendship creates a kind of equality between persons. Other kinds of friendship may create other and debased kinds of equality, but the noble friendship that is directed toward what is good in itself, what is good for another and oneself, creates a noble equality–an equality that is not a leveling, but a lifting up, a mutual recognition of the immeasurable gift that is given in the intimated unity of one’s own destiny with the destiny of another.

We might hear the word equality as it has been uttered by Socrates, in the context of that potential for community which holds together gods and men, earth and sky. We cannot or ought not imagine our good without making some beginning at imagining the good of the whole, the good of sky and earth, the good of what is unreservedly broad open, the home of flight, of constellating light, of what is closed and sheltered, what is molded in the secret depths, the barrow and treasure house of the forgotten past … and also the weather of this in-between: the dew fall, welter of winds, snow drift, sun shower, rainscape. We must make some beginning at the difficult work of friendship–whether as invitation, conversation, prayer, or simply patience–with gods and with humans … and in doing so we set our hopes on being or becoming, if only in some small way, equal to the destiny of others, to great men even, and to the divine.

For to receive something for what it is, according not only to our good, but according to its own good, we must be equal, somehow, to the gift. It is in this way that I would like to understand Dr. Sampo, when he says that “one of the truths revealed by the incarnation is that equality is part of the good.” If the gift of God is God himself, and God poured out pro multis, for the many, then all are capable of, are equal to his being.

The Humanities cycle at Thomas More was so structured as to express the hope that our reading together, including a kind of accountability to each other in conversation, would be enriched and not diminished by the range of intellectual prowess and different stages of development represented in the members of the school as a whole. The proper response to what is beautiful and good in our history does not belong only to those whom we tend to think of as possessors of intellectual virtue; and we learn from the responses of all, even the flawed or fatal responses of a Polus or a Callicles. What ultimately distinguishes the career of a student is not his or her level of ability, but dedication to the call.

Moreover, I would assert that the work of receiving our cultural and historical heritage, is synergetically linked to the work of understanding and loving each other. … As suggested by the life of Socrates, ideally they become one work.

I think some of my claims I owe in part to the insight of the Cowans. If you will pardon me for quoting Unbinding Prometheus, not as though it were a new Republic, but because it sheds some light on what equality might have meant for the Thomas More College we knew …

Education itself is the best beneficiary of a normal mixture of minds. The concept of a magnet school for special interests or for ‘talented and gifted students’ is a ruse perpetrated by fond parents and bowed to by administrators embarrassed by the quality of their enterprise. Granted the problem they face is vexing: how can a single scheme serve both the best of students and the worst? The curriculum is the center of the solution; it must be the same for all students, but designed for the best—not in its complexity but in its imaginative scope and profundity. Ordinary and even lower than ordinary students respond to good material; they may remain less adroit than their brilliant classmates, but they live on the same plane of understanding. And the superior learners acquire from a mixed community responsibility and respect for their fellows.

Hard and Heavy Questions from Pseudonoma

I’m still considering these questions that relate to the small constellation of quotations in my post below, but thought they deserved a post of their own meanwhile. I’ve been thinking towards a response along a number of potentially fruitful lines. In the mean time anyone else equal (more or less) to the challenge is welcome to step forth:

“How is equality in any ways to be associated with liberal education? Does it characterize the manner in which such an education can be received? Is it an expectation to be set upon the availability of such an education? Does it refer to the manner in which the fruits of such an education are to be distributed or attained? Or is it because liberal education has been all too readily associated with equality that it finds itself yoked with the misbegotten task of rescuing culture, or embarrassingly handed over as an ornament to a political purpose?

I do not intend a merely rhetorical flippancy here, but it seems that what is sacred in this world of its own accord constellates a hierarchy among those who would receive it. Otherwise it is given in a way that this world as such does not yet recognize.”

“and we are here because the liberal arts are taught here in a distinctive manner”

Reading the school’s first newsletter, it was apparent to me in a beautiful way that the TMC enterprise was meant from the beginning as a communal adventure in which teachers, administrators, students (and alumni by extension) are called to be, each in their own way, equal sharers and stewards of a common vision. To deny the share of any of these is to attack the vision as a whole.

Read it here.

“The Board of Trustees alone, rather than the alumni or any other entity or persons, has the duty of governance, and … the Report therefore cannot be an invitation to continual dialogue.”
–The Special Committee of the Thomas More College Board of Trustees

“Such a view neglected one truth revealed by Christ: that equality is part of the good.”
–Dr. Peter V. Sampo

“It has escaped you that a geometric equality holds great sway among gods and men, but you suppose it is necessary to overreach others.”
–Socrates

Another Reflection on Lucretius

The Poetry of Lucretius’ Invitation to Accept “Mater Rebus Certa”

In lines 188-198 of the first book of De Rerum Natura, Lucretius describes the implications of there being a “semine certo”, a definite seed for every kind of thing, that each thing has “sua … materia.” His particular concerns in this passage are: that the developement of things from their seed is gradual (188-90), that they need constant nurture to survive and germinate (192-5), and that such a constant nurture maintains for them their constant (or gradually developing) nature (190). Things have their “principiis” (198), their first beginnings, ever present within them; every stage of their development is part of a process from, yet without leaving behind, their origin of life, their “materia” (191), the mother-substance from which they are continually in the process of being born i.e. “natura” (194). Lucretius invites his prospective student to take comfort in this constant mother-presence which grounds the stable nature of the cosmos in an uninterrupted chain of organic causes (196-7). The calming words of Lucretius thus sound within a mother’s womb that the uncanny can never enter (198) – a womb that one never exits, it is also a tomb (202-4). But it is a tomb so homely and familiar that death is no longer something to be feared, but, rather, its dissolution is only one more stage of a seed’s natural development.

approach to meaning restores the experience/ in a different form

John Donne:

All mankind is of one author, and is one volume. When one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated. God employs several translators; some pieces are translated by age, some by sickness, some by war, some by justice. But God’s hand is in every translation, and his hand shall bind up all our scattered leaves again, for that library where every book shall lie open to one another.

T.S. Eliot:

It seems, as one becomes older,
That the past has another pattern, and ceases to be a mere sequence—
Or even development: the latter a partial fallacy
Encouraged by superficial notions of evolution,
Which becomes, in the popular mind, a means of disowning the past.
The moments of happiness—not the sense of well-being,
Fruition, fulfillment, security or affection,
Or even a very good dinner, but the sudden illumination—
We had the experience but missed the meaning,
And approach to the meaning restores the experience
In a different form, beyond any meaning
We can assign to happiness. I have said before
That the past experience revived in the meaning
Is not the experience of one life only
But of many generations—

try and understand me …

I want to praise a book—A Dictionary of Modern English Usage by H.W. Fowler—but I cannot at this moment find the right words to do justice to the object of my admiration.

Instead, I’ll give an example of what I admire (which incidentally confirms and elucidates one of my long and vehemently held beliefs):

try. The idiom t. and do something is described as colloquial for t. to do. It’s use is probably commonest in exhortations and promises: Do t. and stop coughing; I will t. and have it ready for you. And it is hardly applicable to past time or to negative sentences, He tried and made the best of it is not English in the sense required, nor is It is no use to t. and make the best of it; but He did t. and make the best of it will pass, especially if the did is emphatic. It is, therefore, colloquial, if that means specially appropriate to actual speech; but not if colloquial means below the proper standard of literary dignity. Though t. to do can always be substituted for t. and do, the latter has a shade of meaning that justifies its existence; in exhortations it implies encouragement—the effort will succeed—; in promises it implies assurance—the effort shall succeed. It is an idiom that should not be discountenanced, but used when it comes natural.”

I would actually argue that It is no use to t. and make the best of it does work as a kind of indirect discourse where the to t. and make the best of it is the, possibly ironic, presentation of a point of view held by another as held by another. However, I think you can see why this kind of description of usage is helpful, illuminating, delightful, and expresses a true friendship with the language.

That A Dictionary of Modern English Usage is described by the author as “the last fruit of the partnership [with his late brother] that began 1903 with our translation of Lucian” suggests further that it is not just the record of a friendship with language, but also a disclosure of the true and noble human friendship which exists in language.

and the winners are …

Izzy P will receive the complete (to date) three volumes of the Grub Street Grackle!
Tomas will receive a subscription!
Kateri, Melissa A, and Becca will each receive their choice of any issue of the Grackle (past, present, or future)!

I will send the Grackles to you or a friend of your choice. Skreak about it! Be a bad bird!

To the 25 losers: you took a risk, your chances were good, you elected not to bribe me, you lost. Too bad for both of our sakes.

The good news is that the eye of the Grackle is on you … and you cannot escape! The grackle sizes its prey from afar, looks alternately with the horror of tragedy, the world-restoring laughter of comedy, and the hyperbolic pretenses of mock mock epic; you cannot escape in sleepy back-water towns, littered back-alleys, or the midnight underground where the brotherhood of genres shake hands on their clandestine swaps and bargains over whiskey and a battered deck of cards, for the grackle follows the elusive scent of the ninja on the invisible thread that winds story into story.

In short, you may pay the token fee to subscribe, but in your heart of hearts already you’re an addict, you’ve already committed the crime or whispered the magic phrase, … you’ve taken that whatever secret step that makes you a bad bird as well!