Protean Forges
Sean B. Palmer
dull and unremarkable. This would be okay if I could publish the
context, but because the context is so complex and often non verbal,
this can't be achieved.
So I've got a poem which only really makes sense to me. This seems
peculiar because the contemporary notions of poems are as standalone
units, things that use shared language and culture for their context,
commodities that we publish and sell and enjoy like fine wines. But
one could also think of them as diary entries, and indeed my personal
poem would probably be more analogous to a diary entry than a
published poem.
Wittgenstein had some theories about this, but they touch on
compassions too dear for me to fathom. I think that Montaigne's
enjoyment of biographies might be somewhat closer to the mark, anyway.
The works issue forth from the person. But I like to create things for
my friends, so it's depressing when I write something that fascinates
me but that I know would not fascinate anybody else in the same way.
I think what's most annoying is that the poem was a spark thrown out
of some protean forge, one of those periods when there is great
creativity going on. I was reading an article about Early Modern
printing the other day, and the author was having continual problems
describing practices since words such as editor and publisher had not
been invented in that period, and the kinds of things that went on
were very different. For example, print is seen as having credibility
these days, but back then that credibility was still being built up.
Glimpsing into the philosophical laboratories of others is very
rewarding, but there is so seldom the amount of information needed to
appreciate them properly. Even people like Sir Thomas Browne, who were
continually being creative, are sometimes quite inaccessible because
there is no starting point, we only see the products as it were.
Having said that, I have wondered whether my own emergent philosophy
could be best expressed as a refutation of the Religio Medici.
The thing about the Religio Medici is that Browne was poised on the
crux between two ages. There was the traditional age of received
knowledge, old fashioned notions about the way the universe works, and
the new notions of natural philosophy that was to become science.
Since Browne was in the crux, he was in a way able to sample the
fruits of both and weave them together, which is why he is so admired.
But there is also a side of him that is clearly puzzled by the gulf
opening up. One of the things that I like to attempt is to repair that
gulf, which often must be done by striking out orthogonally.
Perhaps the problem is as simple as striking a balance between
adventure and wonder. Adventure is the practice of going out and
finding great things, roaming off into the distance to look for
enjoyable or interesting delights. Wonder is the practice of looking
at something which is ordinary and thinking about what is
extraordinary about it. Too much of the modern age is based on
adventure, I think, so that wonder has almost entirely diminished.
This was Chesterton's thesis, of course. We think we still have wonder
because we are such intrepid adventurers, but in a way this makes it
worse.
I've thought about this problem before. I enjoy crackpot new-age
theories, but it's hard to use them as poetry when you don't believe
in them. So I wondered whether believing at least in the individual
who came up with the theory would be good enough, but it probably
wouldn't. I also figured that perhaps the relationship between
(roughly) wonder and adventure is a symbiotic one, so that you can't
have mystery and poetry and romance without having at least some
mundane rubbish too. But perhaps that's a cop out too. I just noticed
that they tend to go together in folklore, not that they are
necessarily symbiotic.
I probably got a little closer in my thoughts on baptism. I was
wondering whether one ought to get baptised or not, and I came up with
a very peculiar answer. The answer is a riddle. That could be a whole
post in itself, but you can think about what Aquinas says about power,
and why the Church of England has a commemoration day for George Fox.
The answer isn't a yes or no, but more of a story. Not a fable or an
allegory, because those things are feeble.
I suppose all of this explains why in some ways my favourite book is
Keats's Shakespeare, by Caroline F. E. Spurgeon. This is an obscure
little book from the 1920s that I found on a shelf in my library, and
the basis of it is simply to reproduce the passages that Keats
underlined in his personal copy of the works of Shakespeare. The
preface to that work is one of the most endearing protean forges that
I've found.
Dave Pawson
> Once I wrote a poem which looks great to me, but out of context is
> dull and unremarkable.
> So I've got a poem which only really makes sense to me. This seems
> peculiar because the contemporary notions of poems are as standalone
> units, things that use shared language and culture for their context,
> commodities that we publish and sell and enjoy like fine wines. But
> one could also think of them as diary entries, and indeed my personal
> poem would probably be more analogous to a diary entry than a
> published poem.
I can't imagine why you should be different from any other person (poet
or not) who has written poetry Sean? I'm sure they were riddled with
doubt as to the 'fitness' of their work for public display.
They found out by publishing it and waiting for a response. Why not try it?
regards
--
Dave Pawson
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Sean B. Palmer
> I can't imagine why you should be different from any other person
> (poet or not) who has written poetry Sean? I'm sure they were riddled
> with doubt as to the 'fitness' of their work for public display.
But that's likely to be a general trait, lack of belief in their work,
whereas I've written plenty of poems that I think are very good and
deserve publication. I also don't think that this poem *doesn't*
deserve publication, just that it wouldn't be understood as intended.
The poem is good, but it depends on context. And the context is
unpublishable, not because it's bad, but because it's too difficult a
task to publish it.
I'm sure that other people write poems just like this one, that mean a
lot to them but which are inscrutable to anyone but the author. When
they write a poem like that, I'll bet many feel frustrated and as
though their poem has no worth. By suggesting that there is an analogy
to diary entries, I'm suggesting that poems can do other things than
we expect them to.
You can think of it as follows. You go to write a blog post, but you
include too many private details about friends, too many in jokes, and
leave yourself too open to criticism because of delicate views too
boldly expressed. So you decide not to publish it on your blog, but
perhaps instead in a private blog, or maybe just even in your diary.
Does that take away from the validity or the usefulness of what you
wrote?
My poem wasn't quite like that: there were no private details about
friends, or bold views. But there were a lot of things that act in the
same way poetically, things which you need the context of what I was
looking at, studying, etc. in order to understand.
It's still frustrating that I can't share it, because I like sharing
things. Another point here is that the temptation of the author is to
believe that the context is bundled up in the poem. I think it takes a
good level of discernment to be able to see when that isn't the case.
It can be a bit of a hard thing to accept, especially if you intended
a poem to be public.
--
Sean B. Palmer, http://inamidst.com/sbp/
Dave Pawson
> On Sun, Jul 25, 2010 at 7:42 AM, Dave Pawson wrote:
>
>> I can't imagine why you should be different from any other person
>> (poet or not) who has written poetry Sean? I'm sure they were riddled
>> with doubt as to the 'fitness' of their work for public display.
>
> But that's likely to be a general trait, lack of belief in their work,
> whereas I've written plenty of poems that I think are very good and
> deserve publication. I also don't think that this poem *doesn't*
> deserve publication, just that it wouldn't be understood as intended.
Subtly different. Sorry Sean.
>
> The poem is good, but it depends on context.
> It's still frustrating that I can't share it, because I like sharing
> things.
Alternate summary. You like it. You want to publish it,
you haven't (yet) found a way to make it comprehensible
to a larger audience.
Different problem to tackle?