What I'm Reading and Listening To (10/23)
I’ll try to take up my older series of posts on things I’m currently reading, finding interesting, etc., and I’ll add a small section on music that I’ve been listening to, since I listen to quite a lot throughout my day. This sort of thing is a little more challenging for me than the usual stream-of-consciousness writing, because it requires more copying-and-pasting of links and URLs, which feels like busywork—but it is also somewhat important in revealing my thought process, which though chaotic is unified by certain structural themes, as well as the “musical ecology” in which my mind habitually lives.
N.B. In addition to posts like these, which will involve more of my own commentary, I hope to start using the Substack “Notes” feature to share what I’m reading and listening to, etc., without commentary. I am not very familiar with Notes yet, and don’t intend to get familiar enough with it to use it as any sort of substitute for social media—i.e. I will not engage with anybody there. I will merely share links, quotes, music, etc., in that space, for those who are interested. If I understand correctly, subscribers to this blog will get notifications of my “notes,” but they are free to turn off notifications in their settings.
What I’m reading
I’ve been going on a T.S. Eliot spree. Eliot’s erudition is practically unmatched by any other “modernist” poet I can think of, drawing on a range of experiences and literature encompassing his own American roots, his ingratiation into Oxonian England, his deep familiarity with the Western literary and philosophical canon, the Christian scriptures, the oriental scriptures of the Buddhist and Vedantic traditions, and far more. In this respect, and in many of the themes which he tackles in his poetry, he reminds me very much of my favorite atheist philosopher, Kojeve, about whom I’ve written (and will continue to write) on this blog. Eliot of course was no atheist, yet he treats many of the same existential themes in the context of his faith. Anyhow, here a few things by and about Eliot I’ve been reading and/or rereading:
1. The Four Quartets. Definitely Eliot’s greatest poetic masterpiece, up there with The Wasteland. I think I’d even choose the Quartets over the latter. As with all of Eliot’s poetic writings, there are many ways to read the poems within the Four Quartets, but predominant among them—and my favorite reading—is as a meditation on the mystical dimension at the heart of the Christian faith. Even more specifically, it is something like a meditation on what St. John of the Cross called “the dark night of the soul”—and Eliot famously echoes St. John of the Cross himself in the third section of “East Coker”:
You say I am repeating Something I have said before. I shall say it again. Shall I say it again? In order to arrive there, To arrive where you are, to get from where you are not, You must go by a way wherein there is no ecstasy. In order to arrive at what you do not know You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance. In order to possess what you do not possess You must go by the way of dispossession. In order to arrive at what you are not You must go through the way in which you are not. And what you do not know is the only thing you know And what you own is what you do not own And where you are is where you are not.
The echoes of the entire mystical tradition in this text are unmistakable. Indeed, this sort of material pervades Eliot’s entire poetic oeuvre, even extending back into his earlier poetry—though there with more violent overtones (sometimes interpreted as sadomasochistic) that disturb the reader far more than anything in the Quartets, which is disturbing enough in its own way. The more violent imagery of his earlier poetry, such as The Death of Saint Narcissus, represents, in my mind, his attempt to push the limits of his empathetic imagination to the extremes, with the intention of forging in himself an ever more unwavering commitment to a great vision of life that would necessarily entail very great suffering, including that of deep shame. Depressed for much if not most of his lifetime, Eliot actively sought redemption in the darkest moments and imaginative extremes of that depression—and in extremes that he himself never personally experienced. The Quartets are a more mature and perhaps purer expression of this same straining for redemption in the midst of his depression, which might also be understood as his years-long dark night of the soul.
2. Eliot, Reflections on Vers Libre. I’ve read considerably less of Eliot the critic than I have of Eliot the poet, and this was a fun peak into Eliot’s thinking about the “science” or the “art” behind the composition of poetry. He addresses the controversy around vers libre, or free verse, for which he can think of no definition except “(1) absence of pattern, (2) absence of rhyme, (3) absence of metre.” In other words, it’s the “style” of poetry that’s perhaps best exemplified and probably first popularized by the work of Walt Whitman, a style not characterized by any strict rules of meter and rhyme but that attempts to make something out of the natural rhythm of speech. Eliot’s provocative claim is that “vers libre does not exist, and it is time that this preposterous fiction followed the élan vital and the eighty thousand Russians into oblivion.” His reasons for this claim might be summarized as follows:
1) even the worst poetry can still be scanned, still has a rhythm, even if it has an ugly rhythm. There is no such thing as an absence of rhythm from speech. The composition of good prose is really more of a poetic art than anything else, for it depends on precisely the creation of a pleasing sound out of the rhythm of speech—this is poetry. The only question is whether it is done well or poorly.
2) even the “freest” of free verse still artfully echoes, teases, approaches and falls short of the traditional mode of iambic pentameter, which represents something like the most natural and ideal meter of a speech.
[T]he most interesting verse which has yet been written in our language has been done either by taking a very simple form, like the iambic pentameter, and constantly withdrawing from it, or taking no form at all, and constantly approximating to a very simple one. It is this contrast between fixity and flux, this unperceived evasion of monotony, which is the very life of verse.
Further, the charm of so much poetry consists precisely in “the constant suggestion and the skilful evasion of iambic pentameter.” Another choice quote along these lines: “We may therefore formulate as follows: the ghost of some simple metre should lurk behind the arras in even the 'freest' verse; to advance menacingly as we doze, and withdraw as we rouse. Or, freedom is only truly freedom when it appears against the background of an artificial limitation.”
3) Similarly, with respect to rhyme, Eliot notes how the adoption of rhymeless verse is hardly a modern novelty, even in English verse; and moreover, that the absence of metered rhyme hardly makes the composition of poetry more free. Quite the contrary: “it imposes a much severer strain upon the language. When the comforting echo of rhyme is removed, success or failure in the choice of words, in the sentence structure, in the order, is at once more apparent.” Moreover, “this liberation from rhyme might be as well a liberation of rhyme.” Many a poet in a non-rhyming poem has deployed rhyme at chosen moments of the verse in order to convey a heightened intensity, a “tightening up,” or some other change in mood. Eliot himself is a master of this technique. As are other poets such as a Whitman or a Hopkins.
In summary, according to Eliot, “the division between Conservative Verse and vers libre does not exist, for there is only good verse, bad verse, and chaos.”
3. The Life of T.S. Eliot, by Lyndall Gordon. Gordon is the best known biographer of Eliot, and the article is really a summary of her book, The Imperfect Life of T.S. Eliot (which I have not read). I won’t summarize the article myself, but it is always useful to peak into the life and struggles of the man behind the poetry. For most of his life, Eliot was certainly not a happy man. He was a flawed man, who made many foolish decisions that hurt himself and those closest to him, though he always retained his resolute commitment to the lofty vision of life that had inspired him in his youth and which he found most encapsulated in his Anglo-Catholic faith. Eliot stands among several great artistic and literary figures for whom grace could only be found in the midst of, and rarely in escape from, the messiness and contradictoriness of life.
4. “Altered States: On the Ecstasies of Teresa of Avila,” by Carlos Eire, in The Lamp Magazine. Moving away from Eliot, but still on the subject of mysticism. This was a enjoyable telling of the trials St. Teresa suffered as a result of the public scrutiny she had to undergo for her mystical ecstasies. Genuine mystics are generally very private people, yet God chose to expose Teresa to the public eye by granting her visions and ecstasies, sometimes accompanied by levitations (which she hated), in embarrassingly public situations. As a result, she gained a reputation as a mystic nun, at a time when such things were readily viewed with suspicion by Inquisitorial authorities. Her autobiography was written as a judicial self-defense, on the order of her superiors. This whole process was humiliating and excruciating to her, yet she complied with it out of sincere obedience. In reading this, I was struck by how often the Church’s greatest mystics have been suspected of heresy, including those who are now most beloved by practicing Christian faithful. In Teresa’s case, as with others, she was even suspected by her own confessors of being under demonic influence. Though she was certainly concerned to defend herself against this claim as best as possible, she never lacked deference and obedience to her suspicious confessors nonetheless. An amusing illustration:
In Teresa’s case, as soon as she began to have visions and other mystical ravishments, her confessors suspected the worst and warned her that her experiences were demonic in origin. As Teresa dutifully confessed that Christ kept appearing to her, the confessors grew increasingly alarmed—and perhaps also peeved—and ordered her to greet her visions of Christ with an obscene hand gesture known as “giving the fig,” an equivalent of today’s “giving the finger.” Dealing with the Devil on his own level with obscenities and insults was fairly common advice in monastic culture, as common as the belief that the Devil could easily deceive anyone. Teresa dutifully obeyed, despite the pain it caused her to greet Christ in such an offensive way.
5. “The Grace of My Bipolarity,” by an anonymous author, at Church Life Journal. An encouraging and hope-filled personal reflection on a subject that has been much on my heart lately: namely, what it means to live faithfully as a Christian struggling with severe mental illness—in the author’s case, bipolar depression, with daily attacks of suicidal ideation. What I think this piece especially draws out is how fidelity to one’s faith neither requires perfect mental health as its prerequisite nor, in many cases, brings mental health as one of its side effects. To be sure, it brings “healing” on some level, but it’s at a mysterious level under which the concrete symptoms of a given disorder may not actually disappear. Indeed, those symptoms may become precisely the vehicle of one’s sanctification and healing. One need not be whole to be a Saint. One may always be wounded. What matters is whether one perseveres in courageously doing battle against one’s demons or not. As the author writes:
The modern Catholic spiritual writers whom I trust agree that sanctity is proven by our steadfastness in the midst of suffering. If this is true, then I failed during the years my life fell apart. And yet I do not despair of my growth in theosis or becoming a sharer in the divine nature. The desert fathers are clear: it is not by our integrity that we are saved but by humility and repentance.
Some might worry that this can be an excuse for laziness. I suppose I think that in the end there is truth in both positions. I wish I had remained faithful to my baptism during those trying years. I never lost my faith but my “twisted love attempted to make the crooked way seem straight” (Purgatorio10.2–3).
Where am I now? I have some peace because of the wisdom of the Philokalia and a beautiful marriage. The logismoi are always with me but I am not afraid of them as I once was. Few know that I am bipolar; even fewer know the effect it has on my life. Perhaps I am no longer in the dark wood as I suggested earlier, but like a monk in the desert, constantly wrestling the demons.
What I’m Listening To
I listen to a lot of things over and over, and my tastes vary widely, from classical to new age stuff (though never “popular”). Here’s a very small selection of some of the more avant garde selections I tend to listen to, both secular and sacred, or in between. Music is more than something I listen to for enjoyment. One of my professors in college once said something about making music be the “soundtrack” of your life, and I rather liked that. Today I like to think more in terms of the “ecology” of my mind, referring to a more complex and interweaving set of factors, both sensory and spiritual, which contribute to the environment in which my mind is most at home. “At home” is said with some reservation, of course, because the different elements of that environment are always undergoing change. I am always “exploring” new styles, forms, techniques, etc., in music and other areas… But I digress. Here are some selections.
1. Some Fumio Miyashita
2. Some Ryuichi Sakomoto.
3. Some Hiroshi Yoshimura
4. Some Brian Eno
5. Some Arvo Pärt.