314.
Imperfecting poetry
Is poetry a
quest for perfection, for the Platonic, transcendent absolute? Then it is bound
to fail. And it risks to be seen as pretentious, irrelevant, impertinent, an
irritant, even. I pick up this theme from the April 6, 2017 issue of the New
York Review of Books.[i]
Plato claimed
that in order to perceive any particular thing as imperfect, we must have in
mind some ideal of perfection. But how is it possible to set out from
perfection?
In my move of
‘imperfection on the move’, discussed in this blog (item 19) and in a book[ii],
I turn it around. Any notion of the perfect is at best imperfect, temporary,
and at worst an illusion. It is better to face and take on the pursuit of an
ongoing variety of imperfections, one extending, varying, shifting the other,
in a never ending search for improvement or novelty, moving on without knowing
where to.
This is how I
see art, knowledge, and science.
It is also
related to my process view discussed in the previous item in his blog.
Poetry, then,
is not a doomed grasp for perfection, but an antidote to illusions of
perfection. Resistance, rebellion against the lure of the abstract and
universal, unmasking it, dancing on its grave. It goes underground, away from
the clarity and light of reason, in a treasure hunt, mining for the individual,
the particular, that worms from under the abstract universal.
This can be
connected, I think, to the hermeneutic circle (item 36 of this blog), with
science and philosophy pursuing the abstract, extracted from the complex,
variable melee of individuals with their disorderly quirks, and then, with
poetry, bringing it back again, dishevelling it, embedding it again in the flux
of life.
The argument also
applies, though perhaps less prominently, to novels. However, there we find the
‘novel of ideas’, as in the work of Thomas Mann and Dostoyevsky. There is a
tricky temptation to surrender to the lure of abstraction, neglecting the
celebration of the particular that is, I propose, the central purpose of
literature, as opposed to science and philosophy.
That is why I
hesitate to try and write a novel, though I would like to, afraid that having
written so much non-fiction I will be explaining rather than showing. Turning
the suspension of disbelief into the preaching of belief.
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