Poetic Diction Quotes Part 1

I have four pages of quotes typed out from Poetic Diction (helps me to remember them to do this!). I'll post them in several parts over the next few weeks because Owen Barfield's words are better than mine.

Poetic Diction quotes, 1973 edition

p.28: “Only by imagination therefore can the world be known. And what is needed is, not only that larger and larger telescopes and more and more sensitive calipers should be constructed, but that the human mind should become increasingly aware of its own creative activity.”

p.32: “… a true, participant knowledge as distinct from the haphazard pull-and-push ignorance which claims in public the name of science and admits in private that it knows nothing; which, when it turns inward to the mind of the Knower, finds there a nothingness within, to match the nothingness without. … Reflection on the poetic activity teaches us that the same imagination which created that kind of habit can both disturb it and create new ones.”

p.35: “Accordingly they have presented us with the human spirit as bewildered observer, or as agonized patient, compassionate in Hardy, humbled or repentant in Eliot, but always the observer, always the patient, helpless to alter anything but his own pin-pointed subjective emotion.”

p.36: “The possibility of man’s avoiding self-destruction depends on his realizing before it is too late that what he let loose over Hiroshima, after fiddling with its exterior for three centuries like a mechanical toy, was the forces of his own unconscious mind.”

p.58: “’In the infancy of society [wrote Shelley] every author is necessarily a poet, because language itself is a poetry. … Every original language near to its source is itself the chaos of a cyclic poem.”

p.73: “In other words, although, when he moves backwards through the history of language, he finds it becoming more and more figurative with every step, yet he has no hesitation in assuming a period – still further back – when it was not figurative at all!”

p.75: “The full meanings of words are flashing, iridescent shapes like flames – ever-flickering vestiges of the slowly evolving consciousness beneath them. To the Locke-Muller-France way of thinking, on the contrary, they appear as solid chunks with definite boundaries and limits, to which other chunks may be added as occasion arises.”

p.81: “We must, therefore, imagine a time when ‘spiritus’ or pneuma, or older words from which these had descended, meant neither breath, nor wind, nor spirit, nor yet all three of these things, but when they simply had their own old peculiar meaning, which has since, in the course of the evolution of consciousness, crystallized into the three meanings specified – and no doubt into others also, for which separate words had already been found by Greek and Roman times.”

p.82: “… their error merely lay in supposing that life actually created language after the manner in which their logic deconstructed it. They mistook elements for seeds – and called them roots.”

p.85: “… these poetic, and apparently ‘metaphorical’ values were latent in meaning from the beginning.”

Book Review: Habibi

This is a beautiful book and an ugly book, deliberately. It is a book written by someone brought up Christian but set in a Muslim world (I don't say that casually -- the entire perspective is thoroughly through the Qur'an, and the seamlessness with which he presents it is one of the author's greatest accomplishments). It is a book with lovingly detailed drawings of piles of trash, a book that shows an all-powerful sultanate state from 1000 years ago with motorcycles beside camels (and the best depiction of cholera in comics I've ever seen).

To let you know what book I'm talking about, it's titled Habibi and it's by Craig Thompson, whose last major work was the similarly long (~700 pages) Blankets in 2003. Technically it's far superior to Blankets, but ... I can't help but like Blankets better. Blankets is the one I want to read again and give to others. For all the amazing integration of Islamic art and theology, for all the intricate numbers echoing through the plot and artwork, doing things I've never seen a graphic novel do, no, not even one by Alan Moore -- like most of Alan Moore's work, Habibi seems to be missing its heart. Which is really hard for me to say, this book is such a technical achievement. Upon reaching the summit I just felt cold.

Maybe it's the nagging feeling that, for all the emphasis on the stories of the Qur'an, you don't get the feeling that any of the characters really believes the stories or what they represent. Even motherhood is trumped by circumstance, which is completely unrealistic to me on a character level. Ultimately it's a cold universe without belief, in which power is really what rules, and only the most extreme coincidences allow love to live. That's too harsh, and I recognize it as I type it, because love does find a way to live in a surprising way (avoiding spoilers!) -- but what's a review without an honest reaction? I like it, I don't love it. I honestly wish I did.

The bottom line is that I picked up several copies of Blankets at the Library Book Sale just so I'd have a few to hand out to friends. But this one, if I see the beautiful hardcover edition I'll probably pick it up, but it'll be partly for collection, and partly to go through and see details like how each "number" recurs through the very plot of the chapter. In other words, don't expect one from me for Christmas. Which is really too bad, and it's ultimately just one person's personal reaction. If you liked Blankets it's worth a try because Habibi may be technically the best and biggest graphic novel I've ever seen. I know I'm not making sense, but I don't have to. It's my blog after all!

Book Review: Poetic Diction

I have pretty positive reactions to most books. A few I even think, when I put them down, that maybe someday I'll read them again. But very rarely have I ever felt like reading a book again as soon as I put it down. Poetic Diction is that book. I found this book by researching J.R.R. Tolkien, who was influenced by Owen Barfield's ideas, especially this book. Then I kept seeing Barfield's name and I found out that lots of people were deeply influenced by his thinking (and not just his close friend and the person to whom this book is dedicated, C.S. Lewis). He's writing about poetry, but he writes about everything, really, up to and including philosophy of science. For all the depth to the book, it is highly readable and succinct. Barfield was a member of the "Inklings," whatever that means, and this book is right up there with Tolkien and Lewis in its own way. Amazing.

Book Review: Green River Killer: A True Detective Story

If you've been waiting for CSI: Seattle to come out, maybe this book will do the trick. Or maybe not. Because although both this book and CSI are about a complicated case with police work and science, and this book (being a graphic novel) can be read in about an hour like a CSI show, the similarities stop there. This book is realistic to the point of being boring at times. The capture of the killer is not particularly dramatic, and much of the book concerns a long interrogation in which he can't remember anything precisely. But the value of this book is that it is real. It certainly was real for Jeff Jensen, the author, considering his father is Tom Jensen, the detective who at times was solely responsible for the Green River case. This book is about the small joys (and wearing grind) of perseverance. One of the small joys is the way Jonathan Case, the artist, captures the exact aging of the characters as the narrative skips back and forth from the early 80's to the early 00's. That's something you can only get from this medium. On the whole, it is so realistic that you're left to make meta-connections on your own; ultimately, this is a procedural at heart. But it's a good example of what graphic novels can do, and evidence that the genre has really grown up.

Crayola Sculptures

I want one of these. I mean, how hard can it be to make a crayon sculpture? On second thought, those are really BIG:

http://thisiscolossal.com/2011/10/crayon-fire-sculptures-by-herb-williams/

Evolution is Not Simply Divergent

So I just wrote about how I enjoyed the little but formidable text Graphs Maps Trees, which applies scientific visualizations to literature. But there's a problems with the science, and once again, the trail for the misconception can be traced to Stephen Jay Gould.

Gould's point, repeated by Moretti, is that Darwin's original tree of life (yes, I know he was too smart to use that specific term, but it's what we call it now) was more to show divergence than simple common descent: in his diagram, only the most extreme branches continued from generation to generation, and he used to to account for species diversity. That's very true. Gould goes on to say (in a block quote in Moretti's essay) that evolution is a story of proliferation (this same branching of extremes), very different from cultural transmission in which an idea can be carried by a single human from one culture branch to another, and so the branches cross and weave and converge instead of just diverging.

The problem is that the real tree of life is indeed both convergent and divergent, like the cultural tree. The worst offender is this quote by a historian of technology, George Basalla:

"Different biological species usually do not interbreed, and on the rare occasions when they do their offspring are infertile. Artifactual types, on the other hand, are routinely combined to produce new and fruitful entities" (p.137). a.) e.g., the internal combustion engine was merged with the bicycle & the horse-drawn carriage to produce the automobile (p.138)

Um, no. As a biochemist looking at the tree of life, I see exactly this same repurposing of old parts and combinations to make new parts everywhere. Even the process of making antibodies is a shuffling of old parts to make something new. Basalla's quote only works for a limited set of macroscopic species, and I think it's the exception rather than the rule. Bacteria trade genes and build new things by combination all the time. Just because a mule is infertile doesn't mean convergence never happens.

This is a major point of the argument, and it actually helps Moretti, because he's arguing that convergence is the normal state of affairs in literature, and I'm happy to say I think it's the normal state of affairs in science as well. Conway Morris and Dawkins agree with me on this. Fascinatingly on p.81 Moretti argues that if divergence is king then randomness is running the show, but in human affairs like literature, convergence is dominant. Since I'm arguing that convergence is the characteristic of all evolution, then am I arguing that the ecosystem is more "human" than we may have thought? A provocative phrase, and I'm content to think about it for now.

True, the branches of the tree of life can never fully converge, but they can functionally converge. Moretti points out on p.85 that the branches of the tree of literature can never fully converge either, but always remain distinct. The more we talk the more I think we're basically talking about the same kind of tree.

In a nice summary of the branching diagram for literature, Moretti concludes that "literature moves forwords and sideways at once; often, more sideways than forwards. Like Shklovsky's great metaphor for art, the knight's move at chess." (p. 91) Do DNA trees of life imply that life makes similar knight's moves?

Book Review: Graphs Maps Trees

Graphs Maps Trees by Franco Moretti may have the highest thoughts-inspired-per-word ratio of any book I've read recently. Of course, it helps that there's not many words. This is basically three essays (one per word from the title) and an afterword by a geneticist for the scientist's perspective. Moretti argues that we should employ scientific techniques to assess trends and cycles in literature. Before visions of the graph from the first page of that textbook in Dead Poets Society start running through your head, I should point out that Moretti clearly puts this as complementary to traditional analysis oriented on a single text. Rather, this looks at each novel as a leaf on a tree, or a point on a graph, so overall trends may be seen, necessarily simplifying and missing something to see something else.

In Graphs, Moretti shows how genres tend to have a lifespan, and admits he doesn't know exactly why, but it may have something to do with broad patterns of social cohesion often called "generations." (He's puzzled, as am I, by why groups would organize like this when babies are pretty much born constantly, but that's just a tangent).

In Maps, Moretti shows how plotting the events in a series of village novels according to their location shows that the events eventually fragment and dissolve away from the village itself.

In Trees, Moretti shows how the way clues are treated in Sherlock Holmes stories can be sorted into categories that branch off like a tree. I have trouble seeing the real utility of the tree structure in this, it's more an if-then than a tree necessary, but his next tree shows how the person and tense used in different types of novels can change even within a sentence to show certain kinds of branching, and this is very interesting.

I have some bones to pick on the way science is used in the tree chapter, but I think that deserves a post of its own. On the whole, I like Moretti's approach, and I'd like to take some of it myself. The most important thing I learned from him may not be the techniques or ideas, but the sense of humility and openness, that this "scientific" approach is only one possibility while the traditional analysis still holds. Good to remember.