Category Archives: writing

“Saturday” (Henry Green)

June 22, 2012 By in writing Tags: , , , 2 Comments

I don’t know how many are fans of Henry Green, but I thought I would share a fragment of one of his lesser-known short stories, “Saturday”.  Green was “experimenting with the definite article”.

Morning.

Life was in her.  Life was in her and beat there.  Her bed was next theirs.  Their beds took up the room.  Her father and mother slept now in that bed.  No blind was over window.  Sun came by it.  And she turned head over from sun toward them sleeping and did not see them.  She smiled.  Head on bolster was in sunshine.

Life was in her belly.  Life beat there.

Morning.  Thousands slept.  Town was over miles round.  Thousands of houses.  In each they slept.

Under blanket hands were pressed to her belly.  Her fingers stuck out round.  With them she felt beating there.  She smiled.  Sun came in over her.  She was just out of sleep, just in sleep.  All of her was under sunshine, in that life beating under her fingers stuck out round.

Thousands slept.  Were thousands of houses.  In each they slept.

Morning.

Immortal Openings, 9: Kurt H. Wolff, Surrender and Catch

May 23, 2012 By in Philosophy, writing Tags: , , , Leave a comment

Perhaps this book on surrender-and-catch begins thus (or even:  thus begins).

After this walk.  After this–so it might seem–initiatory walk.  For it is to walk, between the stones and walls between which the walking goes, to communicate with the gates and the houses, the ochre paint, or the outrageous red, on the walls around the olive gardens, to greet the forbidding fort, whose walls preclude the view of our cupola, our campanile, our civic tower.  And the cypresses:  black brush slips in the towering sky–for the weather is not good.  The olive trees shimmer, shivering in their own mean color of graygreen against the dark-gray lumpiness of a sky.  And yet:  nothing can happen because one returns home, out of the wind that makes itself known as possibly not joking, and there it is still and warming, and soon expectant.  Expectant?  These words.  I can wait a while.

(For Ed Mooney–in belated (alas!) celebration of his being Ten Days In)

Gerard Manley Hopkins on the Keontic Hymn (Phil 2: 5-11)

May 22, 2012 By in religion, writing Tags: , , , , , , Leave a comment

Photo by Rowan Gillespie

From The Letters of G. M. Hopkins to Robert Bridges (Letter xcix)

Christ’s life and character are such as appeal to all the world’s admiration, but there is one insight St. Paul gives of it which is very secret and seems to me more touching and constraining than anything else:  This mind he says; was in Christ Jesus–he means as man:  being in the form of God—that is, finding, as in the first instant of his incarnation he did, his human nature informed by the godhead—he thought it nevertheless no snatching-matter for him to be equal with God, but annihilated himself, taking the form of a servant; that is, he could not but see that he was, God, but he would see it as if he did not see it, and be it as if he were not instead of snatching at once at what all the time was his, or was himself, he emptied or exhausted himself so far as that was possible, of godhead and behaved only as God’s slave, as his creature, as man, which also he was, and then being in the guise of man humbled himself to death, the death of the cross.  It is this holding of himself back, and not snatching at the truest and highest good, the good that was his right, nay his possession from a past eternity in his other nature, his own being and self, which seems to me the root of all his holiness and the imitation of this the root of all other moral good in other men.

Leavis on Johnson the Augustan

May 17, 2012 By in leavis, writing Tags: , , , , Leave a comment

Every word in a piece of Augustan verse has an air of being able to give the reason why it has been chosen, and placed just there.  The thoughts that the Augustan poet, like any other Augustan writer, sets himself to express are amply provided for by the ready-minted concepts of the common currency.  What he has to do is to put them together with elegance and point according to the rules of grammar, syntax and versification.  The exploratory-creative use of words upon experience, involving the creation of concepts in a free play for which the lines and configurations of the conventionally charted have no finality, is something [Johnson] has no use for; it is completely alien to his habit.  So that even when he is Johnson, whose perception so transcends his training, he cannot securely appreciate the Shakespearean creativeness.

Reading Ebersole, Reading Bouwsma

May 10, 2012 By in history of ordinary language philosophy, Philosophy, reading, writing Tags: , , , , , , Leave a comment

(A section from an unpublished essay.)

Their pages crucially differ in animating spirits: I have talked about one
as mulish the other as sprightly. But I can say more. At an even deeper
level, Ebersole’s pages are animated by a strictness of linguistic conscience.
Bouwsma’s are animated by a spontaneity of linguistic consciousness—a lin-
guistic hilaritas libertatis. For example, there is an deep-going reason why
Bouwsma was attracted to and imitated pages of James Joyce, and self-
consciously built unacknowledged quotations or near-quotations of literary
works into the structure of his essays. Bouwsma provokes his reader ver-
bally, reminds his reader of all of the highways and byways of words, of all
the wonders of words, and of how their wonders can and should make us
marvel at them. Ebersole minces words. He was a working poet as well as a
working philosopher, but anyone who knows Ebersole’s poetry knows that in
it the same strictness of linguistic conscience is on display. I cannot imagine
Ebersole on a spree among words like Bouwsma’s in this passage of his John
Locke Lectures, a passage describing Plato’s Realm of Being:

Imagine…a museum—a museum, deep in calm, fixed in breath-
lessness, done in silence, clothed in invisibility, awful, laid away
in heaven. And the walls thereof are purest essence, some quint-
essence, some tri-essence, but none semi-essence. If senescence is
no wall, for neither is oldness nor youngerness any ness at all, all
is evermore and never the less. And of what essence and what
essences are those walls? Of all heavenlinessences are they and of
brightlinessence of the beaminest. Essences participating in one
another, they ring-round this conjugation of hyper-supers…This
is the museum of quiddities, of whatnesses in their highest nest,
tucked away, ensconced, waiting for the refiners defining, so fine
are they. The museum of none-such such-and suches.

Line up alongside that this from Ebersole’s (anticipatory-posthumous au-
tobiographical) poem, “Conversation with a Dead Philosopher” (a crow is
speaking):

The clock can’t tell you what it says
the way a human tells you.
Maybe I am just a mess of gears and wheels,
and everything I say
is just like half past two—
where I can’t tell you
what I say at all.
People stopped and puzzled when I talked,
wondered what to make of
anything I said.
And if I made them ask themselves
What of heads or tails to make
of a philosopher’s talking,
that was a good thing I did,
I would say.
Yes, I would say that.
Then he flew away,
calling “caw-caw.”

Here is another, related deep difference: it makes sense to say that Eber-
sole and Bouwsma each aims at a kind of simplicity, a philosophical sim-
plicity. But the simplicities aimed at are not the same. We can borrow
a pair of terms from French criticism in the nineteenth century: simplicité
and simplesse. The first we might call naive simplicity, the second
sophisticated simplicity.  The first is simplicity as a native endowment,
an unspoiled innocence or uncorruptedness.  The second is simplicity
as a complicated disposition, an achievement of disciplined responsiveness.
Ebersole presents himself as the simple man.  Bouwsma presents
himself as the simple wise man.  Ebersole’s mulishness, his strictness of linguistic
conscience, his simplicité mean that he is prone to be charged with failing to be a
philosopher by being a plain man. Ebersole can seem Xenophonic. Bouwsma’s
sprightliness, his spontaneity of linguistic consciousness, his simplesse mean
that he is prone to be charged with failing to be a philosopher by being a sophist.
Bouwsma can seem Protagorean.

Eliot’s (Religious) Struggle with Words: Leavis

May 10, 2012 By in reading, religion, writing Tags: , , , Leave a comment

It is a mark of Eliot’s peculiar importance to us—that is, of his major status as a poet of our time—that he should have had his distinctive preoccupation with language.  I am thinking of the preoccupation that, with the pressure behind it, is expressed here, in the opening section V of ‘East Coker;:

So here I am in the middle way, having had twenty
years—
Twenty years largely wasted, the years of l’entre
deux guerres—
Trying to learn to use words, and every attempt
Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure
Because one has only learnt to get the better of words
For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in
which
One is no longer disposed to say it

The poet of ‘The Hollow Men’ was clearly a man driven by a desperate need; a need to apprehend with sureness a reality that could compel belief, claim allegiance and create a centre of significance.  The association, or identification, of the quest driven by such a need with the unendingly resourceful struggle to ‘get the better of words’ determines the way and the sense in which Eliot’s later poetry is religious.

Now the mode of Ash-Wednesday differs very obviously from that of Four Quartets.  Nowhere in it is that anything that challenges the full attention of the waking mind in the blunt, prose-like way of the opening of ‘Burnt Norton’, where we seem to be starting on a metaphysical essay.  You might be inclined to say that the insistently liturgical element and the accompanying character of the rhythm—isn’t it incantory?—make a thinking attention to the sense impossible; at any rate, that they don’t demand it; rather, they discourage it.  If you said that, you would be showing that, though you might sincerely say that you enjoyed the poetry, you hadn’t really read it.  There would be no reason why you should quarrel with Anglo-Catholic expositors who make the poetry something utterly different from what it is, which is something utterly different as religious poetry from (say) Herbert’s.  For it is in answering the question, ‘In what sense is this religious poetry?’, that one has to take account of its insistent challenge to the thinking–the pondering, distinguishing, relating–mind.

Leavis on ‘Importance’

May 10, 2012 By in writing Tags: , , Leave a comment

Nothing of important can really be said simply–simply and safely; and by ‘safely’ I mean so as to ensure that the whole intuited apprehension striving to find itself, to discover what it is in words, is duly served, and not thwarted.  It takes a context, often a subtly and potently creative one, to do that.

“The Eyelids Always a Little Weary”: Leavis on Pater—and Keats

May 9, 2012 By in writing Tags: , , , Leave a comment

Pater may talk of burning always with a hard gemlike flame, but there is nothing answering in his prose; it notably lacks all sensuous vitality.  Indeed, to point to Pater’s prose–cloistral, mannered, urbane, consciously subtle and sophisticated and actually monotonous and irresponsive in tone, sentiment and movement (the eyelids always a little weary)–is a way of giving force to the judgment that for the Victorian aesthete art is something that gets between him and life.  Nevertheless, we can see why pre-Raphaelite and Aesthete should have looked to Keats as they did; we can ourselves see in Keats (if we can see more too) the great Aesthete–the one Aesthete of genius.  For all his unique vitality and creative power, we can see him as related to them by those significantly associated traits which Pater presents:  the devotion to exquisite passion and finest senses, the religious unction of this aestheticism, the cherished pang of transience.

Style Meld–My Partial Answer

May 8, 2012 By in writing Tags: , , , Leave a comment

I want now to answer my own question, presented earlier in Style Meld.

F. R. Leavis–that is the writer whose writing I would most like to reduplicate in my own.  Part of what I love about Leavis is the spirit on display everywhere in his work, but most obviously perhaps in what he called his “higher pamphleteering”:  a remarkably strong push-back against the dead and deadening relationship to language shown throughout our culture, but particularly (alas!) among academic humanists—to use Leavis’ words, a “blind, blank, urbane unconcern” for the kind of sensibility that can live only in a living relationship to language, a kind of sensibility that runs deeply counter to the “technologico-Benthamite” times in which we live.  Leavis doesn’t just say things in this spirit, though; every sentence he writes embodies it.  His prose appeals, and perhaps can only appeal, to what he termed “the full attention of the waking mind”.   His sentences command a discriminating, nervous energy, and carry a relationship to their full context that shapes their content and the choices of words in which they are expressed.  So often in Leavis, the argumentative burden is borne not only by the relationships among his sentences but also and simultaneously by the relationships among the words of the sentences.  Leavis once remarked that he thought the novel should be a dramatic poem; and certainly for Leavis, criticism is a critical poem.  (Leavis’ clear concern for and complete mastery of the (internal and interrelated) rhythm of his sentences is comparable to a great poet’s concern for and complete mastery of meter.)  As Wittgenstein once said of Frege,  “I wish I could have written like Frege!”, I will say I wish I could write like Leavis!  (And of course I do not mean slavishly to copy his style or to produce some stiff-fingered pastiche of his writing, but rather to write in a way that displays the same spirit, as such a spirit might take form in my prose.)

I’ll supply some illustrative quotations, as separate posts, over the next few days.

Immortal Openings, 8: Maurice Natanson, Edmund Husserl: Philosopher of Infinite Tasks

April 27, 2012 By in Immortal Openings, writing Tags: , , , Leave a comment

Philosophy, these sullen days, is somewhat a pensioner in the family of knowledge.  Like an aged grandfather living on a legacy outstripped by the times, philosophy depends on the kindness of relatives who may take some pride in the aura of grandness which surrounds the old man but who help to maintain him more out of loyalty than devotion.