Practical Miracles
Practical Miracles
The Experience of Writing
“Shut the door so I can leave.”
— Fugazi, “Shut the Door”
I’m going to have to disagree.
My ability to do so, according to Dr. Gregg Henriques, is exemplary of the mechanisms creating “meta-cognition,” thinking about thinking.
When we shifted from symbolical communication to syntactical, he says, we began to be able to make propositions about the world. The moment we can do that, we can question our own (and others’) logic.
This capacity for semantic juxtaposition is the foundation of poetry. The symbolic is already built into our capacity to represent the world (pictorially or otherwise)1. Once we’re making propositions, we’re off to the races.
I don’t know what I think about that. I think I know what I don’t know when I don’t know what I think about that. I don’t think I know what I don’t know when I don’t know what I think about thinking about that.
As I write this, I wonder “am I making sense”? Which “I” is the “I” in that question? Who is thinking about the thinking?
Now we’re really cooking with a hot skillet.
“You know that I love you more than anyone can”
— Spoon, “I Just Don’t Understand”
John Koethe, in an essay on Ashbery, writes the following:
But even though Ashbery’s work embodies the presence of a particular psychological ego, it is almost unique in the degree to which it is informed by a non-psychological conception of the self or subject: a unitary consciousness from which his voice originates, positioned outside the temporal flux of thought and experience his poetry manages to monitor and record. . . The sense of the presence of a unified subject that conceives these poems is very strong, almost palpable. Among the stylistic indications that this subject is not a particular personality are Ashbery’s characteristic use of pronouns: it seems a matter of indifference whether the subject is referred to as “I,” “you,” “he,” “she,” “it,” or “we,” shifts between which often occur rapidly within the course of the same poem…
OK, neat. So, if you get really good, you can create a poetic speaker who is transjective. But isn’t that just a parlor trick? Koethe doesn’t think so, and in another essay in the book2, “Poetry and the Experience of Experience,” he argues that it is important to hold a candle for a Romantic notion of subjective expression of (interior) emotion.
The importance of subjectivity and its poetic representation lies in its link with moral value… What is needed is an explanation at … affective level, and I want to return finally to that intriguing remark of Eliot’s… “that what is often held to be a capacity for abstract thought, in a poet, is a capacity for abstract feeling.”
In sum, we need meta-cognition to describe the phenomena we experience as beings capable of meta-cognition. While I may enjoy writing to you, and nine times out of ten you don’t mind that “what I assume you shall assume” (Whitman), I can’t take that for granted. And often, in order to be truly sincere, I require access to the tools and tricks of the abstractionist’s lexicon.
John Vervaeke believes that getting at the transjective is essential to fighting the Meaning Crisis. “The singers shall have help of him, not last” (Elizabeth Barrett Browning). After all, we are the ones looking for common emotion among the warring parties.
But what I really wanted to talk about was the miracle of writing, this crazy capacity to think as one inscribes, always already interpreting the ideas as they emerge. And not only interpreting them, but responding to them — in real time.
Another essay in Koethe’s book is called “The Romance of Realism.” I may get to that in good time.
In the meanwhile, thank you for your patience. If it’s not too much trouble, I suggest that this evening you might take the opportunity to put pen to paper. You may not create anything of lasting value, but whatever you create will have the value of the Real (regardless of what you write).
While it has no commercially capital value, that is a sound investment. It will have been an expression of your mind’s attempt to understand its surroundings, to find syntax for its own emotion.
That is something the world needs, if it’s to be saved. And it needs salvation.
[Graphein γρᾰ́φειν: to write, carve, scratch, draw]
Koethe, John. Poetry at One Remove. University of Michigan Press, 2000.