The News

And Its Place in Consciousness

In the 30s, when news media consisted entirely of newspapers and some radio, Wallace Stevens was worried that the ubiquity of News was a threat to the poet.

(I don’t have a good quotation for you, and am going from memory. You’ll have to take my word for it.)

The worry seemed to be coming from a fear about headspace and consciousness.

If one was constantly thinking of affairs outside of one’s own worldly purview, one’s intellect would bow under the weight and be unable to participate in the cosmic co-creation.

Other poets like Eliot would fold this conflict into their literary composition, and the effect was long pieces that eschewed a single voice for a multiplicity of voices coming from any and all epochs. (In my estimation, Ashbery perfected the art.)

Stevens was writing at a time when the world was just awakening to the fact that we are a global society — a fact of which our current president-elect and a swath of his voters seem to be in denial.

I’m writing from a vantage where we’ve been global for about a century. (You can, of course, chart globalism back to the silk road ~100 BCE, and definitely to the early 17th century, when colonialism really started rolling).

Stevens actually integrated global trade into his poetry, tea from Ceylon, etc. etc.

At home, he purchased tea and paintings from abroad and had them imported to himself.

The news, however, Stevens could not abide.

When I think about it, post-television, I am thinking of the voices of others complicating my ability to hear the still, small voice which longs for me to set it to type.

How can I hear that voice over the noise of the rest?

But, aside from the fact that these media can be inspiring experiences in their own right, this type of mental isolation is a fool’s errand and a cop-out.

If I followed the logic, I would have to eschew literary composition altogether, and give in to an auto-poiesis that was focused on Being itself as a mode of creation.

Which, of course, it is. Hence my affection for Virtue Ethics, and my constant commitment to Being Better (Flourishing, in whatever form that takes, being the ultimate goal).

I have personally chosen to cease making political pronouncements (a cop-out of its own).

My reason for this is that I am too feeble of a thinker to be able to weigh all good points on a single issue, and instead choose to be as helpful as I can as a friendly conversant to all, attempting as best I can to simply ask as many questions as possible.

This doesn’t mean that I don’t have opinions or even convictions, only that I don’t believe I’m a reliable narrator.

The things that I can express are sense perceptions integrated into a philosophy of what was once called “Mindfulness.”

If I’m an advocate for anything, it’s that there are a host of aspects to reality of which we (out of necessity) remain unconscious, and that often it’s from this darkness that I find more interesting items to recognize and stress.

Take, for example, the psychosocial forces guiding the behavior of any given human being — their work relationships, their economic stresses, their (in)ability to code-switch or integrate current styles of speech and thought, their childhood trauma, and their assumptions about types of people.

If this post seems meandering, Congrats! You’ve noticed a truth about the thing, and can probably find questions to ask about who I am, why I’m writing this and writing anything at all, and why you, yourself chose to open this email.

I ask these questions daily, and it’s not always helpful to achieving the goal of composition. Sometimes the interest in the ideas outweighs the ideas I would like to set to type, and sometimes they shut down any ability to have an idea at all.

Yet here we are, and I can make a few brief statements about the activity of writing.

• More often than not, it’s an activity of commitment rather than insight.

• In order to write, one must be in a frame of mind capable of functional cognition.

• Fear of the reaction of the reader is the fastest way to shut it down altogether.

For the reality is that any one of you can read any number of things rather than this, and that whatever meager offering this makes must be sufficiently humble to ask for the privilege of its existence.

And the humility must not be false for, if it were, the entire endeavor would fold on its face.

The News, and my apprehension of it, is just a part of life. To rebel against it would be literary suicide, and I’m not interested in any of that.

So my consciousness must become attenuated to seeing each thing as a participant in a greater, indecipherable narrative, an agent or object in a multiplicity of forces and causes.

Meditating on this, and radically accepting it, is more of a contribution to my psyche than a hindrance.

That’s how I choose to be optimistic (optimizing the circumstance in which I find myself) today.

In fin, I cite Williams:

“It is difficult
to get the news from poems
yet men die miserably every day
for lack
of what is found there.”

Ambitiously, 

Aaron