That’s why it’s poetry

Sir, you can’t translate poetry into prose. That’s why it’s poetry.

Caitlin Johnstone quoted that in a column that greatly exceeded my expectations Seven Reasons Why I Make Art (And Why You Should,Too. I began pulling excerpts, then concluded that I’d be doing a particular disservice if anyone took my excerpts as adequate representations.

But she embedded a video that was evocative, and I found a transcript. Read it as poetry, free verse:

Catalysts to say what has never been said, to see what has never been seen. To draw, paint, sing, sculpt, dance and act what has never before been done. To push the envelope of creativity and language and what’s really important is, I call it, the felt presence of direct experience which is a fancy term which just simply means we have to stop consuming our culture. We have to create culture.

Don’t watch TV, don’t read magazines, don’t even listen to NPR. Create your own roadshow. The nexus of space and time, where you are now, is the most immediate sector of your universe and if you’re worrying about Michael Jackson or Bill Clinton or somebody else, you are disempowered. You are giving it all away to icons, icons which are maintained by an electronic media, so that you want to dress like X or have lips like Y or something. This is shit-brained, this kind of thinking.

That is all cultural diversion and what is real is you and your friends and your associations, your highs, your orgasms, your hopes, your plans, and your fears… and we are told no, we’re unimportant, we’re peripheral, “get a degree”, “get a job”, get a this, get a that, and then you’re a player. You don’t even want to play in that game. You want to reclaim your mind and get it out of the hands of the cultural engineers who want to turn you into a half-baked moron consuming all this trash that’s being manufactured out of the bones of a dying world. Where is that at?

Terence McKenna, Reclaim Your Mind (emphasis added).

“Beauty will save the world” is variously attributed, but I like the attribution to Dostoyevsky, who know who Beauty was.

Then why are so many Christians “half-baked morons”? I suspect it’s because their “art” is reliably propagandistic, and they’ve allowed Beauty to be twisted into ideology (a synonym or close cognate of Johnstone’s “narrative”). Johnstone’s “narrative matrix of the propagandists” certainly encompasses Evangelical megachurches and television evangelists (I’m thinking of you especially, Falwell fils and Robert Jefress, but Joel Osteen merits separate dishonorable mention).

My contribution to spreading beauty has been singing. I haven’t sung explicitly subversive songs for about 50 years, but because much of the western choral canon is sacred, I’ve been singing tacit subversion to this secularizing culture for most of 55 years now.

I may try my hand at poetry, if I can get over the hangup that the only poetic forms I halfway know are limerick and Haiku.

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You can read my more impromptu stuff at Micro.blog (mirrored at microblog.intellectualoid.com) and, as of February 20, 2019, at blot.im. Both should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly, should you want to make a habit of it.

The Cyruses we need

The sexuality scholars of the time fancied themselves edgy characters exploding bourgeois norms. They took pleasure in deriding older scholars, the “dead wood” who devoted their careers to such square projects as the Standard Edition of John Dryden. They, by contrast, wrote books with such titles as Sexual Dissidence: Augustine to Wilde, Freud to Foucault; Sodometries: Renaissance Texts, Modern Sexualities; and Vested Interests: Cross-dressing and Cultural Anxiety. The key words of the day were “subversive” and “transgressive.”

Paglia showed them what subverting and transgressing really looked like, mocking the tenured radicals’ bogus cultural politics—bourgeois lives in leafy college towns and hip urban neighborhoods—and inept handling of bohemian, illicit material.…

… It was taken as a sign of profundity, not incoherence, that few people could untangle sentences such as this from Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990):

Once the incest taboo is subjected to Foucault’s critique of the repressive hypothesis in The History of Sexuality, that prohibitive or juridical structure is shown both to instate compulsory heterosexuality within a masculinist sexual economy and to enable a critical challenge to that economy.

Rather than labor to translate such a sentence into English, Paglia mocked it. Why take these writers’ half-baked “readings” and low standards seriously, she asked. They come from dilettantes, not creative minds.

…

In 1991 Paglia spoke at Harvard, where she accused the university of hiring “trendy people in cultural studies centers who believe that the world was created by Foucault in 1969.”…

… Since those professors were too ensconced and comfortable to improve, or even to carry out the basic pedagogical duties, the students must take charge of their own education:

First, make the library your teacher. Rediscover the now neglected works of the great scholars of the last 150 years, who worked blessedly free of the mental pollutants of poststructuralism. Immerse yourself in the reference collection, and master chronology and etymology. Refuse to cooperate with the coercive ersatz humanitarianism that insultingly defines women and African-Americans as victims. Insist on free thought and free speech.

The critique struck home. Under Paglia’s raillery, the theorists of sex and politics looked like small ignorant figures in spite of their knowing demeanor. All they really understood was academic politics, which they played very well. Paglia demonstrated that they had erected a social network that operated on cronyism and prestige, which would collapse as soon as a few genuinely erudite and courageous critics challenged them.

…

In Provocations Paglia declares that the heart of the ’60s movements was “a new religious vision,” whose votaries cared about political reform, but “were also seeking the truth about life outside [existing] religious and social institutions.” The truth came before politics, sex, rebellion, or drugs. The truth Paglia identified long ago is that in all human beings there is an “emotional turmoil that is going on above and below politics, outside the scheme of social life.” Great art touches it, and so does religion. Individuals who respond to art and religion understand that when politics and social life presume to replace them as right expressions of that turmoil, they falsify it instead…and Paglia won’t countenance a lie. That puts her at odds with every institution liberals have managed to seize, from academia to the Democratic Party. But if you mentioned that to her, she would shrug and get on with the truth-telling. She has nature on her side.

Mark Bauerlein, Force of Nature, Claremont Review of Books.

A lot of Evangelicals reportedly believe that Donald Trump is kind of like King Cyrus in Jewish Scriptures/Old Testament (pick your preference), sent to rescue Real Christians® from liberal captivity.

I’m more inclined to think that Camille Paglia and Jordan Peterson, neither of them Real Christians® but with extraordinary crap detectors, are doing the Lord’s work, probably unwittingly, in demolishing parts of the deathworks. (They are two reasons I believe in common grace and natural law.)

It remains to us to walk out of the rubble.

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2/37,000,000

A few weeks ago, our old male cat died. I’m not wired to need a pet, but my wife is, so after reading up on cat dander, dander supression and such (we have allergic family members), we adopted a Calico cat, 10 months old, a week ago.

I fear she had lived in cages continuously since weaning, but a week later, she seems to be overcoming her timidity about freedom quite well. Even I, pet-indifferent though I be, can anthropomorphize enough to be glad of that.

The adoption, oddly, got me thinking about death again: Even if I live well beyond my three score and ten (which I’ve already attained, and which longevity I’m striving for at the gym), this young cat is fairly likely to outlive me.

As a religious matter, I’m admonished that mindfulness of death is salutary, and I don’t think I’m being morose about it. One of my favorite homilists spots me by almost a decade, and fairly regularly quips that he “hasn’t got time” for this or that nonsense because his clock is running down (he cranks out new books regularly). I suspect that a similar sense has emboldened me to take on the deathworks in my own small way.

In addition to just reaching our individual “sell-by” dates, unknown to any but God, human beings make themselves deathly sick in various ways, seemingly voluntary but subjectively compulsive.

My personal favorite is gluttony, so once again, I’m using MyFitnessPal to count calories, aspiring to descend from morbid obesity to mere obesity (“try to lose 10%,” says my doctor whose own weight I’ve seen yo-yo over the decades). After that, we’ll see; BMI 30 is a dream of mine.

And then there’s smoking, the all-purpose menace. I got that monkey off my back for good about 35 years or so ago, but I co-suffered with a treasured friend as her chain-smoking husband underwent open-heart surgery and cardio rehab only to be felled by after-discovered metastatic lung cancer, all in the space of 12 months.

If something gives our pleasure centers a buzz, the fear of death seems pretty powerless to stop us repeating it.

Syphilis and gonnorhea used to be the biggies in the sexual realm, yet they continued flourishing until antibiotics knocked them down for at least a while (don’t discount antibiotic resistance).

Still, when oral contraceptives and antibiotics seemed to make random fornication safe, fornication increased, so fear seems anecdotally to play some role, just as it plays a role in getting me away from the table and to the gym.

(Somehow, a whole new array of exotic STDs emerged, as if Someone were telling us “multiple sexual partners is not what you’re designed for.” The Important People drew a different lesson, and admonished us that random fornication wasn’t safe, after all, without good, old-fashioned rubbers. Oh well!)

Those of us who’ve avoided or ceased a particular vice can become unduly censorious about it. C.S. Lewis, drawing an analogy that I only vaguely recall, reminded his readers that the sinfulness of gluttony had never led Christendom to ban the sale of liver pills. Today’s gluttons enjoy the modern version of those liver pills: statins, blood-pressure medications, insulin and milder meds for control of the stuff that raises A1C levels — for each of which I personally am grateful.

So how can I begrudge anyone the emerging miracle of HIV eradication by stem-cell treatments, of which there appear to be two cases so far? Even I, “cisgendered” and hetero though I be, can empathize enough to be glad of that.

But do put them in context:

Scientists are struggling to find a cure for HIV, a virus notorious for hiding in the body and evading attempts to flush it out. Nearly 37 million people have been infected world-wide over the past four decades. While more than 21 million take drugs that keep them alive and reduce the spread, an estimated 1.8 million people were newly infected in 2017.

(Wall Street Journal) Two cures in 37 million cases isn’t “WOOHOO!!!” just yet.

But it’s a small lifework, though less consequential so far than antiretroviral drugs that merely keep HIV at bay.

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