Responding to Samuel Johnson: Shakespeare and Aristotle's Unities

Samuel Johnson claiming Shakespeare didn't use Aristotle's unities of time and place leaves out, I believe, two important exceptions that have another significant distinction.  They are Midsummer Night's Dream and The Tempest, both of the plays that prominently feature magic--not just prophecy or descriptions of magical or supernatural events, but magic of physical transformation.  In Midsummer Night's Dream it's Bottom the Weaver getting an ass's head, in The Tempest it's a storm.  

The Aristotelian meeting the magical in these plays seems easy to me to overlook, though, partly because, among classical philosophers who wrote about poetry, Aristotle may be among the more conducive to the material, the mundane, the non-ethereal.  Plato may have been anti-poetry but he still saw it as ex nihilo.  Horace may have dismissed the outlandish in poetry but he wrote his own that could be said to undercut his position.  Aristotle so systematized, structured and segmented that his discourse might seem closed off against unexpected storms, let alone a misplaced donkey head.  

One possibility that comes to mind is that, here and elsewhere, Shakespeare drew creative energy from being at odds with his influencers--not necessarily in Oedipal grappling like Harold Bloom talked about (though maybe--I say that and am not grappling with him, with Bloom, I hope), but relating to them at a slant, like Emily Dickinson talked about.  So, the narrative poem about Romeus and Juliet became the play, the story of Amlothi became the play of Hamlet, and that of King Lear became what it became.

Also, this possibility:  that place (like the woods outside of Thebes, like the island away from Milan) held a kind of magic for the man who could not get away from his life as the Shakespeare we know, back to his roots in Stratford.  Not until that life ended, perhsp with the help of Aristotle as well as Shakespeare.    

Questioning Aristotle's Poetics: Spectacle

 Aristotle's downplaying of the worth of spectacle, as compared to poetry, suggests that there is a difference between the two--that the spectacular can't have its own poetry, and that poetry can't be a linguistic spectacle.  Is this a false binary?

Looking at it in terms that might make sense both to him and contemporary readers, it could be said that the most spectacular event in classical theater might have been the Deus ex machina--least true to the writing or poetry of the play, most dependent on mechanical effects, maybe most potentially pandering to an audience he doesn't see as part of the poetry.  But for Deleuze and Guattari, the machine of language is not dissimilar to the machines they understand each member of the audience to be, or the machine the gods have sent down--all of them acting automatically.

To move up a lot of centuries, to Shakespeare's maybe most famous piece of stage direction, "Exit pursued by bear," the question becomes which is more worthy--the stage direction, or how it's acted out.  The writing of it may have happened relatively quickly.  The staging of it could not be worked out quickly or easily no matter how it was done.  It would require the concerted, as in strenuous and also together, work of two communities at least: that of the theater company and that of the audience.  And has that less poetry than writing four words?

To move forward into today, I just watched a movie, Rebel Moon: Child of Fire, that included a weapon made of some form of fire, that inflicted a wound with fire at its edges.  Was that not poetry?  Seen online, on my phone, I understand it literally to be language--lines of computer code that create a moving image.  That's one way it could be seen as poetry.  Then there's the argument that if could be seen as verbal art, poetry to Jacobsen, simply of a system of verbage that includes a script, visual effects, direction and more.  Finally, the movie's auteur lost his daughter tragically several years ago.  Might that moment of spectacle express his pain more clearly than traditional words can?

On the poem "Thanks," by WS Merwin (written in 2020)

 On my first reading of "Thanks," I teared up, and maybe on the second one too.  Maybe both times were when I was in the mode of talking at gratitude but not feeling it, and the poem's litany of mostly-dark events reached where my feelings were.  "Funerals," "wars," "animals dying," "forests falling"--somewhere in there was some of what was choking me up.  And I got to let some of it out.

Then, COVID arrived, and then the murder of George Floyd, and this national, toxic darkness embodied by Trump seemed in both instances to eclipse the shapes, names and faces of the dead.  And of course George Floyd's murder being one of horrifyingly many of exactly the same kind, but manipulated by the nation's quasi-fascist pseudo-leadership--I went into the numb, hovering mode of waiting for it all to be over that seems too internally brutal for tears, but somehow not for the poem's whole middle two stanzas to do some silent, vibrant work in me:

back from a series of hospitals back 

     from a mugging

after funerals we are saying thank you

after the news of the dead

whether or not we knew them we are 

     saying thank you

over telephones we are saying thank you

in doorways and in the backs of cars and

      in elevators

remembering wars and the police at the

      door

and the beatings on stairs we are saying 

      thank you

in the faces of the officials and the rich

and of all who will never change

we go on saying thank you thank you

It's like those stanzas tick off boxes of what COVID has brought my way--"over telephones" is almost all of my life at the moment, through the screen of mine I see "a series of hospitals" including those set up to handle the overflow and then "the news of the dead" of this pandemic, I see police beatings of nonviolent nonwhite Americans, and the mugging in more than one sense is being done being done right in the public eye by a rich man who's become not only an official but the most powerful one in the world, and who only seems likely to change for the better if it's from a suit into an orange jumpsuit.

And that horror goes on, but also "we go on."  There and throughout the poem, the pronoun stays plural--identifying with the subject of the poem, I'm not alone.

And then I notice that no "thank you" in the poem (I count fourteen) are for any of these events in the poem.  If I say "thank you," I generally make it for something, and I assume that about anyone else's saying of it also.  "Thank you."  "For what?"  And juxtapositions in the poem would suggest that it's for all the damage, so the thanks would either be bleakly ironic or coming from some space of abuse.  Except thanks also tend to be addressed to someone, and these are not addressed to anyone, I see in the last stanza's "with nobody listening we are saying thank you."  If they're not to anyone, then why do they need to be for anything?  So, "we are saying thank you"  while, not because, these dark times keep coming.  

So if the thanks aren't for (as in addressed to) anyone, or for (as in about) anything, what do they do?  How do they help me find some grounding in the face of multiple, concurrent national nightmares (that might yet, unthinkably, continue in whatever forms for another four years)?

When I got to hear Merwin read at AWP one year, he read after Anne Carson, and talked kindly about how difficult it was to read after her.  I had been introduced to her work maybe seven years before that, by way of some of her translations of classical poets, and found something, for me, new and truly helpful:  a space opened by the poem that drew from the accessible and the monumental, or the ancient, at the same time.  I wasn't being intimidated by tradition; I was getting a friendly hand up (or in, or down) to some of it.

And I believe I get that gift in, or out of, this poem too, because Merwin's speaker is actually a chorus, isn't it (or he, or we)?  Like in Sophocles and beyond?  But here the ancient is made war for me again--there are no names i don't know, there are no impossibly lofty goals expressed, and his lack of capitalization and punctuation here take away restrictions on even how to read this chorus's lines, so I can get at home in it, find where and how it fits me, where and how I am right now.

And I find the thanks to no one in particular to be another way of saying yes, this is.  It's all happening, and I am not outside of it, not even in one of the "glass rooms" of stanza 1.  I'm in its midst.  And more importantly, maybe more important than the facts of all these realized nightmares, is the one that I'm not alone.  Connected by phone to my loved ones, I don't have to witness any of this without them.  Perhaps unlike the desperate men who have driven these crises for their own gain (like dictators have since there were Greek choruses and before), I deeply love and am deeply loved.

Stephanie Burt wrote about "spiritual resistance" in Merwin's work, and I believe I find that in "Thanks."  The resistance isn't in the mode of war, which the speaker(s) don't fight but remember; it's in this persistence of an unbreakable common bond between people.  It reminds me that the statues of ancient dictators may first and foremost present reminders that the dictators themselves are long gone, and of the many and intangible gifts I've been given in the midst of this time of crisis, "dark though it is."

My new book of poems

 Grateful that it's out and available on Amazon!

https://www.amazon.com/Batmanticism-Chad-Parmenter/dp/0645128031/ref=mp_s_a_1_3?crid=2P7652TIIIMUY&dchild=1&keywords=chad+parmenter&qid=1635513971&sprefix=chad+parmenter%2Caps%2C182&sr=8-3

Some Reflections On Good Friday

Maybe around 7 years old, I had a set of beliefs that this syllogism sums up:

-Jesus died for my sins
-I'm responsible for my sins
-I'm responsible for Jesus having died

And because if there was one thing I knew about Jesus, it was that Jesus was everybody's favorite, I felt just unbelievably bad for what I did.  To everybody. 

Today, I don't really know how much I've evolved, but it's like there's a neural bypass I'm blessed with that goes "sin=missing the mark."  Seems like I've heard that as the original translation, and it helps me to see things differently.  Without all that caked on shame that I didn't know I had before. 

And today I've gotten to learn a little bit about the human brain.  It has something like 125 trillion synapses.  100 billion or so neurons have thousands of synaptic connections each.  It's just wonderfully, staggeringly unfathomable to me that I have that between my ears.  It's to me justifiably compared to galaxies of stars.

And the idea that I made the choice to miss the mark is like me being on one of those stars, and choosing to steer that galaxy, or all those galaxies, the wrong way.  Which seems, to me, insane.  If a whole cluster in the universe did somehow zoom off its course,  it was as part of an almost infinitely complex system of factors that was definitely not set up by any one or billion human beings. 

And I don't know if a historical Jesus literally was God incarnated in human form, literally taking on the sins of all while being crucified.  I'm not even clear on which grocery store I'm going to today.  Attempts to validate and verify that as literal miss what for me is the point.  The story has a spiritual truth that my faith connects me to sometimes, and that's a gift. 

Is it possible?  Absolutely, in my opinion.  A comedian I was watching one time was talking about this idea that there's no God, and saying "well, have you looked everywhere?"  Any one person has access to so little of the truths represented by this entire universe that I don't believe anyone can confidently rule out anything.  Even the galaxies between our ears don't hold more than a fraction of the information in the universe, do they? 

But knowing isn't the same as faith anyway, is it?  For me, there's an awareness about things that I see as faith, that extends to the material plane but isn't limited to it.  My synapses are not the last word; they simply (amazingly) tell it.  Joseph Campbell talked about how a  common theme among religions is that the material rests on the spiritual.  That's what I happen to believe, based on a strong awareness of it sometimes, as well as other experiences.

Christ is one of the characters in world religions who crossed from the spiritual into the material plane, while retaining the full awareness of the spiritual.  I have no idea how many of those characters are partly represented as sacrifically killed, or able to perform miracles.  But that interpenetration, or  interpolation, as if the spiritual has punched through the material (or come through a tear in its veil)--that seems like a common, cosmic theme. 

And while it seems absolutely understandable to take Jesus Christ's "I am the way" to mean that Christianity is the true religion and none others are, I don't hear that in those words.  Leaving aside how divine love could possibly be manifested as divisive, as fighting words, as condemnation of thousands of years of innocently followed faith paths, I go back again to that spark of awareness.  "Christ" names something in me that is my one way to the divine, to the spiritual plane and possibly a Creator present in it but not encompassed by it.  It's where the material and spiritual meet, and nearly are one, but stay separated by an almost infinitely small space, like the one crossed by a synapse.  What better symbol for that than a cross?

A dear friend told me a few years ago that Jesus's actual name was probably something like Yeshua Ben Yusef.  After that, I saw one of the pictures of what the historical Jesus, or Yeshua, might have looked like:  dark-complected, dark hair, dark beard, both trimmed fairly short but not neatly.  What I got out of those new views:  a sense of empathy.  This was someone who probably suffered like me.  Suddenly, that fact replaced the search for historical evidence or lack of it.  He didn't need to take the bad things I did in order for me to get right with God.  Both of us had missed the mark, and missing the mark suddenly became okay. 

There are stories in maybe multiple religions about divine beings taking on humble human forms, and interacting with people who either treat them well or don't.   Ovid wrote about that in the Metamorphosis.  There can seem to be a coldly practical social purpose for those stories:  if we treat other people well so we don't get it in the afterlife, everyone is more likely to get along.  But for me there's another, better message:  that the divine lives in the human all the time.  And there's an access to it at the point of humility, of vulnerability, of suffering, even of small hurts.  And that I believe to be heart. 

Heart, for me, is that spark of Christ in me.  It's the capacity for empathy that doesn't originate in the physical (nothing does), but has to and gets to travel through it, dance in it, play in it, surrender to its grit and finity in order to love.  It's why Jesus cries out "my God, why have You forsaken me," and suddenly I feel something.  It's what runs between me and Him, whether that event actually happened or not, and makes it a wonder of its own.  I've been there; I get it; I know the feeling; and I have this mysterious trust that everybody else does too.  It might or might not be true, but without that part of me, I don't believe I would ever try to love anyone, even me. 

Maybe there's no division between people, or between entities of any kind, on the spiritual plane.  Maybe the pain-driven leap of consciousness toward another suffering being jolts me toward that unity in this plane.  Different religions' metaphors for an afterlife seem to me to convey a sense of "it's like this life, but not, and definitely better" in different ways.  And that there's divinity, immediate, not separate, not hidden anymore.  Maybe my recognizing myself in the suffering of another, however many of the trillions of synapses carry out that act, points my awareness toward that shared being.  I don't know. 

But I believe that the power of the crucified Christ, Jesus, Yeshua Ben Yusef, and whatever other names might describe that being in that event, is in how I can feel for Him, empathize with Him, wish He wasn't going through it, then extend the same love to others, and then even to me.

The Poem That Won't Leave You Alone, part 2!

What a gift getting to participate in this second part of a project that has taught me so much:

Link here

The idea seemed to come over a summer or more in 2015, and Jonathan Farmer's patient encouragement, the support of many others, and the contributions of more than a dozen so-talented contributors in addition to him, have enriched my life.

Rereading the Buddha's 5 Recollections

These 5 statements from the Upajjhatthana Sutta ("Subjects for Contemplation") have helped me for a little while now, in ways that I would not have expected:

"I am of the nature to age.”  That may seem like a depressing thing to remember at first, and like it’s already so widely known and condemned that there’s no reason to carry it further—why not focus on being youthful, on the immortal soul, or on other things like that?  But the value in realizing this can come from seeing what there is to appreciate about the older people around us, the elders in our lives—maybe they have a peace that we’d love to have, a loss of that drive to prove oneself that we’d also benefit from, and lots of stories to share, to be carried away by.  If I’m of that nature, maybe I can tap into it now—maybe I already do, and can appreciate that more.

 "I am of the nature to have ill health.”  This one, too, can seem like a pure downer at first—why not focus on having good health, or on a heaven or something else like that where all sickness might end?  Again, the benefit can come from looking at sick people, and how some of them come out of the sickness better than they went in.  How did they get built up through the experience, instead of torn down?  Did they use that as a chance to slow down?  Maybe even better, did they openly accept help, letting others care for them, giving others a chance to show love?  Did they breathe easier seeing that the world will turn without them?  Can’t that be done right now, if that nature is already here?

 "I am of the nature to die.”  There might be no better incentive, no greater reason, no more powerful thing to inspire appreciation of the moment, the day, the things that seem ordinary, the everyday that suddenly won’t be here forever.  Suddenly, it’s worth breaking routine, taking a look around, or appreciating that even the routine things are new in this moment.  And realizing that the physical form, not only of this body but of everything, can lead to the reflection that, wow, it’s all made of particles, mysterious forces, things that can’t be understood completely by us after thousands of years or more of wondering.  So, I am of the nature to inspire wonder.  Even sending a text can be wonderful, then.

 "I am of the nature to grow apart from what I love.”  This one might seem like the most painful, right off the bat.  But it doesn’t have to be.  It doesn’t have to mean growing cold toward a loved one; maybe it’s the opposite of that.  Couples or others in loving relationships who age together—don’t they come to see new things about each other?  Don’t they discard the old picture of the other and try to accept the living person in front of them?  Doesn’t that mean some growing apart, in order to grow toward this love, in this moment?  And can’t that be an adventure?  

"I own only my actions.”  How can this be?  Don’t I own things?  Yes, they’ll go away, but whose are they if they’re not mine?  Well, maybe they’re not really mine to begin with—maybe they’re passing through, like whatever I used to pay or trade for them, and whoever was on the other end of that.  Suddenly, I don’t have to sit and obsess about them and what might happen to them—I get to get out and do, take risks, help out, and see that those things really do matter.  It’s maybe easy to try and measure that by the other person’s response, and get attached to that outcome, but what if I accept that I do have an impact, and then watch what it is?  Can I see after a little while how it impacts, how my life touches, more than one other life?  Can I see or hear how it’s reached many other lives after a little while longer?  Can I imagine that it makes a mark in the universe—a beautiful one, because its owner is beautiful?  Yes.