Well, it’s been a long time coming, folks, but there’s finally a new issue of Grub Street Grackle.

If you happen to be in the Dallas/Ft. Worth area, feel free to join us for the roll-out tomorrow (Saturday, April 12) around 7:30. We’ll have food and drink and some music and poetry around nine. If you want to come, the address is 130 West Holland Drive, in the city of Irving, TX 75062. Bring your friends.

In keeping with the Gracklog’s policy (which I just made up) of “staying on the cutting edge of obsolescence,” I’d like to respond to some remarks Mr. Craig Raine made in an article about T. S. Eliot published last month on the Guardian’s website. The article is marked “Foreword” and is presumably meant in some way to serve as a prelude to a more complete consideration of Eliot. But by Raine’s own account, what we have here is really an after-word–”It looks very different now,” he says, and “We can see” now what could not be seen in Eliot’s lifetime. Whereas “All contemporary poetry when it is contemporary is initially baffling to its readers,” we now find it comfortably situated in the folds of history, and it is no longer so unpleasant to meet Mr. Eliot, for now we need not be baffled by him, now that we have understood what sort of a poet he is and explained away all his oddities as belonging to what it meant to be a poet in that time–that is, what it was to be a “Modernist Poet.” Now, Raine happily reports, “We can see, for example, what a brilliant, if surprising, nature poet Eliot was.”

But have we come any closer to understanding T. S. Eliot’s poetry by making friends with it in this way? On what sort of ground does this familiarity rest, if we do not even understand what it was in the first place that made it so difficult to accomplish? Or has something inalienable to the poetry disappeared in our increased comfort with it?

Consider the lines:

Is it like this
In death’s other kingdom
Waking alone
At the hour when we are
Trembling with tenderness
Lips that would kiss
Form prayers to broken stone.

Today, the jarring, fragmentary syntax of these lines can be explained as belonging to the now ubiquitous and much abused rubric of “Free Verse.” If for that reason these lines from “The Hollow Men” are any less perplexing to us, let us not congratulate ourselves on having come to terms with the poetry. Rather, we ought to consider how it is that we have come to be so surrounded by “broken stone” that fragments have come to seem whole to us.

Over at his own website, “Zine und Zeit,” frequent Grackle contributor Martin Heidegger has posted the following tirade against the daily chatter of the media and the political blogosphere, which are now together callaed the pundustry:

But when Dasein goes in for something in the reticence of carrying it through or even of genuinely breaking down on it, its time is a different time and, as seen by the public, an essentially slower time than that of idle talk, which ‘lives at a faster rate.’ Idle talk will thus long since have gone on to something else which is currently the very newest thing. That which was earlier surmise and has now been carried through, has come too late if one looks at that which is newest. Idle talk and curiosity take care in their ambiguity to ensure that what is genuinely and newly created is out of date as soon as it emerges before the public. Such a new creation can become free in its positive possibilities only if the idle talk which covers it up has become ineffective, and if the ‘common’ interest has died away.

In the ambiguity of the way things have been publicly interpreted, talking about things ahead of the game and making surmises about them curiously, gets passed off as what is really happening, while taking action and carrying something through get stamped as something merely subsequent and unimportant. Thus Dasein’s understanding in the “they” is constantly going wrong in its projects, as regards the genuine possibilities of Being. Dasein is always ambiguously ‘there’–that is to say, in that public disclosedness of Being-with-one-another where the loudest idle talk and the most ingenious curiosity keep ‘things moving,’ where, in an everyday manner, everything (and at bottom nothing) is happening.

This ambiguity is always tossing to curiosity that which it seeks; and it gives idle talk the semblance of having everything decided in it.

I’ve long admired and often emulated the habit Emerson had of passing through strangers’ land and fancying it his own, and thinking what he would do with it. I can think of no better way of taking in the environs synoptically than to imagine oneself their steward. It certainly beats counting grains of sand.

If I don’t misunderstand the following quotation (and I certainly don’t claim to have a thorough grasp of the context), something like this way of looking seems to be at work in it:

In equipment that is used, ‘Nature’ is discovered along with it by that use–the ‘Nature’ we find in natural products. Here, however, “Nature” is not to be understood as that which is just present-at-hand, nor as the power of Nature. The wood is a forest of timber, the mountain a quarry of rock; the river is water-power, the wind is wind ‘in the sails.’ As the ‘environment’ is discovered, the ‘Nature’ thus discovered is encountered too. If its kind of Being as ready-to-hand is disregarded, this ‘Nature’ itself can be discovered and defined simply in its pure presence-at-hand. But when this happens, the Nature which ’stirs and strives,’ which assails us and enthralls us as landscape, remains hidden. The botanist’s plants are not the flowers of the hedgerow; the ’sourse’ which the geographer establishes for a river is not the ’springhead in the dale.’

Speaking of Hegelian interpretations of No Country for Old Men, this is worth a read:

I ordered him another whisky to settle his upper lip. I hate it when Hegelians take to quivering. They never know how to start a point ‘cause it’s all one big fucking idea. Like Parmenides and his “well rounded truth.” No way to get in. A whole tribe of hedgehogs. Hegelians.

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From J. Anselm Prever’s review of “No Country for Old Men:”

The Coens aren’t interested in manipulating our emotions. Not that the emotions remain unaffected: few scenes in any film have the understated sweetness of Moss’ laconic exchanges with his wife Carla Jean, the terror of Chigurh’s coin-toss conversation with the storekeeper, or the poignancy of Bell’s narration of his two dreams. What happens in these scenes? People talk to each other, in level voices. What warms the heart, or chills the bone, is the substance of what is said.

This is true enough, and a good reason to be grateful for the Coens’ work. But I think Mr. Prever has not dropped the other shoe here. Is it really only the substance of what is said that moves us (as though even the blankest delivery could leave that substance untouched), or is it also and much more the very difference between what is said and the “level voices” that say it? I believe that this difference is what raises the film above the level of a “proof” or even an “argument” about nihilism, either in favor of or against it, even as it reinstates the question to which nihilism is the mute and conclusive answer. For what it says (not in words, precisely not in words) is that it makes all the difference what is said.

In Chigurh, who puts the blankness of his speech into the “substance” of his words, this difference is annulled. Only he could say what he says in the following exchange (borrowed from the IMDB quote page):

Anton Chigurh: Don’t put it in your pocket, sir. Don’t put it in your pocket. It’s your lucky quarter.
Gas Station Proprietor: Where do you want me to put it?
Anton Chigurh: Anywhere not in your pocket. Where it’ll get mixed in with the others and become just a coin. Which it is.

What is the difference between this coin and any other? None, says Chigurh. There is no difference. There is then this difference between Chigurh and all others, which (paradoxically enough), Chigurh here wishes to preserve: all others hold the illusion of difference open.

From Ginger Strand’s insightful, if sadly inconclusive, article about Niagra Falls, Marylin Monroe’s gait, and the Red Hat Society:

The controversy reflected what biographer Sarah Churchwell calls “the central anxiety in Marilyn’s story: Was she natural or manufactured? Scripted or real?” In the ’50s, this was becoming a question for the Falls too. A 1950 treaty with Canada had been signed that allowed more water to be diverted into power plants than ever before. Anticipating the reduced water flow over the brink, Ontario Hydro and the Army Corps of Engineers had scheduled the Falls for a face-lift. In fact, a massive engineering project was in place to carve out the riverbed, reshape the banks, rebuild the viewing points, and artificially raise the water level—all in order to keep up the appearance of natural grandeur. Marilyn’s 116-foot walk strode right to the heart of an issue that was playing out at Niagara and on many fronts in American life. What is real, and what fake? If something is artificial, do we admire its beauty less? How much are we willing to be hoodwinked?

There is something offensive about artifice becoming so rigorous in its imitation of nature that it poses as the original nature itself (therein lies the difference between Marilyn’s walk, which created, one might say, a new nature, and the measures taken to conserve the magnitude of Niagara Falls). Strand’s question might better have been put, “If something is more artificial than it seems, do we admire its beauty less?” I mean this “seems” not to refer to the basic pretense of being something else, which all art adopts, but to what it allows to shine through that disguise in announcement of itself.

I also think it worth asking, in light of the recent Kundera-kindled conversation regarding historical consciousness, whether the production of works posing as nineteenth-century compositions is worse than mendacious because it wishes to announce what is absent?

After listening carefully to those notes out of season, I could not supress the following line of questioning, a questioning which, as it were, arose spontaneously at that moment when those unseasonable notes first graced my ears:  Does the curtain come down too quickly in this untimely meditation? Does it fail to stay in step and keep the time properly…or even fail to keep a proper sense of time? What insight is Kundera’s observation striving after, even though such striving is prematurely stopped short? Should art be looked for –and, indeed, is it ever found –in historical conciousness? Or should we expect to find the primal possibilities of something like what is later called historical consciousness only in art? 

    Two fundamental poles govern Kundera’s observation, and obtaining between them is some sort of implied oppostion. These poles are the cerebrality of “historical conciousness” and the “spontaneity” of “sensation”. The former is expected to be delayed, an after-thought or post-script, something gained only after the latter, namely, the immediacy of sensation, has run its course. In this way, i.e. through the expectation of delay, and immediacy, a sense of time underlies the very boundaries of that which is thought to be “historical conciousness”. This curiosity becomes genuinely perplexing when we consider too that this immedacy of sensation, one which would yield, as Kundera puts it, “aesthetic pleasure” or the lack thereof, has a history of its own:

“Almost as soon as specialized thinking about art and the artist began, such reflections were referred to as ‘aesthetic’. Aesthetics treated the artwork as an object, indeed as an object of aesthesis, of sensory apprehension in the broadest sense. These days, such an apprehension is called ‘experience’. The way in which man experiences art is supposed to inform us about its essential nature. Experience is the standard-giving source not only for the appreciation and enjoyment of art but also for its creation…But perhaps experience is the element in which art dies. This dying proceeds so slowly that it takes several centuries.” (Appendix to Heidegger’s Origin of the Work of Art)

    In the spirit of Kundera’s observation, I now observe: perhaps it is true that the spontaneity of sensation has nothing to do with “the intense moment, isolated with no before and after”, but rather does it have to do with “a lifetime burning within every moment” and “not the lifetime of one man only, but of old stones that cannot be deciphered”   

From Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics

For we set down that the highest good is the end of politics, while it takes the greatest part of its pains to produce citizens of a certain sort, namely, ones that are good and inclined to perform beautiful actions. It is reasonable, then, that we do not speak of a cow or a horse or any other animal as happy, since none of them is able to share in being at work in such a way. And for this reason a child is not happy either, since he is not yet capable of performing such actions on account of age; children who are called happy are pronounced blessed on account of our hope.

From W. B. Yeats’ Reveries over Childhood and Youth

After that come memories of Sligo, where I live with my grandparents. I am sitting on the ground looking at a mastless toy boat with the paint rubbed and scratched, and I say to myself in great melancholy, ‘It is further away than it used to be,’ and while I am saying it I am looking at a long scratch in the stern, for it is especially the scratch which is further away. Then one day at dinner my great-uncle, William Middleton, says, ‘We should not make light of the troubles of children. They are worse than ours, because we can see the end of our trouble and they can never see any end,’ and I feel grateful, for I know that I am very unhappy and have often said to myself, ‘When you grow up, never talk as grown-up people do of the happiness of childhood.’

From Milan Kundera’s The Curtain:

What? We feel aesthetic pleasure at a sonata by Beethoven and not at one with the same style and charm if it comes from one of our own contemporaries? Isn’t that the height of hypocrisy? So then the sensation of beauty is not spontaneous, spurred by our sensibility, but instead is cerebral, conditioned by our knowing a date?

No way around it: historical consciousness is so thoroughly inherent in our perception of art that this anachronism (a Beethoven piece written today) would be spontaneously (that is, without the least hypocrisy) felt to be ridiculous, false, incongruous, even monstrous.