Keats' Epistle

Hello, Ancient Marinere. This poetical letter opening reads like what the life of the wedding guest in Coleridge’s "Rime" would become. He has seen too far into the darkness of life, and that sorrow haunts him forever.

I completely understand this during the current state of affairs. Every day in the news, another horrible tragedy has occurred. People are killing their families, themselves, and their neighbors. I understand that tough economic crimes breed more crime and hopelessness, but this seems like a new level of violence. These are seemingly average people (like always) that appear to just snap. I know it’s like throwing your back out; hefting that laptop didn’t actually throw your back out, but it was the final straw on multiple strains. It’s still fairly distressing to realize that a father can get to the point where killing his entire family seems like a better option than losing the house, or a mother can become so angry at her husband that she decides to retaliate by killing their children. Why? What in our culture teaches people that death is better than poverty, or violence is an appropriate response to feeling powerless? Is it even a cultural issue, or a primitive trigger that gets tripped? As the poem illustrates, in nature, the more powerful prey on the less powerful. It’s the darker side of the ecosystem. However, as “higher” animals, we are supposed to have better control over these things. Yet, the cycle still exists, just in other terms. Instead of active violence towards the poor, the more powerful (i.e. wealthy) just prey on them through economic oppression. Then, in their powerlessness, the impoverished turn to violence against the only people they have power over: their families.

A blog of randomness

I’m studying Marx in my philosophy class. This is not my first exposure to Marx, as my father is a Marx fan, and we joke about me being a “red-diaper baby”. It is, however, my first time studying him in-depth. Hearing things like “man creates, through his labor, a world he experiences as his own” struck me as similar to the Romantic idea of humans “creating the world”. The fact that my English class immediately precedes my philosophy class also may be why these connections popped up in my head. In my curiosity, I ran across this quote from Marx at the Marx archive. I totally believe this, despite the fact that I occasionally experience Shelley as a loquacious, whiny ass. Occasionally.
Keats, on the other hand, is one of my favorite Romantic poets. He and Coleridge are in a close race. I especially enjoy "Ode to a Nightingale" because it seems to me like Keats turns the poem into a tomb. It has the overt references to death and dying, but also the gloom and the darkness of the surroundings envelop the speaker like a coffin. He even refers to the “embalmed darkness” which, while meaning perfumed, I don’t think is generally associated with anything other than burial/preservation preparations. There are also the purple violets and the purple wine, a color of death. Unlike Shelley’s skylark, in whose flight “the pale purple even/melts” or overcomes death, Keats’ bird lulls him into a sleep/dream/death-like state.
One last side note: I was reading through poetry and "Christabel" and "Lamia" gave me crazy dreams. Crazy, crazy dreams. It also made me think that these poems may have inspired the bit in the last Harry Potter book with the giant snake bursting forth from the old lady.

No vacancy

Watching the “Powers of Ten” and reading the last lines of Shelley’s “Mont Blanc” reminded me of an article I read about the Hubble Telescope discovering a new planet. The telescope snapped a picture of it 10 years ago, but it was hidden from view by the glare of the star in front of it. Scientists figured out a way to get around this and were able to see a gas giant, 3 times the size of Jupiter. I thought about this giant planet hurtling along an orbit somewhere, and the image of our own startlingly beautiful Milky Way, and it makes absolutely no sense that we could be the only beings in the universe. It would be a waste of matter and form. However, when we look to the stars, the vacuum of space can seem like only “silence and solitude” and therefore “vacancy”. This is somewhat like the old tree falling in the woods question. I think in the fast-paced modern world people are afraid of silence because it reminds them of death. It is as if life must be boisterous and loud and “in-your-face” to really be life. Your relaxation time must be just as filled as your work time, or else you’re wasting it. But life is waiting to be discovered in the vacancy of the moment. These are the flashes of stillness that allow you to hear your heartbeat; the seconds of solitude when you catch the faintest whisper of the breeze lazily sliding through the leaves, making them murmur to one another in voices just low enough to make it seem like an imagining. The silence can sometimes be the only reminder that you are alive, and not just an automaton, rushing, rushing, rushing, towards death.