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.

On a Lark

I find the last lines of Shelley’s “Ode to a Skylark” to be slightly egotistical. He’s essentially saying “Give me the knowledge of your joy, and I will be a great poet that the world must hear”. It seems focused on what the poet can get out of the relationship with this unseen bird. It’s also kind of odd that he specifically says “Teach me” even just some of the happiness “thy brain must know”. These are words that describe thought and processes that can be learned, not emotion and feeling. This represents the human struggle between the dichotomy of the heart and the mind that the bird does not encounter. It knows and feels, equally, only joy. In earlier lines, the human emotion is besmirched by thought; the deepest joy is still affected by some long forgotten moment of sadness. Alternately, if we never felt pain, we still would not reach the heights of joy that the bird experiences. It has been my understanding in all things that if you have not felt the opposite experience, then your appreciation for the experience is not as acute. Someone who has never experienced the depths of despair has a different experience of euphoria than someone who has traversed through the darkness to emerge into the light. Overall, balance is necessary. Balance between joy and sadness, thought and emotion. Without balance, the “harmonious madness” is just madness, whether it’s someone becoming so focused on their misery that they harm others, or someone so caught up in chasing joy that they harm themselves.

"They wrote it all down to the progress of man"

I’ve always enjoyed Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere” because of the vivid descriptions. He uses his words as paint to create an illustration within the mind. It gives hope to those of us that struggle to translate the images in our heads into something tangible to share with others. If I can’t paint it, I might be able to write it.
Beyond that, I like the message within the poem. The Mariner indiscriminately kills a bird, leading to a curse on him and the death of all his shipmates. The curse only begins to lift when he finds it in himself to rejoice in and bless the natural life around him. The poem also ends with this moral:
“He prayeth best who loveth best
All things both great and small:
For the dear God, who loveth us,
He made and loveth all.”
I think this is pretty relevant in a time global warming and destruction. If you kill nature, you kill humanity. People are starting to decide that focusing on the human toll of climate change will force people to recognize the need for change; I say that if people don’t care about the toll it’s taking on animals, they cannot care about the toll it is taking on humans. As part of the same creation, if you lack the capacity to care about one, you lack the capacity to care about the other. Of course, not caring about other humans leads to things like wars fought for control of oil, which devastate both humans and the environment. The oil then contributes to climate change, furthering devastating humans and nature, until more is required, necessitating the start of another fraudulent war. It's a self-perpetuating cycle, but not fueled by hate. Instead, it's fueled by apathy and greed. The destruction is a side effect of greed, and the apathy allows it to be called progress.

Same problems

Samuel Taylor Coleridge writes in “The Nightingale” that man has forced his own sorrow on the song of the nightingale. In reality, according to the poem, the bird is quite cheerful, blissfully warbling away, content with its avian existence. In other words, Coleridge has rejected one projection of human emotion on the nightingale in favor of his own projection of emotion. This returns to Wordworth’s idea of “half perception half creation” of nature, but I’m still struggling with this. I understand the idea that on some level we must project ourselves onto the things around us in order to be able to effectively forge a connection with those things, but where is the line between putting an element of yourself into things in order to experience them and just being self-centered? If I have a hand in partially creating everything, doesn’t that mean to some extent that everything revolves around me? That seems incredibly self-absorbed. If I have partially created everything around me, then the world exists to serve me. Therefore, I am entitled to the things I desire and need. Where do other people exist in this picture? What about the fulfillment of their wants and needs? If the fulfillment of their wants/needs leaves less resources for me, should I begrudge them that fulfillment, or worse, even try to stop it? It seems to me that this type of thinking leads directly to the Madoff and AIG bonuses mess. I want it, and if I don’t have it, I’ll just take it from other people.

Phish in Nature

I did a lot of traveling over my break. I flew into Charlotte, and got a lovely view of the melting snow from the freak storm they had the day before. I drove to Charleston and watched Spanish moss, hanging from the giant trees growing over graves, swaying in the light breeze. My break ended in Richmond, where I was surprised by the vestiges of fall that still clung, as multi-colored leaves, to the deciduous trees as we rolled on towards spring. All of my experiences of observing nature and the world around me culminated, as did my break, with the Phish reunion at Hampton Coliseum on Saturday.
I love Wordsworth’s “The world is too much with us” because it is the acknowledgement of the things I abhor about modern humanity. People are so focused on consuming and making sure they get their fair share that they miss everything else around them. They are only aware of themselves and their needs. This is also why I love Phish concerts. It is impossible to be “out of tune”. In the explosion of sound and people, there is a unity that sneaks up on you in the middle of a huge jam, when you catch the lights and the rhythm in just the right way. The commonality between you and the hundreds of people surrounding you gently dawns on you in a break in the crowd when you can see straight to the band on stage. You didn't come from the same place and are going different places, but for the moment you are all sharing one experience, and fundamentally the same. It’s not quite the same as experiencing the joy of nature contained in a miniature rosebud or the power revealed in a raging storm, but it is a glimpse into the nature of humanity.