Farm State

Farm State

Weary the wheat and plow the wishes.
Harvest what of God you know. Stow it
in a town-sized silo. Why grow
anything when the loans never seem
to evaporate? Summer stands over land
like a ruddy-faced fry-cook and cracks
the sky: out comes a yolk of sun.

Thunderheads filibuster like the senator
filling the Farm Bill with his high pressure.
Lightning votes. An incumbent known
as Toil rigs the election. This is a farm state,
where one day your fate may rise from loam
like a galleon shrugging foam, and maybe
you shall sail yourself away on swells of luck
toward a coast where roosters don't crow
til supper-time, tractor-axles never break,
and climate keeps its promises.

Hans Ostrom

Copyright 2008 Hans Ostrom

Paradigms and Poetry

As I continue my desultory reading of the philosophy of science, I am getting reacquainted with ideas from Thomas Kuhn, specifically his notions of "paradigm shifts" and "theory-laden data." The latter notion is meant to disrupt the idea that data can be neutral, just sitting there waiting to support this or that theory. ("Just the facts, ma'am.") Kuhn suggests that the way the data are gotten or placed or shaped springs from theory. It's not so much that, like Disraeli ("lies, damned lies, statistics"), Kuhn is mocking or dismissing data; he's just pointing out, I think, that data are never innocent ("theory, damned theory, and data").

With a paradigm-shift, I reckon a way of putting the idea is that one overarching way of looking at the world is replaced by another one. One of the most dramatic paradigm-shifts in my lifetime, I think, has been the one shaped by feminism and its effects. Not that long ago, it used to be unthinkable for women to hold a huge spectrum of jobs they now hold, and even people who remain allergic to the word "feminism" accept women in these roles--because the paradigm has shifted.

Two paradigms that simply will not, apparently, stop butting heads are so-called Evolution and Creation.

Bush took a bit of LBJ and a lot of Nixon and created a paradigm by which the president is an elected dictator, as well as a compulsive gambler. He seems to have put about as much thought into invading and occupying Iraq as a drunk does when he decides to hit on 15 at the blackjack table in Bordertown, Nevada. I exaggerate, but I wish I were exaggerating more. Even his former press-secretary, Scottie the Wonder-Dog, referred to Bush as "a gut player." That's quite a paradigm-shift.

In a minor key, the paradigm-shift can be useful for poets. You can get stuck writing one kind of poetry--first person, semi-autobiographical free verse remains a dominant paradigm, for instance. But then you can glance at Randall Jarrell's "Death of a Ball Turret Gunner," to pick just one example, and realize you can write from the perspective and in the voice of someone different from you, relate an experience you have not had but can imagine, and, by the way, have a dead person speak. Or, like Hopkins, you can look at the dominant "music" of your contemporary poetry and decide, "Gee, I think I'll blow that up." With sprung rhythm, he blew up the monotony of iambic pentameter. Dickinson ignored so many paradigms and seriously bent others that it's hard to keep track of them. Surrealism was once a scandalously new paradigm. Now it's pretty much a dominant one, as is the image-devoted poem.

I think poets are naturally comfortable with the idea of "theory laden data"; or at least they sense that all that stuff we encounter and perceive out there is laden with something. Often it's laden with our desire to write a poem about it. That summer's day didn't know Shakespeare was going to write about it and show why it shouldn't, in fact, be compared to his love; and those plums didn't realize that a) Williams would eat them and b) that he would then write a poem in the form of a note apologizing for having eaten them. They were cold, delicious, and poetry-laden data, those poems.

A Poet's Questions for Obama and McCain

I think I speak for all poets when I say no one can speak for poets, who are harder to herd than cats and, in politics, are mere noise in the data, at best, and crackpots at worst.

Situated somewhere between noise in the data and cracked-pottedness, I therefore launch my questions for the only two people who seem to be semi-serious candidates for the presidency, which in my opinion has become awfully close to a dictatorship; "has become" may be naive, however, for if the Constitution started with an electoral college and by putting the head of the executive branch in charge of the whole military, then it looks like "we" always had a hankering for a Strong Executive, or Dictator Lite. In any event, the questions:

1. The obligatory--but, I would add, a deceptively useful--one: who are your favorite poets, and what are your favorite poems, and why, gentlemen? Think of how revealing the answers to this question would be. I predict McCain would refuse to answer, perhaps get angry. I predict Obama would stall, go over the options, and then go with something wry or populist, such as "Bob Dylan".

2. Specifically, what will you do to reverse the growth of secrecy and privilege in the Executive Branch. Examples include "signing statements" (meaning "I won't obey the law you just passed, but thanks for playing"); claims of privilege that block Congress's ability to look at documents and interview employees; the unprecedented growth in "classifying" documents (new ones and old ones, paper and email) as secret because of "national security"; the excessive politicalization of the Justice Department; and so on. I predict McCain would simply revel in all the expanded powers of the Exec. Branch--which have developed over decades, even if Bush II accelerated things. I predict that Obama . . . would do the same. But this is unfair of me. Let the lads speak for themselves.

3. What, exactly, and please give us the math, will you do about the three "items" that drive the budget, which seems to have grown beyond Pluto [to which the arrows point in photos accompanying this post], which isn't even a planet anymore: defense spending; Medicare; Social Security. As far as I know, the rest of the budget is, comparatively, mere fluff. Bob "Roseanne" Barr talks about cutting the Education Department, for example, which would be like cutting one whisker from a mountain man's beard, although such analogies are probably not used much in economics circles, including pie-chart circles.

4. Why shouldn't every citizen have a health plan as good as yours? This is not a rhetorical question.

5. What will you do, if anything, about spying sans warrants on American citizens? I predict McCain and Obama would both mumble something platitudinous--and then leave the system as Bush created it. Both seem in favor of the current FISA bill, for example.

6. Okay, what will you do about torture? How about an Executive Order, written on your first day in D.C., outlawing it? I predict that whether it's Obama or McCain in office, the torturing and "rendering," also known as kidnapping as a prelude to torture, will continue.

7. Who's your favorite philosopher and why? I predict both lads would go for the joke here, if they answered at all. Neither would mention the name of a vaguely legitimate philosopher. But as with the poetry question, think of how revealing the answer would be!

8. What is the lie you told in your life (so far) that you regret the most?

9. Specifically, what will you do to roll back all the anti-trust excesses, including those in the oil industry and the media? I predict neither has any interest in dismantling media conglomerates.

10. What is the biggest line of bullshit you've uttered so far in your quest to become president? Nothing personal here, lads. Everybody knows all candidates have to speak bullshit to get elected, or just to pass the time, or to give the frenzied crowds what they want. Which line of bullshit do you yourself have trouble saying?

11. Speaking of Pluto, as we did in #3, will you promise to reinstate it as a planet? I realize the territory known as "Pluto" isn't strictly under American control, but that has rarely seemed to be an obstacle in American foreign policy, and we're just talking about restoring planetary status, not occupying the place.

Praise Good Sense

July 4 in Tacoma was positively serene as compared with July 4 some 10 miles south, where they still not only allow but encourage fireworks.

In years past, we would have endured two weeks of the build-up, then the noise-riot of the "holy day," then a week of blasting the inventory that remained. One of our neighbors had a cannon. I kid you not.

This year: nothing, except for some noise from Gig Harbor, where official fireworks still go off for an hour, tops, and then some noise from one distant neighbor, who let off some fireworks in spite of the regulations. After this neighbor lighted the fireworks, they created light, noise, and smoke, just as they have done for thousands of years. Why don' t people just put in a DVD of fireworks going off? They seem surprised when the same effects result from lighting black powder anew. I hesitate to say the behavior is moronic. But. . . .

But: like a wee firecracker going off, a thought occurred to me this year that hadn't occurred in years past. Are fireworks gendered? That is, if men weren't around on July 4, would anyone set off fireworks? I assume that at least a small percentage of women would light them, but I think if men weren't around, fireworks sales would diminish by 90%, pure guesswork, and only guesswork. We'd need to hear from social scientists who study fireworks-behavior, take a look at their data and graphs, to get a better sense of this fireworks/gender issue.

I dream of a noiseless 4 July, when dogs and cats rest easy and all the money spent on black powder and paper goes toward . . . well, goes toward something, anything, quieter. Maybe baby food for impoverished families. Boom! Anyway, a tip of the cap to the City of T-Town and the good sense it had to outlaw fireworks, except for a big show down on the waterfront for folks who like that sort of thing.

Multiple Realization and Poets

Sometimes, after my mother (R.I.P.) would do something based on intuition, she would say, "Don't ask me why [I did that]." "Don't ask me why, but I had a feeling there was a rattlesnake there, so I didn't lift up the box."

Don't ask me why, but I've been reading some philosophy of science, though I haven't probed the depths as extensively as the Hyperborean,whose blog is on my list.

Specifically, I've been reading Philosophy of Science: A Very Short Introduction, by Samir Okasha. These very short introductions from Oxford U.P. are nifty little books. As is often the case with books, I'm drawn to these because they're physically pleasing--thin, nicely designed, easily fitted in the back pocket. I think I own about 10 of them now, everything from short intros to the Koran and to Islam to short intros on Descartes, Spinoza, Literary Theory, and Ancient Philosophy. If you know the subject already, the books are great refreshers, with updates on newer literature in the field. If you don't know the subject, they're great introductions (indeed) and point clearly to additional reading.

Among the topics I was drawn to in Okasha's book was the concept of multiple realization:

"How can science that studies entities that are ultimately physical not be reducible to physics? Granted that the higher sciences are in fact autonomous of physics, how is this possible? According to some philosophers, the answer lies in the fact that the objects studied by higher level sciences are 'multiply realized' at the physical level" (p. 56). The example of the concept Okasha deploys is demotic: ashtrays. That is, you can have a theory of or a design for ashtrays, but then when you go out into the world, you see that ashtrays are multiply and, figuratively speaking, infinitely realized. Even two ashtrays based on the same design are different. One has a nick in it, for example, or it's slightly warped. So any one ashtray cannot be completely reduced to the physics underlying. Another science, or two, is necessary to explain that one particular ashtray you're looking at.

I like this concept because it articulates the way in which what is always seems to outrun or disrupt what is thought about what is. I like it also because I think poets are drawn more to the particular manifestations of reality as opposed to reality as generalized by scientists, custom, and so on. That one particular bird, city street (and moment on that city street), interchange with a person, sweater, kiss, cloud, or copy of Kant's writing (the copy with the coffee stain on page 92): these highly specific realizations are what, in most cases, first hook a poet's interest. Poets aren't necessarily opposed to concepts or categories, and a lot of poets, I think, aren't in fact interested in the particular. But most are. In this sense, the poetic way of looking at the world is not so different from the scientific way. I think in another context, Emily Dickinson (for example) would have become a botanist or an entomologist. Her poems are far more grounded than most readers expect or think. Almost all of them begin in close observation of a single realization: not "snake" in general, but a snake, seen on that day. Also, Wordsworth liked geometry--because it was, in his view (and according to the etymology), it was the science of measuring the earthy [geo + metric]. That is, it had to do with the planet that supported his beloved lake country and its multiple realizations. Most mathematicians now, I gather, do not think of geometry as the science of measuring the earth but as just another conceptual framework--another dialect of math, as it were.

Don't ask me why, but I think I'll end this particular realization of the blog here.

Blue Teeth, Etc.

One with whom I live just reported that we're getting new cellular phones, which, by the way, always sounded like phones embedded in one's cells, something nano-technology apparently has in store for us, even though phone companies no longer seem to have stores. It was also reported to me that "you're getting the biggest buttons they have," meaning the buttons on the phone. I suffer from Homer Simpson's Syndrome, whereby when I hit a phone-button with one of my thick fingers, I hit three buttons at once. For whom are these phones made, anyway? Barbie? It takes me the better part of a day to construct and send a text message. Smoke-signals would be faster.

When it was reported to what we used to call THE phone company that I used 15 minutes of calling per month on my cell phone, the person from the company was incredulous. "Did you say FIFTEEN?!" Hey, that's 30 seconds a day. In Sweden, that would make you a real gas-bag. I don't like talking on the phone.

I'm also getting a blue-tooth, I've been advised. This is great, especially because I have no idea what one is. All I know is that it's associated with a thing you wear on the side of your head--something like Uhura wore in the original Star Trek. It looks like a big beetle, and I think it's quite a fashion statement.

I already have a blue tooth. Thanks to Raymond Cervantes, who hit me in the mouth with his elbow when we were going after a rebound in high school, one of my large, saber-tooth-cat front teeth is discolored; it's also dead. It's the original blue tooth. I can't receive calls on it, but so what?

The proliferation of phone-technology is most amusing, especially since, when I was young, our family was on a "party line," which sounds quite festive but which actually meant that we shared a phone line with two other families. One effect was that sometimes, when you picked up the phone to make a call, Sophie from the Yuba River Inn would be on there talking. It was considered bad form to a) listen in [did you hear that, Congress, Bush, Homeland Security, and Tele-Kom companies?] and b) talk too long. Of course it took forever to dial a number back then--because you used a dial. I think they should provide cell phones with dials because it's harder to make a mistake when you can lock your finger in that hole and spin the wheel. I think cell phones with little dialing-wheels would be more aesthetically interesting, too. People might rethink whether they actually need to make that call, and they could get their minutes down to 15 or fewer per month.

I'd like now to leap to a proposal: I think there should be an international text-a-poem day. We already have write-a-novel-in-a-month and write a blog-entry-every-day-for-a month, so why not a text-a-poem day? Everybody with access to a cell phone would simply text-message a short poem, which they could write or which they could borrow from someone else. Above the globe, where there used to be ozone, there'd now be poems flying around. I think the phenomenon known as "good vibes" would ensue, and Uhura, wearing her Blue-Tooth, could link up the Universal Translator. Keep thinking about those good vibrations.

Zzzzzzoooo

We went to the zoo today, chiefly to see someone who works there. While we were there, we looked at a few exhibited creatures. The lemurs looked like they'd been up all night, drinking caffeine and writing term-papers. In fact, pretty much all the creatures looked weary. It was late in the day, after all, and a humid day, too. The elephants looked very sleepy, but they also looked as if they felt lying down would require too much work. For an elephant to lie down is a bit like a building dismantling itself.

The tapirs were doing well. They seemed to have joined together in a civil union, and physically, they seemed to prefer to stand in a kind of parallel position. They wore matching fur outfits.

The Sumatran tiger was completely out of it, sleeping deeply, not even a flick of the tail.

I liked the empty exhibits. You walk up and look through the glass or over the fence, and there's no creature in particular there. It's as if someone took a great deal of trouble to create a space for absence. So you stand there and start to observe other people, who are, after all, inside the zoo, just like the other animals. Maybe they could employ a poet to sit in one of those empty spaces. The sign could say something like "Poet--Hominid," and people could take pictures of the person as he or she wrote a word and then erased it.

Crows at a zoo behave in an even more superior fashion than they do elsewhere, it seems. They hang around tables at a cafe, pretending to be customers, and they're all full of themselves about not being on exhibit, or part of the paying public, or part of the paid staff.

I saw the father of two young children buy two brightly colored cloth snakes for the kids. While he was purchasing the second one, his wife, mother-in-law, and kids sat a a table nearby. Referring to the kid who already had a snake, the wife yelled, "He just tried to make the snake kill my mother!" Then she laughed. So did the mother, who's apparently not afraid of cloth snakes or her grandchildren. I don't know, though. I might keep an eye on that one kid if I were her. The dad seemed moderately amused by the cloth-attempt on the mother-in-law's life.

Taste

I dropped off two people at the Taste of Tacoma today; they're volunteering at the Wine Tent. Naturally, I'm inclined to take such titles as the "Taste of Tacoma" literally and imagine morsels of sidewalks, slices of warehouses, salads of rhododendron leaves, and distilled paper-mill excretion.

As I let them out of the car and saw how many people had already gathered, I realized the degree to which I'm not much of a "festival" person. I find something fatiguing about all that humanity milling about, literally grazing, and there's a lot of pressure to have fun. My impulse is to retreat to a quiet corner and observe, or to go where people aren't. I've also been accused, rightly, of catastrophizing such events, for I invariably speculate that these Taste events are chiefly a breeding ground for food-poisoning and savage sun-burns.

--Interesting how "taste" took on the connotation of generalized discernment. I haven't checked the OED yet to see when this happened, but I suspect it happened in the 19th century, and maybe the French triggered the move of applying aesthetics to food, beverages, clothing, and interior decoration. Allegedly, they are the inventors of the middle class and of middle-class "taste." But who knows? Maybe "taste" goes at least as far back as the classical Greeks. This will require a visit to the OED.

Apparently at the Wine Tent there are spittoons, into which you may expectorate the wine you've tasted, although I'm not sure whether expectorate takes a direct object. Hmmm. One of my departed uncles had the job of cleaning genuine spittoons, the tobacco-kind, when he was a lad in the 1930s. I think he told me this fact to suggest that my work for him--which included breaking rocks with a sledge-hammer, which he insisted upon calling a double-jack and not a sledge-hammer--was more pleasing than I might think.

I believe that rock-breaking and spittoon-cleaning both require a kind of detachment. One has to focus on the grain of the rocks, and I imagine one has to find a way not to dwell on the fact that the spittoon holds a great deal of saliva.

My dad owned a spittoon but never deployed it. It was considered okay in our household to spit tobacco juice into the wood stove (as long as a fire was burning), the fireplace (same rule), or off the back porch. I chewed tobacco for a while but gave it up long ago--although occasionally I do look nostalgically at a can of Copenhagen in the grocery store. I used a "spit cup" sometimes in the days of "dipping" tobacco. My intuition tells me that this discussion of tobacco and spitting is not very tasteful. Ya think?

I also learned today that a piece of dark chocolate--the unsweetened kind?--is a better way to cleanse the taste-buds than eating a bit of citrus fruit, in between gulps of liquid sour grapes. How to cleanse the taste-buds after chewing tobacco is different subject altogether.

I do hope they have a Poetry Tent at the Taste of Tacoma. Maybe you can go in there and ask to be read a poem, or leaf through an anthology, or write a poem and give it to someone, after which you'd say, "Here you go. Here's my poem." The Poetry Tent might be a good place to go after tasting a lot of wine and spitting it out.

What Do I Expect?

When I was growing up, I never did like it when, in response to something that went wrong (something with which I was concerned), an older person would say, "Well, what did you expect?" This sentiment was memorably rephrased in Robert Towne's script for Chinatown: "Forget it, Jake. It's Chinatown."

I don't think Jake ever learned the lesson, the lesson being a blend of cynicism, nihilism, and fatalism, nor have I. I keep expecting cable-news and metropolitan newspapers to report in much greater detail on the rise of the Taliban in Afghanistan (along with what looks like the impending exhaustion of American forces there); on the demi-monopolies of media-ownership (I think there are basically only 6 or 8 large owners now, such as G.E., Viacom, and Murdoch--mainly I'd like to see a mainstream report on this just to see how quickly the reporter would be fired); on the alleged fact that most of the oil from Alaska and Canada gets sold to . . . China; on what life is like for wage-earners in the U.S.; on the vastly disproportionate number of African American men and women in prison; and so on.

McClatchy, which owns a ton of newspapers and which bought Knight-Ridder (who did some of the best--only?--American reporting on Bush's "build-up" to the Iraq invasion), just fired a bunch of people from its papers, including the Tacoma News Tribune. One person I know who was fired may be one of the most community-service oriented citizens I've every met here. Another was heavily recruited from the Midwest just six months ago. The editor, of course, wrote a lachrymose column on the firings, said the paper still had 100 reporters in the South Sound, and said everyone was committed to hitting the "reset" button. Whatever the hell that means. I wish he'd write a column in which he tries to defend the benefits of media conglomerates and hostile take-overs, and how the story of media conglomeration is one "his" paper will not and cannot cover objectively. I also think that because of the proximity of the military bases (Air Force and Army), the paper has never been able to cover all aspects of the war, including protests, AWOL stories, the abandonment of veterans upon their return to the States, and torture. The paper has never analyzed its own complicity in taking the bait Bush threw it. (The News Tribune prints the newspaper at Fort Lewis. I think that represents a conflict of roles.) I found the reporting on the port-protests to be especially thin, biased, and incomplete. The paper flat-out missed some great stories within the story.

I know. What do I expect?

I expect Hollywood to make a good movie one of these days. I'd even settle for a movie based on a script that Robert Towne has lying around. Forget it, Jake. It's Hollywood. Maybe Adam Sandler will play the lead role in The David Hasselhoff Story. Maybe Pixar will do a documentary on veterans' affairs, war-protests, poverty, or torture. It can be narrated by a Pixar-lated, virtually stuffed animal.

162 Beers; More Than a Woman

So we trekked to Seattle today for a bit of business, and then we had dinner at a place called the Tap Room Grill. One of us (me) was out of place because the joint seemed geared to young urban professionals. I'm not young, I'm just barely urban (and not urbane), and although I have a profession, I don't really look professional.

The place's claim to fame is that it has 162 different kinds of beer available. That's impressive, and that's too many. At some point, the tyranny of choice (not quite as bad as the tyranny of no choice, I admit) kicks in. I wonder if anybody comes in and just gets stuck in a an Escher-loop by reading the beer-menu. Because I was going to operate a motorized vehicle weighing thousands of pounds, I went with the the one kind of mineral water they had, San Peligrino.

The conversation at our table focused chiefly on movies, for I was with the family's movie-expert, so expert that he actually knows how to download sub-titles for obscure foreign movies and has an encyclopedic knowledge of arcane strains of the horror-genre. Recommendations included a film called Torso and one called, I think, Shocking Mall. Then there's one that sound like a whimsical take on the chainsaw-movies; it's called The Tool-Box Massacre, or something like that. We both like Jim Jarmusch films, including Dead Man, with Depp (Robert Mitchum's final movie), and Coffee and Cigarettes.

On the music machine in this place, they played the Bee Gees' "More Than a Woman." My goodness, that took me back a few eons. Many of my associates at the time despised the Bee Gees for starting the disco-rage, killing off rock and roll (so the reasoning went), and leading to the unimpressive 1980s. I remember some of my friends being most amused by Paul Simon's comment that the Bee Gees sounded like singing dolphins. I thought that was pretty funny, too, but I also thought it may have been sour grapes. Also, I think music that gets people up and dancing in any particular eon is okay. Saturday Night Fever wasn't a bad movie, either, especially insofar as it took the trouble to look at working-class issues.

The Bee Gees did mystify me with some of their lyrics, however. "I Started a Joke" is a bit Kafkaesque. And "More Than a Woman" is perplexing. Is the woman a Supreme Commander or a demi-god? Is she Woman 2.0? Is she a Woman and also a CEO of the speaker's corporation? Or maybe the woman isn't just a woman but a trans-gendered person. Maybe that's it.

A bonus on the way home was that I got to hear "Boogie Shoes" by K.C. and the Sunshine Band, a group also despised by some of my friends back in the day but not by me. "Boogie Shoes" always struck me as more of a funk-song than a disco-song, and a darned good funk song. I'd recommend for your Ipod. What I liked about K.C. was that he was completely unpretentious, unlike some singer-songwriters we might mention from the 1970s and 1980s.

Somehow, however, I've misplaced my boogie shoes. They were more than some footwear to me (more than some footwear, more than some foot-wear to me).

Before we pulled into the driveway, I got to hear "Throw It Up" by Little John, or is it L'il John? He's so over the top that he amuses me to a laugh-out-loud extent, and of course I thought of Chapelle's impression of him and laughed more. I'd guess Little John's music is not on the Ipods of Clinton, Obama, and McCain.

Poets, Philosophy, Pyrrhonism, Pragmatism

Poets have a bit of a checkered history with regard to philosophy, among other things. Aristotle used dramatic poets, the playwrights of his time, or at least their work, as the basis for his Poetics--after Plato had suggested that in the perfect Kingdom, poets probably shouldn't be included, apparently because they make things up, unlike philosopher-kings, who always speak the truth, unless of course they're inventing dialogues between Socrates and opponents who always seem to fall for his tricks.

One of many problems may be that poets treat philosophy as they treat other items, as raw material for poetry. So literary critics can argue about how much German philosophers influenced Coleridge or how much Kant and Hartley influenced Wordsworth, but the by-product of such influence is always going to be idiosyncratic and quirky, especially in the poetry itself but also in the nonfiction prose the poets might write. One might also posit that the more purely philosophical a poet becomes, the less interesting his or her work may become, and one might go on to cite Alexander Pope and Matthew Arnold. Pope was a superb versifier, master of the heroic couplet and great manager of extended conceits, but oh my goodness, sometimes his poetry just wears you out with its "ideas." Ideas seemed, in a way, to paralyze or enervate Arnold, whom I don't think was a very good poet. Arguably, Yeats and Pound get downright loony in their philosophical and political turns.

A hopelessly broad generalization is that poets tend to be Aristotelian--grounded--as opposed to Platonic, tempted to look past or through what is here. "No ideas but in things," as Williams wrote--in a poem. Two schools of philosophy that might well be appealing to poets, then, are Pyrrhonism, a form of skepticism, and Pragmatism, as practiced, so to speak, by William James, bro of Henry "Hank" James, but not, apparently, a member of the James Gang, although a movie in which William and Henry rode with Jesse, or one in which Jesse lectured at Harvard and Yale, might be moderately amusing.

My understanding of Pyrrhonism is that it assumes for every good argument, a very good counter-argument can be found, and whether we can know anything for sure is not only doubtful but actively doubted. So I think you're just supposed to go with the flow, live according to the way things seem. Of course, extreme skepticism can lead to what they call "quietism," in which you accept all manner of things without squawking, including things that appear to you, in spite of your skepticism, obviously wrong. Unjust. Undoubtedly bad. I guess one appeal of Pyrrhonism is that in does focus on "appearances," on the concrete aspects of life, or at least on the sensory reports about same. Poets do seem inordinately fascinated by really specific, ordinary stuff. I mean, Hopkins wrote a great ecstatic sonnet about "dappled things," for Heaven's sake (literally for Heaven's sake).

Pragmatism, as advanced by Charles Pearce and William James, doesn't doubt everything; it just doubts philosophy, unless and until one or more persons can see how any philosophical idea will play out with Charles Pearce, William James, or whoever, literally, happens to be living at the time, breathing air, thinking, talking, trading, laughing, gardening, and blogging. Pragmatism in this sense is not anti-intellectual; the question is not, for example, "How will philosophy help put food on my table?" The question is more like "As I'm eating at the table, how will this or that philosophical idea alter my experience of eating at the table, along with everything else I'm doing at that moment, and everything else everyone else is doing?" My reading of James is that he constantly tries to remind philosophers and anyone else who will listen about how messy, voluminous, and shifting reality is. (At one point, he suggest that reality often "boils over" and overwhelms a fixed philosophy.) James isn't flatly opposed to idealism, or to a skepticism that suggests we can't really know anything, but he counters with the idea that, well, we apparently do know things, in the sense that we go around knowing and acting on knowledge all the time.

He actually pays philosophers (and scientists and anyone with bright ideas) a compliment, though, by arguing that what this or that age sees as "common sense" may be the result of a long, evolutionary process influenced by a person who had a great new idea. For instance, "common sense" now tells us that the Earth is round, but only because leap-ahead work by Copernicus and friends finally, slowly, got absorbed into everyday knowing. James thinks knowing is under constant revision, even when it may not seem to be, so he embraces the view that we simultaneously go around knowing things for sure and knowing that things for sure may not be for sure for long. This is sort of thinking is mightily bothersome to those craving absolutes, of course. At the same time, James by no means shies away from establishing an ethics.

James's work is highly poetic--full of imagery, anecdote, warm irony, and some jokes. He's far more accessible--and in a way, less abstract--than some of the prose from his brother Henry (I really mustn't call him Hank). Of course, people who "do" philosophy, will point immediately to the imagery, anecdote, and familiar rhetoric and assert "not philosophy!" People who "do" poetry, as readers or writers or both, are likely a) not to read William James's work at all and b) if they do read it, like all the arguments in favor of the contingent, ongoing, frustrating, but specific messiness of life as we, as you, live it.

In any messy case, here's a shout out to the four P's: Philosophy, Pyrrhonism, Pragmatism, and Poetry. What a mess they make.

The Lyricism of Politics

Ah, I love it when politicians wax poetic in their constant effort to keep the herd hypnotized.

Bush: "They [terrorists, presumably] hate our freedoms." But not as much as the Bush administration hates them, apparently. Warrantless wire-taps, suspended habeas corpus, executive power stretched to tragi-comic limits (the people have no right to hear what Cheney said to "energy" executives?), "signing statements" ("I laugh at your legislation, elected legislators! I am Texas's answer to Mussolini!").

Obama: "The Audacity of Hope." Has a nice ring to it. But if to hope has become audacious, then hope is probably just a lovely gesture. I think one aim of government might be to make hope commonplace. "Change you can believe in." Is that Obama's or Clinton's? I can't remember. I'll believe it when the next president completely revamps the machinery of secrecy and executive privilege started by Eisenhower and made worse since then. I'll believe it when the next president breaks up media and oil conglomerates, with the help of Congress. I'll believe it when the military tribunals (which Obama supports) go away. Etc.

McCain: As I've mentioned, if a person really favors straight talk, he or she doesn't lyrically refer to a bus as the Straight-Talk Express. McCain is also a self-styled "maverick," a poetic word that appeals to Americans' fondness for frontier independence. Oddly enough, here's the original meaning of maverick, according to the OED:

1867 in J. G. McCoy Hist. Sketches Cattle Trade (1940) 83 The term maverick which was formerly applied to unbranded yearlings is now applied to every calf which can be separated from the mother cow.

To be fair, we must acknowledge that the connotation of "maverick" has changed; nonetheless, the bar of independent thought is set pretty low when all you have to be is weaned and a year old--but still a part of that herd on the Chisum Trail. And what is McCain independent from? Not from any major policy-decision Bush has made, with the possible exception of torture. Not from lobbyists. Not from all the Anti-Trust abuses. With regard to the ever-expanding "privileges" of the Executive Branch, I suspect McCain would be like a pig in--I mean a maverick in manure.

It's a measure of a) my befuddlement and b) the blurring of campaign slogans that I don't know whether "Change you can believe in" belongs to Clinton or Obama. In any (or either) case, the phrase would have been trochaically more interesting (but far more nerdy) as "Change in which you can believe," which has roughly the same rhythm as "Tyger, Tyger, burning bright." Anyway, one can still believe in change with which one disagrees, so I'd need to hear more about what changes the person has in mind. I think "Good change you can believe in" is a more persuasive phrase, potentially.

I think that among Obama's most audacious moves is to decide to (and demonstrate the capacity to) raise a lot more money than McCain. When was the last time a Demo was that audacious? LBJ v. Goldwater? "Change (as in ka-ching) you can believe in."

Responses Appreciated

Recent comments on recent postings have informed me of the following, which I appreciate:

1. In Tacoma, not only does Alder (Street) turn into Pine which turns into Cedar, but Cedar turns into Oak. Maybe it just continues on down to California and becomes Palm Street. I think there's an idea for a movie or a short story in here somewhere. In Tacoma, people just blithely note that (for example) Pine turns into Cedar. No one seems to want to explore why this is so. I believe there's an existential and/or epistemological debate lurking in this street-name phenomenon. I don't recall Kant or Hegel writing about the streets in Tacoma. Clearly an oversight. Please note, however, that Hammett, in The Maltese Falcon, does mention the philosophy of Charles Peirce in a Tacoma-street context--in the splendid "Flitcraft" chapter, which all philosophy students, but especially those who like detective novels, should read.

2. The New Incredible Hulk may be worth seeing. I think I'll still wait for it to come to television, whereupon I can watch it in pieces. It's hard for me to digest these blockbusters at one sitting. They bust my block. I like to watch European movies on the IFC. The Europeans still make movies about people with human problems. It's very old-fashioned of them. The movies have stuff like conflict and dialogue. Actors play scenes. It's all very quaint.

3. Ants in some parts of Japan are a huge problem, so watch out. Apparently, they're a lot more trouble than humans are over there. Hmmm. Maybe there's a connection here to all those great giant-insect movies from Japan.

4. I was very glad to hear from another Chickering-piano-player (and Chickering-player-piano-piano-player).

5. At least one reader liked Browning's short poem. Those who didn't like the poem can take some consolation in the fact that the poem is short.