keatsy

A Year After Graduation…

Today, someone tweeted this question and I thought I would try to answer it:

Um..let’s see:

I can erase whole objects from a picture in Photoshop using Clone Stamp.

I can calculate a pretty complicated equation in Excel, after only a few trial & errors.

I can use the words “CAM,” “Cap Rate,” “Lien,” “Amortization,” “Profit Sharing,” and “Estoppel” confidently (most of the time).

I can pay my own car and health insurance.

I can walk to the grocery store and to the bar.

I can lose five pounds.

I can go to a party or networking event by myself.

I can ignore my ex-boyfriend’s text messages.

All in all, I’d say it’s been a pretty successful, though anticlimactic, year since my college graduation. Here’s to hoping next year’s list is a little more impressive… (though I am really proud of that last one).

Getting to know someone in the 21st century

People love to talk about how technology is ruining real, meaningful human relationships; about how tweeting, texting and commenting all day long instead of speaking face to face prevents any real connection from forming. Most of these people are our parents or our 40+ co-workers, but sometimes it’s the hipster, 20-something, return-to-our-roots type crowd as well, blaming laziness and the American demand for easy, instant gratification.

I see the validity in some of their points: how texting at the dinner table removes you from the conversation at hand and allows you to be more aloof; how “getting to know” someone through by reading their blog posts and stalking them of Facebook is really only one-sided and may not show all of the facets of a personality that getting to know someone face-to-face, with their gestures, body language and tone, can. But, I also think that technology has become the scapegoat in our society for the distance people feel toward one another, something that I don’t think is necessarily new or a direct effect of Facebook or Twitter.

People, inherently, are mysteries to one another. Just like basically every piece of literature tells us in some respect, it’s impossible for one person to know another fully. There is such a sea of opinions, traditions, insecurities, memories and loyalties hidden under each human facade that to know all of them is ludicrous. We don’t even recognize all of our own layers; how are we going to understand those of someone completely apart from ourselves?

I’m not saying that our parents believed that before cell phones and the internet, everyone had a complete and fulfilling knowledge of one another without any  misunderstandings or mysteries due to the fact that they had more face-to-face interactions, but I do think that the wedge technology has put in relationships is greatly exaggerated. In fact, I think most technology (aside from texting at the dinner table) increases our knowledge of each other, and helps aid in communication and understanding. Sure, you may not be able to read your boyfriend’s tone in the ambiguous text message he sent you, but at least there’s a line of communication going between you that doesn’t have to be reserved for a date or hand written letter that you receive once a week. Also, that friend that moved to New York doesn’t have to drop off of your radar because you can see what she’s been up to by looking at her Facebook, emailing her and following her travel blog. These outlets may lack the personal quality of an individual conversation reserved only for you, but why is that advantageous? Isn’t shared information just as informative as something shared in private? I would rather read about my friend’s life on her tumblr than simply get a snippet of information after we’ve finished playing phone tag for two months.

So, I see both sides, but maybe we need to ease up on today’s technology a little bit; it’s hard to get to know people in general, and sometimes the occasional text or Facebook stalking session can help.

W. W. Norton: First Lines from New Books Out Today: July 18, 2011

Writing

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about writing and what it means, and what would happen if we didn’t have the capability to write. Most people, it seems, write down at least something during their lives— whether it’s diary entries, e-mails between family members, or Facebook messages between friends. I wonder, though, how much of it speaks about who they truly are and what they believe, and whether it even matters.

I read a while ago an essay by Loren Eisley called “The Long Loneliness,” and he mentioned something that has stuck in my mind every since. He says, “Only the poet who writes speaks his message across the millennia to other hearts. Only in writing can the cry from the great cross on Golgotha still be heard in the minds of men.”

He speaks about animals, then, and their inability to record communication, to remember between generations or to look toward the future. We can learn from them, he says, in that they do not need to proclaim their genius, but are quiet and content in keeping their minds to themselves. “[The Dolphin’s] genius is declared in his doing nothing in particular to prove it. It is declared in his pyradimical silence.”

I think, though, that the human dilemma is the same. Is it more admirable to have innovative, insightful thoughts and never share them, or to proclaim them to the world by writing them down? And, if you do write them down but no one reads them, does that mean they’re meaningless? Do thoughts only have meaning if they are communicated to someone else?

It’s sort of like what Virginia Woolf was saying in To the Lighthouse in that there is a sea with infinite depths inside everyone, but a barrier when it comes to communication and truly knowing someone. It’s kind of sad when you think about it, but hopeful in the fact that everyone shares the same dilemma.

Anyway, I’ve resolved to write a little bit more, to record my thoughts, and, even if no one ever reads them, at least they will not die with me, as they do with the dolphins.

collaborative poetry-- love it!

Art

How are you supposed to know what’s art and what’s not? It seems easy when a professor tells you, points out the beautiful parts, shows you where there is more than what simply meets the eye. But what about when you leave college? When all of a sudden there are a plethora of galleries, of emerging writers, of haughty new designers, each telling you that he or she is the best, is the most understated, the most avante garde, the most fascinating?

I’m not very sure what the standards are for art— and I’m not sure they change for art’s different modes— literature, painting, performance, architecture, fashion, anything. How does Koons get to call two vaccuum cleaners art, while Bernini painstakingly carved realistic goddesses out of marble? I understand that it is all a progression, all a questioning, especially on the contemporary artists’ front, of what art truly is, and a pushing of those limits, but I don’t know what else ties them together. How do you see a natural swirl in the dirt and not confuse it with a Robert Smithson?

Again, I’m not sure, but in some way it has to do with intentionality (even if the artists refuses to say he “made” it), in that artists have a vision, even if that vision involves completely removing meaning and subjectivity from the work. 

Part of it, too, must come from a sort of self-sufficiency; that the artist need not lay out on a platter his or her meaning and intentions. Though I don’t think an artist’s true goal or meaning is ever fully apparent to a viewer, or even to the artist, it does seem as though there should be some vibe you can pick up on that tells you something is meaningful, that it has a purpose, and that somehow there is much more beneath the surface of the work that is waiting to be found, or perhaps just enjoying dwelling in its depths. Art, it seems, has a life of its own, instead of a life superimposed onto it, making it static and seasonal, instead of dynamic and eternal.

So, though no one is going to tell me which books on the New York Times bestseller list are going to become classics in the future, I should be able to know on my own whether they’re worthy of such a title or not. And, when I think about it, it’s kind of freeing to decide for myself what is art and what is not— to see and read things before the standards are in place— so that it truly does come from the heart, instead of what some critic may tell me.

Blasphemy

wwnorton:

Let the blasphemy be spoken: poetry can save us,
not the way a fisherman pulls the drowning swimmer
into his boat, not the way Jesus, between screams,
promised life everlasting to the thief crucified beside him
on the hill, but salvation nevertheless.

Somewhere a convict sobs into a book of poems
from the prison library, and I know why
his hands are careful not to break the brittle pages.

Martín Espada, from The Trouble Ball

What should poetry do?

Today, we talked about W.H. Auden’s “In Memory of W.B. Yeats,” and the line “For poetry makes nothing happen” stuck with me.

Of course, the romantics were forever concerned with what exactly the office of poetry was, and Keats didn’t exclude himself from this. “Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world,” said Shelley; and Yeats, a sort of bridge person between the romantics and the moderns said:

“A little lyric evokes an emotion, and this emotion gathers others about it and melts into their being in the making of some great epic; and at last, needing an always less delicate body, or symbol, as it grows more powerful, it flows out, with all it has gathered, among the blind instincts of daily life, where it moves a power within powers, as one sees ring within ring in the stem of an old tree.”

Poetry, Keats thought, has “a palpable design on us,” whether we realize it or not. It certainly had one on him, admitting in one of his letters, “I cannot exist without Poetry,” and in another, “This morning poetry has conquered…There is an awful warmth about my heart like a load of immortality.”

He said that “poetry should surprise by a fine excess…it should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance. Its touches of beauty should never be half-way, thereby making the reader breathless, instead of content. The rise, the progress, the setting of Imagery should, like the sun, come natural to him, shine over  him, and set soberly, although in magnificence, leaving him in the luxury of twilight.”

I think, based on this, that Keats may side more with Auden in saying that “poetry makes nothing happen,” and with Yeats’ subtle diffusion of poetic influence, instead of the aggressive, “Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” He sees poetic radiance as something much more subtle than that, something that leaves an afterglow, not a map for how to live your life.

Though poetry may make nothing happen, it does let things happen on their own. One man who reads one touching poem may change ever so slightly after that, creating the smallest ripple effect in society and adding a new ring to the old tree, though that poem made no explicit designs on his life.

Poetry, in its action, is passive and receptive, not aggressive and demanding. Like Keats realized towards the end of his career, its not the active seeking out that is important, but the quiet reception of nature’s truth, however subtle and unsatisfactory it may be.

So, don’t read a poem trying to find the solutions to your life’s problems, or to learn a new way to live. Read it for what it is, and let it affect you how it will, though it may not make anything happen.

Whoa it’s been a while! I’m not sure how long a blog on Keats can stay fresh, but he sure stays fresh in my mind. We’ve been learning in class about Modern vs. Romantic writing. Though I know Keats has always been classified as a Romantic, now I’m not so sure. It seems as though, according to T.E. Hulme’s definition, that he fits both categories pretty well.

To Hulme, moderns are classicists that are firmly groundly in “the real,” and recognize the boundaries of human nature. Romantics, he says, get carried away and go off on tangents that try to escape “the real,” which to them is torturous and enslaving; they seek those sublime moments that can let them enter what they think it real— the world of the imagination.

Keats, though, maybe wasn’t so easy to put in a box. Sure, he had his moments of trying to escape painful human experience— “Nightingale” and “Grecian Urn” definitely don’t help his case. But, then again, he always came tumbling back down into the here-and-now, no matter how painful it was to him. And, when that crash landing happened, he realized something: that it actually wasn’t so bad.

Especially in “Ode on Melancholy” or in “To Autumn,” or even “Bright Star,” he realizes that what’s truly beautiful is that pain, because it’s so real. Not “real” in the Romantic sense that reality must be a total escape from the empirical and tangible, but “real” in the sense of what humans actually experience together— painful or not. He says in “Autumn” that, though the plains are “stubble” and empty, showing the mournful end of the harvest, they have a “rosy hue.” It’s almost like they have a human blush, giving them vitality despite their sad barrenness. In the end, for Keats, it’s not about human experience vs. the life of the imagination, or sensation vs. thought. It’s about what’s true— a subject that can dissolve those dichotomies and transcend generational labels.