found myself embarrassingly taken by Byron's Don Juan, so taking some time out to reapply myself to a little more reality, as it's seeping into my prose and personality. the first time I comment on the blackness of someone's eyes, or note how fast the sun is moving, I'm going to take a step back from reading the Romantics. such dense ideas and symbolism are scattered throughout the stanzas, but also are a lot of subtle (and less than subtle) attacks on other poets, or other vague "celebrity" figures of the time, one stanza commenting on death, or the affect a teacher has on a young mind, the next making a strange joke about wanting to have sex with a woman he met at a party. it's altogether too genius and too stupid for me.
this diary entry's poem is the first part of Choruses from 'The Rock' by T.S. Eliot, which I was reading aloud until he began to talk of knowledge, and then I fell out of all sorts and into my own mind, and shocked still.
The Eagle soars in the summit of Heaven,
The Hunter with his dogs pursues his circuit.
O perpetual revolution of configured stars,
O perpetual recurrence of determined seasons,
O world of spring and autumn, birth and dying!
The endless cycle of ideas and action,
Endless invention, endless experiment,
Brings knowledge of motion, but not of stillness;
Knowledge of speech, but not of silence;
Knowledge of words, and ignorance of the Word.
All our knowledge brings us nearer to our ignorance,
All our ignorance brings us nearer to death,
But nearness to death no nearer to God.
Where is the Life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
The cycles of Heaven in twenty centuries
Bring us farther from God and nearer to the Dust.
this was not at all like my reading of Coleridge, which was stunted and stopping and stumbling over the verbiage and meaning of older words, and the forgotten rhymes, and the background and culture from which it sprang, and the deeper meanings therein. this was a more visceral reaction, as all of Eliot's poems seem to have, against a problem which he identified almost a hundred years ago. it is simple to say that his idea simply had not gravitas, and therefore was not picked up by the morays of better or more influential thinkers, but it is also not too conspiratorial to think that the notion that a free and wild pursuit of knowledge could lead to issues in the world that some wish to create.
the popular culture's understanding of and reaction to S C I E N C E is herdlike and damaging. it is a problem that has only compounded since Eliot's time; that Nietzschean (but of course some ways removed) idea of state of spiritual nihilism brought on by faithlessness has in a pathetic and shameful way been overcome by a new worship: that of knowledge and scientism. in some circles this observation is quaint and almost self-evident, but it remains that among my more deracinated or culturally isolated colleagues and friends, it is a seemingly harmless thing to pour time and effort into.
why do I say seemingly harmless? because the outcome of pouring time and effort into something—and as you well know, this applies to video games, team sports, gambling, politics, fandom—is that you become invested in it: in its existence, and in the way that you want it to progress. for a man who is invested in something, if it looks like its foundations are going to be shattered, or its largest figures are being attacked, or its premises are failing, or especially if one of his friends insults the thing, then he must take it as a personal slight against all the time and effort he has poured into it. this necessarily is an insult, and he defends the thing in insulting riposte, no matter how meaningless—in most senses of the word—the thing is.
I don't like Rick & Morty.
earnestly, Elliot
