The Perfection Spectrum
Suddenly — despite my misgivings ever starting a sentence with such — suddenly, I imagined a world without poets, in two parts.
More Kant than Freud but free of both, first I imagined poetry as equal-opportunity sublimation, subliming both what we want to see and what we don't. What we want to see — the secret centers of our being, well-walked feet soaking in attractively rustic buckets of warm water, 24-hour museums, lives lived up and down but always tethered to our world the space elevator — and what we don't want to see — the blood of children in the streets, corn-dog grease in the carnival midways, half-way houses gutted of half their funding, Aberzombification of old-fashioned promiscuity — All redeemable by the poet, in his picking up each handle of contingency chanced across and kissing it with the lips he has; in his tissue-paper and butcher-paper wrapping of the good bad and ugly alike in probative words of concern and discovery. All boats lifted. All of life's bits, worldly and wordly, deliverable in words from their clichés of meaningless passing and passed over, finally, into clichés themselves in need of further deliverance, unendingly and unendably.
And then I imagined all of this obsolete. A water-wheel world with the goods on their pedestals and the bads buried in holes; the good perfectly actualized and the bad perfectly gone. No gaps between the world we want and the world we have; no need of wordsmiths to forge any bridges across. No need to make ornaments of anything since everything is already self-beautifying: a sphere without a crust.
It was mildly terrifying (like an oncoming car only for two seconds too oncoming, too brief to be true-blue terror). So I added another line to my growing list of reasons why writers write —
To cherish equally both end-zones of the perfection spectrum, close to and far from, in some secular allegiance to the Christian-Apologist message: Beneath the atoms and strings, beneath the sensations and states of being momentarily fragmentarily known, the world is made of redemption.
More Kant than Freud but free of both, first I imagined poetry as equal-opportunity sublimation, subliming both what we want to see and what we don't. What we want to see — the secret centers of our being, well-walked feet soaking in attractively rustic buckets of warm water, 24-hour museums, lives lived up and down but always tethered to our world the space elevator — and what we don't want to see — the blood of children in the streets, corn-dog grease in the carnival midways, half-way houses gutted of half their funding, Aberzombification of old-fashioned promiscuity — All redeemable by the poet, in his picking up each handle of contingency chanced across and kissing it with the lips he has; in his tissue-paper and butcher-paper wrapping of the good bad and ugly alike in probative words of concern and discovery. All boats lifted. All of life's bits, worldly and wordly, deliverable in words from their clichés of meaningless passing and passed over, finally, into clichés themselves in need of further deliverance, unendingly and unendably.
And then I imagined all of this obsolete. A water-wheel world with the goods on their pedestals and the bads buried in holes; the good perfectly actualized and the bad perfectly gone. No gaps between the world we want and the world we have; no need of wordsmiths to forge any bridges across. No need to make ornaments of anything since everything is already self-beautifying: a sphere without a crust.
It was mildly terrifying (like an oncoming car only for two seconds too oncoming, too brief to be true-blue terror). So I added another line to my growing list of reasons why writers write —
To cherish equally both end-zones of the perfection spectrum, close to and far from, in some secular allegiance to the Christian-Apologist message: Beneath the atoms and strings, beneath the sensations and states of being momentarily fragmentarily known, the world is made of redemption.
posted by Christopher Phelps at 12/22/2008 02:13:00 AM
1 Comments:
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