First a passage, a reading of an image of an image of an image (Milton's "What thou seest, fair creature, is thyself") from Stephen Knapp's Literary Interest:
Eve looking into the lake in the moments following her creation: does she fall in love with the image of herself, or should we read God's equation to mean that what she falls in love with is what she herself really is, namely, an image? (LI 53).
Secondly, what Knapp extrapolates from this image, a notion of "self-discovery...by subordination of [Eve's] consciousness," or more generally "the attribution of self-awareness to figures traditionally deprived of full consciousness" (LI 53).
And then the thinking that pursues these connections with the extratextual. Or does it always happen this way? From text to world, and then back to text? I found myself trying to write a poem the other day that would succeed in breathing life into something concrete--no eidos but in words. Instead, I ended up suspended upon a Platonic generality--an ending whereby Love rides high and truth holds on for dear life. Why is the concrete universal so elusive these days? Has there been a gradual imaginative separation of the two--particularity/universality--in our culture? That gets me toward a question, or set of questions, I am trying to ask myself and the poets I am reading for my dissertation. How and why does the value of traces of the sacred in secular modernity challenge poets to do a certain kind of work--philosophical investigations of the secular--that sustains and rethinks the concrete universal? Furthermore, why do poets variously see this project as a necessarily ethical one?
Here I am, lost in questions, forgetting where I started, not knowing where I go. It is starting to feel like autumn out there...
Have you read Gide’s “Les Faux Monnayeurs”? That’s where he comes up with the concept of “mise-en-abyme”. Apart from this, I find your questions extremely pertinent, and I guess I should add that the answers, even though they may abound, are not necessarily easy (and easily graspable) ones. I wonder if we can re-inscribe your distinction between particularity/universality back into creation/mimesis. That could possibly illuminate the path to answer your question about poets rethinking the concrete universal. I do not think, however, that it’d help you see why the project is ethical. But again, these are extremely challenging points, and I’d like to see where you’re going with them.
ReplyDelete