Our Questionable Gratitude (2)
First, an apology
I have been leaving things out.
A friend asked me why my thinking here about poetry — and poetry’s questionable capacity for bringing people together in mutual understanding — hasn’t included a description, or even a recognition, of how extraordinarily painful it is for a person to feel unknowable.
He was right: I haven’t described that feeling of deep isolation. I haven’t even tried. Feeling unknowable is an agonizing (and probably common) modern human experience. Why haven’t I included this?
Perhaps I do not want to talk about myself: and it is unavoidable to refer to this feeling as myself feeling it; I cannot experience the feeling of being unknowable as another person than myself.
Or perhaps I believe expressing this feeling of unknowability is only adequate in that strange transmission that I am trying to understand: the poem. But if this is the case, then these recent Appeals are committing the fallacy of begging the question: Why should we believe that poetry can conquer Other Mind Skepticism and the feeling of unknowability at its core? Because poetry has some special, mysterious capacity to give us a sense of communion and mutual understanding in which we can believe. This isn’t good enough: I do not believe in the mystical. Things can be articulated and explained. I don’t want to throw up my hands.
Another friend told me that in focusing on Tolstoy’s disdain of so much artwork, I’d forgotten to cite an instance when art helped me feel that it was possible for me to be known (the very thing I’m trying to understand more fully). She was right: Impatient or unwilling to delve into personal history (perhaps in fear of exposing my own aesthetic allegiances) I added a throwaway line about an early encounter with Poe, but it’s hardly enough. It isn’t a description of why and how I felt understood.
What has been compelling me to leave out the very things that these Appeals were meant to investigate?
Where there are defense mechanisms, there are fears: I am afraid that these thoughts on misunderstanding and unknowability will themselves be misunderstood, thus compromising any endeavor toward knowledge and understanding in the first place.
But I am also afraid that by putting these thoughts into an analytic mode of speaking I am distancing myself from the very issue I am trying to investigate and more fully understand. I am afraid that a tone of distancing is a posturing that could even deceive me, as I continue to try to think.
These are just some of the dangers that come from trying to think through poetry in philosophical modes, while trying to avoid reducing one to the other (in either direction). The reason I am trying to think about poetry in these ways is to come to a better understanding of how poetry relates to truth, where truth is Truth — not subjective, unverifiable, unsubstantiated ‘truth.’ I want to hold the belief that art can be valued beyond the subjective. I am trying to earn that belief, however imperfectly.
Thank you to those who are willing to confer. With these dangers and pitfalls in mind, I will try to continue toward a conclusion.
❂
Our Questionable Gratitude, cont.
Remember: Tolstoy’s standard for art is that it creates communion between reader and author; beauty — and other special effects — is a moot point. And remember what Stanley Cavell suggests: Poetry has the capacity to cure us of the skeptical worries that make us doubt whether other people can have the same experiences we’re having or understand our inner experiences. In “Knowing and Acknowledging” (1958) he writes:
There is a natural problem of making such experiences known … because one hasn’t forms of words at one’s command to release those feelings, and hasn’t anyone else whose interest in helping to find the words one trusts. (Someone would have to have these feelings to know what I feel.) Here is a source of our gratitude to poetry.
And if I draw from my own early experiences in coming to love poetry, it does seem right that what we require from an encounter with art goes beyond beauty, pleasure, strangeness.
So, if poetry does have such potency to counter Other Mind Skepticism, what kind of remedy is it: a momentary treatment for an otherwise natural condition of alienation, one that’s essential to being human, or does it point to a cure? And, while it sounds well and good that we should be grateful to poetry, as soon as we ask what it is exactly about this encounter is so powerful, it becomes more obscure.
In the passage above, Cavell seems to suggest that poetry can give us “forms of words” (beyond our own command of the language) that convince us that those words capture the truth of our inner experiences. This sounds perhaps needlessly abstract, but I think it becomes understandable when you think about the few poems you return to, as if they occupy the role of special confidants. (When I read Fern Hill, I become convinced that Dylan Thomas wholly captured the inner states I, too, experienced — despite vastly different circumstantial details — in childhood. A question to consider: Which works of art do this for you?)
In “Between Acknowledgment and Avoidance,” (1979) Cavell refers to, and slightly expounds on, his original call for our gratitude to poetry (pay special attention to the ending parenthetical here):
I once accounted for the sense of unknownness by saying that an individual may ‘take certain among his experiences to represent his own mind — certain particular sins or shames or surprises of joy — and then take his mind (his self) to be unknown so far as those experiences are unknown.’ Does an individual in such straits take it that his existence is unknown? Perhaps he takes it that he exists for the others as unknown; anonymously, as it were. Perhaps he or she has the sense, somehow, that he or she is different, exceptional. (They may, for this reason, suppose that poetry is meant only for them, since only poetry can find what suffices for their knowledge. But everyone stands in need of the power of poetry, so long as anyone does. Society merely limits who may have it. This is one measure of the disorder of the world.)[1]
In relation to our specific question about why poetry has the power to soothe the skepticism in us, it may seem like both of these passages say something pretty straightforward: A person, lacking the resources to properly convey the experiences she takes to be expressive of her inner self, is able to turn to poetry for a more capable and trustworthy expression of her inner states. Then we can infer that this person can use the poem to express to someone else what she could not express about herself.
But there are tremendous assumptive leaps if we infer this picture of poetry from these passages. These leaps complicate the capability of poetry to soothe skepticism. Think of the experience of sending a friend a poem that you believe competently captures your inner state and that friend responding with an entirely different understanding of the poem. How dissonant and potentially more isolating that exchange can be!
But perhaps it is not the use of the poem in an exchange between two readers that soothes skepticism of other minds, but the poem itself. If I take the poem itself as expressive of my inner state, the poem seems to become a testament (to me) to my mind being knowable in principle. This relates to Tolstoy’s communion thesis. The poem exists in the world and was written by someone other than myself, so why shouldn’t that suffice to show that others can have my experience? The problem with this is that it still does not assure me that I can know that I have interpreted the poem competentantly. If I cannot verify this, what is to prevent me from coming to doubt my relationship with the poem? If I lacked the capacity to express myself in the words that I found to be expressive of my inner states, why should I assume that my interpretation is the truth of the poem?
Let’s say I could ask the author — what kind of exchange would that be? How could I communicate what I take to be the inner things that I need to express other than showing the author his own poem? (This would be the situation if I subscribe to the idea that poetry is unsummarizable, which is a thesis some philosophers of language hold.) If I think that I could offer summaries of my inner states to the author, how could I verify that the author of the poem interprets and understands my descriptions of my inner states sufficiently well to judge whether his poem captures them, especially if we’ve established that I’ve turned to the poem precisely because I lack the forms of words that sufficiently express my inner states? In short, in these interactions with a poem, some suspension of skepticism — or some acts of trust — are still necessary for poetry to speak to us.
Given all the complications an encounter with poetry potentially offers, do we turn to poetry only in situations where plain everyday speaking, or analytical/philosophical language seems to fall short?
One problem with this is that the shifting of contexts that Cavell (elsewhere in his 1958 essay) finds unfair in the antiskeptic’s treatment of the skeptic is precisely what he took to be an immoral treatment of the skeptic’s concerns. If the skeptic doubts whether he exists and the antiskeptic argues: “Here is your hand — therefore you exist,” the antiskeptic isn’t really taking seriously the crisis the skeptic expresses, which includes doubting the existence of his own perceptions that show another person pointing out the skeptic’s hand. So if Cavell thinks this shifting to plain-spoken ‘common sense’ talk is unfair to the skeptic, why should shifting modes of speech toward the poetical be somehow more fair and potentially more soothing? Are we to suppose that poetry has some power to pick up the slack from other forms of speech, or that other forms of speech are essentially limited by literal word meanings and regular grammar and syntax? Why should increasingly flexible uses of language, expansive word meanings, and untraditional syntax necessarily expose a bridge between minds or a remedy for the worry, the germ from which other mind skepticism becomes an affliction? Is poetry just swooping in, like a magician’s sleight of hand, changing the context from literal or investigative to something else? And what is this something else?
The original passage (the “gratitude” passage) suggests that a poem is importantly different than a person and that we might trust a poem more than we can trust other people. The later passage extends this sentiment to suggest that one may trust poetry to be representative of one’s own experience so much that one becomes possessive of it, excluding oneself and poetry from the world: “Human beings do not naturally desire isolation and incomprehension, but union or reunion, call it community,” Cavell writes, “It is in faithfulness to that desire that one declares oneself unknown.”
But if anyone stands in need of the power of poetry to speak for our inner states, this must be true for everyone in virtue of being the kind of creature that has a notion of a self and picks out mental states as representative of oneself. While it is a “natural problem” that we take inner states to be representative of ourselves and have difficulty expressing these states, it is not a natural problem, Cavell suggests, that so many people do not turn to poetry to help make themselves known; this is a contingent problem that stems from society’s limitations of who may have access to the power of poetry. (How can these limitations be broken down?)
I think that Cavell’s perspective that poetry offers a remedy for our sense of feeling unknowable, for Other Mind Skepticism, works only if we assume that a skeptic’s total, simultaneous distrust of language is impossible. That is, Cavell assumes that a complete distrust of language would contradict being human. In being forced to even minimally trust language in order to be human, there will always be the uncertainty that other language users, including myself, are reliable. And in this picture of the world, poetry shows us our limits and aspirations as linguistic creatures, sometimes illuminating something we could not ourselves articulate, and other times entirely missing the mark. This is one way of understanding why the concept of poetry elicits strong responses: devotion and sacrifice on the one hand, indifference and disdain on the other.
So Cavell believes that shifting the context to poetry can soothe the skeptic’s concerns. Cavell assumes that poetry has this power because it is more capable of acknowledging the crisis the skeptic experiences. If we accept this, we still haven’t said what specifically about poetry has the power to acknowledge and speak for the skeptic in a way that rings true.
In order for poetry to convince us of its truth, its capacity to speak for our inner experiences, and its remedy for skepticism, I think that this entails at least two requirements of poetry: A poem must 1) say something determinative, and 2) show itself worthy of trust. In my next post, I’ll try to justify these requirements. And I will also try to say why the advent of the creative writing workshop very much complicates these issues. Remember: “Everyone stands in need of the power of poetry, so long as anyone does. Society merely limits who may have it. This is one measure of the disorder of the world.” Is the workshop the way people are given access to poetry? Or is it one way society limits who may have access? Again, (because it is worth asking again and again) how can these limitations be broken down?
[1] Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), 460-461.