----- Original Message -----
> by Ron Koertge
>
> "Even Ornaments of Speech Are Forms of Deceit."
> - History of the Royal Society>
>
> It's 1667. Reason is everywhere, saving
> for the future, ordering a small glass of wine.
> Cause, arm in arm with Effect, strolls by
> in sturdy shoes.
>
> Of course, there are those who venture> out under cover of darkness
to buy a bag
> of metaphors or even some personification> from Italy, primo and
uncut.
>
> But for the most part, poets like Roderigo
> stroll the boulevards in their normal hats.
> When he thinks of his beloved, he opens
> his notebook with a flourish.
>
> "Your lips," he writes, "are like
> lips."
That's fucking hysterical. Those Puritans -- er, we Puritans? -- were so suspicious of slippery language.
Of course, his linkage of Reason, realism and rationalism to less-figurative speech is bunk. Most great advancements in literature have been advancements of realism, contemporaenous with similar scientific and political lurches forward. Gk lit; Dante; Chaucer; Shakespeare; Flaubert; all advances in realism over predecessors. Romantics too. Modernists too: new world, new seeing. "The Waste Land" -- cubism -- is a realist advance, a reaction to the myth of superficial representation. The light of Reason shines broadly on the arts and sciences. Historically, rationalist thought has promoted art and artistic experimentation; irrationality and dogmatism have been the consistent enemies of metaphor. It wasn't the rationalists who closed the London theatres, but the Roundheads. The Royal Society's campaign against ornamental speech parallels similar oppositions in great literature: Shakes over Marlowe, Donne over Pope, Wordsworth, Arnold, Pound, Eliot.
Furthermore, it's unreasonable to apply the standards of scientific rhetoric to poetry. Rationalists see them as different realms, with different rhetorics; dogmatists, on the other hand, being literal-minded, tend to break down or, better put, are too stupid to see such distinctions. Thus, milk cartons with pictures of cows on them cannot be imported into Afghanistan.
In fact, secular rationalists have ardently promoted poetry -- figured speech -- art and culture -- as the necessary, only and saving grace of mankind (as opposed to religion). Aristotle did; the neoclassical humanists did; as did their 19c descendants (cf. Matthew Arnold, "Culture & Anarchy").
The underlying phenomenon Ron's really complaining about is unsophisticated, literalist groupthink: in short, dogmatic thinking. All philosophies dissolve into dogma in the mainstream; rationalism tends to do so less than its alternatives because its fundamental premises are experimentation and falsifiability. All literary breakthroughs are anti-dogmatic, and Reason is by definition anti-dogmatic; when its follwers become dogmatic, they cease to be reasonable.
Interestingly, scientific "truths" are by definition metaphors: gravitational theories, Newtonian or Einsteinian, are theories which always approach but cannot ever fully describe reality. Non-rationalists, particularly in the transcendental tradition (e.g. Protestants, Dissenters, Puritans), claim the right to apprehend utlimate reality directly. This is the ultimate literalism.
Artists who pick on rationalism don't understand it; they bite the hand that feeds them. Ron's poem deconstructs itself: the lines "'Your lips,' he writes, 'are like / lips'," intentionally or not, resonates with Gertrude Stein's "A rose is a rose is a rose ...," and constitutes the same sort of radically slippery speech, the figurativeness of which is multiplied by its apparent, but ultimately paradoxical, literalism. Her lips are like "lips"? The word lips? The word on the page? The referent? Lips generally? The Platonic, ideal set of Lips? Even more interestingly, it's not her lips that are like anything; it's the word "lips" that he writes in his notebook. Literally speaking, this is a very clever tautology: her "lips," as a word written in his notebook, are indeed very much like the word "lips" written in his poem: the same arbitrary sign in a semotic system.
The understanding of language as an ultimately arbitrary, radically metaphorical sign-system is a notion bequeathed to us by the rationalist tradition -- the same tradition that understands that all "truths" are fungible and theoretical. It's also the perspective which makes it possible to see this poem as a clever, slippery work of art, as opposed to a merely cute grouse.
