W.W.W.D.?
What would Whitman do?
Start the presses! Let the T-shirts and bumper stickers roll! I'll let Harold Bloom do the talking:
The effect of experiencing this combination is for Bloom (following Barfield), "a felt change of consciousness." To perceive the "otherness" of the beautiful in the reading of poetry opens one to the possibility of the beauty in an-other. Paul Ricoeur imports a similar idea in his late ruminations upon the possibility of the self--seeing oneself as another.
This is the challenge that Whitman presented continually in Leaves of Grass: singing his most strange self, or selves, Whitman would awaken us to a vision of America as a place where the (previously) untold beauties of otherness would gather.
"Yeah, but how do you make a buck off that?"
Get thee behind me, Satan! You make it at all the trades and professions that Whitman extolled; but you do so with a felt change of consciousness.
It strikes me as very odd that we have somehow lost the sense that practicality and romance can go hand in hand. Did we ever have it? Russell Goodman (American Philosophy and the Romantic Tradition) and others have tried to rearticulate this sense--tracing pragmatism's Romantic roots, for example. I myself published an article in the journal Soundings back in the mid-1990's in which I argued for what I termed a "Critical Romantic" ethos for lawyers. But none of this penetrates the national consciousness (if one can speak of such a thing) very far. It certainly has no traction among individuals in the upper reaches of our government. I would imagine that any one of the Gang of Four would defend their position with respect to Iran, for example, as being forged in the smithy of "reality." But it is, like every reality, one of their own making: it reflects their self-righteousness, their greed, their paranoia, their deep dishonesty about the available intelligence--the list of elements is quite long.
Somebody should tie Condi to a chair and make her read Leaves until she, well, leaves... And the same goes for the rest of them.
But rather than close this post with spleen, let me suggest that when we begin to broach questions of "world-making," "self-making," "reality-testing," "consciousness-expansion," etc., we are arriving at the philosophical thresholds of what I intend by the term "Romantic Orientalism"--both halves of which require explication. I intend to undertake that task shortly. But in the meantime: what would Whitman do?
Start the presses! Let the T-shirts and bumper stickers roll! I'll let Harold Bloom do the talking:
I think that poetry at its greatest--in Dante, Shakespeare, Donne, Milton, Blake--has one broad and essential difficulty: it is the true mode for expanding our consciousness. This it accomplishes by what I have learned to call strangeness. Owen Barfield was one of several critics to bring forth strangeness as a poetic criterion. For him, as for Walter Pater before him, the Romantic added strangeness to beauty: Wallace Stevens, a part of this tradition, has a Paterian figure cry out: "And there I found myself more truly and more strange." Bloom, The Art of Reading Poetry, New York, HarperCollins (2004), pp. 54-55.
The effect of experiencing this combination is for Bloom (following Barfield), "a felt change of consciousness." To perceive the "otherness" of the beautiful in the reading of poetry opens one to the possibility of the beauty in an-other. Paul Ricoeur imports a similar idea in his late ruminations upon the possibility of the self--seeing oneself as another.
This is the challenge that Whitman presented continually in Leaves of Grass: singing his most strange self, or selves, Whitman would awaken us to a vision of America as a place where the (previously) untold beauties of otherness would gather.
"Yeah, but how do you make a buck off that?"
Get thee behind me, Satan! You make it at all the trades and professions that Whitman extolled; but you do so with a felt change of consciousness.
It strikes me as very odd that we have somehow lost the sense that practicality and romance can go hand in hand. Did we ever have it? Russell Goodman (American Philosophy and the Romantic Tradition) and others have tried to rearticulate this sense--tracing pragmatism's Romantic roots, for example. I myself published an article in the journal Soundings back in the mid-1990's in which I argued for what I termed a "Critical Romantic" ethos for lawyers. But none of this penetrates the national consciousness (if one can speak of such a thing) very far. It certainly has no traction among individuals in the upper reaches of our government. I would imagine that any one of the Gang of Four would defend their position with respect to Iran, for example, as being forged in the smithy of "reality." But it is, like every reality, one of their own making: it reflects their self-righteousness, their greed, their paranoia, their deep dishonesty about the available intelligence--the list of elements is quite long.
Somebody should tie Condi to a chair and make her read Leaves until she, well, leaves... And the same goes for the rest of them.
But rather than close this post with spleen, let me suggest that when we begin to broach questions of "world-making," "self-making," "reality-testing," "consciousness-expansion," etc., we are arriving at the philosophical thresholds of what I intend by the term "Romantic Orientalism"--both halves of which require explication. I intend to undertake that task shortly. But in the meantime: what would Whitman do?
posted by Sidi Hamid Benengeli | 9:14 AM
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