Edward Estlin Cummings

"His style reflects his thinking, which was fiercely independent and vastly amused. His poetic eccentricities remained unchanged over the years. They marked him as a happy, unashamed, one-man romantic movement."

--John [Clellon] Holmes, "E. E. Cummings" in the World Book Encyclopedia.

The Romantic Humanism of Wallace Stevens

No less than Lucretius before him, "Stevens saw beneath the illusory surface of our world to the whirling vortex of the atom. He knew that life is motion and that structure is illusion. Like most of us moderns he felt from time to time the discomforts of motion sickness, and like most of us he felt a 'blessed rage for order' in the face of the uncertainties of whirl and flux. He knew, or came to know, that to give form and beauty to what is essentially without form or beauty is to falsify, that to fix 'reality' even momentarily is to create a fiction. But he came to know, too, that the final belief must be in a fiction and that the courageous man knows that it must be so and chooses carefully and well."

--Richard Allen Blessing, Wallace Stevens' "Whole Harmonium", Syracuse University Press (1970), 6-7.

Further Notes On Mazeppism

Mazeppism is a variety of Romantic humanism--a phrase as redundant, in my view, as "liberation theology." But what does such a phrase mean?

As terms and as movements or trends or tendencies or attitudes--rhetorical postures all--both "Romanticism" and "Humanism" have complex histories, and both are quite malleable when it comes to defining them. Each is a congeries of values--some overlapping, some competing, some downright contradictory.

What I mean by the phrase is open to interpretation. If one reads this blog, and its sibloglings, one might arrive, perhaps, at a definition. But what would be the point of that? Definitions provide us only with a false sense of security.

When, as an undergraduate, I read Lucretius, I wanted only to understand his argument, his point of view. I never suspected then how deeply his thought penetrated my own. Now I feel as though I cannot escape him.

The nature of things are as he sang them. What, then, are definitions but illusions?

Mazeppism is a Romantic Humanism. What is that?

This.

A Hopeful Form of Humanism: Mazeppism Re-Visited

The image of Mazeppa strapped naked to a wild steed and sent hurtling through a dark wood--chased by wolves (no less)--is, like all great religious images, symbolic of human truths.

A similar image, found in Homer's Odyssey, depicts Odysseus "strapped to the mast/Back to the mast/Begging to be untied" while the Sirens attempt to seduce him and his oarsmen into running their ship aground.

I have long associated these images with one another and each of them also with a third: that of Christ on the cross. Whenever I see a crucifix, I never see Rabbi Jesus hung on a gibbet, but all of humanity stretched out upon the planks of injustice: the scaffolding of a civilization founded upon violence and inequality and maintained by force of law and brute coercion.

Nevertheless, I tend to be somewhat selective when it comes to crucifixes. Most seem to appeal to a Mel Gibson-like aesthetic which revels in sado-masochistic depictions of the Christ figure: those which emphasize a beaten "savior." Since I find the notion that God demands human blood sacrifice in exchange for forgiveness unworthy of a just Deity, I reject the doctrine of sacrificial atonement. That makes the image of a crucifix problematic for me. Occasionally, however, one finds a crucifix (like the one above left) in which Christ appears almost unconnected to the cross--it is as if crucifixion and resurrection are, in some mysterious sense, one and the same event. Some sects of Gnostic Christians and the Qur'an endorse similar views of the Christ victorious over those who would railroad him to his death by torture. That is a Christology of which I approve.

At the end of his long and painful ride, Mazeppa lives to struggle on behalf of the oppressed. Odysseus escapes the enchantments of the Sirens to be re-united with his family. And, despite all odds, humanity overcomes its civilizational self-crucixion.

Mazeppism is, in fact, a hopeful form of humanism.

The Great Humanistic Revanchement

The Mazeppist, whose patron saint is Jude Thaddeus, also known as the patron saint of desperate or lost causes, has dedicated the coming year of 2012 to the "Great Humanistic Revanchement" (YGHR). To that end, he urges every reasonably educated American to read three (count 'em, only 3) books in the coming 12 months:

1) Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions;

2) Edward Said, Orientalism;

3) Stephen Toulmin, Cosmopolis.


Why these three? All published in the latter half of the 20th century, each book contains an antidote to three of the four horsemen of the 21st century apocalypse.

Reading Kuhn's SSR as an undergraduate enabled me to recognize the constructed nature of all knowledge--especially scientific knowledge. Such insight helps to bring one back from the lost highway of naive realism. Never again would I take the claims of so-called "experts" at face-value. My undergraduate course in statistics didn't hurt, either. Naive realism underwrites the Siamese twins of scientism and religious fundamentalism who somehow manage to sit astride the gray horse of the 21st century apocalypse.

Reading Said's Orientalism in the mid-1990's alerted me to the constructed nature of my "knowledge" of Asia and, in particular, of Islam. It also alerted me to the political uses and implications of such "knowledge," not to mention the irony that such "knowledge" is, in fact, ignorance. As the years have passed, I have become fairly critical of Said's own biases and blindnesses; nevertheless, Orientalism is a book that must first be read before it can be properly critiqued--and, once read, the deep truths it contains concerning the hypocrisy that infects all "Western" narratives of moral superiority will never allow one's conscience to rest. Such narratives underwrite the nationalistic jingoism, liberal condescension, and sublimated white supremacy that ride the black horse of the 21st century apocalypse.

Toulmin's Cosmopolis, a book I read before Orientalism, helped me to appreciate the catastrophic significance of the Thirty Years War for all of the subsequent history of Europe and its North American progeny. The catastrophe was not limited to the unprecedented slaughter that took place during the conflict itself, but to the manner in which Europeans chose to respond to the tragedy.

History is the record of unintended consequences and Toulmin, a student of Wittgenstein's, argues that the post-war Cartesian turn to dogmatic metaphysics and scientific certainty amounted to a counter-revolution against the humanism of Montaigne and Shakespeare. This counter-revolution continues to this day and underwrites jingoistic nationalism, scientism, and religious fundamentalism: all effects of that 17th century civil war. The Cartesian counter-revolution is the pale horse of the 21st century apocalypse that gallops behind the others and urges them forward.

As for the fourth horse of the 21st century apocalypse--the bloody red one--read these three books and you will see it coming with your own eyes.

The Most Important Fact In The World

The Mazeppist cannot improve upon Walter Pater's description of the two "large" classes of minds who, together, comprise the endangered species known as religious humanists:

Robert Elsmere was a type of a large class of minds which cannot be sure that the sacred story is true. It is philosophical, doubtless, and a duty to the intellect to recognize our doubts, to locate them, perhaps to give them practical effect. It may be also a moral duty to do this. But then there is also a large class of minds which cannot be sure it is false—minds of very various degrees of conscientiousness and intellectual power, up to the highest. They will think those who are quite sure it is false unphilosophical through lack of doubt. For their part, they make allowance in their scheme of life for a great possibility, and with some of them that bare concession of possibility (the subject of it being what it is) becomes the most important fact in the world.

—Walter Pater, Review of Mrs. Ward’s Robert Elsmere
Essays from "The Guardian" (London: Macmillan, 1910), 67-68.

I suspect that, although Pater wrote as if he were describing the thoughts of other people, he was really describing his own two-mindedness about religious belief. I would be surprised to learn that he did not, throughout his life, repeatedly cross the invisible line that divides one "class" from another.

His intellectual honesty is so rare in these days of desperate religious certainty. Had he the courage to write about his own hopes and doubts in the first person, he would have achieved the admirable candor of Montaigne.