New Directions!

Today I created a new blog called Slowly Going Nova, where I will be posting music reviews and other works of pop-cultural import. Though it's gone neglected for a very, very long time, I'd like this blog to function as my creative writing outlet. Now to see if I'll follow through!

Traffic Lights

When I was a child
so surprised was I
at the size of the blind
traffic lights
with their hooded eyes
as they wait on the ground for repair.

Yet with lightness
they bounce on their wires,
yellow as a fisher's slicker
in the storm.

What a difference
distance can make.

A meditation on nothing, in response to the questions of February 18

STYLE
Flaubert wanted to write a novel
About nothing. It was to have no subject
And be sustained upon the style alone,
Like the Holy Ghost cruising above
The abyss, or like the little animals
In Disney cartoons who stand upon a branch
That breaks, but do not fall
Till they look down. He never wrote that novel,
And neither did he write another one
That would have been called La Spirale,
Wherein the hero's fortunes were to rise
In dreams, while his walking life disintegrated.

Even so, for these two books
We thank the master. They can be read,
With difficulty, in the spirit alone,
Are not so wholly lost as certain works
Burned at Alexandria, flooded at Florence,
And are never taught at universities.
Moreover, they are not deformed by style,
That fire that eats what it illuminates.

HOWARD NEMEROV

At first, I was at something of a loss to respond to this poem. On the suggestion of a classmate, I entered the word "nothing" into Google's image search. The first image to catch my (mind's) eye was this one by David J. Nightingale entitled There's Nothing On, taken/shamelessly stolen from Chromasia.com (thumbnail, click to zoom):

I'm sure that I was attracted initially by the striking image of something as profoundly modern as a television in a setting as primal as the sea, as well as by the reflection symmetry featured in the photograph. However, as I began to consider the image in the context of my present task (that is, the answering of one of the strikingly existential questions posed by my fellow 340 Forkers), I was struck by its applicability to this question by Brent Pantaleo, Krista Mathews and Katie Caralis:

3) What correlation is Nemerov influencing by presenting style in the form of religion, a modern economical juggernaut, and ancient civilization?

To begin, the first part of the question combines with Nightingale's photograph and my memory of a particular Calvin & Hobbes comic strip about television by Bill Watterson (which I read in my childhood) to remind me of Karl Marx's famous assertion that "Religion is the opiate of the masses." The strip is presented below. I'm referring specifically to the first two panels, but why waste quality comix? (thumbnail again; for the full-size strip.)


Of course, Marx's statement, as well as Nightingale's photograph and Watterson's comic, don't view their subjects in particularly sunny ways. All three imply that these human creations — religion, history, and modernity/entertainment — function merely as distractions. They are, in essence, style devoid of content.

Of course, to make this claim is not without controversy, particularly in the case of religion. I myself don't take a stand on this, being a person of varied spiritual and religious beliefs. For the sake of argument, however, I will assume at the very least that religion as a structured entity is an earthly institution, created by human beings. If we think in the direction implied by Brent, Krista, and Katie (or at least in the direction of my interpretation), Nemerov seems to say that these institutions — and I am considering our knowledge of ancient civilizations to be a modern institution, given that history is an after-the-fact creation only hopefully based upon fact — all share this quality. In the end, if God turns out (again, for the sake of argument) not to exist, then wasn't millennia-worth of religious thought kind of a waste of energy? And is modern culture a waste of time anyway? Or our concept of history?

Maybe this is just a product of my generally optimistic outlook, but, you know, I don't think so. And I think that my optimism is shared by Nemerov.

Given the faith-based natures of both religion and history, and given that these stories do not and, by their nature can not have outcomes, I am forced to conclude that this phantom book of Flaubert's can encapsulate the whole of human history and endeavor. Maybe someday the story will end — after all, time does have a habit of marching on — but we won't be here to see it. All we have is our little span in the middle. The novel in ineffably vast, and each of us is just randomly given a page. Try picking up a book you've never read and opening to a random page. Can any sort of meaning be gleaned from your page with no knowledge of context, of plot? If that page is all you've got to go by, who's to say that the book you hold has any meaning, any point, any content? All you know for sure is that it is a book, it has (a) style, and, maybe, if you could see the whole thing, it has a meaning. But you'll never know.

Maybe that's a bleak outlook to have. It makes me feel kind of free.

Anyway, since it sort of fits, and since I haven't provided any sort of visual for ancient civilizations, I'll leave you with "Ozymandias" by Percy Bysshe Shelley.

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shatter'd visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamp'd on these lifeless things,
The hand that mock'd them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains: round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

First post, in class

It's 7:57 PM, in the U-M's vast, northern waste. (I've just noticed my cellular phone's lack of service in this place; though it can be explained by this building's composition of steel, glass, and cement, this lack of signal is a compelling representation of our relative isolation.) During a discussion of the merits of forks relative to those of spoons, I found myself compelled to write a defense of spoons. I was not two sentences in, however, when I realized that, truly, the fork is the poetically superior utensil. From my notebook:

"The reverse of the spoon is convex, mountainous, Braille-like, an instrument of meaning and of its expression. However, it remains blunted; it lacks the inherent danger of the fork's sharpened tines. It is tame , and thus only able to contain platitudes, flat-itudes, in ironic contrast to its otherwise varied topography. The fork may contain those truths that, though unpleasant, remain true."

Also, I must remember to ask about the Mardi Gras beads.