When writing about literature and philosophy there are three obvious tropes: the existential or absurdist nior, the speculative fiction, and the condemnation of poetry. Not that poetry hasn’t had its defenders, and if Mark’s rant is indication, the sort of “deepity” he seems to accuse McCarthy of can easily be applied to most poets. In fact, Zizek would apply atrocities to us and except his favorite forms of pulp drama from such dangerous Romanticism. However, this seems to miss why both Nietzsche and Wittgenstein defended poetry: it alludes to concepts which the necessary rectification of philosophy seem ill-suited to expressing.
So this leaves us with a problem: does literature, particularly figurative literature, dwindle into vagueness? There is a rationalist tendency that Wittgenstein was aware of in both analytic and more mystically inclined philosophy to confuse precision of nomenclature with precision of thought. To have precision of nomenclature and precision of thought completely overlap, one must, ultimately, askew both language and qualia. Abstract logic and mathematics feel in this role.
I don’t know, however, that such precision is necessarily clarifying as the thoughts we have are larger than one of semiotic systems for expressing them. Poetry, I think, alludes to this. So, I’ll conclude with a few lines from an undeniably philosophical poet, Wallace Stevens, whose allusions seem to hint at larger categories which would be hard to taxonomize exactly:
The Idea of Order at Key West She sang beyond the genius of the sea.
The water never formed to mind or voice,
Like a body wholly body, fluttering
Its empty sleeves; and yet its mimic motion
Made constant cry, caused constantly a cry,
That was not ours although we understood,
Inhuman, of the veritable ocean.
The sea was not a mask. No more was she.
The song and water were not medleyed sound
Even if what she sang was what she heard.
Since what she sang was uttered word by word.
It may be that in all her phrases stirred
The grinding water and the gasping wind;
But it was she and not the sea we heard.
For she was the maker of the song she sang.
The ever-hooded, tragic-gestured sea
Was merely a place by which she walked to sing.
Whose spirit is this? we said, because we knew
It was the spirit that we sought and knew
That we should ask this often as she sang.
If it was only the dark voice of the sea
That rose, or even colored by many waves;
If it was only the outer voice of sky
And cloud, of the sunken coral water-walled,
However clear, it would have been deep air,
The heaving speech of air, a summer sound
Repeated in a summer without end
And sound alone. But it was more than that,
More even than her voice, and ours, among
The meaningless plungings of water and the wind,
Theatrical distances, bronze shadows heaped
On high horizons, mountainous atmospheres
Of sky and sea.
It was her voice that made
The sky acutest at its vanishing.
She measured to the hour its solitude.
She was the single artificer of the world
In which she sang. And when she sang, the sea,
Whatever self it had, became the self
That was her song, for she was the maker. Then we,
As we beheld her striding there alone,
Knew that there never was a world for her
Except the one she sang and, singing, made.
Ramon Fernandez, tell me, if you know,
Why, when the singing ended and we turned
Toward the town, tell why the glassy lights,
The lights in the fishing boats at anchor there,
As night descended, tilting in the air,
Mastered the night and portioned out the sea,
Fixing emblazoned zones and fiery poles,
Arranging, deepening, enchanting night.
Oh! Blessed rage for order, pale Ramon,
The maker's rage to order words of the sea,
Words of the fragrant portals, dimly-starred,
And of ourselves and of our origins,
In ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds.
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have you read Critchley’s Stevens book, it’s pretty good.
“Earlier physicists are said to have found suddenly that they had too little mathematical understanding to cope with physics; and in almost the same way young people today can be said to be in a situation where ordinary common sense no longer suffices to meet the strange demands life makes. Everything has become so intricate that mastering it would require an exceptional intellect. Because skill at playing the game is no longer enough; the question that keeps coming up is: can this game be played at all now and what would be the right game to play? (CV 27)”
http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/perloff/witt_intro.html
I love that you quoted Perloff there, but no I haven’t read Critchley’s Stevens book.