Guest blogger: JL of Modern Kicks
Before Dan went on his Colt .45 bender, he left us this parenthetical comment regarding the Donald Kuspit piece we both commented on:
Frankly I think it cries out for—interestingly enough considering its author's own critical predilections—a psychological reading of its dynamics and motivations, but I'm certainly not prepared to offer such myself.
If I remember correctly, I’ve already put myself on record as loathing psychological readings. And I’m not going to offer one here. But Dan touches on something I find important, so I want to briefly talk about that.
As was obvious to anyone who bothered to read the various posts, I was pretty ticked off by Kuspit’s article. At the same time, if one goes back and looks closely, most of what one sees consists of difference in emphasis and perspective, ways of talking and claims of what’s prior to what. Not nothing, but not a whole lot, either. Kuspit laid out a certain position, I reacted against it, and Dan mostly mediated, but one could point to all sorts of fundamental points of agreement, and even say that the disagreements were not as real as they seemed.
But like Dan says, it’s clear that Kuspit was involved in what he was doing. And it’s equally clear that I was involved in my reaction against it. Without putting anybody on the couch, one has to acknowledge that who one is, one’s personal history and all that comes with it, figures into how one thinks about these things. A former teacher of mine would sometimes ask, “How do you write a book like Foucault? Do you first have to be Foucault?” That all we write and say constitutes at some level a type of autobiography is the sort of thought that occurs to everyone at one time or another, and helps to explain the emotional intensity that can attach itself to even small differences. At the same time, once one begins to consider the epistemological abyss that opens once one starts to take such thoughts too far, the natural reaction is to pull back. I don’t have any answers to offer. There’s simply something plaintive about the thought that our understanding advances through our presenting allegories of our selves. It will not surprise regular readers of Modern Kicks that I find that Howard Nemerov expressed this conflict most beautifully. Dan thought he could stop me, but the Nemerov bloggin’ begins now:
To a Scholar in the Stacks
When you began your story all its words Had long been written down, its elements Already so cohered in such exact Equations that there should have seemed to be No place to go, no entrance to the maze. A heart less bold would have refused to start, A mind less ignorant would have stayed home.
For Pasiphaë already had conceived
And borne her bully boy, and Daedalus
Responding had designed the darkness in
Its mystical divisions; Theseus,
Before you came, descended and returned,
By means of the thread, many and many a time,
What was there that had not been always done?
And still, when you began, only because
You did begin, the way opened before you.
The pictured walls made room, received your life;
Pasiphaë frowned, the Sea King greeted you,
And sighing Ariadne gave the thread
As always; in that celebrated scene
You were alone in being alone and new.
And now? You have gone down, you have gone in,
You have become incredibly rich and wise
From wandering underground. And yet you weary
And disbelieve, daring the Minotaur
Who answers in the echoes of your voice,
Holding the thread that has no other end,
Speaking her name whom you abandoned long ago.
Then out of this what revelation comes?
Sometimes in darkness and in deep despair
You will remember, Theseus, that you were
The Minotaur, the Labyrinth and the thread
Yourself; even you were that ingener
That fled the maze and flew – so long ago –
Over the sunlit sea to Sicily.
