As you know, here at Grub Street Gracklog, we are in favor of repeating yourself. So the fact that I have already posted my thoughts on echo in song-writing will not prevent me from remarking again that echo says the impossible. But let me also go a little further and say that the marvelous phenomenon of refrain depends on that same impossible saying. Take the lyrics of this Mountain Goats song:

And I sang “Oh, what do I do? What do I do? What do I do? What do I do without you?”

Needless to say, this refrain is already calculated to make Grackloggers smile. But is it also needless to say that this is not yet a refrain? It is “only” repetition. Only the empty rhetorical words of a broken man for whom nothing is possible, wandering in speech through his own indifferent thoughts just as he “wandered through the house like a little boy lost at the mall.” And please don’t let the force of that image go to waste! For a little boy with his mother the mall may be a place of wonder (even there, perhaps, the gods are present!), with something new to astonish him at every turn–but with his mother’s disappearance, there disappear also all the various and surprising invitations of the place and all that is left is the space between him and his mother, which threatens to be infinite–nothing appears to this child but that his mother is not there, nor there, nor there again, as with each step she–all he could hope to find–does not appear.

“What do I do?” An expression of the impossibility of doing anything. If a man reaches out to speak, or rather to sing, in the midst of the impossibility of doing anything at all, this expression threatens to become all he has and to repeat itself infinitely in all his song. Song itself, the wondrously various and surprising highway of the soul, becomes an exercise in futility.

But if this man sings these words so often that they lose their meaning, he might recognize that they had all along the peculiarity of not meaning what they mean: “What do I do?” A question. How am I to proceed? But the words meant precisely that this question could not be asked, because no answer could be expected, and there is no such thing as a question which expects no answer. A question, to be a question, has to “[get] ready for the future to arrive.” If it does not have this readiness it asks for nothing and is only bitter rhetoric. And in our song this readiness which the singer has is why his repetition of the refrain is emphatically not only a repetition, but a discovery. Suddenly the very words of hopelessness have joined the world in coming alive.

And let me say also this: in order for all of this to be true, the refrain must have already had this life in the first place in order to come alive. If in its first entrance the same saying which concludes the song on an expectant note does not bear itself toward the future with expectancy, it must for that very reason be said that it does bear itself in this way toward its transformation in the end. Waiting: holding back. If the song is a composition, something to be performed more or less according to prescription, then the sense of expectancy is withheld deliberately and knowingly from the first entrance of the refrain, in expectation of the second. The first waits for the second. And only because it does so, because it refrains and holds something back can the second come as a surprise.

So what is an axiom?

Axiom, as no doubt you are aware, is the name of the great space station on which mankind draws out its centuries-long vacation from the planet as the movie Wall-E opens. It seems to have been named in the confidence that it could supply the complete conditions for human life without any need of its being supported, and this confidence would seem seem to be confirmed by the fact that so many generations later, humans still live on the ship, with not even a memory of any other place to live. However, we learn that the Axiom has according to its own intelligence reached such an estimation of its self-sufficiency that it rebels against that part of its directive which it interprets as a threat to its autonomy–namely, the directive to seek a return to ground. Being themselves aliens to ground, men have no resource to question this claim.

Not to make too much or too little of the heroic exploits by which mankind is brought back down to Earth, it will be enough for my present purposes to remind you that the same Axiom which adrift in space sustained nothing which could be called human life and therefore failed in its own directive, when grounded on the Earth does serve human life as a starting point–that is, a point of departure. And this departure (from itself) is the true being of the Axiom.

Tune in next time for the full interpretation of this allegory.

There is a prejudice abroad that an axiom is a certain sort of proposition or statement, which serves as one of a set of starting points to build the any science (construed as a set of interrelated propositions regarding a genus) through inferences from these axioms. For those who distinguish between axioms and principles–which we must if we are to countenance the notion of an empirical science (and let that be an axiom if you like)–this thesis may be refined to say that axioms serve as the most general starting points and function alongside the empirically disclosed and clarified principles of any given empirical science to govern the manner in which inference may and must proceed from those starting points.

Presumably Aristotle is somehow responsible for this state of affairs, since perhaps there are only a handful of prejudices of logic which cannot somehow be traced back to his work. I have not yet found anything of the sort asserted in the Analytics, but perhaps that will only tell you how little attention I have been able to give that text. What I do find is the fact that an axiom is never brought into a straightforward argument: e.g., “That it is not possible to affirm and deny at the same time is assumed by no demonstration–unless the conclusion too is to be proved in this form” (An Post 77a10). In other words, only if one wants to prove precisely that a certain true proposition is not to be denied, or that a certain false proposition is not to be asserted, do we appeal to the axiom known as the principle of non-contradiction. Yet, even in this case, if the principle of non-contradiction is truly an axiom in the sense of being indispensable for grasping anything whatsoever, the same principle which is made explicit as a premise must also undergird the connection of this premise through the other to the conclusion. And it cannot do this as a premise.

Okay, so what does this have to do with Wall-E? I guess all you robot-loving fools out there will just have to wait till next time to find out, won’t you?

Kant distinguishes the respective influences of the sublime and the beautiful in terms of stirring [rühren] and alluring [reizen]. These terms suggest a constellation of oppositions between the sublime and the beautiful. The sublime interrupts, astonishes, and overpowers its audience, “moving” them only in the sense of stirring, setting them in a circular motion, in the field of force. On its side, the beautiful sustains, enlivens, and appeals, drawing forth a linear motion, in the field of freedom. Sublime influence thus raises the problem of communication, as in Milton’s poem “On Shakespeare:”

What needs my Shakespear for his honour’d Bones,
The labour of an age in piled Stones,
Or that his hallow’d reliques should be hid
Under a Star-ypointing Pyramid?
Dear son of memory, great heir of Fame,
What need’st thou such weak witnes of thy name?
Thou in our wonder and astonishment
Hast built thy self a live-long Monument.
For whilst to th’ shame of slow-endeavouring art,
Thy easie numbers flow, and that each heart
Hath from the leaves of thy unvalu’d Book,
Those Delphick lines with deep impression took,
Then thou our fancy of it self bereaving,
Dost make us Marble with too much conceaving;
And so Sepulcher’d in such pomp dost lie,
That Kings for such a Tomb would wish to die.

Within the feeling for the sublime, speech is not possible. Because it astonishes, (I.e., turns to stone, “make[s] us Marble,” (I.e., makes us marvel)), its audience is (I almost cannot stop myself from quoting another poem, by Yeats) “struck dumb in the simplicity of fire.” Yet it it is not for want of a theme but “with too much conceaving” that they are thus astonished. How then to bring that too pregnant thought to birth, to become a singing stone? That is, how to sing the sublime from within the feeling of the sublime? Is it even possible? The existence of Milton’s poem proves nothing, unless we could also show that Milton has not exempted himself from the feeling for Shakespeare’s sublimity which has astonished others; indeed this would seem to be the most logical conclusion… provided that we are not ourselves overcome by the sublimity of Milton’s poetics. We can only state that canny, cunning hypothesis from within a total insensitivity to the sublime. And this is precisely the problem.

It may seem like I never respond to comments on this blog, but the fact is that it just takes me a lo-o-o-ong time. So please, keep commenting.

Today, I’m writing in answer to patrokleia’s remarks nearly two years ago, on the matter of “the rewards of rewording.” That is, if this can be called an answer when in truth I am only and from a great distance reechoing his own words.

Rewarding, that is to say, recovering. For don’t we take cover within a ward? (Nevermind recovery within a psychiatric ward). And isn’t the warden the one who guards and watches over? Does this “ward” have anything to do with the WAHR of WAHRHEIT? Please note also that your title “What are words worth?” makes use of the word “worth”, while “worthy” in German is WURDIG, and “wurd” is perhaps related to “ward” (since what is worthy is rewarded).

At any rate, to continue with our rewording of “re-warding”: to re-ward is to re-word and to re-cover, that is, reconceal. Rewarding is thus to give a new donning and deeming, therefore, a redeeming that does not profer, though perhaps promises, redemption.

I am now convinced that my original question “What are words worth?” must be paraphrased as “What is a ward’s work?” Is it when words are useless that a guardian is most useful for them? And if so, what do we expect from the justice of this guardian? That it will keep the words intact until such time as we have a use for them, in the meantime neither adding nor subtracting from them, but being ready to return them on demand in just the condition in which we first deposited them? In that case, we should prefer computers to poetry, PERL shells to pearly shells.

But perhaps in keeping this sense of guardianship we are guarding too strictly the sense of the old saying about justice, that it is giving what is owed. In their interrogation of this sense of justice in Plato’s Republic, Socrates and Polemarchus come to the astonishing conclusion that far from guarding the literal sense of the saying of the sage Simonides (”That it is just to give to each what is owed”), it must be vigorously guarded against:

We shall do battle then as partners, you and I,” I said, “if someone asserts that Simonides, or Bias, or Pittacus or any other wise and blessed man said it.”

Rather, the true guardianship of the wise saying of Simonides keeps it in obscurity. This indeed is Socrates’ first reaction, as we may see if we do not hasten to interpret his perplexity away as mere irony:

Well, it certainly isn’t easy to disbelieve a Simonides. He is a wise and divine man. However, you, Polemarchus, perhaps know what on earth he means, but I don’t understand.”

The ward’s work preserves words’ worth: but this does not mean that it echoes them back unchanged, nor that it returns them with an open hand. It also withholds, and may, as does the shell gathered by “the man whom sorrow named his friend,” turn all we sing “to inarticulate moan.”

What’s more adventurous than adventure? By now you’ve had time to see Pixar’s Up, so you know that the answer is “everyday life.” But did you also know that everyday life is more heroic than heroism, and greater than greatness?

From Peter Lawler’s remarks on Whitman:

We aren’t most characteristically—I’m tempted to say essentially—warriors or thinkers or poets. The average person, Whitman claims, has the capacity to perform nobly in war and to be moved deeply by poetry. But those qualities aren’t what he or she most needs to live well most of the time, and so they can’t be the source of the virtue that’s most his or her own. The virtue that is most his own (and I’m now privileging being masculine because Whitman did distinguish between the characteristic virtues of men and women—because they are given different responsibilities by nature!) is living well with the “lot which happens to him as ordinary farmer, seafarer, mechanic, clerk, laborer, or driver.”
The task of the democratic poet and virtue is to identify and celebrate the virtue—we tempted to say the freedom and responsibility—that comes with living well with the ordinary duties most of us have been given most of the time. It’s in the duties of the “citizen, son, husband, father”—as well as those of the ordinary “employ’d person”—that the highest human greatness, from a democratic view, is found.

You may also have read my remarks on Up elsewhere, to the effect that insisting on a literal sense of adventure makes true adventure impossible. What I failed to say there is that only the most unadventurous literal-mindedness could conclude that the literal sense ought to be replaced by a metaphorical sense. It is as though story-tellers wanted to say, “People think stories should be about war and exploration, but really they should be about everyday things.” But since they say this in stories, the great story-tellers don’t tell stories about everyday life. If Up were just a story about an ordinary old man living his life, we’d have the first ten minutes of the movie, which would be good but not great: definitely worth ten minutes, but would you watch it for two hours? Instead we have a story about departing from one sense of adventure to arrive at another.

It’s the same with Whitman (and Milton for that matter). Whitman may claim to be “neither for nor against institutions,” asking parenthetically, “What indeed have I in common with them?–Or what with the destruction of them?” But of course the poem in which this claim is made can only make its claim as a gesture of unconcern with institutions, and a gesture indicates concern. In order to say farewell to an institution in poetry, it has to be instituted first within the poetry.

To say this another way, what Whitman has in common with institutions is their commonalty. It is common to be for or against institutions, and Whitman if he is anything is the bard of the common.

This website would have been pretty good except that its author completely ruined it by writing a second post after five months to explain why it was beneath him to put a second post on the site.

• How to be an elitist bastard.
• How to be one of the roughs.
• Some other third thing!

Stay tuned.

True believers can now follow all the latest breaking news in the only subject that matters: youtubed amateur renditions of “Mah na mah na.”

It’s your monthly Mah na mah na!