Samuel Beer, legendary Harvard professor, has died at age 97. He taught, for decades, Social Science 2, and since Mr UD not only took it with him lo these many years ago, but saw Beer recently, I’ll let him do the talking.
***************************************************
“I saw him at the Harvard Memorial Church, at the memorial for John Kenneth Galbraith, and I talked to him after the event at the Galbraith house.
I said ‘I enjoyed your course,’ and he smiled and made a funny remark I don’t remember… His wife said he gets that a lot. They were in the Tokyo airport not long ago and someone stopped him to say he enjoyed his course.
Soc Sci 2 was a very famous course – there’s an edited volume based on it. Don’t know the title; came out a long time ago. [Is it this?] About the same time I was an undergraduate.
It was a core course , a social science requirement, and it was a great course. Quite a number of interesting intellectual types went through it as teaching assistants. It was a year-long course devoted to revolutions.
He started with the Gregorian revolution, so that was an unusual thing… The great changes starting in the 11th century and developing through the 12th and 13th – church reforms , struggles between the papacy and the emperor.
One could argue that modern revolutions have their roots there… Then he did the English revolution… Then the great revolutions of the 18th century… The Russian revolution… I think the last one was the Nazis…
Sam Beer was important to me intellectually … I’m glad that I had a chance to tell him at the Galbraith event that I enjoyed his course. It was really kind of a crucial course in my intellectual development. I could have gone a more conventional route; I was a government major, but I didn’t want to take a course in American government. It struck me as incredibly boring.
I took his course, which was kind of history-heavy social science… Looking for patterns and so on. I very much liked that and I switched into social studies.
[UD: It says in the Crimson story about him that he sometimes wore his military uniform to class. Do you remember his doing that?]
No. When I was a student at Harvard, that wouldn’t have been a good idea.”
***************************************************
… has won the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize.
UD would like to take as our text of the day some remarks Howe made ten years ago about poetry and bewilderment. Your University Diarist will weave them into Palimpsest, Gore Vidal’s memoir, which I found in my Key West house. And into other things.
As always, UD‘s comments appear parenthetically, in blue.
Howe titles her essay Bewilderment.
*************************************
‘What I have been thinking about, lately, is bewilderment as a way of entering the day as much as the work. [Bewilderment doesn’t just inspire poems; it’s a way of being, a form of consciousness, every single day.]
Bewilderment as a poetics and an ethics. [If the condition of bewilderment is intrinsic to us, then our art must mark and convey it; but our morality too should evolve ways of thinking about good and bad bewilderment.]
I have learned about this state of mind from the characters in my fiction–women and children, and even the occasional man, who rushed backwards and forwards within an irreconcilable set of imperatives.
What sent them running was a double bind established in childhood, or a sudden confrontation with evil in the world–that is, in themselves–when they were older, yet unprepared. This is necessity at its worst.
These characters remained as uncertain in the end as they were in the beginning, though both author and reader could place them within a pattern of causalities. [There’s a necessity to our being the particular way each of us is, a necessity established long before we were aware of it. Our lives are a rushing back and forth between the necessity of this self and the attempt to exercise the freedom to be more than, or other than, this self. Although we always remain caught in this back and forth, and in the bewilderment that underlies it, we can understand this pattern itself, and the personal reasons for it.]
Within the book they were unable to handle the complexities of the world, or the shock of making a difference. In fact, to make a difference was to be inherently compromised. And for me the shape and form of their stories changed in response to the perplexities of their situations. [To step outside the authentic, private, bewildered self and attempt to change the public world in some way is to compromise, to falsely simplify, one’s complex inner truths, as well as the complexity of the world. Yet one wants that public engagement as much as one wants a sense of inner authenticity.]
Increasingly my stories joined my poems in their methods of sequencing and counting. I would have to say that something like the wave and the particle theories troubled the poetics of my pages: how can two people be in two places simultaneously and is there any relationship between imagination and character?
There is a Muslim prayer that says, “Lord, increase my bewilderment,” and this prayer is also mine and the strange Whoever who goes under the name of “I” in my poems–and under multiple names in my fiction–where error, errancy and bewilderment are the main forces that signal a story. [Ted Hughes writes this: “Almost all art is an attempt by someone unusually badly hit (but almost everybody is badly hit), who is also unusually ill-equipped to defend themselves internally against the wound, to improvise some sort of modus vivendi… in other words, all art is trying to become an anaesthetic and at the same time a healing session. [Poetry is] nothing more than a facility… for expressing that complicated process in which we locate, and attempt to heal, affliction… [T]he physical body, so to speak, of poetry is the treatment by which the poet tries to reconcile that pain with the world.“]
A signal does not necessarily mean that you want to be located or described. It can mean that you want to be known as Unlocatable and Hidden. This contradiction can drive the “I” in the lyrical poem into a series of techniques that are the reverse of the usual narrative movements around courage, discipline, conquest, and fame.
Weakness, fluidity, concealment, and solitude find their usual place in the dream world, where the sleeping witness finally feels safe enough to lie down in mystery. These qualities are not the stuff of stories of initiation and success. [Rilke in poetry, Proust in prose, but so many others — they lie down in mystery and convey in language the dream world from which we sometimes struggle to wake toward a certain form of comprehension. Think too of Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus and his artist’s ethos: silence, exile, and cunning.]
But it is to that model that I return as a writer involved in the problem of sequencing events and thoughts–because in the roundness of dreaming there is an acknowledgement of the beauty of plot, but a greater consciousness of randomness and uncertainty as the basic stock in which it is brewed. [“The urge to comprehend is so deep. … It would make little sense to live a life if you didn’t understand what you had done,” writes John Montague. Yet Howe reminds us that the accomplishment of a sense of one’s plot is a messy, fugitive affair. It’s certainly never linear, but can in the hands of the poet take on a roundness, a circular always-returning — rather than a neurotic, destructive back and forth rushing in a horrible double-bind. ]
There is literally no way to express actions occurring simultaneously.
If I, for instance, want to tell you that a man I loved, who died, said he loved me on a curbstone in the snow, but this occurred in time after he died, and before he died, and will occur again in the future, I can’t say it grammatically. [Our deepest emotional moments represent a complex, atemporal in-gathering of many moments. How to reconcile this reality with the narrative imperatives of written art? Writing about Joyce’s method in Ulysses, Hugh Kenner says this: ” Of what use, a Descartes might ask, is the senses’ sharp vividness, when minds may entertain clear ideas? And Joyce will let Stephen answer: Hold to the now, the here, through which all future plunges to the past. The now, the here, are where I am. Reality is immediate experience, and in a book is the immediate experience of language, streaming through what Finnegans Wake will call ‘the eye of a noodle.’ … There are things [in this novel] we shall never know, and we think it meaningful to say we shall never know them, quite as though they were entities on the plane of the potentially knowable, forgetting that nothing exists between these covers after all but marks on paper … Joyce’s aesthetic of delay, producing the simplest facts by parallax, one element now, one later, and leaving large orders of fact to be assembled late or another time or never, in solving the problem of novels that go flat after we know ‘how it comes out’ also provides what fiction has never before really provided, an experience comparable to that of experiencing the haphazardly evidential quality of life; and, moreover, what art is supposed to offer that life can not, a permanence to be revisited at will but not exhausted.”]
You would think I was talking about a ghost, or a hallucination, or a dream, when in fact, I was trying to convey the experience of a certain event as scattered, and non-sequential.
I can keep UN-saying what I said, and amending it, but I can’t escape the given logic of the original proposition, the sentence which insists on tenses and words like “later” and “before”. [This is where Vidal’s palimpsest comes in. You see palimpsest literalized in the erasure-canvases of the great painter Cy Twombly. This is work which, again, does not express the uncomprehending, neurotic entrapment of back-and-forthing, but rather conveys both the temporal logic of a given proposition, the immovability of human facts, and our ability to play with that givenness, to half-create and half-perceive our own patterns. Here’s Vidal, at the end of his memoir: “I’ve… been reading through this memoir, adding, subtracting, writing over half-erased texts, ‘palimpsesting’ – all the while looking for clues not so much to me, the subject, if indeed I am the subject, as to what [my] first thirty-nine years were all about… [on] the small planet that each of us so briefly visits.” Recognizing that his patterns are all about an imperishable youthful love for a classmate killed at Iwo Jima, Vidal concludes his book in this way: “Finally, I seem to have written, for the first and last time, not the ghost story that I feared, but a love story, as circular in shape as desire (and its pursuit), ending with us whole at last in the shade of a copper beech.” Vidal will be buried near his lover.]
Bewilderment is an enchantment that follows a complete collapse of reference and reconcilability.
It cracks open the dialectic and sees myriads all at once.
The old debate over beauty–between absolute and relative–is ruined by this experience of being completely lost by choice! Between God and No-God, between Way Out Far and Way Inside–while they are vacillating wildly, there is no fixed position.
Bewilderment circumambulates, believing that at the center of errant or circular movement, is the axis of reality.
… Q–the Quidam, the unknown one–or I, is turning in a circle and keeps passing herself on her way around, her former self, her later self, and the trace of this passage is marked by a rhyme, a coded message for “I have been here before, I will return”.
The same sound splays the sound-waves into a polyvalence, a daisy. A bloom is not a parade. [A parade is sequence. Public sequence at that. We are talking here of a private aesthetic blossoming whose page may or may not find a small audience.]
A big error comes when you believe that a form, name or position in which the subject is viewed is the only way that the subject can be viewed. That is called “binding” and it leads directly to painful contradiction and clashes.
No monolithic answers that are not soon disproved are allowed into a bewildered poetry or life.
… In so many senses making these spiral, or serial poems, is very close to dream-construction, where we collect pieces of […] emotionally charged moments and see how they interact, outside of the usual story-like narrative.
But this is not a plan or an experiment. It is simply the way my poems come into existence and carry something out of my stories that is having a problem taking form there.
This is, I think, my experience of non-sequential, but intensely connected, time-periods and the way they impact on each other, but lead nowhere.
This is what gives them their spiraling effect within the serial form.
And ultimately I see the whole body of work as existing all but untitled and without beginning or end, an explosion of parts, the quotidian smeared.
In the meantime each little stanza expresses my infatuation with the sentence; and each stanza is a sentence where the parts and phrases are packed and shaped to bring out the best in them.
Like the disassociated stanzas in poems by Ibn Arabi, or Hafiz, I see my poems as being composed of queer sentences with lots of space, a dreamlike narrative, and a hidden meaning, so to speak, in that it is hidden from me. [I read this with Eve Sedgwick‘s death in the background, and the whole thing sounds like an elegy for her.]
The actual theological meaning of the word “salvation” is meaning.
To seek salvation is to seek a sense of meaning to the world, one’s life.
And so somehow the business of bringing these poems to light is part of a salvific urge.
Not gnostic–in the sense of seeing humanity as cast down, unwanted, unloved, duped, expelled, tested and misunderstood–and not fearing that only a few are chosen to be loved by God or history–I am a victim of constantly shifting positions, with every one of those positions stunned by bewilderment–is it here, is it here, is it there?–and by the desire to shuck the awful attributes of my own personality. To toss the dreck.
The illuminati used flagellation, levitation and starvation as a method of accounting for the power of the invisible world over their lives. Public suffering and scars gave the evidence of hidden miseries which had begun to require daylight.
The poet uses words to do the same. From the lashes of whip and ink the secrets become common, rather than signs of individual genius.
After all, the point of art is to show people that life is worth living by showing that it isn’t.’
*******************************************************************
Deborah Digges, a poet and Tufts University professor of English, jumped off the top of the University of Massachusetts stadium while the Temple University women’s lacrosse team was practicing there. The team noticed her, “in the upper reaches of the stadium,” but thought little of it, and then they found her body.
She was an accomplished writer. Much of her poetry and prose chronicles the despair behind her suicide. Disillusionment, every reflective person’s experience, undid her.
In a memoir about her troubled son she writes, “I have been a snob, a bohemian snob who believed that the arts, music, poetry were religion enough . . . and that somehow, above all the groups in culture – rich and poor alike – we were superior in our passionate pursuits.”
Reading her, you get the sense of a person extraordinarily bifurcated, unable to overcome the gap between the beliefs and passions upon which she set her life, and the failure of those beliefs and passions.
Here’s one of her strongest poems. Read it first here, without my commentary:
RUNE FOR THE PARABLE OF DESPAIR
Little left of me that year [The poet recalls a terrible year of despair, which almost did her in.]—I had a vision
I was strata, atmosphere. [Little left of her. Mere air.]
Or it was that the host entire coded in my blood
found voice and shrieked, for instance,
at what we now call roads
and I must maneuver freeways, bridges with these inside me
falling to their knees beating the ground howling. [The self-eviscerating despair was so great that her very reality as a self was taken over by a “host” of shrieking creatures.]
One might well ask why they’d come forward—
fugitives flushed from a burning house,
converts fed down the aisles, [Should this be “led” down the aisles? UD isn’t sure – thinks maybe this is a typo…]
bumping and blubbering their way into revival light,
light so eroding, the human face is aberration,
the upright stance a freak
with no means otherwise. [How do I even stay upright under this despair?]
Some things won’t translate backwards.
Some things can’t be undone,
though it takes years to learn this, years. [The pain of recognizing that you’ve made unalterable mistakes in your life.]
Such were the serial exhaustions of my beliefs, [One by one, the convictions on which I grounded my life wore out.]
whatever drug worn off that must belong to youth,
or to the feminine, or simply to the genes begun a wintering.
Then I knew the purest bitterness,
as if my heart were a wrecking ball,
my love for the man an iron bell used of the wind,
calling to task a population,
calling them in, as from these fields,
before the stone wheel became speech,
before fire dropped from the sky to be caged and carried into the caves. [The fire of youthful romantic passion transmutes into an embittering, imprisoning flame.]
And so they came to be with me,
whom I suspect was nothing more to them than shelter,
a ransomed hall, a shipwreck among dead trees,
the fallen branches lichen-studded,
which they dragged into my rooms. [The host again; the sense of her self taken over by morbid aggressive forces of misery.]
And when the lights burned out they wept,
and when the heat was gone they gathered my rugs around them. [Again, even the flame of bitterness burns out eventually, and one is left with cold emptiness.]
I’d never known how quickly a house
can be taken back, taken down,
nor will I grant myself the balm—
though it’s been centuries—
that I was “blessed” to see it turned inside out,
the furniture thrown through the windows, and the books
to lie face up, riffling, swelling, until the pages
emptied into a thousand seasons, [An honest person, she won’t console herself with the facile notion that the total destruction of everything you’ve stood for and the end of your love affair is somehow purgative, clarifying, an energizing challenge to begin anew. She knows better. No pathetic “revival light” for her.]
books that once possessed the magnet pull of stars!
In the end I let them keep the house
the way they wanted, wash from the toilet,
hang yew boughs from the eaves,
my sturdy doors fallen from the hinges,
even my hair commingling with theirs— [She gives herself over to despair, lets everything go. The hosts take her over.]
huge animal clumps a-swirl in the eddies
of spiders’ eggs and broken teeth and cemetery moss and pine needles— [Great list here. Note how good poets can toss together a set of images and have them carry a theme — here, the theme of the dessication of her youthful fertility.]
until not one ornament was left that said I lived, [Preparing the Christmas theme with which she’ll end here.]
not even a drinking glass
I might have toasted with just as the clouds
shifted, my shadow disappeared, [Again the ‘little left of me’ theme.]
O, drink from once before my leaving, leaving.
With any luck, I sang, I’ll be in hell by Christmas. [Sardonic final line, anticipating a holiday release of suicide.]
***********
The surprise of dusk come early is from her poem Lilacs.
… but their content stinks. Here’s an example, from an opinion piece in today’s Boston Globe.
The title tells us The Way to Fight a Recession. The way to fight a recession is for businesses to keep going, expand, never say die, beat back their fear, etc. There’s a coffee shop chain that’s doing just that, and the writer commends them. But there’s another business, a developer named Harvard, that isn’t doing that, and the writer berates them.
… I’m standing along Western Avenue in Allston, construction site of Harvard University’s much trumpeted science center. The new complex is just the first part of what has been promised to be an epic transformation of the area. Or at least, that was the hope. The tall red construction cranes are still busy clearing the area, but Drew Faust, Harvard’s president, has just announced that the university is putting on the brakes. For the moment, work proceeds, but at the end of the year the school will reassess. This has come as a shock to many, especially Allston residents, who now fear they may be stuck indefinitely with what some call the Harvard Hole. And the rest of the projects? No one is saying, but things don’t look good.
Both of these are recession stories, tales of two significant organizations (Harvard, America’s oldest college, and Nespresso, a unit of Swiss food giant Nestle) with two different approaches to the economic crisis. One bulls forward. The other quails. [Yeah, what’s Harvard afraid of? Ain’t it a for-profit corporation just like Nestle? Isn’t it all about the bottom line, just like Nestle?]
… A reported 30 percent drop in the value of its endowment seems to have thrown the university into a tizzy. [A few hundred million off their bottom line and look what the weenies do! A tizzy! Don’t they know they’re a money-generating multinational that has to keep going in order to do what they’ve been created to do — generate money?]
… Economies are strange things. Sophisticated computer modeling, Nobel Prizes, and great thinkers notwithstanding, no one can really explain how to make them grow or why they shrink. Presented with an illness, a group of doctors would pretty quickly figure out how to assess, diagnose, and treat. That’s because medicine really is a science. Economics, pretensions otherwise, is not. Put 100 economists in a room, and the only sure thing you’d get would be 100 different theories. One can see this in today’s throw-it-on-the-wall-and-see-what-sticks approach to economic policy making or in the profession’s slippery language: consumer “confidence,” “virtuous” circles, “giddy” (or “panicked”) investors. There’s an almost self-fulfilling, touchy-feely quality to this: If we believe things are going to be good, then they will be. If we believe otherwise, then they won’t be. [Put aside the fact that medicine — especially that queen of twisted research and conflict of interest, psychiatry — is a notoriously inexact science. Concentrate only on the nonchalance with which this writer dismisses the many economists who warned money managers like those at Harvard that their risky investments would implode.]
So when a company such as Nespresso spends money and makes plans, it sends a message — the bad times will end, growth will resume. If enough companies behaved the same way, then indeed, the economy would turn. Harvard, too, is sending a message. “If Harvard can’t build, who can?” worried one construction industry publication. Perhaps, many will conclude, no one can, and, as a consequence, no one will. [Yes, the American construction giant Harvard needs to set an example, so that other construction companies around the country — Yale, Princeton — and other more specialized builders — for instance, sport franchise/construction ventures like the University of Georgia and the University of Minnesota, can be emboldened by Harvard’s business plan and keep growing.] …
