Smart Energy

Essay by Brian Charles Clark

A tapestry of metaphor

In this essay I speculate on a possible relationship between “word,” “writing,” “weaving,” and “work.” While the essay is speculative in its etymology, I think it does show a definite intertwining of the histories of metaphors that underpin the changes in meaning we see from Indo-European, Greek, and Latin, into English. Because of limited space, my investigation into the histories of these words is of need cursory. My intent here is to entertain and provoke the reader’s own imaginative speculations, not to create a definitive history or an airtight case.

A *wer is a “high raised spot” (American Heritage Dictionary, wer1). I can imagine a letter or word carved in stone or wood being called a “high raised spot.” *Wer (ibid., wer3) also means “to turn, bend.” From this root we get our Germanic “worth,” because value is a turning toward fair exchange, and Latinate “verse,” the fruits of the poet’s turns of phrase. In olden times, a traveler was worth his board based on the value of his conversation. And everybody knows the value of the devil’s silver tongue, whose conversation can pivot on a dime, and suddenly turn to your soul’s worth. Read the rest of this entry »

Essay

by Brian Charles Clark

Since his death I’ve been trying to discover who killed my brother.

Is it a crime to kill a man who longs for death? If a man yearns for death so profoundly that he kills himself, has he committed a crime, broken the taboo? I still ask Chris these questions, although he’s been dead for nearly three years now.

Of his death, there is only one fact, and this fact contradicts itself. Christopher Michael Clark, aged 37 years, drowned in the Mojave Desert on August 15, 1997. An amazing feat in an accident-prone life, to drown in the middle of the desert. He found the thing he went to find. Death, I see, is as subjective and unknowable as any other experience. Time is relative, Einstein reminds me, and space is curved. Read the rest of this entry »

Down the garden path...

I’ve heard it said, or maybe I read it somewhere, that travel is good therapy for an ailing marriage. There’s something romantic about leaving jobs, kids, and friends behind and going to some place where it’s “just us two.” “A romantic paradise,” the travel agency ads claim about almost anywhere. Travel strips us down to our ontic necessities—which is why some people don’t travel well: they need everything. For those who can get by on a toothbrush and a change of underwear, any cheap motel room can become a “bower of bliss,” an erotic Eden. Add a loaf of bread and a bottle of wine and even St. Paul would have a difficult time getting the couple to listen.

The traveling couple’s motel room is emblematic of gardens as ontic cloisters, enclosures and wardens of states of being. These gardens, they’re all over the map, from the hellish-obsessive delights of Bosch, to the sublime intellectualizing and celebratory seductions of Shelley’s “The Revolt of Islam.” I can only imagine reading Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress” in a garden or–for a walk on the wild side–a more untamed setting. If, that is, I wanted to partake of the poem’s carpe diem effect and make hay while the sun shines. What all these gardens have in common is the protective enclosure they provide for the acting out of human desires: this is the basis of their delight. Read the rest of this entry »

essay by Brian Charles Clark

A secret war has been raging for millennia. The battle lines can be roughly drawn between those who insist that empiricism can answer all our epistemological questions, and those who insist that knowing is fundamentally an imaginative act, one that is forever becoming and shrouded in mystery. Plato is typical of just how “rough” those battle lines are. In the Republic, Plato wrote of the dangers of the imagination, especially as displayed in the poetic consciousness or “divine madness” of inspiration. This is the same Plato whose beautifully erotic love poems grace the pages of the Greek Anthology.

Two thousand years later, in 1817, John Keats would jump into the fray with his eyes wide open. In fact, it was Keats’s viewing of a painting that led him to write a famous letter. (Keats’s letter of December 21, 1817 is quoted in full in, among other places, Rodriguez, Book of the Heart (Hudson, New York: 1993), pages 39-40.) After looking at a painting by the landscape artist West, Keats wrote his brothers that there were “no women one is mad to kiss” in the picture. Nothing in the painting inspired his passion, “there is nothing to be intense upon,” nothing provoked his sense of the marvelous. The hic et nunc flatness of West’s painting admitted no otherness, no “Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without an irritable reaching after fact & reason.” Read the rest of this entry »

essay by Brian Charles Clark

Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz in her library.

Where does history go when we don’t write it down? Where does history go when we’d rather forget it ever happened? Where does history go when we were too stoned to remember what happened? To this plague of impossible questions we might turn to Freud’s idea of the repressed in order to begin forming a response. The response might be, We don’t know where history goes—maybe it goes underground—but it always returns. Which is a useful enough idea for those things, events, or persons for which we have categories of knowledge. For history that lies outside of our epistemological framework, it is simply lost—and if it returns, in the inimitable way of the Freudian repressed, we won’t recognize it as a return, but rather as a new agency of knowledge and transformation. As Octavio Paz writes, “[t]he ruling system of repression in each society is based upon [a] group of inhibitions that do not need to be monitored by consciousness” (5).

Human culture does indeed have an underground historical agency that returns, again and again, like a weed from a rhizome. The agency I’m thinking of is plant life. Vegetation, in one form or another, is our “daily bread,” and gives us our staves of life, to boot. But surely, the reader must be arguing, we have well and truly identified plant life as an essential component of culture, and metaphors extended from our knowledge of plants fill our languages and literatures. We have metaphors of bread-making (e.g., “bun in the oven”) and metaphors of farming (e.g., “You reap what you sow”). But although the English language is full of words and metaphors referring to altered states of consciousness, we rarely base those metaphors on plants (“put that in your pipe and smoke it,” being one possible exception). I might say, for instance, “What blows my mind is that Sor Juana became a nun,” where “blows” signifies some sort of cognitive dissonance. More commonly, we refer to being “surprised,” “confused,” or of “having an epiphany,” without usually reflecting on two epistemological assumptions embedded in what we are saying. Read the rest of this entry »

essay by Brian Charles Clark

John Donne

John Donne wrote the First Anniversarie to commemorate the death of the daughter of Sir Robert Drury (Marotti, 235), but whatever is being eulogized in the poem, it “clearly [refers to] something greater than Drury’s deceased daughter” (236). The poem offers “more affright, then pleasure” (1st, 372) and in that, I think, it is typically Donne. But where the Songs & Sonets are forward looking and testing the ground ahead, the First Anniversarie is dragging its feet like a petulant or fearful child being forced to do something it doesn’t want to. One reason for this petulance is easy to see in a biographical context even though, as Marotti writes, “Critics have largely ignored or taken for granted the patronage context in which the Anniversaries were composed” (236). But what I notice about the poem is the strange lack of logico-rhetorical daring do that characterizes so much of Donne’s (presumably) earlier poetry. The “new Philosophy cals all in doubt” such that “The Element of fire is quite put out” (205-206). Read the rest of this entry »

Essay by Brian Charles Clark

“Onomatopoeia / I don’t want to see ya / speakin’ in a foreign tongue,” John Prine once sang—or wheezed, depending on your taste in music. We do it all the time. We growl and mewl at our lovers, bark and howl at friends and strangers. At least we do in my neighborhood. But what is it, in any language, that we are doing when we say “arf arf” or “moo moo”? And if “onomatopoeia” simply means “to make a name like the thing itself” then why the heck does it sound like nothing English speakers ever say or hear? Read the rest of this entry »

Essay by Brian Charles Clark

Anima Lucida

Hypatia, daughter of Theon, comes down to us as much a myth as a reality. In the hands of writers of various ideological persuasions, she was a Christian martyr, the last philosopher of Hellenism, or a pagan who deserved what she got. Besides the usual positioning to prove a dogmatic point, the reason for this disparity of opinion is that there simply isn’t much primary source material with which to form a biographical picture of Hypatia. Maria Dzielska, in her book on Hypatia, has combed through the primary and early secondary sources in search of some semblance of truth as regards the life and works of Hypatia. The result is a short work divided into three main sections, each section largely repeating what the other sections portray.

“What Hypatia got,” of course, was murdered by an Alexandrian mob in 415, when she was 60 years old. Read the rest of this entry »

essay by Brian Charles Clark

John Donne

A naïve reader, I, reading now what was written in the 16th century, prove by way of demonstration that to study poetry and to make critiques is to live dangerously. When I first passed through John Donne’s “Communitie,” I stumbled into Donne’s trap of logic, his Ramist rhetoric of knots tied over from Medieval philosophy with a knife-twisting joie de vivre that is the Renaissance.

Peter “ram it down yr throat” Ramus, late of Paris and the Sorbonne circa 1490, who stood his in defense of his Master’s thesis for a legendary number of hours, set loose a wolf in sheep’s clothing, a wolf whose taste in clothing set a trend. Like the Medieval schoolmen, and as was still the standard for scholarly work in western Europe as late as the beginning of the 17th century, Ramus wrote and argued in Latin, and he employed the classical terminology of rhetoric, using an argument of parts, the syllogismus, the enthymema, inductio, and exemplum. Of these parts, the enthymema, or enthymeme as it is called in modern English, will tell us a few things about the twist Peter Ramus put on the art—and accessibility—of argument, a twist that transferred to England like a virus spread through intimate contact. By understanding the psychological function of what we call in theory the enthymeme, we may be able to shed some light on a few of Donne’s poems. Read the rest of this entry »

essay by Brian Charles Clark

Donne’s poetry reflects his life in liminal times. Medieval worlds were being wrenched into new configurations due to changes in ways of doing science, religion, and politics. Donne was particularly caught between two sets of changes, in the Church—now churches—and in what was becoming the modern legal profession. Satyre II is a snapshot of the birth of the legal profession, and heralds all the lawyer jokes to come, as well as the suspicion of professionalism that has always wafted around “men” who “practise for meere gain,” whose “repute” is “Worse then imbrothel’d strumpets prostitute” (62-64); “And they who write to Lords, rewards to get, / Are they not like signers at doores for meat?” (21-2).

Coscus is the named target of the poem (cf. 40), but is likely a strawman or effigy rather than a real lawyer, as “the name was often contemporaneously used for a court pleader” (Shawcross, 255). “Coscus’s abandonment of poetry for the law” (Corthell, 27; cf. lines 43-4) rouses Donne’s ire with his “words, words, which would teare / The tender labyrinth of a soft maids eare” (57-8). He who twists the ancient and venerable rhetorical arts for personal gain “is worst,” for he “doth chaw / Others wits fruits, and in his ravenous maw / Rankly digested, doth those things out-spue” (25-7). Donne offers an example of such “Bastardy” and “Symonie” (74, 75; cf. Shawcross, 256) in the controversion (cf. 101) of land: “Peecemeale he gets lands, and spends as much time / Wringing each Acre, as men pulling prime” (85-6). Since men played a lot of the card game primero in Donne’s time (Corthell, 28), the stakes are high in terms of time and shady dealing. “But when he sells or changes land, he’impaires / His writings, and (unwatch’d) leaves out, ses heires” (97-8). By omitting the crucial words “the land will not devolve upon the new owners’ progeny but will default to the law” (Shawcross, 256).

The Inns of Court “had always served a dual purpose; as Sir John Fortescue noted in the fifteenth century, they were called Inns of Courts ‘because the students in them, did there, not only study the Laws, but use such other exercises as might make them the more serviceable to the King’s Court” (Corthell, 25, quoting from Philip J. Finkelpearl, John Marston of the Middle Temple [Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1969], 9). Thus, “That onlely suretiship hath brought them there, / And to every suitor lye in every thing, / Like a Kings favorite, yea like a King” (68-70).

If “the main occupation of the Satires is hate” (Carey, 63), it is no wonder the Inns and the products issued therefrom are Donne’s targets here. Giving the poem a historical reading, it is hard to believe that “hate” was Donne’s only motive for writing Satyre II. “Donne was” an impressionable and idealistic “19 when he entered Thaves Inn”, and the Inns themselves were “a kind of liminal place where they [the young students of law] could make the passage from parental control to the larger social circle where they would assume their occupational identities” (Corthell, 26). Thus it is difficult to agree with Carey’s blanket statement that “Donne’s anger is bred from thwarted ambition” (63) alone. There is also, as we would say today, a Christological impulse at work here: “Good workes as good, but out of fashion now, / Like old rich wardrops; but my words none drawes / Within the vast reach of th’huge statute lawes” (110-112).