Repeating Himself

A couple years ago, I emerged from my office building at lunch hour to put some change in the parking meter. At my car's last known location, I met the yawning horror of an empty space. "No!" I thought. "But why not just a ticket? I'd pay for it! Just don't say they towed me; anything but that!" Of course, that is precisely what they had done. I looked over at a sign I had no memory of glimpsing before. It said something about an extremely rare farmers market event in which everything on the block would be towed, and this-- of course-- happened to be that one day. 

Fuming while I waited for the Lyft to arrive to take me to the impound lot, I found my sardonic fury crystalizing into verse. Not wanting to lose the thought, I jotted down the lines in an email to myself in my phone (I append them as a footnote below, if you want to read the lines); then promptly forgot all about them. 

They suddenly came back to my awareness earlier this fall, because I was forced by the start of law school to recall and seek out the documentation of every possible encounter I'd ever had-- however minor-- with the coercive power of the state. Searching in my inbox for words like "parking ticket," I stumbled upon this incomplete fragment of verse that I had written in the spare minutes standing on the roadway median and waiting for my cab to arrive. I found myself delighted with everything about them, so I forwarded them on to a friend and fellow poetaster. 

The friend was not impressed. "Why is there no meter?" he asked. "Why are there rhymes but no scansion?" I insist to myself that, in writing tortured long lines that sometimes but do not necessarily terminate in simple AA/BB rhymes, I am partaking of the long and glorious tradition of robust American free verse. I am like Vachel Lindsay! 

My friend continues to cock a skeptical eyebrow. So then I make a more humble plea: "Well, I was standing by the side of the road. I didn't have time to make it perfect and check all the feet and syllables and what-not. I just wanted to make sure I got the ideas out. Because the ideas are great. Even if I can't quite defend it as poetry, per se. I defend the ideas!"

This is a line of defense I often employ internally, including for the many undeniably sloppy passages in this blog. I know that could be phrased better, I tell myself. I know that probably shouldn't be in passive voice. But there's no time! I have other things I want to do today. I just want to make sure I get this thought out onto the page before it escapes me! 

Most of this blog is not written willingly, after all, but under compulsion. I'd gladly be relaxing or reading a book instead. But some idea-- some linkage of thoughts-- suddenly intrudes upon my free time, and I sigh to myself "well, there goes the next few hours. Now I have no choice but to exorcize that idea by writing it out." I am like the cynical popular writer in Chekhov's The Seagull: "When I finish work, I hurry to the theater or to fish; I can relax there, forget myself-- but no, there's a heavy cast-iron ball already turning in my head -- a new subject [...] and again I have to make haste to write and write." (Alpin trans.)

This is why this blog is always written in such a sloppy rush. I imagine that someday, in some unimagined future, I will come back and express everything at my leisure, and really take time to savor the mot juste for each thought. But right now, I think, I just have to make sure I get it all on the page before I forget the central insight-- or, even worse, the quotes from my eclectic reading that suddenly sprang into place in my memory, threading these ideas together. I have to get it all out on the page, now! Faster! Faster!

I thought that this line of defense against the charge of sloppiness, which I tried on my friend, was original and unique to me. But Nicola Chiaromonte, in one of his essays, quotes a young Antonin Artaud entering the same plea. In a letter he wrote to an older and more established French man of letters, Artaud (the future nutty progenitor of the "Theater of Cruelty"), insists that he knows his verse is flawed; but he urges his judge to forgive the flaws of form, since they are merely an imperfect vessel to preserve his fugitive ideas: 

"When I can seize a form," he writes, "even if it is imperfect, I fix it for fear of losing the whole idea. I live beneath myself, I know, and I suffer from it, but I accept it for fear of dying completely. [... T]he few things I sent you are fragments I was able to conquer from the void." (Quoted in The Worm of Consciousness, trans. by Miriam Chiaromonte.) 

In the same way, I would plead with my friend as well as my inner critic: I know this is flawed; some day I will go back and fix it. But for now I just need to make sure it exists in some form, otherwise I might lose it completely! I must capture it in amber now before all trace of it is lost!

The esteemed man of letters, writing back to Artaud, is just as unpersuaded by this defense as my friend. His response to the young man's plea is, in so many words-- don't get so enamored of your ideas. You may say that form should be sacrificed to ideas, but in the end, form is all we have. Your ideas are almost certainly not as original as you think. The mere expression of your naked self is not actually so desirable. Form and limitation are the essence of art; so do not think you can override them to get at something "truer" within.

The question then really turns on whether there is truly such a thing as an original idea-- an inner subjective knowledge that is unique to the individual-- which is so sui generis that it demands expression now, in however imperfect a form, so that at least it will not be lost for all time. 

If yes, then even the most artless and stumbling means of expression are justified, simply to try to capture a glimpse of it. We are something like campers who stumble upon a mysterious cryptic in a forest clearing, and are content to catching a shaky and uncomposed photograph of the creature in the worst possible lighting, rather than let the encounter go completely unrecorded. 

If not, however, and there is truly nothing new under the sun, then all we are doing is repeating each other in more or less artful ways. In that case, the esteemed man of letters is right. Felicitous means of expression is really all we have to go on. There is no chance that your ideas will really be original; there is no possibility that your inner subjective experience is actually unique to yourself. It has been lived a thousand times over by countless others. So we have to focus on perfecting our form, because a new and slightly better way of expressing the idea, not the idea itself, is the only thing that has any chance of being original. 

It is another version of the debate I have been having with the same friend mentioned above on the topic of AI. He keeps insisting that the new artificial intelligence is going to solve all these problems in science and medicine that have historically eluded humankind. I scoff at this. "All the machine is doing is drawing on data that human beings have already created, and then using it to guess at plausible new combinations of the same old material," I say. "So it can't really solve problems or come up with original solutions that human beings haven't already thought of."

"But that's all human beings are doing!" my friend retorts. "They're just coming up with new combinations of things that already existed. That's all creativity is. There's nothing new under the sun." 

Perhaps he's right... perhaps. And perhaps the esteemed man of letters is correct. But I can't help but want to cast my lot with the young Artauds of the world. Or with the sentiment expressed by André Gide's protagonist in The Immoralist (and yes, I see the irony of cobbling together my defense of humankind's ability to come up with genuinely original ideas by quoting from famous books that have already been written):

In explaining why he has lost interest in studying history, in a later stage of his development into an "immoralist," Gide's protagonist explains that he is sick of being confined to only what people already said long ago. "How could an old answer have satisfied my new questions:" he asks. "What more can man do, what else can man be? [...] Was what man had said up till then all he could say? Wasn't there something he didn't know about himself? Could he merely repeat himself?" (Howard trans.)

I insist, with Gide, with Artaud, that there are things human beings can say that have not already been said, and that therefore cannot be guessed at by machines however skilled at combining preexisting elements. Human subjective experience is not a closed and finite set. And so there is still value in feverishly trying to write down and convey what one thinks, in however hasty a form, because you never know when it may be that one idea or experience's only shot at existence. 

________

The verse fragment in question:

I was stirred this night by a powerful hate

When I learned what had been my poor car’s fate,

Abandoned in a Cambridge municipal lot.

I was prepared for a ticket – but worse came; I forgot

As anyone might, the semiannual farmers market,

And late for work already I’d said fuck it I’ll park it.

Calling the towing company, I heard a sour voice on the phone

From one whose ordained task was to squeeze blood from a stone.

Ignoring my false efforts at human amity,

He heaped hollow harshness on my parking calamity.

It seemed he’d resigned himself there could be no love between us

Whether that of gods, of brothers, or even of Venus.