On Fundamentalism
“Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.” Voltaire
“Many people would sooner die than think. In fact they do.” Bertrand Russell.
The Intent Of The Critic
The three roles of the critic—as an individual respond- ing to the work of art, as interpreter to an audience, and finally as judge—merit analysis, for each of them leads to significant corollaries and conclusions.
That a work of art is a personal expression is today generally accepted. It is not so widely recognized that literary criticism is also personal expression. A pure literary critic in the actual practice of his profession cannot escape from being an individual excited into a new or an increased awareness by a specific poem or play. The first quality of a literary critic is the natural
endowment for responding, intuitively and in his own person, to works of art.
— Edmund Wilson.
Beautiful Writing
“How do you forget something? You just walk away from it, those who are still alive. There are so few clearings in our hearts and minds, so few places where something can’t grow on top of whatever happened to us before, and this is love too. ”
“The window rattles without you, you bastard. The trees are the cause, rattling in the wind, you jerk, the wind scraping those leaves and twigs against my window. They’ll keep doing this, you terrible husband, and slowly wear away our entire apartment building. I know all these facts about you and there is no longer any use for them. What will I do with your license plate number, and where you hid the key outside so we’d never get locked out of this shaky building? What good does it do me, your pants size and the blue cheese preference for dressing? Who opens the door in the morning now, and takes the newspaper out of the plastic bag when it rains? I’ll never get back all the hours I was nice to your parents. I nudge my cherry tomatoes to the side of the plate, bastard, but no one is waiting there with a fork to eat them. I miss you and I love you, bastard bastard bastard, come and clean the onion skins out of the crisper and trim back the tree so I can sleep at night.”
“This is love, to sit with someone you’ve known forever in a place you’ve been meaning to go, and watching as their life happens to them until you stand up and it’s time to go.”
“Friends can make you feel that the world is smaller and less sneaky than it really is.”
“Someone can break your heart, leave you dead on the lawn, and still you never learn what to say to stop it all over again. ”
“I have a dream of what would have happened if what happened instead hadn’t.”
Daniel Handler
What Makes A Good Poem (For My Reference But You Can Read It)
A good poem is a blind date with enchantment.
Above all, no matter what its subject matter,
it must possess perfect verbs and no superfluous
words. It must be an antidote to indifference.
The acid test is that you want to read it time and
time again, and not only to yourself. A good poem
begs to be shared with others.
J.Patrick Lewis. Freedom Like Sunlight: Praisesongs for Black Americans.
When I think of a good poem :
Many things come to mind but a few specifically: A good poem makes you feel like you’ve been there before, or want to go. A good poem takes you to the city, to the sea, to the heart of any and all matters; you see it, taste it, belong to it. A good poem is a menagerie of craft; a spinning of sound, word choice, alliteration, rhythm and often rhyme. A good poem is the arrangement of enchantment, or as J. Patrick Lewis says, a blind date with enchantment.
Rebecca Kai Dotlich. Lemonade Sun and Other Summer Poems.
For me, good poems, ones that I like to read over and over, can bring delight in many ways. Wit, word-play, unexpectedness of word and thought, depth of feeling, word-music, vivid images, the shape of the poem on the page, all bring me joy.
I think poetry should come from the heart of the writer—whether it is light and funny or deeply-felt. Caring—about the subject, the emotion, the act of making the poem—is, I believe, essential.
It seems to me a good poem can rhyme or not rhyme, use similes and metaphors or not, be metrical or free, be as complex as a Shakespeare sonnet or as seemingly simple as a statement by William Carlos Williams. It can be anything the writer wants it to be—as long as it reflects true feeling. And that “feeling” can be just the joy of using words!
Strong, accurate, interesting words, well-placed, make the reader feel the writer’s emotion and intentions. Choosing the right words—for their meaning, their connotations, their sounds, even the look of them, makes a poem memorable. The words become guides to the feelings that lie between the lines. Just-right words make the poem reverberate—and give the reader the joyful shivers!
Patricia Hubbell. Black Earth, Gold Sun.
Prose = words in their best order; Poetry = the best words in their best order”—Coleridge said it, and I believe it. Poetry IS about words—their precision, texture, beauty (and ugliness). Prose is about words, too, but not in the same way. Prose is about the bigger picture. The canvas is bigger and so are the brushstrokes. A good poem, whether narrated by a character or by the poet her/himself, uses words wonderfully, and it uses them to capture specific moments in a fresh way, a way that makes the reader exclaim with delight, “Yes, that’s it! That’s right!”
A good poem may also ask philosophical questions. In its condensed form, poetry gives these questions an immediacy, a great power to startle and grab the imagination. Poetry is great for asking—and sometimes answering—those questions that come to you just as you’re falling asleep.
Marilyn Singer. Footprints on the Roof: Poems About the Earth.
Personally, I’d say a good poem makes me see something in a new way. It’s fresh and eye-opening. And it’s also compact and intense. One of my favorite quotes about poetry is this one from Arnold Adoff: “I really want a poem to sprout roses and spit bullets; this is the ideal combination…” I think it’s partly the compactness of a poem that, if the poet has a strong vision and command of language, will let it both “sprout roses and spit bullets” at the same time. A good poem doesn’t waste words; it uses them sparingly and meaningfully.
Rebecca Davis, editor
There are at least a hundred different ways to respond to that question. Like a good poem, it says more in a few words than some novels do in three hundred pages.
But, here’s a thought I had recently about poetry:
A good poem is like medicine. It can be made up of almost anything, but only when its ingredients are put together in the right proportions–neither too much nor too little—can it affect your life.
Taking that medicine analogy even further, just a little dose of good poetry is sometimes all you need to be helped and even healed.
This, of course, ties into some very old ideas. My Abenaki ancestors said that words have power, that a song can be medicine, can restore balance, can bring back joy after sorrow. Words of power make things happen. Good poems touch that sort of power.
Joseph Bruchac. No Borders.
My answer to your question comes in part from a poem of mine called “What Is A Poem?”
What is a poem?
Hard work.
Emotion surprised.
Throwing a colored shadow.
A word that doubles back on itself, not once but twice.
The exact crunch of carrots.
Precise joys.
A prayer that sounds like a curse until it is said again.
Crows punctuating a field of snow.
Hard work.
Jane Yolen. Take Joy: A Book for Writers.
Quotes on Platonic Conception (Plato’s Cave), competitiveness, passiveness and the self-propagating qualities of rottenness.
“Is it possible, in the final analysis, for one human being to achieve perfect understanding of another?
We can invest enormous time and energy in serious efforts to know another person, but in the end, how close can we come to that person’s essence? We convince ourselves that we know the other person well, but do we really know anything important about anyone?
…Never in the whole course of my life – had I grappled with questions like this. And why not? Perhaps because my hands had been full of living. I had simply been too busy to think about myself. “
“All men are not created equal, he said. That was just some righteous-sounding nonsense they taught you in school. Japan might have the political structure of a democratic nation, but it was at the same time a fiercely carnivorous class society in which the weak were devoured by the strong, and unless you became one of the elite, there was no point living in this country. You’d just be ground to dust. You had to fight your way up every rung of the ladder. This kind of ambition was entirely healthy. If people lost that ambition, Japan would perish. In response to my father-in-law’s views, I offered no opinion. He was not looking for my opinion. he had merely been sprouting his belief, a conviction that would remain unchanged for all eternity.”
“Kumiko’s mother was the daughter of a high-ranking official. She had been raised in the finest Tokyo neighborhood, wanting for nothing, and she possessed neither the opinions nor the character to oppose her husband. As far as I could see, she had no opinion at all about anything that was not set directly in front of her (and in fact, she was
extremely nearsighted). Whenever an occasion arose in which she needed an opinion on something in the wider world, she borrowed her husband’s. If this had been all there was to her, she wouldn’t have bothered anyone, but as is so often the case with such women, she suffered from incurable pretentiousness. Lacking any values of their own, such people can arrive at a standpoint only by adopting other people’s standards or views. The only principle that governs their minds is the question “How do I look?” And so Mrs Wataya became a narrow, highly strung woman whose only concerns were her husband’s place in the government and her son’s academic performance. Anything else ceased to have meaning for her.”
“Somewhere, far, far away, there’s a shitty island. An island without a name. An island not worth giving a name. A shitty island with a shitty shape. On this shitty island grow palm trees that also have shitty shapes. And the palm trees produce coconuts that give off a shitty smell. Shitty monkeys live in the trees, and they love to eat these shitty-smelling coconuts, after which they shit the world’s foulest shit. The shit falls on the ground and builds up shitty mounds, making the shitty palm trees that grow on them even shittier. It’s an endless cycle… As I sat here looking at you… I suddenly remembered the story of the shitty island. What I’m trying to say is this. A certain kind of shittiness, a certain kind of stagnation, a certain kind of darkness, goes on propagating itself by its own power in its self-contained cycle. And once it passes a certain point, no one can stop it – even if the person himself wants to stop it.”
The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, Haruki Murakami
Quotes on humility, cultural rejection and mental rigidity
“The mark of the immature man is that he wants to die nobly for a cause, while the mark of the mature man is that he wants to live humbly for one.” — Wilhelm Stekel (quoted in The Catcher In The Rye)
“I’m standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff—I mean if they’re running and they don’t look where they’re going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That’s all I’d do all day. I’d just be the catcher in the rye and all.”
“This fall I think you’re riding for -it’s a special kinda of fall, a horrible kind. The man falling isn’t permitted to feel or hear himself hit bottom. He just keeps falling and falling. The whole arrangement’s designed for men who, at some time or other in their lives, were looking for something their own environment couldn’t supply them with. Or they thought their own environment couldn’t supply them with. So they gave up looking. They gave it up before they ever really got started.”
-The Catcher In The Rye, J.D Salinger
Roger the Alien in American Dad is right. It’s a “filthy book”. I can understand why many assassins love this novel. It’s filled with angst, hatred and this deep sense of anger at the world due to their misfit and cultural rejection.
” ‘Only people who’ve been discriminated against can really know how much it hurts. Each person feels the pain in his own way, each has his own scars. So I think I’m concerned about fairness and justice as anybody. But what disgusts me even more are people who have no imagination. The kind T.S Eliot calls hollow men. People who fill that lack of imagination with heartless bits of straw, not even aware of what they’re doing. Callous people who throw a lot of empty words at you, trying to force you to do what you don’t want to. Like that lovely pair we just met.’
…’Gays, lesbians, straights, feminists, fascist pigs, communists, Hare Krishnas – none of them bother me. I don’t care what banner they raise. But what I can’t stand are hollow people. When I’m with them I just can’t bear it, and wind up saying things I shouldn’t. With those women – I should’ve just let it slide, or else called Miss Saeki and let her handle it. She would have given them a smile and smoothed things over. But I just can’t do that. I say things I shouldn’t, do things I shouldn’t do. I can’t control myself. That’s one of my weak points. Do you know why that’s a weak point of mine?”
” ‘Cause if you take every single person who lacks much imagination seriously, there’s no end to it,” I say.
“That’s it. … But there’s one thing I want you to remember, Kafka. Those are exactly the kind of peple who murdered Miss Saeki’s childhood sweetheart. Narrow minds devoid of imagination. Intolerance, theories cut off from reality, empty terminology, usurped ideals, inflexible systems. Those are the things that really frighten me. What I absolutely fear and loathe. Of course it’s important to know what’s right and what’s wrong. Individual errors in judgement can usually be corrected. As long as you have the courage to admit mistakes, things can be turned around. But intolerant, narrow minds with no imagination are like parasites that transform the hose, change form, and continue to thrive. They’re a lost cause, and I don’t want anyone like that coming in here… I wish I could just laugh off people like that, but I can’t.’”
- Kafka On The Shore, Haruki Murakami
It’s my favourite quote. 
Freedom Of Speech (Unfinished)
Milton argued that if the facts are laid bare, truth will defeat falsehood in open competition, but this cannot be left for a single individual to determine. According to Milton, it is up to each individual to uncover their own truth; no one is wise enough to act as a censor for all individuals.
Noam Chomsky states that: “If you believe in freedom of speech, you believe in freedom of speech for views you don’t like. Stalin and Hitler, for example, were dictators in favor of freedom of speech for views they liked only. If you’re in favor of freedom of speech, that means you’re in favor of freedom of speech precisely for views you despise.”
English biographer Evelyn Beatrice Hall quote: “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it,” is often cited to describe the principle of freedom of speech (often mis-attributed to Voltaire) as an illustration of Voltaire’s beliefs in Beatrice Hall’s biography on him.
One of the most notable proponents of the link between freedom of speech and democracy is Alexander Meiklejohn. He argues that the concept of democracy is that of self-government by the people. For such a system to work an informed electorate is necessary. In order to be appropriately knowledgeable, there must be minimal constraints on the free flow of information and ideas. According to Meiklejohn, democracy will not be true to its essential ideal if those in power are able to manipulate the electorate by withholding information and stifling criticism. Meiklejohn acknowledges that the desire to manipulate opinion can stem from the motive of seeking to benefit society. However, he argues, choosing manipulation negates, in its means, the democratic ideal. Eric Barendt has called the defence of free speech on the grounds of democracy “probably the most attractive and certainly the most fashionable free speech theory in modern Western democracies”.
Thomas I. Emerson expanded on this defence when he argued that freedom of speech helps to provide a balance between stability and change. Freedom of speech acts as a “safety valve” to let off steam when people might otherwise be bent on revolution. He argues that “The principle of open discussion is a method of achieving a moral adaptable and at the same time more stable community, of maintaining the precarious balance between healthy cleavage and necessary consensus.” Emerson furthermore maintains that “Opposition serves a vital social function in offsetting or ameliorating (the) normal process of bureaucratic decay.”
According to the Freedom Forum Organization, legal systems, and society at large, recognize limits on the freedom of speech, particularly when freedom of speech conflicts with other values or rights. Limitations to freedom of speech may follow the “harm principle” or the “offense principle”, for example in the case of pornography or “hate speech”. Limitations to freedom of speech may occur through legal sanction and/or social disapprobation.
In “On Liberty” (1859) John Stuart Mill argued that “…there ought to exist the fullest liberty of professing and discussing, as a matter of ethical conviction, any doctrine, however immoral it may be considered.” Mill argues that the fullest liberty of expression is required to push arguments to their logical limits, rather than the limits of social embarrassment. However, Mill also introduced what is known as the harm principle, in placing the following limitation on free expression: “the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others.
In 1985 Joel Feinberg introduced what is known as the “offence principle”, arguing that Mill’s harm principle does not provide sufficient protection against the wrongful behaviours of others. Feinberg wrote “It is always a good reason in support of a proposed criminal prohibition that it would probably be an effective way of preventing serious offense (as opposed to injury or harm) to persons other than the actor, and that it is probably a necessary means to that end.” Hence Feinberg argues that the harm principle sets the bar too high and that some forms of expression can be legitimately prohibited by law because they are very offensive. But, as offending someone is less serious than harming someone, the penalties imposed should be higher for causing harm. In contrast Mill does not support legal penalties unless they are based on the harm principle. Because the degree to which people may take offense varies, or may be the result of unjustified prejudice, Feinberg suggests that a number of factors need to be taken into account when applying the offense principle, including: the extent, duration and social value of the speech, the ease with which it can be avoided, the motives of the speaker, the number of people offended, the intensity of the offense, and the general interest of the community at large.
Quotes on universal isolation
Sputnik (companion) I from the Baikanor Space Centre in the Republic of Kazakhstan was the first man-made satellite launched into spacein 1957. Sputnik II was successfully launch in the same year, with the dog Laika on board. The satellite was never recovered and Laika ended up sacrificed in the name of astrological research.
‘”And it came to me then. That we were wonderful travelling companions, but in the end no more than lonely lumps of metal on their own separate orbits. From far off they look like beautiful shooting stars, but in reality they’re nothing more than prisons, where each of us is locked up alone, going nowhere. When the orbits of these two satellites of ours happened to cross paths, we could be together. Mayber even open our hearts to each other. But that was only for the briefest moment. In the next instant we’d be in absolute solitude. Until we burned up and became nothing.’”
‘Why do people have to be this lonely? What’s the point of it all? Millions of people in this world, all of them yearning, looking to others to satisfy them, yet isolating themselves. Why? Was the Earth put just here to nourish human loneliness?
I turned face-up on the slab of stone, gazed at the sky, and thought about all the man-made satellites spinning around the Earth. The horizon was still etched in a faint glow, and stars began to blink or in the deep, wine-coloured sky. I gazed among them for the light of a satellite, but it was still too bright out to spot one with the naked eye. The sprinkling of stars looked nailed to the spot, unmoving. I closed my eyes and listened carefully for the descendants of Sputnik, even now circling the Earth, gravity their only tie to the planet. Lonely metal souls in the unimpeded darkness of space, they meet, pass each other and part, never to meet again. No words passing between them. No promises to keep.’
‘So that’s how we live our lives. No matter how deep and fatal the loss, no matter how important the thing that’s stolen from us – that’s snatched out of our hands – even if we are left completely changed people with only the outer layer of skin from before, we continue to play out our lives this way, in silence. We draw each nearer to our allotted span of time, bidding it farewell as it trails off behind. Repeating, often adroitly, the endless deeds of the everyday. Leaving behind a feeling of immeasurable emptiness.’
—Sputnik Sweetheart, Haruki Murakami
Finished the book. Ends with a very kau pei feeling, yet in a bittersweet philosophical tinge at the back of your tongue. We are all alone, but we still clinge on to the impossible yet human hope that someone might understand us, accompany us as we try to break that mirror to get to the Other self, in the Other. (You’ll have to read the book to understand)
Quote on relative morality, oppressive ideologies, feminism and illusion
“Indeed, such differences of opinion are enough to cause bloodshed and revolution. Towns have been sacked for less, and a million martyrs haves suffered at the stake rather than yield an inch upon any of the points here debated. No passion is stronger in the breast of man than the desire to make others believe as he believes. Nothing so cuts at the root of his happiness and fills him with rage as the sense that another rates low what he prizes high. Whigs and Tories, Liberal party and Labour party – for what do they battle except their own prestige? It is not love for truth but desire to prevail that sets quarter against quarter and makes parish desire the downfall of parish. Each seeks peace of mind and subserviency rather than the triumph of truth and the exaltation of virtue – but these moralities belong, and should be left to the historian, since they are as dull as ditch water.”
— Virginia Woolf’s Orlando
“‘Better is it’, she thought, ‘to be clothed with poverty and ignorance, which are the dark garments of the female sex; better to leave the rule and discipline of the world to others; better be quit of martial ambition, the love of power, and all the other manly desires if so one can more fully enjoy the most exalted raptured known to the human spirit., which are’, she said aloud, as her habit was when deeply moved, ‘contemplation, solitude, love.’
‘Praise God I’m a woman!’”
— Virginia Woolf’s Orlando
“A poet is Atlantic and lion in one. While one drowns us the other gnaws us. If we survive the teeth, we succumb to the waves. A man who can destroy illusions is both beast and flood. Illusions are to the soul what atmosphere is to the earth. Roll up the tender air and the tender plant dies, the colour fades. The earth we walk on is a parched cinder. It is marl we tread and fiery cobbles scorch our feet. By the truth we are undone. Life is a dream. ‘Tis waking that kills us. He who robs us of our dreams robs us our life -”
— Virginia Woolf’s Orlando
Give me time; I will finish the damn book.
In Remembering Our Eclipse.
My wife! my wife! what wife? I have no wife.
O insupportable! O heavy hour!
Methinks it should be now a huge eclipse
Of sun and moon, and that the affrighted globe
Should yawn at alteration.
–Shakespeare’s Othello, quoted in Woolf’s Orlando.
Somehow, I was always puzzled by this Shakespeare phrase. I dun get why the frightened Earth would suddenly “yawn” at change. Then I realise that there’s an archaic definition to the term “yawn”: to open wide, or lay open, as if by yawning. Makes more sense that way. Damn connotations.
P.S Because I love her.
