Foerster on Forcing

The reading of the poem benefits from the poet's note:

"A Pot of Crocuses": The women of ancient Athens celebrated the death and resurrection of Adonis in an annual springtime festival, during which they set out on their rooftops small pots of forced flowers. Because these "Adonis gardens" would soon wither under the heat of the April sun, the expression eventually was used to refer to any transitory pleasure.

With horticultural precision we enter the mythic.

the corms poke through the soil
like randy waking gods, their pale
phalluses swelling in the sun.

The narrator pivots from the flowers to observing a youth skateboarding who "slouched off / with raw, abraded palms toward home" and then muses upon gifting the pot of flowers to the mother of the skateboarder and thinks again of it — tripped up by intimations of ever-present mortality.

it wouldn't have been for any promise

of beauty I had to offer, nor any
incorruptible idea of it,
nor even the cherished terra cotta
I've buried and retrieved these fifteen
years. For how could I have looked
him in the eyes, not knowing which
of these must end up broken first?

The pathos comes through in the imagined presentation of the gift, earlier in the poem. It impresses the viewer with a mooted dialogue:

Here, take these crocuses
to your mother, so she might forgive
the scarring a woman has to endure
to see a boy safely to manhood.
Instead, I stood there, wavering
with that crowded pot of spikes in my hands,
and knew if I had summoned him
it wouldn't have been for any promise

And so we cross over into the concluding stanza and its retraction poised on the impossible question of the first to fall when we have been made so painfully aware that nothing lasts.

Richard Foerster. "A Pot of Crocuses" in The Burning of Troy

And so for day 1488
09.01.2011

Scarry on Beauty

First delivered as a Tanner Lecture, On Beauty and Being Just by Elaine Scarry has two parts: "On Beauty and Being Wrong" and "On Beauty and Being Fair". The argument in the second part is etymologically driven and phenomenologically derived. It is a remarkable feat to link beauty with justice through subtle shifts in a semantic field.

The notion of a pact here again comes into play. A single word, "fairness," is used both in referring to loveliness of countenance and in referring to the ethical requirement for "being fair," "playing fair" and "fair distribution." One might suppose that "fairness" as an ethical principle had come not from the adjective for comely beauty but instead from the wholly distinct noun for the yearly agricultural fair, the "periodical gathering of buyers and sellers." But it instead — as scholars of etymology have shown — travels from a cluster of roots in European languages (Old English, Old Norse, Gothic), as well as cognates in both Eastern European and Sanskrit, that all originally express the aesthetic use of "fair" to mean "beautiful" or "fit" — fit both in the sense of "pleasing to the eye" and in the sense of "firmly placed," as when something matches or exists in accord with another thing's shape or size. "Fair" is connected to the verbs "vegen" (Dutch) and "fegen" (German) meaning "to adorn," "to decorate," and "to sweep." [...] But "fegen" is in turn connected to the verb "fay," the transitive and intransitive verb meaning "to join," "to fit," "to unite," "to pact." "Pact" in turn — the making of a covenant or treaty or agreement — is form the same root as "pax, pacis," the word for peace.

It would be a stretch to allow the argument to rest on this relay. Scarry will examine other links based on a typology of thing, beholder and creator.

When we speak about beauty, attention sometimes falls on the beautiful object, at other times on the perceiver's cognitive act of beholding the beautiful thing, and at still other times on the creative act that is prompted by one's being in the presence of what is beautiful. The invitation to ethical fairness can be found at each of these three sites [...]

It is easy to follow Scarry through this trajectory though I somehow find myself resisting her critique of those that invoke the danger of reification in regards to beauty. The old fashioned notion of idolatry is worth broaching.

And so for day 919
19.06.2009

Beauty Said Sublime Rehearsed

This stanza from a poem in Alicia Ostriker's The Book of Seventy is shaped like what it is about: it is a thing of beauty.

we have almost escaped the rule of reason
we have almost returned
to the rule of beauty

I like the balance that is achieved and the subtle hint at referencing the "sublime" which is aligned with reason. And from my reading of Burke and Kant (refreshed by entries at Wikipedia, especially the one on the sublime) I remember that the pleasure of beauty derives from the passion of love and that the sublime's frisson is met in the taming of fear. Such taming proceeds by way of repetition and detachment. In a way the sublime depends upon rehearsal and the carting away of death.

And so for day 864
25.04.2009

Ravaging Beauty

Alessandro Baricco in "Another Kind of Beauty: Note on War" the afterword to An Iliad

For this reason, today, the task of a true pacifism should be not to demonize war excessively so much as to understand that only when we are capable of another kind of beauty will we be able to do without what war has always offered us. To construct another kind of beauty is perhaps the only route to true peace.

He goes on "To give a powerful meaning to things without having to place them in the blinding light of death."

It is perhaps music that leads the way.

And so for day 784
04.02.2009