intellect and other thoughts

A weighty topic. I’m reading John Ashbery, An Introduction to the Poetry, by David Shapiro. It’s a thrill. It’s just difficult enough that it’s hard to read more than a few pages at a sitting. But the writing makes it totally worthwhile, irresistible. I feel the stretching of my brain reading it. Today I was having a fantasy that I would suddenly become vastly intellectual, magically able to understand much more than I ever had before. I could swallow this book in one quick hour, just because I was tantalized by the initial taste of it.

What is this drive to understand? I’m not sure it’s ethically worth anything.

What is this concern with ethics?

What’s it all about?

Funny how questioning gets you nowhere, as questions lead to ever bigger questions and then suddenly, you’re left with:

I just like it (desire at the root).

. . .

Shapiro says things like this:

Ashbery has a very full palette, and one must distinguish between grammatical anomaly, unexpected dream imagery, and the nonsensical. Ashbery is one of the poets who senses an epoch’s rule system for sense itself and revolts against it with wit.

Ashbery tries successfully to reinstate the poetic qualities of all possible sources–journalism, degraded ditties, bad poetry–by implying that there is no such thing as the poetic.

His poetry starts with the feeling of cliché, the banal, the given, but ends with something complex and strange: disastrous relations.

I could quote the whole chapter. I guess I better stop. I am sighing for something. I’m having an attack of intellect. That quality that is stunted, stymied, and not useful in my life.

. . .

And then there are issues: Hero worship. Harvard. Privilege. Parody, lack of compassion in. Preciousness. France. Influence and tradition. The ultimate value of inaccessible writing. Have we gone too far with thinking, have we come to a dead end. Pluto. The Third World. Rhythm. Story. Emotion. As in whatever happened to. The ends of self-consciousness, meta, writing about writing. IMAGINATION.

Imagination is the only thing that makes sense. Imagination is fun, and a problem-solver. I can see the point of that. And compassion is a good thing too.

OK, so much for that. Over and out for today.