tRoMAI: Aesthetic Emotion Ultimately Trumps Explanation

[tRoMAI?]

I’ll use a poem by James Wright that seems to be the subject of more polarized opinions than usual:

“The Jewel”

There is this cave
In the air behind my body
That nobody is going to touch:
A cloister, a silence
Closing around a blossom of fire.
When I stand upright in the wind
My bones turn to dark emeralds.

Being the victi– I mean proud possessor– of a decent education in literary theory and philosophy, I could knock out 10 or 20 pages explicating this poem, short though it may be. If I did so, some of those pages would naturally be filled with far-out concoctions created almost wholly in my own head– personal interpretations with little likelihood of representing any part of James Wright’s intentions when he wrote the poem, while others would contain contentions as close to objective facts as possible– given the inevitable caveats of the postmodern age– demonstrated by the widespread agreement of those who read them.

But, like any piece of art, much of what makes Wright’s poem work (or not) depends on an emotional engagement that can’t be fully explained.  By “fully,” I mean explained in such a way that the person being explained to would take on your view, seeing that it was “true.”

For example: one criticism of this poem– indeed of much of James Wright’s poems– hinges on his use of words like “dark.” The negative critical view of the word “dark” is that it’s vague, abstract, worn-out, unrepresentative, clichéd, etc. Take your pick. But what one person sees as worn out cliché another may reasonably see a deep archetypal invocation. “Dark” just so happens to be one of the latter for me, along with a variety of others (bone, stone, tongue). When I read this poem I don’t see “dark” as insufficient or a cop-out or even just a reference to a shade (in the sense of light and dark… I might buy that the sense of ghost is implied, and there you have a paragraph or two in my mythical explication). I read the word in this context as an invocation of dark as in absence, as in that which exists opposite “light” emotions– dark thoughts and dark deeds, as in the dark of a bone-weary depression which is inextricably linked to happiness and sadness alike.

My point isn’t that I’m right or wrong, but that both sides are right. At some point, both of these reactions to the word “dark”– and ultimately the entire poem– are sufficient because that’s what the reader undeniably feels. And when the final card is dealt in the game of persuasion, spin, and rhetoric that is the game of criticism when that critical engagement is necessarily deeply personal, emotions trump analysis. One might object that this means absolute relativism, that whatever a reader says is good is good. I would contend that– setting aside that relativism is probably called for in a pursuit in which defining the art in question comes down to “it’s a poem because I say it is”– this is technically true and completely irrelevant. In extremis, when we reach out desperately for true things– when we dig into a book knowing we need something from it– we reach for what we care about and what moves and sustains us. Or at least we should… I know from experience that there’s nothing sadder and more dangerous than becoming so wrapped up in critical opinions and schools and the theory of poetry that we can no longer figure out, or remember, or feel, what moves us in these important ways.

Nor does my anti-intellectualism mean there’s no room for critical engagement and debate. In fact, it practically demands those activities else we are never able to learn about the variety of poems out there and characteristics that make them tick. Aesthetics is a field that remains in motion as our understanding of the world changes. I hesitate to call this potentially lifelong, ongoing change a “progression,” which tends to demean and devalue previous experience, but it is change. I may no longer feel (or be capable of feeling) the same way about some Shel Silverstein poems as I did when I was a child, but that doesn’t mean my engagement wasn’t valid… and intense and important and very, very real. But our world changes, we change with it, and our capabilities and the complex factors that feed into our personal aesthetics change as well. I simply recognize a variable point at which we move from critical activities that enable to those that disable ourselves or others. Recognizing the existence of that zero point doesn’t exclude a “negative” critical approach (about which I am personally ambivalent), but it does highlight the care, skill and patience needed to take such an approach and remain productive. And productivity is a key attribute of that activity that happens somewhere between reading poems and writing them.

My assumption is that criticism and debate are finally intended to have a productive outcome: to encourage appreciation, enhance understanding and increase our capacity to get inside a work of art. It’s easier to achieve this goal by showing what we appreciate and– to the extent possible– how we understand and find our way into the work than by demonstrating the failures of the many works that must– Sturgeon’s Law being as true for poetry as for any other kind of writing– necessarily fall short. If, in the end, we are persuading our audience of something, why not persuade them toward something valuable than something that is not? And if we aren’t persuading, but doing something more objective or in some other way grounded, why not spend that time and effort giving something rather than trying to take it away?

No matter the analysis, explanation, explication or polemics employed, in the end the poem must remain the thing. “I like it”– better yet “I love it”– is reasonable and reason enough.