Standing in My Emphases

                My two emphases are Environmental Studies, and English. Each of these disciplines is rich in occurrences of the standing metaphor. One of the most prominent features of each of these institutions are standards. In English the standards are grammatical standards, like the Oxford Comma, which is a manifestation of humans in an ivory tower dictating in a totalitarian way what the rest of the world is supposed to think. In Environmental Studies standards are set in place as a means from keeping rich, powerful humans from doing whatever they want. Both disciplines require great understanding as well. The mechanical rules of English dictate that we adhere to standards, and understand them if we are to succeed. I took a class this semester called “Imaginative Writing and the Creative Process.” For our final project we had to write a complete work, or a few complete works and send them along to publishers.  Being that the Beat Generation has come and gone, we are back to a period of time in American literature that requires a mastery of grammatical rules. Imagine if I had sent a ridiculously unorganized paper, with commas spread unevenly and nonsensically throughout. iT co,ulddd ge,t re!aallY aBSURd!

 And all of human life has benefitted greatly from environmental controls that have been obtained through hundreds of years of the scientific method. We’ve mastered many environmental problems which have led to the proliferation of our species. We obtained the understanding sometime in the past few hundred years, and the understanding has led to a practice of standardization which has served to benefit all of humankind. For example, there is a systems program called the ISO 14000, which is headquartered in Switzerland, and it standardizes all of the engineering regulations. What this means is that all the components of everyday life: toilets, electrical wires and switches, screws, light bulbs, wrenches , engineering controls for water systems, solar energy systems, nuclear energy systems, etc. are going through a continual improvement systems plan. What ultimately means is that we are trying to bring these components up to a global standard, so that a global manufacturing base can be implemented to create components for mass-production, and the service of more people, and the spreading of an increased quality of life. To standardize, according to our metaphor, means we will set in stone the specifications for parts. Therefore, the blueprints will be easy. The stage is set.

                A Buddhist economist named Ernst Schumacher wrote an article called “Small is Beautiful”, discussing the need to decrease the amount of resources we consume, all the meanwhile working to promote as much happiness and well-being as possible. He invokes the standing metaphor magnificently when he writes, “It is not wealth that stands in the way of liberation but the attachment to wealth; not the enjoyment of pleasurable things, but the craving for them.” So there is something standing between us and liberation, obstructing us. When we view obstacles in our lives, it’s funny that we invoke the standing metaphor by saying, in essence, “The only thing standing between me and happiness is…” Why is an obstruction something that stands? Why not something “lying between me and happiness”? Or something “squatting between me and happiness”? I’ll tell you why: Because standing is POWERFUL! It’s a position of dominance, and when a big wall is standing between me and China, (I’m a hording Mongol,) and I can’t rape and pillage, I’m extremely disappointed. It’s easy to see how the metaphor can be used to express dissatisfaction and disappointment.

                Another powerful article concerning my Environmental Studies emphasis is “Ecology, Community, and Lifestyle: Outline of an Ecosophy” by Arne Naess. This is a really phenomenal work, and could by itself exhaust the requirements of this essay. For space purposes I will keep it relatively brief though. Naess discusses the universal right to self-unfolding and the correlative intrinsic value of every life form. This refers, of course, to all biota—so plants and animals fit within the sphere of protection Naess proposes. Naess writes, “To have a home, to belong, to live, and many other similar expressions suggest the fundamental milieu factors involved in the shaping of an individual’s sense of self and self-respect. The identity of the individual, ‘that I am something’, is developed through interaction with a broad manifold, organic and inorganic. There is no completely isolatable I, no isolatable social unit.”

                This paragraph from Naess describes to me one of the deepest elements of this semester in our class, Standing as a Metaphor. Man is a wandering primate—intelligent, to be sure, but also an animal. We’ve stood up, we’ve created myriad languages and technologies as a means of self-expression, but there is something about us which can never be independent. Our consciousness depends on the external world. There cannot be an observation without an observer, and vice-versa. This relates specifically to the formulation of metaphors generally, as well. Because we interact with an exteriorized environment  we construct linguistic methods of dealing with what we see, thus allowing ourselves to communicate. Naess writes, “To distance oneself from nature and the natural, is to distance oneself from a part of that which the I is built up of.” If anything can be said for man, it’s that we’ve dominated nature. But we are not outside of nature, and any time we do something to harm the environment, we are hurting ourselves by hurting our perception.

                Naess also said, “The emergence of human ecological consciousness is a philosophically important idea: a life-form has developed on earth which is capable of understanding and appreciating its relations with all other life forms and to the earth as a whole.”

                Language is a fascinating tool. We belong to the Phylum chordate, which means we share a recent (in geologic terms,) common ancestry with any animal that has a spinal chord. It’s impressive to think of how different we became when we became bipedal, language-using monkeys. Suddenly our world become an object of inquiry and fascination. I imagine that after we had named one thing we wanted to name them all.
                Here's where I jump the rails slightly, but it's still a valid scientific theory, and worth considering in this context. Terence McKenna is a thinker I'm particularly fond of. He has a theory about the evolution of language that I consider to be worth entertaining. McKenna talks about how we were once canopy-dwelling monkeys on the African savannah, staying in the trees for fear of predation. Along the way there were harsh dry seasons in Africa which caused a lapse in the fruiting of the trees. This led our monkey ancestors to leave the trees and go out in search of food. According to his theory, we came upon psilocybin magic mushrooms growing on the dung of ungulates, and we ate them. This led to a distortion of normal consciousness and the awakening of tonal perception. He theorized that when these apes got stoned they were then able to differentiate between different tonalities in their grunting. McKenna thought this was the origin of human language. I'd be interested in hearing a correlative theory of Standing, if one exists. Of course, it would contain different components, but something radical must have happened along the way.

 

Family Structureless

                The traditional family structure is entirely undermined in The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka, The Marquise of O  by Heinrich Von Kleist, and Iris by Mark Jarman. Each of these authors employed the standing metaphor as a means of storytelling, displaying emotion, and displaying dominance hierarchies within family structures. Each of the stories has a delightful grossness about them, as well.

                Our first gross story is The Metamorphosis. “One morning, upon awakening from agitated dreams, Gregor Samsa found himself, in his bed, transformed into a monstrous vermin.” Thus begins The Metamorphosis. To better understand the origins of this story it helps to realize the situation Kafka was born into. He was born into a middle-class Jewish family in Prague, Czechoslovakia. His father Hermann was described by Kafka as a “huge, selfish, overbearing businessman,” and as “a true Kafka in strength, health, appetite, loudness of voice, eloquence, self-satisfaction, worldly dominance, endurance, presence of mind, and knowledge of human nature.” Kafka’s relationship with his father was troubled. In his short “Letter to His Father”, Franz complained of being profoundly affected by his father’s authoritarian and demanding character. Indeed, the story of The Metamorphosis is quite inseparable from Kafka’s daddy issues.

                He awakens for work but cannot go. His mother, who has been so dependent on him to provide for the family, calls to him at a quarter to seven, “Gregor, don’t you have a train to catch?” From the beginning we see how Gregor’s family has become so dependent on him. When he awakens in the morning, of course,  he finds that he is now the one who requires help. “It occurred to him how easy everything would be if someone lent him a hand. It would take only two strong people (he thought ofhis father and the maid); they would only have to slip their arms under his vaulted back, slide him out of the bed, crouch down with their burden, and then just wait patiently and cautiously as he flipped over to the floor, where he hoped his tiny legs would have some purpose.” We see how he has been forced into a moment of helpless subordination due to his circumstances, and how in order to get low enough to help one as low as Gregor, somebody would have to crouch down. That’s how low he’s become.

      
         Throughout this morbid tale there are so many examples of standing and lying down as being integral to the relationships between the characters. Gregor was once in the army and sees a photo of himself standing in his uniform, “demanding respect for his bearing”. This device issued to emphasize just how low Gregor has sunk. At the beginning of the second section is another example of this device. “The glow from the electric streetlamps produced pallid spots on the ceiling and the higher parts of the furniture, but down by Gregor it was dark.” Clearly his posture as a bug has removed him from the light, both literally and figuratively.

                 The Marquise of O is an extremely gross story. For me, (and I don't mean to be a harsh critic,) the redeeming quality of that story was when the dad and the daughter were making out. It was extremely disgusting,to be sure, but I appreciated the dark Freudian surrealism,especially in a story so old. The standing metaphor is prominent throughout, but again, is most meaningful in the scenes regarding the gross dad and the daughter. When it refers to the father as being "bent over double", we see how he's been broken by the whole situation with the Marquise and the soldier. But as the story unfolds we see how his blessing has become the cornerstone of the entire piece.

              Jarman's Iris has a different kind of family structure than the others, since Iris' male family members are killed early one. She does search out her poetry teacher and have the little fling with him, sort of as a filler fantasy. But that's not all that important to the story, except that it lends some credence to her overarching obsession with Robinson Jeffers. It seems like, throughout the whole story, Iris is depending on men to make her happy. Her family life is completely jacked up-- except that she and the junkyard guy  raise Ruth to be a very good kid. When she finally gets to visit Jeffers' property, she knows that of course she was a prominent figure in his life too, since he so painstakingly planted a row of irises. Ahhhh.

Breathing Space

In the Duino Elegies, Rilke expresses the role of time in the life of the artistic work. One day when we discussed it in class I had a really magnificent experience. The British author Colin Wilson refers to it as “breathing space”. We spoke about that moment when the bow is pulled completely back, at the fullness of tension, and there is a split second of nothingness when the draw is released, but the arrow has not yet begun to fly.  When a person is going to jump into a pool, there’s the moment when they’ve begun their thrust, when they’ve decided to jump, sprung forward, there is the moment of tension between the decision and the action. There is the moment when the very tip of their first toe touches the water, but is not yet wet—not yet submerged.  T.S. Eliot referred to this as “the still point at the center of the universe,” like an axis around which all of existence revolves. When we discussed this in class I had this sensation that Colin Wilson expressed—this notion of “breathing space”. This is a feeling one gets when one transcends ordinary reality, and as it persists one achieves a state Wilson referred to as “Faculty X”.

Faculty X is the place to be. According to Wilson, and Rilke, all great art arrives from this place: a place that exists beyond time. Rilke said, in the Seventh Elegy, “Truly being here is glorious.” The italics were from Rilke himself. To my mind, truly being here is dramatically different than just being here. 

And this is where Rilke says the angels live for eternity: beyond time, truly here. This is a state of heightened consciousness, of hyper-reality, and of true understanding.  Eliot wrote, in the Four Quartets, “Love is most nearly itself when here and now cease to matter.” So love exists beyond time, along with other mythic, heroic, and ethereal qualities.

Could it be that everything  we perceive as reality is only a projection from this deeper realm, but it’s snapped into the finite via our imperfect senses? My good friend Tyler McDonald seems to think so. He talks about how, when we perceive something, our perception is only an illusion—or, a way to make the infinite, finite.

So I wonder whether this is the responsibility that has fallen on the poet: to bring the infinite a little closer. The poet creates linguistic structures which convey hyper-real sensory experiences, thereby bringing us a bit closer to that realm of angels, and to Faculty X. But how do we arrive there, and how can we stay? Or can we? Is this a domain only habitable by hyper-real entities? Can man ascend to such a high state of consciousness that this is where he always exists? (Women too, of course.) Eliot asked, “Where is the summer? That unimaginable Zero summer?” Does it exist, and can we arrive there?

Rilke seems to think we cannot. In the Ninth Elegy he asks, “Why then have to be human—and escaping from fate, keep longing for fate?” So, why do I enter heightened consciousness for a little while, only to be snapped back unwittingly? He answers his own question a few stanzas down: “Because truly being here is so much; because everything here apparently needs us, this fleeting world, which in some way keeps calling to us.” This requires us to question a statement from the First Elegy, when Rilke said, “We are not really at home in our interpreted world.” He seems to think we can enter the angelic realm for a moment at a time, but then we snap back into our reality, because, in a way, we are needed here. This is where the philosophy of Tyler McDonald comes in. When we arouse Faculty X we see with the eyes of angels: we see the infinite, if only for a few beautiful, fleeting moments. But our sensory perception of the hyper-real, the extra-dimensional leaves us struggling with our language, our “shabby equipment”, Eliot called it. We can only explain our experience through metaphors, and metaphors are extraordinarily imprecise, inaccurate, and clunky.

“Strange to see meanings that clung together once, floating away in every direction,” wrote Rilke. That’s one of my favorite passages I’ve ever read anywhere, by anybody.  It rings so true. One of my hobbies is boundary dissolution—so to see the experience articulated so beautifully—well, it feels good.

 So what is this extra-dimensionality? After all, “Trees do exist. The houses we live in still stand.” T.S. Eliot phrases it perfectly, (as per usual), “Not the intense moment isolated, with no before and after, but a lifetime burning in every moment.” And a few lines later, “We must be still, and still moving into another intensity.” This is the same conclusion that every great mystic has ever reached, I think. There’s a Buddhist saying that you don’t have to climb to the top of the mountain to reach enlightenment. You can do it from home. And Eliot and Rilke and Wilson and T. Mac all arrive at the same conclusion. The time is now. The place is here, right where we stand. “To have been at one with the earth, seems beyond undoing,” wrote Rilke. “And so we keep pressing on, trying to achieve it, trying to hold it firmly in our simple hands, in our overcrowded gaze, in our speechless heart.” Rilke knows, though, that it’s not out there waiting for us to find it; it’s in here waiting for us to look at it. “And we, who have always thought of happiness as rising, would feel the emotion that almost overwhelms us whenever a happy thing falls.”  

Twelve Stones, Twelve Stanzas

Leslie Norris wrote “The Twelve Stones of Pentre Ifan” celebrating the megalithic monument in  Wales. The monument itself is a four-stone structure in the middle of eight smaller stones. A notable feature of Norris’ poem is that the poem itself is twelve stanzas long—twelve stones long. The word “stanza” is itself notable in this context. A stanza is: "a group of rhymed verse lines," 1580s, from It. stanza "verse of a poem," originally "standing, stopping place," from V.L. *stantia "a stanza of verse," so called from the stop at the end of it, from L. stans (gen. stantis), prp. of stare "to stand”.

            Norris’ nearly translates the stone monument literally by memorializing it in stanzas. Like the ancients who originally stood the stones endwise and arranged them harmoniously, so also did Norris create a monument by standing objects on end. The characters  the ancients wrote their language in were tangible objects, dense, with specific gravity, and cumbersome. By some engineering device they raised the capstone (about 16 tons,) atop three erect stones and raised a monument.

            The tools Norris utilized were significantly different than this. Norris’ tools were much, much smaller. Rather than recording the language of his moment in heavy stone, Norris employed small angular tools, which represent little mouth noises fashioned by linguistically-advanced primates. Are words less cumbersome than stones?  Perhaps they are. Perhaps they are not. The question which remains to be answered is whether linguistic stones will stay standing as long as those of granite.

            Wendell Berry commented, indirectly, on the plight of Norris. In the beginning lines of his poem “The Farmer, Speaking of Monuments”, Berry writes, “Always, on their generations breaking wave, men think to be immortal in the world.” And a few lines later, “He will not be immortal in words.” The work of our hands will outlive us, of course, but Berry seems to think our immortality is better chiseled in stone than in the simple mouth noises we articulate in the moment. “His words all turn to leaves,” he writes, “answering the sun with mute quick reflections.” And to end the poem Berry writes, “In autumn, all his monuments fall.” I interpreted this as a reference to death, and how death is the great author and finisher of our lives. When autumn comes, all of our monuments will fall.

                Melendez seems to approach this with a different sensibility. She writes, “I oppose temples, object to the mountainous externalization of might.” This is a truly beautiful expression. Rather than meditating on the erection of temples and the existence of stone, she rejects these forms of masculine self-identification. She approaches it with a newness that violates the male sentiment expressed in the building of temples. “Might in me,” she writes, “is not erected, but absorbed.”
            Perhaps the purpose of our life is better represented by the philosophy of Melendez than by Berry or Norris. I saw a bumper sticker the other day that I thought was apt: “Leaving your mark is overrated.” Perhaps this is the basic truth of our existence: that we will live a while, then we’ll die a while, and all things external have always been external, and will remain external forever. Perhaps we are only here to observe. Our monuments are bound to fail. Even the language of stone is indecipherable after a gap in history. We are doomed to pathetic contributions, and our names will die no matter how high our skyscrapers. It’s best to accept that and adopt a non-interventionist attitude.