The Incompleteness of Self-Consideration

[vagantes]

Who can himself beginning know?
(Which was Adam's predicament).
The difficulty is to go further back:
About which Wittgenstein was uncertain.

The mad Caligula claimed wine brought life,
While Stalin (equally insane) obliterated
Photos and childhood friends alike.
Both defacing birth from forgetfulness.

I cannot go back behind the poem
To discover the self from which it stems,
For there is nowhere to go behind the poetry
And no-one to go there into that darkness.

Though x might determine y thereby
Determining causal relationship,
We cannot separate the causally significant
From that which is insignificant
When we examine a poem, because
It exists in that hinterland of thought
Where thought emerges from what is not thought.
This supplies the potent shock of awful consciousness
That Wordsworth saw down-bending from the boat
And provided the fidelity of the accidental delight
Of the self talking to dark worlds where it was born.

[Virgil]

There is much to like in this poem Vagantes. For some reason I found these lines a little awkward: "For there is nowhere to go into that darkness/And I can find no-one to go there." Otherwise a solid poem for an abstract subject. I thought the closing four lines were particulalry good:


This provides the potent shock of awful consciousness
That Wordsworth saw down-bending from the boat
And provided the fidelity of the accidental delight
Of the self talking to dark worlds where it was born.

[vagantes]

Yes, you are right Virgil.

The stanza is uneven and I have now conflated the two lines, which might improve the flow.

[PrinceMyshkin]

I agree with Virgil about the awkwardness of those lines in the original version, as well as in his appreciation of how gracefully you've handled so philsophical a question. There are other lines that I'd like to single out for appreciation:

I cannot go back behind the poem
To discover the self from which it stems


a poem...
...exists in that hinterland of thought
Where thought emerges from what is not thought.

and especially:


the fidelity of the accidental delight
Of the self talking to dark worlds where it was born.

Bravo!

[vagantes]

I am still worrying about those lines, which were central when I began the poem.

The basic idea is the contradiction of the state known as coeval.

If as a poet I am denied introspection ie a return to the origins of the impulse to write, then I cannot go back behind the poetry to find the self from which it stems, for there is nowhere to go behind the poetry because there is no-one to go there.

Now that might seem to be an awkward and perhaps a not-needed puzzle to resolve, but to a large extent it is the basis of literary criticism.

I am beginning to change my mind and am thinking of reversing my alteration.

I have now added, changed the structure and more or less reverted.

Thanks for the comments and the criticism which as ever is helpful.

[PrinceMyshkin]

I am still worrying about those lines, which were central when I began the poem.

The basic idea is the contradiction of the state known as coeval.

If as a poet I am denied introspection ie a return to the origins of the impulse to write, then I cannot go back behind the poetry to find the self from which it stems, for there is nowhere to go behind the poetry because there is nowhere to go there.

Now that might seem to be an awkward and perhaps a not-needed puzzle to resolve, but to a large extent it is the basis of literary criticism.

I am beginning to change my mind and am thinking of reversing my alteration.

I have now added, changed the structure and more or less reverted.

Thanks for the comments and the criticism which as ever is helpful.

Perhaps it's a question of both the inter-relationship and the difference between surface and depth, neither of which exists without the other but they cannot, I don't think, be known simultaneously. One learns - slowly, painfully but never perhaps perfectly - to give one's attention to one or the other.

[vagantes]

I think this quote from the Victorian critic Eneas Sweetland Dallas is relevant:

"Trains of thought are continually passing to and fro, from the light into the dark, and back from the dark into the light. ..... After a time the current of thought comes back to us changed and grown, as if it were a new thought, and we know not whence it came".

I think that he is writing about the non-mechanical process of memory which is very much the well-spring for creativity. .