Read Online Life Sentences by William H. Gass - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: William H. Gass
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head full of nonsense is far worse than having a nose full of flu, and when I see the joggers at their numbing runs I wonder if they ever exercise their heads or understand what the diet of their mind does to their consciousness, their character, to the body they pray to, the salvation they seek.
Yet I had to admit, wondrous as he often was, that D. H. Lawrence was a fascist chowderhead, Eliot an antisemitic snob, Yeats fatuous, Blake mad, Frost a pious fake, Rilke—yes, even he—wrong more often than not, and that even Henry James … well … might have made a misstep once alighting from a carriage. But—there it was again, that
but
, that
yet
—yet Henry was great, surely, if anyone was. How did the artist escape the presumably crippling effects of his intellectual idiocies? Here I had activity number five to help me. It was theorizing. Not about truth. About error. Skepticism was my rod, my staff, my exercise, and from fixes, my escape.
What is critical to the artist is not the fact that he has many motives (let us hope so), or that their presence should never be felt in his canvases, or found in the narrative nature of hisnovels, or heard amid the tumult of his dissonances. In the first place, our other aims won’t lend their assistance without reward, and they will want, as we say, a piece of the action. No; the question is which of our intentions will be allowed to rule and regulate and direct the others: that is what is critical. It is a matter of the politics of desire, or, as Plato put it when he asked this question of the moral agent: what faculty of the soul is in control of the will?
I believe [I use this word here with the greatest irony] … I believe that the artist’s fundamental loyalty must be to form, and his energy employed in the activity of making. Every other diddly desire can find expression; every crackpot idea or local obsession, every bias and graciousness and mark of malice, may have an hour; but it must never be allowed to carry the day. If, of course, one wants to be a publicist for something; if you believe you are a philosopher first and Nietzsche second; if you think the gift of prophesy has been given you; then, by all means, write your bad poems, your insufferable fictions, enjoy the fame that easy ideas often offer, ride the flatulent winds of change, fly like the latest fad to the nearest dead tree; but do not try to count the seasons of your oblivion. (
Finding a Form
, 1996)
Life may be a grim and grisly business, but the poet’s task and challenge remains unchanged. Rilke wrote:
Tell us, poet, what do you do?
—I praise.
But the dreadful, the monstrous, and their ways,
how do you stand them, suffer it all?
—I praise.
But anonymous, featureless days,
how, poet, can you ask them to call?
—I praise.
What chance have you, in so many forms,
under each mask, to speak a true phrase?
—I praise.
And that the calm as well as the crazed
know you like star and storm?
—because I praise.
[“
Oh sage, Dichter, was du tust?
”]
Celebrating is the sixth preoccupation then. Because to write well about anything, and it might be mayhem, is to love at
Yet I had to admit, wondrous as he often was, that D. H. Lawrence was a fascist chowderhead, Eliot an antisemitic snob, Yeats fatuous, Blake mad, Frost a pious fake, Rilke—yes, even he—wrong more often than not, and that even Henry James … well … might have made a misstep once alighting from a carriage. But—there it was again, that
but
, that
yet
—yet Henry was great, surely, if anyone was. How did the artist escape the presumably crippling effects of his intellectual idiocies? Here I had activity number five to help me. It was theorizing. Not about truth. About error. Skepticism was my rod, my staff, my exercise, and from fixes, my escape.
What is critical to the artist is not the fact that he has many motives (let us hope so), or that their presence should never be felt in his canvases, or found in the narrative nature of hisnovels, or heard amid the tumult of his dissonances. In the first place, our other aims won’t lend their assistance without reward, and they will want, as we say, a piece of the action. No; the question is which of our intentions will be allowed to rule and regulate and direct the others: that is what is critical. It is a matter of the politics of desire, or, as Plato put it when he asked this question of the moral agent: what faculty of the soul is in control of the will?
I believe [I use this word here with the greatest irony] … I believe that the artist’s fundamental loyalty must be to form, and his energy employed in the activity of making. Every other diddly desire can find expression; every crackpot idea or local obsession, every bias and graciousness and mark of malice, may have an hour; but it must never be allowed to carry the day. If, of course, one wants to be a publicist for something; if you believe you are a philosopher first and Nietzsche second; if you think the gift of prophesy has been given you; then, by all means, write your bad poems, your insufferable fictions, enjoy the fame that easy ideas often offer, ride the flatulent winds of change, fly like the latest fad to the nearest dead tree; but do not try to count the seasons of your oblivion. (
Finding a Form
, 1996)
Life may be a grim and grisly business, but the poet’s task and challenge remains unchanged. Rilke wrote:
Tell us, poet, what do you do?
—I praise.
But the dreadful, the monstrous, and their ways,
how do you stand them, suffer it all?
—I praise.
But anonymous, featureless days,
how, poet, can you ask them to call?
—I praise.
What chance have you, in so many forms,
under each mask, to speak a true phrase?
—I praise.
And that the calm as well as the crazed
know you like star and storm?
—because I praise.
[“
Oh sage, Dichter, was du tust?
”]
Celebrating is the sixth preoccupation then. Because to write well about anything, and it might be mayhem, is to love at
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