POETICKS

In an article for the the latest issue of The New Criterion, Gary Saul Morson quotes this from a dialogue by Alexander Herzen, the Russian provocateur of letters: “An end that is infinitely remote is not an end, but, if you like, a trap; an end must be nearer–it ought to be, at the very least, the laborer’s wage, or pleasure in the work done.”

I prefer Emerson’s idea of hitching one’s wagon to a star but agree with the above, I suppose, if you know the end you are aiming for is infinitely remote.  Otherwise, I fear I have Nietzschean elitist contempt for anyone without some goal vastly superior to the laborer’s wage (although only a little bit superior to pleasure in the work done.

One reason I bring this up, aside from my inner-directed near-obsession with attaining some grand goal or other is my impression that just about no one else I know seems to have any particular goal in life, other than having nice things, financial security and friends.   They would agree with what Morson goes on to say after quoting Herzen:  “Each present moment, and each human life, is precious in itself, not just as a means to some exalted goal.  This is a lesson revolutionaries never seem to learn.”

Actually, the majority of present moments are at best innocuous.  As for the preciousness of each human life, that our species seems to have made that its Primary Moral Truth is the reason I feel myself to be some kind of aberration–or would if it weren’t that there are people who think there are some things more valuable than human life.  Morson would probably agree that liberty is, since liberty is what would be lost if reason controlled lives (from what he otherwise says in his article, which includes the Tolstoy quotation that I re-quoted yesterday).  Yes, liberty is more valuable than life–but only if you use it for more than getting your kids through college.  Unless you mistakenly believe that doing that is an important step toward getting them, or someone else, to another galaxy.

Sure, the latter is no doubt meaningless, but I hold that there are degrees of meaninglessness, and a final understanding of existence, which exploration of space may be a sine qua non for the achievement of,  is substantially less meaningless than  whatever it is that most people seem to be living for.

I do believe that all we have are moments, but that it’s foolish to be content with each of them equally.  One should be aware that no moment is of any value unless it contains a lot more than the present.  I would As I’ve said quite a few times, just about the only times I’ve experienced such moments have been when I’ve taken some work of art or verosophy into what seems to me of Final Positive Value to Mankind(!) and makes me remember other moments when I’ve felt the same way about something I’ve been working on, and makes me remember in reverse later such moments I’m sure I will have.  Urp.

I have very few such moments now.  (Yes, boo hoo.)  Certainly not right now, although I have a hydrocodone in me.  It occurred to me a moment after writing that the the best moments also contain some hint of an applauding audience, and now I really feel sad, as opposed to self-disgusted, because I would have wanted my parents in that audience, and too many others now dead.  I think now of my poor alcoholic father whom I always looked down upon for not seeming to have any real goal, realizing (as I sort of have many times before) that he did have a superior goal: it was that his children have superior goals and reach them.  He was proud of my achievements, however minor they were, once introducing me to someone as a playwright the day after a play of mine became a finalist in some play competition I lost.

That reminds me that I was going to post a copy of that play on the Internet yesterday, but found I had no computer file of it.  Today I hope to scan it.  It may take a while to correct the conversion to readable text, but I vow to do it and post the damned thing.  I’m megalomaniacally thinking of then posting an extreme revision to update it to the present.  I wrote the first draft of it more than forty years ago.  Werebird is the name of it.  A young man’s dream of marrying a certain young girl is threatened by his sudden propensity for becoming a chicken when the moon is full.  The Marx brothers and Macbeth and his wife are in it, albeit with different names.  I saying so much about it to psych myself up–and I want as many people to know of my vow to make sure fear of Horrid Embarrassment will force me to live up to it.  (Although I have probably horrideously forsaken at least a thousand previous such vows.  But I’ve begun scanning.  Pray to Apollo for me–and Dionysius.  You don’t have to pray to Athena–I know she’s on my side; how could it be otherwise considering the wonderful poem I   made in homage to her?)  No “urp” this time but an “Excelsior and Gahzoo the the power of 97!”

With this word, I brought this entry up to a total of 900 words.  As an extreme example of Riesman’s inner-directed man and thus neurotically obsessed with goals even tinier than this one, I must now write another hundred or more.  They will probably be filler butread them anyway: who knows what I may say.  And, gosh, the way I’m going now, I may keep going until I hit two thousand! My scan, by the way, is up to page 7.  52 pages to go after that.

I glanced at the first page, by the way, and really liked the first stack of lines (in blank verse–the scenes my Macbeth and Lady Macbeth characters are in are in blank verse).  The process is going much faster than I thought it would, but I have no idea how good the result will be.  As always when doing anything concerned with pages, I curse the dryness of my aged fingers.  I suppose I should use hand lotion much more than I do.  With that, I pronounce this entry done, with a word count of 1066.  Phooey, my counter just changed that to 1074.  It didn’t want me to brag I was William the Conquerer, I guess.  But it got me to go past a count of 1100.
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