Harold Carr

Steiner's Sad Thought

Ten (Possible) Reasons for the Sadness of Thought

George Steiner

My brother-in-law, Guillermo Antonio Cervi��o-Wood, recommended George Steiner’s Ten (Possible) Reasons for the Sadness of Thought. I found his essay of that title (originally published in Salmagundi) here and here.

I can’t say I like Steiner’s writing. It seems unnecessarily convoluted. Plus, all his points were made earlier by Bataille and Bataille’s writing is much better, even in English translation. He even uses some of Bataille’s phrases (e.g., “sadness unto death,” “laid bare”).

But I did take the time to read and summarize the article.

Introduction
1 — Infinite thought cannot think everything that exists.
2 — We can’t control thought for long, and even if we could, it might be dangerous to our health.
3 — Thinking is private but common and repetitive.
4 — No absolute truth (language is inherently ambiguous).
5 — Thinking is wasteful.
6 — You can’t do everthing you think.
7 — Thought veils as much as it reveals.
8 — The veil makes it impossible to know what others are thinking.
9 — The fact that few are capable of great thought (“creativity”) conflicts with the ideal of social justice.
10 — We know (and try to escape) death.

The Tragic Sense of Life

The movement from a view of life as essentially simple and orderly to a view of life as complex and ironic is what every individual passes through in becoming mature. ... Amid simplicity and order rationalism is born, but rationalism proves inadequate in any period of upheaval. Then equilibrium must be created out of opposites. Such inner peace as [we] gain must represent a tension among contradictions... A feeling for [dramatic] paradox allows seemingly dissimilar things to exists side by side, their very incongruity suggesting a kind of truth.

Robert Venturi quoting August Heckscher

We are surrounded by life but everything dies - thus the irony.

We ourselves are alive and seem to escape death like Odysseus under the ram, but our family, friends and we ourselves, die - thus the tragic sense of life.

The trick is to turn this tragic sense into a source of joy and wonder. Into the infinite now.

With Ginsberg, Snyder, Weller and Sanders at the Great Salt Lake Book Festival

On Saturday I heard Thomas Cahill, Rebecca Solnit and Sam Hamill speak at the Great Salt Lake Book Festival that took place at city library. On Sunday, Tony Weller and Ken Sanders had a "rare book roadshow" at noon. I almost decided not to go since I was still laying in bed reading at 11:30am. Even after I did get up and drive down to the library I had to wait in my car for 15 minutes for a thunderstorm to pass.

I brought my signed copy of Allen Ginsberg's Howl and my Totem Press/Corinth Books edition of Gary Snyder's Myths & Texts. Ginsberg did a reading in the Union Ballroom in February 1989 (with Steve Fletcher accompanying him on guitar). Later in the evening I was fortunate to sit with him at the table of Anselm Hollo (now teaching at Naropa), who was living in Salt Lake at the time. Ginsberg signed my facsimile Harper & Row edition of Howl "for Harold Carr at Anselm Hollo's table - Salt Lake 2/22/89" - illustrating it with a Buddha, Skull and Crossbones, sun, crescent moon and stars. Tony and Ken valued it between $300 and $500 dollars. Myths & Texts was valued at between $40 and $200. Of course, I've had these books for a long time, especially Myths & Texts and I didn't buy them for their future value - I obtained them for my interest in the author's work - particularly Myths & Texts - one of the seminal works in my poetry collection and in my own poetry.

My mom called this morning to say the Salt Lake Tribune has an article mentioning my books at the festival.

Pierre Joris points out poets

In his essay, "Notes toward a Nomadic Poetics" Pierre Joris points out poets of interest:

Nataniel Mackey - foundational noise
Valere Novarina - theatre - ludic nomadology of names that dissolves character into a fluidity...
Robert Kelly
Melvin Tolson - bifacial multi-phasic poet
Kateb Yacine - multiple life-long text
Jerome Rothenberg
Don Byrd - leads us through the "mesocosm - the dense locale of the common, that is absorbed by the exaggeration of symbolism, on the one hand, and by mere biology, on the other.
Leslie Scalapino - reading ... so slow ... no content ... motion is a thing in itself
Edouard Glissant - poetics of the diverse
Allen Fisher - investigation into all our knowledges - the great serial constructive derive...
Lynn Hejinian - border worker
Michel Deguy - hospitality
Abdelwahab Meddeb - allography
Muriel Rukeyser - life as necessarily political, as needing to be engaged at all levels
Nicole Brossard - quest for and conquest of meaning
Charles Berstein- invention is not a choice
Nicole Peyrafitte - wild metonymic grammar of desire - no fictional single static point
John Cayley - Indra's Net - cyberpoetics
Jed Rasula
Franco Beltrametti
Anselm Hollo - writing nomadically in a language that is not his mother-tongue

"All language is found -- or given. Language does not belong to us. One does not own language or does not create language, one is invited into it."