Literary Addenda

Writing is craftsmanship. Reading can be too. Discoveries are made along the way. Everything cross-connects. I came across a Jack London reference in Borges, which struck me as peculiar. How could a high-brow literary “classicist” like Borges find anything of value in London, a guy who wrote adolescent anthropomorphic stories about dogs, and recommend him? I read a couple books by London (Martin Eden and The Sea-Wolf) and was surprised to find a name outside my frame of reference: Herbert Spencer. Spencer, a kind of philosopher, applied Darwin’s evolutionary theories to forms of knowledge, specifically traditional humanist disciplines. The application of discipline-specific theories, like evolution, to larger and broader phenomenon is common practice. Marx took Hegel’s anti-Aristotlelian logic, applied it to economic class struggle and demystified the nature of labor, money and power; Marxists applied these theories to the real world, inventing a new form of government; Nietzsche, a subversive psychologist, used Darwinian ideas to psychoanalyze the human spirit through history, making it possible to postulate the question, “Is consciousness itself an evolutionary mistake?”; Freud employed similar methods on the individual psyche; Foucault took Marx’s and Nietzsche’s theories of power and investigated how these forms are structured and manifested in the real world, how they affect the individual, to what extent they manufacture or inhibit freedom both real and conceptual. Essentially, ideas and theories become modes of interpretation that play out in reality and affect the individual experience in every way imaginable. Outdated thinkers like Spencer get lost in the shuffle, although their ideas may get assimilated into mainstream thought.

James Dickey wrote an introduction to one of the London books I’d read. Wherein resides Dickey’s fascination with London? It would have to do with the primal struggle inherent in nature, the natural world and the individual that London explores so often. Call it the human animal death struggle; Dickey calls it “primeval.” In the introduction Dickey manages to introduce the major Pre-Socratic philosophers with a magician’s sleight-of-hand. Dickey is full of literary and poetic tricks. Explaining a difficult poem by Pound, Dickey points to a passage about a hawk, saying that he enjoyed birds of prey and at least that’s a start, a point of entry to any difficult poem. Even the most difficult thing can be approached by what the reader simply likes, whatever strikes the fancy. If it’s not immediately, intuitively interesting it should probably be set aside. The reader’s consciousness will affect the experience, the way it play out, so it’s better to keep to what engages.

The reader will find the human aspect of the animal death struggle in Dickey’s Alnilam, an experimental novel whose presentation is in part non-traditional. Alnilam is the name of the star in the center of Orion’s belt. It’s a symbol for a secret society of young fighter pilots in training who discover destiny in flight and energy. One of the episodes of the book creates a context for his poem, “The Zodiac.” It can be seen how one work inspires the other, how work grows out of work. The same with reading. Books become more meaningful in time. Books mean more as readers grow with them, mature and cultivate life-experience. There is a reason Pound made a list of books to read before the age of 18.

But Pound is no longer read. I think he’s banned for the most part. From his colossal failure, though, there are things to be learned. It’s like witnessing a runaway train, a great mind deteriorating into sickness. Alnilam is out of print; Spencer is forgotten; London’s best work is hardly discussed. I’ve yet to find a good English translation of Rilke. The bulk of the poet’s thought, expressed in his personal correspondence, is hard to obtain and unreasonably expensive. Borges wrote that he first read Dostoevsky abroad as a teenager and that the characters reminded him of people he knew in his native Buenos Aires. I, too, read Dostoevsky as an adolescent away from home, and it reminded me of people I knew in the trailer park. Point being, the characters are real and life-like to the core. Writers and thinkers are their own great characters, print or no print. But the reader creates them. In the end, the reader is the master. Books are diffused, examined, interpreted, reinterpreted. Unearthed. But the reader remains.