The End of Fine Art

I finished Chapter 4 of S. H. Butcher's essay on Aristotle's Poetics.  I'm pausing from my rewrite to collect my thoughts.  I wasn't making much headway today anyway.

BTW, Chapter 4 is nicely entitled "The End of Fine Art."

Why have I been reading Poetics and Butcher's criticism?  It's interesting.  It's a nice counterweight to writing time.  When I write I eventually hit a wall.  My mood darkens, thoughts become heavy, foggy.  Reading Poetics is half-time.  Like the coach  putting correctives up on the board, and then telling the team we're not committed, not working hard enough.  Then kicking our ass out of locker room onto the field for the afternoon writing shift.

So what are some of my questions or conclusions:

1. Will The Reader react with pity and fear?  That is my intent.  I want recognition that there, but for the grace of god, go I.  To get past the headline--soccer mom kills 12 year old son--to--it could happen to you.  And here's what it would feel like if it did.
2. Plot: I don't stick to the probable impossibilities.  I include the improbable incidents that happened. Thus sacrificing coherence. Why? Because they happened.  In order for The Reader to imagine what it feels like.
3. The deux ex machina is Denise's psychotic action.  Outside the plot.  If it wasn't an irrational act it would be the fitting climax of a tragedy.  Aristotle writes "when the tragic incident occurs between those who are near or dear to one another--if, for example ... a mother kills her son--these are the situations to be looked for by the poet."  The story turns into memoir when the author is the father.  Poetry (or tragic drama) if the poet was a third party.
4. Where nature fails art steps in.  Aristotle's view that art perfects nature--imitating the particular in a way to reveal the universal ideal to the [cultivated] audience.  In one regard I do NOT want to do this.  I want to show nature fails.  No amount of Reason can stop it.  It is hubris to think you can.  And I don't want to allow The Reader an escape by believing that Reason could have triumphed.  However, I do need to be artistic or poetic.  I am selecting, editing, shaping incidents.  I am writing.  I want what I write to breathe life into my grief (confused thoughts, chaotic emotions, shock ... ) on the page in a way The Reader can personally imagine.
5. The poet imitates nature.  She creates a picture or "phantasy" on "the border-line of sense and thought." This is where the book operates--on that border-line.  The phantasy is an after-image that stays (or can be recalled) in the mind after the object that first excited it has been withdrawn.  Produces, in Aristotle's view, the spontaneous and necessary union of intellect and sense.  (Sense, here is sensory perception.)
6. The book is history not poetry in that it relates what happened, not what may happen.  Poetry exhibits a more rigorous connection of events than history does.
7. Oh yes, lest I forget, my memoir depicts meaner mortals, average people, not heroes like Hamlet.  The Reader does not "think of measuring the intrinsic probability of what they say or do."  Heroes are allowed to be or do the implausible.
8. Length: if it is too small, the whole is perceived but not the parts.  If too large, the parts are perceived but not the whole.  (The story is currently at risk of being too large.)
9. Side-effect: expose the fiction in the word psychosis.  That everyone is seduced by.  When it happened.  By real actors in the story.  And by The Reader.
10. Quoting Coleridge, Butcher says poetry steals access through our senses to our minds.  I do want to do this.  Particularly if "mind" includes the subconscious, the visceral, can I say, our emotional understanding as well.
11. Goethe, not Aristotle writes: "I had, as a poet, nothing more to do than artistically round them off and elaborate such views and impressions, and by means of a lively representation so to bring them forward that others might receive the same impression in hearing or reading my representation of them."
12. Ok back to Aristotle. I agree, aesthetic enjoyment proceeds from an emotional rather than from an intellectual source.  The main appeal of poetry is not to the reason but to the feelings.  (This reminds me that the whole reason I started writing poetry was because I was confronted at points in this memoir, with trying to say something that prose couldn't express.)
13. The pleasure of art is not for the artist but for those who enjoy what she creates.  (This reminds me of what Nick Flynn said during audience Q&A about catharsis.  He doesn't achieve catharsis writing poetry; he does sometimes achieve it reading it.)  Venue: http://www.poetshouse.org/programs-and-events/readings-and-conversations/art-losing-nick-flynn-marie-howe-kevin-young
14. tragedy reveals the true nature of a thing.  Yes, I agree with that.  I would like my book to achieve that.
15. the end then, is a state of feeling, it is a feeling that is proper to a normally constituted humanity
16. a poet charms the mind not instructs it

Examples of Aristotle's hubris:

1. poetry turns facts into truths
2. what has never anywhere come to pass, that alone does never grow old
3. no one can be a good poet who is not first a good man
4. philosophy is higher than poetry.  if poetry serves emotion (and sense) and philosophy serves reason, that philosophy is only higher than poetry, if reason is higher than emotion.
   Reason that only works in the ideal world, and fails when it confronts reality (i.e. my story), places philosophy lower than poetry.

Now Plato's turn.  Hubris?

1. art reveals to sense the world of ideas.  I know a conceptual artist that surely subscribes to this view.

Falling Round

From Aristotle Poetics XIV, "the deed must either be done or not done--and that, wittingly or not wittingly."

The deed was done.  Denise killed Jack.  Was it wittingly?

Our medical and legal system concluded she was psychotic.  That would mean unwitting, right?  But that doesn't satisfy the dramatic need.  For it to be a tragedy Denise can't be acting from a psychotic view of reality.  It's not a reality that a reader can identify with.  This makes the book history according to Aristotle.  Not poetry.

 The deed must be the result of a great error or frailty.

Unless the book is about her break-down.  Which it isn't.  She can write that one if she wants.  Maybe that book will reveal that Denise had visited Delphi and had heard her future foretold.  Then we would have a tragedy.  Her actions to try and escape her fate.  Over time the history of Oedipus turns into myth in service of the tragic ideal, but in the beginning the story starts as history.  Its inconceivability demands a rational story be told--to tame it.

Instead, the book is about me and what I do that year.  I'm witting.  I do deeds, and don't do them.  The deeds done aren't of sufficient magnitude.  Are the deeds I don't do--like killing Denise, for example--sufficient for tragedy?

Where is the drama?  Peripety--the unexpected reversal of circumstance?

There are no sufficiently significant deeds which the reader believes I'm about to enact, and then at the last minute I come to my senses and don't perform.  It is a story where a lot happens, but I'm often passive in the face of it.  My drama is just surviving the year--trying to get me and Libby through it as best I can.  My drama isn't the reader's drama.  So history, then.

Plot isn't story.  It is a chosen set of incidents that map the drama.  A series of cause & effect chains.  A tragedy needs a beginning, middle, and end.  A unity.  Aristotle defines the beginning as "that which does not in and of itself follow anything by causal necessity, but after which something naturally is or comes to be."

Plot is the artistic equivalent of action.

I have a beginning.

Aristotle tells the poet to exclude the irrational.

PS.  This story is all about hubris.  Believing you can know the unknowable--control the controllable.  Psychosis is an interesting object for hubris.  To know your hubris, it isn't enough to have a intellectual understanding--you have to know it emotionally, in your gut.  You've failed.  And you know you have.  And the magnitude is big.  And, then, you see, years later, your hubris is in tact.  Stronger than ever.

Without hubris we aren't human.  We couldn't walk on the moon, for example, without hubris.  Aristotle wouldn't write Poetics without hubris.  There is no Greek tragedy without hubris.  Luckily there is plenty around.

Finished Read-thru

I finished reading the manuscript.  As far as my editorial decisions ...

• Yes, have a Greek Chorus.
  I couldn't differentiate the voices.  General cacophony sometimes.  Sometimes they all were saying the same thing.  Offering advise.  Listening to me, offering comfort.
  But there is one friend who I can decide whether she is a primary character or part of the chorus.  In Greek drama they are well defined types: soldier, nurse, slave.  To answer my question about this character--she really is a type--a foil for me to confide certain things to which I can't to others.  There is something that makes her unique.  But I'm reluctant to have many primary characters ... because I'm little afraid of further consequences to them.
  Is Grace my choragus?  
• Yes, have fugues ... me drifting in and out of fantasy more towards the end of the book.  As I begin to imagine my life going forward.  But edit them.  Be more judicious of their use.  And they aren't fugues in the psychiatric sense of the term--I don't lose touch with myself--I'm not dissociating.  I do indulge in them.  The escapes though are small.  Tiny.
• Yes, leave the writerly stuff in there.  But, like fugues, be very judicious.
• I have some ideas on how to edit the letters (sent, not sent) and the main story line of August 2006 and 2007.  Give the letters and email to friends and family (Greek chorus) primacy, and prune my narrative where it is redundant ... not advancing the plot or key to revealing the emotional arc of the story.
As I dive into the rewrite, this will be more clear.
One of the first things I'll do next, is read these letters in isolation to rest of the book and outline to plot. 

I wish I had an idea how many words or pages to shoot for.  Unfortunately, I'm still adding content.  Not much.  Just from a email here or there.

fugue

fyo͞og/ noun

1. 1.

   MUSIC

   a contrapuntal composition in which a short melody or phrase is introduced by one part and successively taken up by others and developed by interweaving the parts.
2. 2.

   PSYCHIATRY

   a state or period of loss of awareness of one's identity, often coupled with flight from one's usual environment

Soul Mates and Others

Thanks to +Amy Lemmon for taking these three poems for ducts.

                                       The wood fights
and grabs a life already lost.  The pitch
sweetens with each swing.  Then pops: a ping
pong ball smashes basement walls.

Reading Page 263

I am reading my way through.  Trying to find the editorial answers, either in my dreams at night, or in the text that already exists.  Need to make those decisions before I begin the writing part of this revision.

I've posted on the editorial question of the Greek Chorus and all the secondary and tertiary characters in my story.  Other questions:

• where do I locate myself in this re-write:  physically in Seattle?  emotionally post-divorce?  where is the present tense in the story?
• how to I go about editing the letters?  where does my structure, and any given too-long-letter to Denise, become tedious to the reader?  how much really can I indulge(?) in depicting my grief vs advancing the story.
• and the writerly stuff ... who wants to read another memoir that features the heroic odyssey of the protagonist becoming a writer

I'm on page 263.  I can handle about 20 pages at a time before the cumulative effect of triggered memories and thus, emotions, fogs my brain.  Today was the first day I check, repeatedly, to see if I'd hit my 20 page milestone.  I'm feeling dragged down by it.  Wondering what I hope to accomplish.  I'm thinking if I was the reader, I'd be saying, come on Bill, get on with it.  Stop so much this navel gazing.  Looking at the book--the book split open on this page--the reader sees she's only halfway through and groans out loud.  (I imagine the book physically.  Not an E-book.)

I like to get a second session in after a break ... could be reading about Greek drama or walking down the hill to a coffee shop and getting that third cup of coffee.  I am immersed in the story.  Feeling the familiar ache in my neck and shoulders.

Rhodopis and the Strange Occurrence of the Sandal

The Cinderella motif may well have originated in classical antiquity. The Greek geographer Strabo recorded in the 1st century BC in his Geographica (book 17, 33) the tale of the Greek slave girl Rhodopis, "Rosey-Eyes", who lived in the colony of Naucratis in Ancient Egypt. It is often considered the oldest known version of the story:

They tell the fabulous story that, when she was bathing, an eagle snatched one of her sandals from her maid and carried it to Memphis; and while the king was administering justice in the open air, the eagle, when it arrived above his head, flung the sandal into his lap; and the king, stirred both by the beautiful shape of the sandal and by the strangeness of the occurrence, sent men in all directions into the country in quest of the woman who wore the sandal; and when she was found in the city of Naucratis, she was brought up to Memphis, became the wife of the king...^[13]

Herodotus, some five centuries before Strabo, supplied information about the real-life Rhodopis in his Histories. He wrote that Rhodopis came from Thrace, and was the slave of Iadmon of Samos, and a fellow-slave of the story-teller Aesop. She was taken to Egypt in the time of Pharaoh Amasis, and freed there for a large sum by Charaxus of Mytilene, brother of Sappho the lyric poet.^[14][15]

and,

The 3rd-century-BC poet Poseidippus of Pella wrote a narrative poem entitled "Aesopia" (now lost), in which Aesop's fellow slave Rhodopis (under her original name Doricha) was frequently mentioned, according to Athenaeus 13.596.^[65] Pliny would later identify Rhodopis as Aesop's lover,^[66] a romantic motif that would be repeated in subsequent popular depictions of Aesop.

In 1690, French playwright Edmé Boursault's Les fables d'Esope (later known as Esope à la ville) premiered in Paris. A sequel, Esope à la cour^[73] (Aesop at Court), was first performed in 1701; drawing on a mention in Herodotus 2.134-5^[74] that Aesop had once been owned by the same master as Rhodopis, and the statement in Pliny 36.17^[75] that she was Aesop's concubine as well, the play introduced Rodope as Aesop's mistress, a romantic motif that would be repeated in later popular depictions of Aesop.

If it is true, why didn't Aesop write Cinderella?  Either he did, and that's why we know it.  Perhaps in the non-animal part of his oeuvre.  Or it wasn't a fable to him.

In a February 5, 2007 letter to Denise, I first mention Cinderella.  Recalling a conversation Libby and I have on a drive back up to Brown.