The complex relationship
between Inter-Dialogism and philosophy cannot be simply or succinctly
enumerated. When consciousness leaps into other consciousness, the basic
questions of phenomenology remain the same— what is inside our consciousness,
what is outside, what is held or bounded in or by consciousness, and what is
not— only issues of individuation, difference, and distinction manifest to lead
any inquiry into any number of both theoretical and semantic quagmires. When
philosophical issues are addressed in serious poetry, the potential and actual
arabesques out into cognitive space become innumerable, especially when
Inter-Dialogism is used in a new capacity. What happens when, as often happens
in philosophy, allegorical figures are employed? From Socrates to Zarathustra
to Abraham, philosophical texts must lean on symbolic representations of
individuals, to delineate the essences of philosophical dilemmas and interests.
Abraham, we know, was Kierkegaard’s major choice in his most pivotal text— Fear
and Trembling— and he, as an author, asks us, as an implicit “you” in an I-thou
relationship, to attempt to leap into Abraham’s consciousness when the Lord
asks him to climb the mountain and sacrifice his son, seemingly for no reason,
and testing Abraham’s faith, sharpening his faculties of perception. Apparition
Poem 1613 subsists as both an interpretive vista onto Kierkegaard and a
tangential representation of an implicit “I” who has been able, it would seem,
to achieve the requisite Inter-Dialogic leap into Abraham’s consciousness,
though we know Abraham to only be a figure in an allegory, rather than a
partner in any intimacy:
Follow Abraham up the
hill: to the extent that the
hill is constituted already by
kinds of knives, to what extent
can a man go up a hill,
shepherd a son to be sacrificed,
to be worthy before an almighty power that may or may not have had conscious intentions
where hills, knives, sons were concerned, but how, as I watch this, can I not feel that Abraham, by braving knives, does not need the one he holds in his rapt hands?
What the implicit I sees
in 1613 is a kind of loop around unconscious processes of governance— that God
himself may rule the Universe from a center of consciousness or not, and that
the subtle mental strength Abraham gains from contact with this Universe Force
unconsciously begins to direct his thoughts and actions, which take on
consonance with being sharp, incisive, knife-like. The final loop, we see, is
that, in a binding chain, the “I” in the poem becomes sharp, incisive, and
knife-like from Inter-Dialogic interaction with Abraham (and it is implicit by
this time that Inter-Dialogic interactions may happen with characters in
allegories and their unseen creators, as well as flesh and blood people), who has inherited his
incisiveness from the Universe Force whose consciousness or unconsciousness
cannot be gauged or mastered. If the dry ice rule applies here, as it does for
most of Apparition Poems, it is because all philosophy, as heavy as it is on
intellect and allegory, is touched by dry ice, and I-you queries ride shot-gun
to the objectivism which must drive the enterprise forward and turn the proverbial
steering wheel. Is some real I-thou intimacy mixed in? To answer this brings us
to a philosophical critical crux which is very strange— strange, in 1613,
because the protagonist seems to be (mystically, uncannily) attempting an
Inter-Dialogic leap into our brain, as he (unconsciously) sees what he sees,
and steps back out again, leaving a sense behind that philosophical awareness
can be governed by unconscious processes and impersonal forces all the way
through, just as many of the most salient Big Questions, both for science and
philosophy, are impersonal ones, and can only be conjectured at in an
impersonal, if not unconscious, manner. The implied “you” in 1613 is rather
rare, and demanded by a literary context; a merely philosophical context would
stay in the third person; but, in attempting a bridge and a chiasmus between
philosophy and literature, and, as is also the case in 1617, aids the reader in feeling a sense of humanity amidst
all the objectivism and dry ice. Yet, the contradiction inheres that in
addressing the Big Questions on any profound level, it is almost always
individual consciousness which is able to produce breakthroughs in science and
philosophy, cloaked in the impersonality and objectivity (governed, also, often
unconscious processes) of the third person. If poetry is able to enter this
game seriously, the first person singular must re-make itself as explicit, and
personal, to give whatever construct is at hand the insignia of the aesthetic (including poetry's imperative-to-song),
and allow the reader graceful entrance.
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