John Keats, especially in his Odes, both patented and
mastered what I call the Ricochet Effect. What the Ricochet Effect amounts to,
in serious poetry, is this: in the economy of Keats’ Odes, line by line and
word by word, each word or phrase is made to ricochet, in exquisite, harmonious
balance, with the words around it. In Shelley or Wordsworth, this is true of
the end-rhymes and uses of anaphora, when they occur; what makes Keats special,
and peerless, is that he effortlessly employs end-rhymes, anaphora, assonances,
and internal rhymes to create a Full Spectacle of words ricocheting off each
other in harmonious balance, so that no words, even “thy,” “thou,” “that,” and
the like, remain untouched. Keats is, as I have incised before, a peerless
verbal musician. But what are the implications of this formal innovation in
serious art— the Ricochet Effect— and what does it mean, as manifestation of
the highest kind of formality in serious art, for the Ricochet Effect to exist
in the human world and in the human landscape, as a thing among things?
Keats did not live, as we all know, to see his work flourish
in an expansive way. During the decades of obscurity following his death, the
Empty Spectacles around poetry, the wheels spinning, one might say, continued unabated—
names meant to be forgotten were cast up, prizes given to dolts and dullards,
fame appointed to stooges and puppets as usual. The way the human landscape is
configured, Keats’ formal innovation— what I call the Ricochet Effect, which
implies totalized, comprehensive musicality in language— had to sit for a long
time before it was pronounced worthy to live past the dolts, stooges, and
puppets of the early-to-mid nineteenth century. The horror of the staging of
Empty Spectacles while genius-level work just sits, waiting to be elevated, is
that it means that for individuals who dare to create on serious levels, what
is guaranteed, usually, is a thankless positions buried obscurely beneath the
stooges, puppets, and dolts. Yet I wonder if there isn’t some wisdom to letting
the most advanced kind of artistic work just sit, just sit there, emanating
into the Collective Unconscious and all kinds of human economies, while the
stage is cleared for its emergence. Serious artistic work, to be mystic, has a
kind of sentience of its own— Keats’ Odes (for me at least) are sentient, and
able to chop into whatever economies they choose to chop into, over a long
period of time. If individuals who create seriously are willing to give up the
drive for recognition, and just let their work sit, then the work can begin to
do its own job of destroying the Empty Spectacles and puppet shows over a long
period of time.
Serious forms in art, as I have said, are (I believe)
sentient, or have a kind of sentience inhering in them. What is sentient in
them is a second individuality, past the individuality of their creator. How
the sentient forms reach out into the world is to find the individuals most
receptive, and begin the process of altering their brains. If this sounds a
little Star Trek, please forgive me…but the mysticism of serious formality in
art is a little Star Trek, a little Vulcan. It is based on granting sentience,
shuddering, resonant sentience, to whatever forms are high-maintenance enough,
complex enough, and exquisite enough to carry it. Why I like Keats’ Ricochet
Effect as a paradigm model is that, as I have incised before, it models not
only serious formality but permanent avant-gardism— because the Ricochet Effect
works so subtly that it changes every time we see it, Keats’ Odes can never
(for me) leave the sphere of the avant-garde. The semi-sad conclusion: for the
individual creators of serious formality in serious art, there may or may not
be redemption or salvation. Often, unfortunately, there is not. But for the
work itself, emanating seen or unseen, heard or unheard, into the world, there
will always be a sentient sense of redemption and/or salvation, every time a
new individual is reached, tormented, exalted, and brain-altered. More Star
Trek soon.
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