New Year's 2022

In following the changes in the Oahu weather in the first week of the New Year, the world went from lush to threatening to lushly threatening to becalmed and then seemed to emerge into a higher realm, all atmospheric faults solved.

This struck me as parallel to my own progress as a poet, from the logical rigor of John Donne’s highly moral metaphysical parables, through the cloaked but dogmatic scholarship of Eliot, the folksy allegories of Frost, and the brilliantly rhyming lectures of Auden, into a less judgmental, less reasonable world, an upper air where the world was as lush, but not as frenetically structured around the author’s message. Solipsism focuses on the ipseity of the natural world, where, as Donne said in “The Sun Rising,”

Thy beams, so reverend and strong
Why shouldst thou think?
I could eclipse and cloud them with a wink,

The writer controls what we see, what we think. The world is filtered through one person.

Bob Dylan once said, “I’d like to be able to play the guitar like Leadbelly, and then not.”

Eduard Steuermann, the teacher of my piano teacher Russell Sherman, said to him before a concert, “Play it straight, Buddy.”

We have already shaped the words or the music enough that our backstory is more than evident, and we need to forget ourselves and simply address the music or the world before us, and there will still no doubt remain a residue of our own viewpoint.

In Oscar Wilde’s day it was popular to visit the countryside with a framed mirror. You then turned your back on nature and used the mirror to frame precisely the painting you wanted to see. Thus the world was “picturesque.” It was fit into a painting. A common phrase was, “Let’s picturesque it in the Dales.” Wilde said that Wordsworth found “precisely the sermons under stones that he had already planted there.” The aesthetic movement was a repudiation of this solipsism.

Rather than extruding morals from a landscape, framing the shot and setting just the aperture and speed to convey a particular vision, I think of the concept of the RAW file, where the camera is allowed to capture every possible fact about the scene in front of it, which then can be adjusted in any direction on the computer after the fact. But the ultimate goal would be not to adjust anything, to let viewers make their own decisions about what was there, and what it meant, if anything. This seems to me closer to a broader view of the world. Technology both abets and impedes such views. We now have the ability to make photos deceptive, to twist them to our designs through programs like Photoshop. Photographers can’t be trusted.

But technology can also help us present more of what was there. It can clear the world of the fog of egotism, and present the clear morning of an uncluttered sky. We can emerge into the incandescent light of a world that flowers by itself. The poet, the photographer, might more selflessly step back from the world, and stop trying to teach, to “invisible things to see,” as Donne put it.

It is the way John Luther Adams takes dictation from the universe. Rather than writing about the desert, his music becomes the desert, eliminating the ethical nuisance of the middleman, the composer, who is merely there to convey the world, not describe it.

The challenge is to eliminate the observer from Jan Van Eyck’s mirror in Arnolfini’s Wedding. To step back from analysis, from the microscope.

And yet even to acknowledge such an intent is to be premeditated, to tinker with the metaworld, the aura that exists above the mathematical set being observed, safely out of sight, but in fact simply pulls the strings from a greater height.

We can never eliminate the observer, as Heisenberg stated in the Uncertainty Principle. Quantum mechanics has created a limbo called the thought experiment, where a potential observation is only imagined, so it has no effect on what is observed.

It might be the obvious conclusion that, as observation compacts an infinity of directions into one single choice, it is less intrusive not to look at all.

As Wilde wrote, “A gentleman never looks out of the window.” The aesthetic movement attempted to eliminate nature from art. As we become aware that our interaction with nature can in fact destroy it, however, we have a broader obligation to allow the obverse of that destructive intrusion.

So a quantum definition of observation would be an imaginary process, whose intrusions on the world are discreet and non-destructive.

This process has the added benefit that it leaves the physical world untouched, while influencing the way that we perceive it. Hamlet as a play, or “Dover Beach” as a poem, are hyper-realities, as meaningful to many people as their more reality-based lives. As our contact with society has become more virtual during the pandemic, these hyper-realities have assumed a greater role than ever.

The need for poetry as an example of the best use of our capacity for wonder and magic, has expanded enormously during recent times.

Joy Harjo, the American Poet Laureate in 2022, has written that “what often follows periods of decay and destruction and chaos is rebuilding and renaissance—periods of fresh invention in thought, in art. That’s what often emerges from the ruins. You see little plants like after a fire…coming up from the char.”