Dear Rupert
While I agree with your proposal that we can’t cross the same river
twice as writers, you seem to be expressing a fallacy by contrasting
two anthropomorphic myths: romantic nature as superceded
by nature red in tooth and claw. If you suggest, as you appear to, that
the latter is more ‘about’ the present than the former, I think you
are inaccurate, in that both are mythic constructs and can be relevant
or irrelevant according to how they are used. It seems to me that any
idea or any method of writing can remain alive through mythmaking: ‘Urban
development’, ‘food chains’ and so forth are forms of myth, not necessarily
forms of fact, in that they are ways of interpreting reality just as
much as a painting by Turner. You seem to propose ‘scientific’ forms
of interpretation as if their development has invalidated other forms
of interpretation, but I don’t see how that can practically be so. Your
approach sounds very like the modernist’s enthusiasm for the modern,
an idea that is itself dated, yet I don’t think irrelevant for that.
I do think though that the vocabulary of chaos theory, red-blue shifts
etc sounds as mannered to me as that of a nature poet, just a different
manner: knowing a vocabulary does not necessarily equate to possessing
knowledge, and anyway why do these so-called facts of contemporary life
invalidate any myth or fiction we may have made in the past, or may
make in the present? The whole of time is our territory, not just the
pin-point of the present.
On another tack, I do think proposing limitations and rules is for the
authoritarian among us, and our propensity to obey rules makes these
rules seem inevitable and natural. This rather avoids the issue of any
ideological structure beneath the rules, as I think your statement does
by suggesting we can do this or can’t do that. The fact is we can do
what the fuck we want as writers, and it can be effective or ineffective,
and this may have nothing to do with ideas of essence or necessity,
which are themselves myths. By which I mean: you may propose one myth,
one construct, but I may propose a different one, and we are both ‘right’.
As for whether poetry itself is a clear means of reaching a large number
of people, I think the same principle applies: sometimes it is, sometimes
it is not. I would say that poetry’s failure, by and large, to achieve
a mass audience in the manner of, say, music, does not define whether
or not it is effective. To resort to quantitative yardsticks to judge
poetry negatively seems to me rather conventional and conservative in
itself, and I’d say your depressed materialism is a rather backward-looking
place to be right here and now, in that any ‘better’ future, whatever
vocabulary or method we use to describe it, must first be imagined or
supposed, must first be fiction, before it can become fact.
© Keith Jafrate
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