Found / Things

“Why don’t you assume you’ve written your book already—and all you have to do now is find it?”—So Steward Brand wrote, in an email to Brian Eno, and so Eno reports to us, in “About This Diary,” the preface to A Year With Swollen Appendices: Brian Eno’s Diary, 1995. You see, Eno had in hand a £100,000,000 advance for a book (reader, I counted the zeros twice), but he had not started writing the book. He didn’t even have a plan. It had been years. After Brand’s suggestion—and how was that not already printed on an Oblique Strategies card?—Eno declared that his diary would be his book. Well philosophers are also good at making assumptions, and while I don’t keep a diary, I do have an app called “Things” which, though designed for to-do lists, functions for me as digital scrap paper: action items are interspersed with random musings, essay prompts, lines from poems I’ll never write, and so on.

In one of her best and most well-known quotes, Flannery O’Connor, explaining her technique, wrote that “to the hard of hearing you shout.” The idiots, the drawling southern bigots, the well-meaning but ignorant intellectuals: only through such exaggerated caricatures could her spiritual message get through to her secular audience. In her story “The Partridge Festival” a murderer is seen by the “simple” townfolk as plainly evil. But to Calhoun and Mary Elizabeth, both well-educated outsiders who sneer down at town society, it is the town who is ultimately to blame for the killings. Their sympathies lie not with the victims but with the killer: they identify with him, and regard him as an innocent sacrifice, a sensitive soul pushed to his act by a hostile and uncomprehending social environment. But when they visit him in the mental hospital, they find him a horror and a monster. Now I count myself an O’Connor fan, but I did not like this story. Was I supposed to identify with Calhoun (whose education-level and accent I share), and his disdain for the unwashed southerners? Were the scales supposed to fall from my eyes, as they fell from his, at the end? But I disliked him, and disagreed with him, and thought him too-crudely drawn, from the beginning.

I sing a symphony of silent notes,
A song of summertime and heavy coats.

As Calhoun and Mary Elizabeth arrive at the hospital,

A cluster of low buildings, hardly noticeable, rose like a rich growth of warts on the hill to their right.

That’s good.

I sing of Panzers breaking thorough
And Stuckas while their sirens scream.

In other moods, I’m on O’Connor’s side. There’s a story about Steve Jobs meeting with an ad executive. Steve wanted an ad that highlighted a number of his new product’s new features. This was against Steve’s otherwise-firm commitment to simplicity as a guiding value. To talk Steve out of this idea (no easy task), the exec crumpled up a piece of paper and threw it at Steve, who caught it. “That’s a good ad,” he said. Then he crumpled up five pieces, and threw them all; Steve caught none. “That’s a bad ad.” The story has a wider moral. Great Art is supposed to have a bottomless complexity, and Great Poetry is supposed (by some) to be characterized by neutron-star-level densities of meaning: more significance-per-syllable than any other form of writing. I admit to being against this. Put too much in, and all of it is lost. I’m against poetic compression, as a general rule, with exceptions as needed. Thus, the appeal of thought-rhyme, whose repetition is the opposite of compression. (In fairness, parallelism at its best is repetition without redundancy.)

Compression in poetry sometimes entails grammatical contortion: leaving words out, putting words in the “wrong” order (adjective after noun, say). These are sometimes done, I suspect, in response to a felt need to “signal” that one is writing poetry, a need one may feel when writing free verse. In this way metric poetry can be more freeing than free verse: if you’re writing iambic pentameter, then whatever else it is, it’s certainly poetry; you are therefore at liberty to sound as pedestrian, or as conversational, as you like. No need for fancy words, or to make everything a metaphor for everything else. This was Wordsworth’s idea, though he lived up to it poorly—Shakespeare is often better at ordinary-speech-in-blank-verse than Wordsworth. But it was Robert Frost who was truly devoted to this paradoxical ideal, of un-poetic poetry. While there’s a lot of Robert Frost’s poetry that I don’t like, this ideal I do like. It, and his insistence on writing in meter, while living in what he called “an age of mere diction and word-hunting.”

Abe Lincoln closed one eye
And then he closed another.
In visions he was troubled by
Brother killing brother.