Good Intentions

 

It has been a year and two days since I last posted something to this blog. I had not intended for it to be so long. But in my advancing old age—and in the absence of any of the urgency that while I was still teaching I was more regularly able to muster—it's pretty easy to let my good intentions slide, one day at a time, until I look up and oops, another year gone by. The post below has actually been sitting for some months on my desktop, waiting for me to get around to posting it. It was intended to be the first in a series. It still may be. Or maybe I'll see you next year. We'll have to wait and see.

    As a sophomore in college I took a first-semester course in Chinese philosophy from Dr. Lik Kuen Tong. (I wrote about that course on this blog ten years ago.)
    Dr. Tong was a tremendous teacher, and our class was so taken with him that we asked him if he could teach a followup course the following semester. He said he would have to ask permission from the deans to do so. They gave their permission, we all signed up, and so during the second semester he taught a course that featured the process-based philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell, among others. What I remember most clearly about that course was a series of presentations Dr. Tong did on symbolic logic, the essence of which was that certain philosophers had hit upon the idea that given the inherent slipperiness of verbal communication, it might be possible to represent the Truth (or Truths) of the Universe more accurately in mathematical terms.
    On the first day of the unit on symbolic logic, Dr. Tong walked to the blackboard and said something to the effect that we might begin by letting the Greek letters sigma stand for human existence, the letter lambda stand for the universe at large, and see the former as a function of the latter. While doing so, he wrote that equation on the board.
    I should acknowledge here that I am recalling this presentation from a distance of more than fifty years. I don't remember much of what he actually said or wrote down, and I don't know that what I do remember is anywhere near close to accurate. The importance of the lesson for me, both at that time and from the wrong end of the telescope today, is the experience I had as a student of watching as Dr. Tong began fiddling with the equation, saying things like, "Well, having gotten this far we would have to ask ourselves what the equation does not yet include that would be important," and then he would scribble some more on the board, adding factors and including items in parentheses in the denominator and talking his way through his thinking. He would arrive at class the next day and say something like "I was thinking about where we left off yesterday and it occurred to me that we had not considered the quadramoxial factor..." and he'd be off, chalk in hand, talking to us, sort of, but mostly talking to himself as he motored on down the road toward a mathematical representation of the universe that would stand up as being both accurate and adequate.
    I cheerfully admit that I understood only a very small percentage of what he was saying. But what blew me away was the ambition of the project intensity and intelligence and self-discipline with which Dr. Tong pursued it. From a spectator standpoint it was not unlike witnessing YoYo Ma play a cello sonata or Pablo Picasso painting a portrait of Dora Maar. The lasting value of that class, for me, had very little to do with process philosophy in general or symbolic logic in particular. It had to do, rather, with finding myself in the presence of someone who had made a fierce commitment to the deployment of the full resources of his considerable intelligence to a task which was not only ambitious but by any normal standard of judgment clearly impossible. What I have come to understand at this point in my life that I did not understand then is that the impossibility was precisely the point. If it was something anybody could figure out for themselves, there would be no point in attempting it. I'm sure to most of us, most of the time, that sounds counterintuitive, if not completely insane. But I will say this: Dr. Tong demonstrated in class every single day the rewards of the attempt to transcend your perceived limitations. By means of his aspirations be became an inspiration to me.
    I've been fortunate in my life to have had several such inspirational teachers. Some I have know personally, others I have encountered in print. The great British sculptor Henry Moore, for example, had this to say:

The secret of life is to have a task, something you devote your entire life to, something you bring everything to, every minute of the day for your whole life. And the most important thing is—it must be something you cannot possibly do.

Much of my working time the last few years—to the extent that as a retiree I can be said to have "working time"—has been devoted to the reading and writing of poetry. And the thing about writing a poem is that it's basically impossible to get it right. The testimony of working poets and writers and artists echoes Moore over and over again. Here, for example, is Dani Shapiro:

When writers who are just starting out ask me when it gets easier, my answer is never. It never gets easier. I don’t want to scare them, so I rarely say more than that, but the truth is that, if anything, it gets harder. The writing life isn’t just filled with predictable uncertainties but with the awareness that we are always starting over again. That everything we ever write will be flawed. We may have written one book, or many, but all we know — if we know anything at all — is how to write the book we’re writing. All novels are failures. Perfection itself would be a failure. All we can hope is that we will fail better. That we won’t succumb to fear of the unknown. That we will not fall prey to the easy enchantments of repeating what may have worked in the past. I try to remember that the job — as well as the plight, and the unexpected joy — of the artist is to embrace uncertainty, to be sharpened and honed by it. To be birthed by it. Each time we come to the end of a piece of work, we have failed as we have leapt — spectacularly, brazenly — into the unknown.

So sure, any poem I write, or you write, or anyone else writes, will be at least a partial failure. But as Shapiro suggests, that's maybe the most important reason to attempt it.