New York Diary (Books)

I used to think "pithy" meant "light" or even "trite." oops.

Hi folks. Of late, I've been reading Francis Bacon's Of Empire, a collection of his essays. He's got a few pithy lines in there among his instructions as to how to build the ideal garden (30 acres, open galleries, fruit trees, an artificial heath) and how to travel the world (with a tutor, keeping a diary, and without putting down roots in any one place). My three favorite quotes are below. (Let me add, however, that this man is no Shakespeare--offbeat speculations aside.)

Pithy quote # 1: "There is no question but a just fear of an imminent danger, though there be no blow given, is a lawful cause of war."

I used to think of this as the Bush Doctrine. Turns out, unsurprisingly, that it's been around much longer than Mr. Bush, and, again unsurprisingly, that it has been more explicitly and concisely stated than ever the President has done. What's interesting about Bacon, though, is the reasoning that informs the sentiment. Bacon's concern is with relative power: in a finite world, your gain in territory or trade comes only at my loss. Every time you become stronger, I become relatively weaker, and this is all that matters. Perhaps what Bacon says is obviously true in the case of territory, but it is nonobvious in the case of trade; we think of free trade and manufacturing for comparative advantage as helping all involved, but Bacon would argue that the disproportionality of benefits is deeply problematic. A neighboring state's growing power is a threat, even if that state is peaceful, and even if it comes with your own, relatively slower, growth in power. (This is, of course, an oversimplification; if my state is growing in power relative to 10 states, but to do so must lose power relative to an 11th state, we would be well-advised to accept the deal for the time being. Our world is not a two-state system, after all.)

The other interesting thing about Bacon is his presumption that all leaders and rulers will, and should, follow this precept. His understanding of war (and indeed of international negotiation) is vastly different than ours. It is one that allows for a noble enemy, one which doesn't necessarily cast armed conflict in terms of right vs. wrong, but rather in terms of two rulers each struggling to protect their nations against the encroachment of the other. For Bacon, it is morally equivalent to say, "I attacked because I felt imminent danger" and "I was attacked because I presented imminent danger." (It is not practically equivalent, just morally. What I mean is, Bacon doesn't feel the need to pick sides, or to discover which cause was the more just.) Indeed, for Bacon, a bad leader would be one who does not fight to protect his people, or even just to make them great.

If his take is very equitable, it is also very mechanistic. (Perhaps we should expect this of a sometime-dabbler in Enlightenment sciences.) While he has a sense fo the noble cause, Bacon also has a strong sense of human nature; it is his contention that fighting to preserve one's nation, for example, is noble--but also that it is unavoidable. When we look at Henry the Eighth of England, Francis the First of France, and Charles V of the Holy Roman Empire, Bacon would have us see that they formed alliances and waged war in very similar ways and for very similar reasons. One reason not to proclaim the moral high ground in armed conflict, then, is the possibility of one's enemies' nobility; another reason is the certainty of our inherent similarity.

Pithy quote # 2: "All precepts concerning kinds are in effect comprehended in those two remembrances: Momento quod es homo, and Momento quod es Deus or vice Dei: the one bridleth their power, and the other their will."

First, a quick translation: "remember you are human" (or, "remember you are a man"), and, "remember you are God, or God's regent on earth" (or "a God," "one of God's viceregents," etc. with various articles flowing in and out as the translator sees fit).

I like this. You're in charge--you get the power, you the responsibility, you get to boss people around and create worlds and all that. On the other hand, you're just a person, nothing special, what makes you think you deserve all this anyhow?

I'm not really in favor of divine monarchy or the whole leader-as-God's-regent kind of thing, I have to say. Give me a democracy any day. But if you have to explain the trappings of monarchy, this is not a bad beginning.

Pithy quote # 3: "It is good also not to try experiments in states, except the necessity be urgent or the utility evident; and well to beware that it be the reformation that draweth on the change, and not the desire of change that pretendeth the reformation."

Well said, Sir Francis. Spoken like a true conservative indeed.

I mean, I take the point that reformation and revolution do not break out of nowhere, and so must generally have some more immediate cause than the continuing status quo. The problem here is not the observation, but the prescription that comes with it, the "...it is good not to experiment, because that might cause--gasp!--reformation!" I mean, there is a difference between reform and out-and-out revolution, no? And there are real goods to come of change, too. I mean, Bacon is basically saying, "It's no good to change things, because changing things might cause a clamor for further reform, and reform is a kind of change, and obviously we presume that it is no good to change things." Come now. Surely this is circular. Bacon's whole prescription relies on the idea that his readers are already predisposed against any sort of governmental reform.

This, I note, was probably a good assumption. I mean, if you are at the top of an arcane pecking order, you'd rather stay there, too, wouldn't you? Suddenly you'd go all-in for the perpetual stability of the current regime, right?

Well. Or something. So there you go. A three-bulletpoint summary of Francis Bacon on statehood and empire.

posted by Skay @ 4:14 PM

Of Blogging

There is only one poem about poetry that is any good.

If that.

I waffle; today I find that it is pointed and well-wrought; today again I find that it is empty or hollow.

Here I am thinking of Archibald MacLeish's Ars Poetica. It starts with an apparent contradiction, saying that poetry should be "mute," "dumb, "silent," and, finally, "wordless." Taken on their own, of course, these sentiments would be baffling--but from the start we are also given the better alternative to loud and wordy poetry (even if it takes a while to understand that fact). For MacLeish, a poem's power is in its palpability, its ability to show, not tell. Indeed, he says straight out, first line, "A poem should be palpable..." but it's only in the final section of the poem that his meaning comes clear: no poet should write the "history of grief," but should rather show grief with "an empty door and a maple leaf." No poem should say "I love you," but should instead speak of "the leaning grasses and two lights above the sea."

And this is precisely the problem with Ars Poetica and all other poems about poetry. Ars Poetica is indeed a pretty good poem (especially its semantically-complicated second section, actually, which I haven't even touched on here)--but MacLeish, like every other poet on poetry that I've read, is unable to take his own advice when writing about poetry itself. If poetry should make its point palpably, should show and not tell, then his explicit exhortations are of an inferior sort. To be sure, they're far better than the incredible self-indulgence of Wislawa Szymborska or the ridiculousness of Naoshi Koriyama's A Loaf of Poetry. (Note to Koriyama and numerous others: metaphors do not a compelling allegory make. It is not enough to write, with Billy Collins, about the horrors of "torturing a confession out of" a poem; there is no torture, and no confession, and we all know that what is stake here is the meaning of the work. By happy contrast, when Shelley reflects on the brevity of human life and dominant civilization, we are meant to believe that there is an actual Ozymandias, that there are statuary remnants in the desert, and that the moral is the metaphor and the palpable image the reality--and not vice versa.) Somehow, even very great poets seem to lose themselves once they take on the subject of poetry itself, and their literary efforts inevitably fall short. It is not cleverly self-referential to write about verse in verse if the verse is no good in the first place.

This leads me to today's rumination. Do I blog more when more interesting things are happening to me, because I have more to say? Or less, because I have less time for this virtual world when fully engaged in the real world?

I suspect that I fall into a third category altogether. I write a post, generally speaking, when I feel like I have an interesting idea or observation--but surprisingly, this does not appear to me to be particularly correlated with doing interesting things in life. Of late I've noticed, in fact, that the more often I go out, the more often I drink Belgian beer on Friday nights and go on urban treasure hunts on Saturdays, the LESS often I seem to engage with interesting ideas (which you'd think would be more forthcoming as I do more varied and interesting things). Is this a comment on my friends? Our conversations? The (less analytical?) way I'm coming to look at and live in the world? Maybe just the way in which I am more settled in my reasonably boring job? Or what?

I feel like I'm losing my sharpness, and my blog seems to me to be a chronicle of this. When I fail to post, it is not because I'm doing something else (which I think is the stereotype), but because I feel at a loss for anything to say.

End of self-indulgence. Back to normalcy now.

posted by Skay @ 11:55 PM