From Edinborgh in a Storm: on Rhapsodes

Like a polar bear coming out of hibernation, or the first lifewards stirrings of a hatchling from its egg, I finally end the period of dead silence that has reigned over this blog. I cannot promise it won’t happen again; however, I can also promise that it weren’t happen again for a while. One of the things I wanted from this writing early on was consistency; I had a notebook which I filled for three years with upwards of 60,000 words of private writing: of letters to myself; I haven’t written in that notebook for a while now: all the material that was poured into that space has gone to this. That this is a watched space, twists my writing a little, but not too much. I feel that I am a watched animal.

The last few weeks were taken up with work. I wrote a dissertation on human suffering: in blunt, particulated academise. Thankfully I can stop talking in that tongue-twisting language.

I have also moved for a year to Scotland. Scotland is a strange place. Reality is thinner here: issueless large cries seem to bleed through in the back garden at night; blackbox-creatures make juddering passages through the undergrowth; and it rains a lot.

Edinborgh, the city I’m renting part of a house in, brims with metallic, bladed names for its districts. Everything has a watery, palpitating quality to it: conversations seem more insistent here: brimming with either meaning or menace; the city is famous for its problems with intoxicants: and no wonder, when every conversation seems half-intoxicated on its own secret language. It’s like you were in a marine world: listening hard to catch the conversations of passing eels over the pulse of the water.

My friend showed me last night the Scotsman Step: a marble stairway cut in a spiral down the city’s face: each step a clashing, different kind of marble from the last. In the incoherence of every step’s alternating, rain-mottled surface there was a kind of savage coherence. It was like a mouth of differently-rotted teeth snarling up at the wet sky. Yes: I do like it here.

This house is a sizeable improvement to the previous Oxford-place I lived in. It has an airy void of a sitting-room sheepishly lurking in a corner of the ground-floor. The kitchen is a real kitchen: with room for serious cutting, cooking, and a wide dining-table hedged-in by bandy-legged stools. My bedroom’s skylight clings like a pane of nothingness above my bed. There is a storm blowing around the house right now: and the last time I was up there, it shook its little glass teeth maliciously over me at the wind’s excuse. There is a tiny-door that leads directly to the loft, hunched in a corner of the room, that obsesses me. I keep dreaming of it itching open: and a small, elfish figure crawling out with narrow eyes. I half want to crawl through it myself, shoulders about my ears, and test the unfamiliar territory of the rafters. I am sure some Elves have left it as some kind of entrance hatch.

My new task, as far as I see myself as having one, beyond seeking employment, is to find or create Rhapsodes.

Before I moved here, I read Plato’s Ion, which I think is true as far as its analysis of divine insanity goes, though it also ultimately demonstrates the strictures, the imaginative constraint, of Socrates’ method of rational comparison. His logic does not admit for a thing to be both a skill and an inspiration: and while by his own reasoning that is true enough, it also irritated me, because it demonstrates the inadequacy of such a reasoner before the manifestations of poetry. Good literature makes its producer as much a channel for its production, as it does inaugurate them as an “author”.

But...

Ion gave me the key to understanding another terrible loss our fallen culture has conceded to antiquity: which is, to say, that the Rhapsode as understood by Socrates and Ion, is a far greater, a more living and virile version of what our “literary critic”, or, to take the most hopeless case, our “literary scholar” is. The Rhapsode was not simply a reader of poems: but also their knower, their interpreter. Imagine if you had both a immeasurably-gifted reciter and Harold Bloom in one!

This is what the Rhapsode is: what Ion understood himself and his ilk to be. This is what the literary element of the academy is descended from: though we must understand this descent as devolution, not its opposite in natural selection.

In fact the descent from the Rhapsode to the literary scholar: the pen-pusher academician composing absurd “Deconstructionist” analyses of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’s game theory — that serves to neither spread the vital life-force of such art to the general population, nor to even really reveal new aspects of the art, but rather to turn the art into a piece of conception to be “interrogated”, to be “deconstructed”, to be made the subject of ever-increasing obscurantist careerism — this may be termed with some smugness a form “unnatural hyper-selection”. Literary scholarship is not in its totality meaningless: but in its current state, it is very close to that.

The academic paper, I think, is all well and good in the sciences; and even in philosophy, though I do believe that the abandonment of the dialogue, for the paper of the Analytical School, served only to separate philosophy from its vital need of questioning all of the All, for the All, and sequestered it instead in the logic-game of academia. However, it is truly in the English departments of high and low where the idea of a “paper” is most absurd: most utterly useless. Have you read half the papers by our learned cast of literary professors on Jstor; and if you have, can I ask a simple question: did they show you how to live, or how to encompass minds other than your own, which I believe is one of the purest forms of the democracy of the living?

No, they didn’t show me how to do that either. It is a far cry from the scholarship that uncovered the metrical conventions of Sappho’s work, to a Marxist “interrogation” of Middlemarch.

I skewer the scholar, and try to make for some division between him and the literary critic intentionally. The literary critic, or rather the true literary critic, which only a minority of our “critics” may be said to be: is still a person trying to teach us how to live, to encompass other minds, other states. A true literary critic is still writing about life, she is writing about life from a certain remove.

Go and read Merve Emre’s New Yorker columns: that is real literary criticism, which is to say life-criticism. Emre is Bloom’s successor in this way. There are others: but Emre’s talent is the most florid.

Yet even these critics, like Bloom and Emre, are only fulfilling half the role of the Rhapsode. The Rhapsode is not only the knower, the interpreter of the art: they also allow the art, almost as fully as the art’s composer, to live inside them. Through recitation they join the composer in being the art’s vehicle: the riverbed through which its channel flows.

I am not here just to exhort dead things. I am here to bring back dead things to life. If you don’t believe me, read the Odyssey: who did Odysseus go and see in the underworld to help him back to his good-life?

I am here to reinvent the Rhapsode. That sounds like much.

I am not delusional: what I am doing is just a small thing. I am finding people: beautiful people preferable, people who other people would enjoy seeing, enjoy watching, even want to watch, and I plan to have these people, if they are willing, read my poems on social media sites like TikTok. Does that sound crazy? Maybe: but even a TikTok video with a hundred views, even a morsel like that: would have a hundred true views, a hundred actual engagements.

How many people do you think have actually read your poems in the most prestigious of the publications you have been lucky enough to place in?

And how many of those people do you think were reading your poems out of actual interest: as curious bodies? How many were just there because they were also published in the journal?

Even a hundred views is a hundred-readers.

The Rhapsode: is a critic, an actor, and a reciter. A Rhapsode is a treasuring of the aesthetic: of artistic, physical, cognitive beauty. I am not sure I will be lucky enough to find people immediately, with all of those traits: but physical beauty, and a willingness to read my poems for a camera is a start. I think it is a big start.

Until further developments: my friends, “this is plenty, this is more than enough”.