Doug Anderson

“Aporia is that ironic place where poets begin,” Doug Anderson claims at the start of his essay “In Praise of Aporia” for this month’s issue of Plume– ironic because it’s the source of nascent “unknowing” that leads, as if by some unconscious, preternatural magic, to serendipitous, enduring expression. “Things”, that is, that one didn’t know she or he knew that depend utterly, in turn, on the poet’s mere belief in the gold in the void. Precisely what compelled Beckett to write, “I can’t go on. I’ll go on.” Anderson explores this creative phenomenon with cogent examples from Keats’ writings, specifically his definition of “negative capability” as “that ability to be in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” Anderson recognizes this creative opus operandi as just as viable a cognitive methodology for divining scientific phenomena as he does for conjuring the verbal calculus of great poetry., drawing the analogy to Newtonian physics, But he goes further than making this cross-disciplinary claim about genius; he examines the very matrix of some of Shakespeare’s language as well that stuns in its marriage of sound and sense. His exegeses of Aporia in literature, philosophy, religion all complement each other, despite their diverse disciplines, as sister mysteries that reside in the same original, phenomenological source of unknowing.

—Chard deNiord

In Praise of Aporia       By Doug Anderson

Plato used the word “aporia” to name the point beyond which a logical argument can’t proceed. It is often expressed as “all Cretins are liars, said the Cretin.” But aporia is where poets begin. The best articulation of this is Keats Negative Capability: “…when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” In this letter to his brother, Keats nailed something essential about poetry—and art—that is often misunderstood. Some people, particularly its critics, think Keats means a failure of thought. That’s not what he means at all. In my understanding, Negative Capability is a spaciousness, a receptive state of mind, in which new thought can arrive unencumbered. It’s where the best poetry comes from; poetry that is not predictable, that always takes you somewhere you didn’t think you were going.

I’d like to suggest, and I know I’ll catch flak for this, that physicists also experience negative capability. A physicist, although wicked proficient in math, knows that he really doesn’t know what is on the other side of the certainty of accepted physics, especially Newtonian physics. The Webb telescope is as I speak sending back information that questions our ideas about the origin of the universe. The discoveries of modern physics make me hungry. They make me want to write poetry, to enter the zone of aporia with my eyes wide open. Physics is quite comfortable, it seems, with aporia; it’s a garden of wonders. While admitting I don’t know enough math to understand physics, I am in love with it.

Also, there are no discrete binaries between thought and emotion. Thought is immensely complicated. It carries everything that came before it on its back. It associates in all directions. The language of mathematics is supposed to keep this from happening. Two plus two equals four is uncontestable. Maybe. But I believe scientists, particularly physicists, are wonder junkies. They are driven. They are as hungry as poets.

Poetry persists because we want to capture thought and it always exceeds our grasp. Poetry is a celebration of this. But what is the payoff? There is an internal enchantment that happens with a great poem, just as there is with a great painting or piece of music. Something happens to us that is not quite explainable, that resists thought, that makes us want to go beyond ourselves. And even afterwards, in literature classes, when layer upon layer of theory is applied to it, there is a lingering shadow of the original experience of reading or hearing a poem. One way to test this is to observe what dates in literature and what does not. Topical references date; in Twelfth Night, all the archaic legal jargon, which was probably intended for the lawyers where the play was performed, has no meaning for us. Directors cut it. But what does not date in the poem is the poetry. In Midsummer Night’s Dream, the mythological references date, but the poetry does not. The educated members of an Elizabethan audience, including the queen, would have been conversant with Ovid, and that’s why the allusions are in the play. Let’s take the line, “Love looks with the mind, not with the eye, therefore is winged cupid painted blind.” Cupid is not the interesting part of the line; but the concise psychology of love remains true. We smile, although it is not yet Shakespeare’s best. I am using references to Shakespeare because Keats’ speaks of Shakespeare in his letter as an exemplar of Negative Capability. Following is a passage from Shakespeare’s Macbeth. I’m going to work my way through it according to Keats:

Macbeth:

“Ere the bat hath flown
His cloister’d flight, ere, to black Hecate’s summons
The shard-borne beetle with his drowsy hums
Hath rung night’s yawning peal, there shall be done a deed of dreadful note.”

Whatever later revision Shakespeare may have done to this line, I argue the synesthesia and music were there in the original flourish. He was at the top of his game in this play. He was dazzlingly good.

I’ll close read:

He says Banquo will be killed before nightfall, but look what he does with night: “…the shard-borne (hard-winged) beetle (deathwatch) with his “drowsy” (here is the beginning of the z sound that will flow right through “hums” into the synesthetic yawning (z sound becomes visual gaping blackness) struck painfully hard, highlighted with a bell’s “peal.” Then all this is followed by four ominous drumbeats, “done a deed of dreadful note.”

“Hecate” is topical and of not much help. The “deathwatch beetle” was a superstition of the time, but everything else is pure poetry.

I’ve merely close-read this line: but what is it that we feel? What is it that helps us imagine? The visual images are cinematic. There is a gestalt that must be “got” by the reader/auditor. And this is the part of poetry that cannot be explained. Shakespeare’s words are the equivalent of a musical score.

So, we are at aporia. There is nowhere to go besides having the experience. You cannot explain falling in love by the biological activities of the body, nor can you explain poetry by elucidating its elements.

You are perhaps annoyed that I have just argued that what happens in poetry cannot be described. In the Symposium and the Phaedo, that most reasonable of writers, Plato, and his hero, Socrates, have alluded to what happens for them at the end of logic: the Eleusinian mysteries. This is where they go after Aporia. They have applied their spiritual beliefs to the divine not-knowing. Buddhism refers to “emptiness,” and spaciousness. Emptiness results from the knowledge that all reality is interdependent. Spaciousness is the practice of opening up beyond mere thinking to allow the confusion to be, to allow the dynamics of our furious cogitating to be what they are until we let go of them. What remains? Something extraordinary that has no name. It can be euphoric or terrifying or just peaceful. I often feel this when I’ve read a poem that enchants me: there is something here beyond thought, beyond summation, beyond interpretation. It echoes through me but I can’t name it.

I have sat through many Q & A’s after poetry readings and have always been bored. I am against Q & A’s; I believe the poetry audience should be allowed to sit with the feelings and imaginings evoked by the poetry itself, should go home with them, and let them nourish their dream life. Similarly, after many years of teaching, I have discarded theory as a primary means of approaching poetry. If there is any point to writing an essay in which I argue that what makes a poem a poem cannot be explained, it is to argue that poetry is experiential, and that other analyses should be after the fact. Have your theory, watch the generations of theories pass but let the experience of a poem be prior to and independent of theorizing. When Derrida refers to “the endless play of signifiers” maybe this is what he’s talking about, although he’s used a million words to arrive there. In Brecht’s Galileo, his hero says: “How does a pearl develop into an oyster? A jagged grain of sand makes its way into the oyster’s shell and makes its life unbearable. The oyster exudes slime to cover the grain of sand and the slime eventually hardens into a pearl. The oyster nearly dies in the process. To hell with the pearl, give me the healthy oyster!”

Author: Doug Anderson

Doug Anderson has written about his experiences in the Vietnam War in both poetry and nonfiction. He is the author of the poetry collections The Moon Reflected Fire (1994), the winner of the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and Blues for Unemployed Secret Police (2000). In 2009 he published his memoir, Keep Your Head Down: Vietnam, the Sixties, and a Journey of Self Discovery. His most recent book is Undress She Said (Four Way Books, 2022). Doug’s awards include a grant from the Eric Mathieu King Fund of the Academy of American Poets, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and a Pushcart Prize. Anderson has taught at the University of Connecticut, Eastern Connecticut State University, and the William Joiner Center for the Study of War and Its Social Consequences at the University of Massachusetts, Boston.

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