Aldous Huxley: The Mike Wallace Interview

Recently I've been reading Aldous Huxley's "The Doors of Perception," an interesting book about drugs and self-transcendence inspired partly by the thought of William Blake. I plan on writing a little bit on this book soon. Until then, here's an intriguing interview with Huxley I found this evening:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KGaYXahbcL4

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iUTEOY1hre4&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2iDPnwkU9DA&feature=related

Window-gazing

My eyes are weak, weaker than they used to be-
Yet not the blight of a man advanced in years,
Glassy globes clouded over. Eight or ten words
Will do to tell the world this morning,
And the next they will do
Again and just as well, or worse: better.
Narrow is my vision now, but
Small gods separating the
Flowers from the flowers,
Dwelling each realm of the rain-drooped
Garden- didn't we find them once,
We seers wandering blind?

"I was wondering who was doing that to the hymnals..."

To continue my "Secret Lives of the Poets" series, I'd like to turn to the 17th-century British poet George Herbert (portrait above sketched after swim-practice, 11th grade).

Herbert, born in 1593, will be remembered today as undoubtedly one of the most fiercely religious of the so-called "Metaphysical Poets." After the death of his wife, he decided to give up on all earthly ambition and so became Rector of Bemerton, in Wiltshire. He payed out of pocket to rebuild the ramshackle church. There he had time to work on the poems which, after his death, would make him famous.

As a poet, Herbert is best known for (1) expressing in meticulously-crafted verse his tortured struggle to know God and (2) occasionally making his poems into funny little shapes, like angel wings or kittens.

In my recent perusal of the shelves at my local library, a volume of Herbert's caught my eye: Sacred Poems and Private Ejaculations.

If you're half as excited as I was upon first reading this title, I feel it is my duty to warn you: there's not nearly as much ejaculating in these poems as I would have expected.

When's the last time an insurance salesman got drunk and punched you in the face?

Pictured above (uncharacteristically sporting an indication of emotion) is Wallace Stevens: Insurance salesman by day, and by night- well, probably sleeping like everybody else in preparation for another day of selling insurance. But somewhere in there- often on morning walks, I've heard- he found time to produce an astonishing body of work, earning him a lasting place amongst the giants of American poetry.

But his personal life wasn't all so straight-laced. Though he was perhaps no Byron (making love to hundreds of men and women across Europe and drinking wine out of a human skull- often simultaneously, I like to imagine), he nevertheless managed to get into at least one hilarious adventure worthy of a creative spirit. I stumbled upon this as I was reading through his biography in the Collected Poetry & Prose:

"1935- Meets and spends time with Robert Frost in Key West. Discouraged by (wife) Elsie from drinking at home, becomes connoisseur of teas; frequently joins friends for martinis at the Canoe Club in Hartfort[...]
1936- Provokes drunken fight with Ernest Hemingway while in Key West in February; breaks right hand in two places from hitting Hemingway's jaw, and is knocked down' the two make up before Stevens leaves (tells Elsie he fell down a flight of stairs)."

I like how you can trace his decline-this would make a good moment in a "Behind the Poet" documentary. Stevens could talk about trying to stick to his teas, but ultimately falling off the wagon, having a few martinis, and looking for shit from Ernest Hemingway. There could be a great dramatic re-creation: Stevens drunkenly throwing a punch into Hemingway's jaw (likely after a brief and furious moment of indecision in the wake of a snide insult), recoiling in horror and pain has he realizes that he has broken his hand, then getting promptly knocked to the ground in front of any and all spectators.

I think you know you've made it as a poet when you not only meet and socialize with an established artist of your time, but then proceed to break his jaw in a drunken moment of rage. Stevens' real mistake was picking on somebody who was undoubtedly a superior all-around physical specimen.

My plan to earn literary recognition is a little more thought-out: I will take out one of the elderly greats. Their skin and bones are softer, reducing the likelihood of a broken hand on my part, and there's every chance that I could nearly kill one of them on impact- no return punches.

If I ever run into W.S. Merwin, he'll get what's coming to him- right in his feeble, 82-year-old face.

Above: The increasingly grandmotherly W.S. Merwin as he appears before my fist caves in his soft, feeble skull before a crowd of onlookers.

Well, I'm in the mood to include a poem by Wallace Stevens now. I choose this one because I think it's one of his lesser known poems, though it's very enjoyable:


Six Significant Landscapes

I
An old man sits
In the shadow of a pine tree
In China.
He sees larkspur,
Blue and white,
At the edge of the shadow,
Move in the wind.
His beard moves in the wind.
The pine tree moves in the wind.
Thus water flows
Over weeds.

II
The night is the color
Of a woman's arm:
Night, the female,
Obscure,
Fragrant and supple,
Conceals herself.
A pool shines,
Like a bracelet
Shaken in a dance.

III
I measure myself
Against a tall tree.
I find that I am much taller,
For I reach right up to the sun,
With my eye;
And I reach to the shore of the sea
With my ear.
Nevertheless, I dislike
The way the ants crawl
In and out of my shadow.

IV
When my dream was near the moon,
The white folds of its gown
Filled with yellow light.
The soles of its feet
Grew red.
Its hair filled
With certain blue crystallizations
From stars,
Not far off.

V
Not all the knives of the lamp posts,
Nor the chisels of the long streets,
Nor the mallets of the domes
And high towers,
Can carve
What one star can carve,
Shining through the grape leaves.

VI
Rationalists, wearing square hats,
Think, in square rooms,
Looking at the floor,
Looking at the ceiling.
They confine themselves
To right-angled triangles.
If they tried rhomboids,
Cones, waving lines, ellipses-
AS for example, the ellipse of the half-moon-
Rationalists would wear sombreros.

"EVERYBODY, LISTEN UP!"

The ski mask- it is at once both an extremely practical and comfortable bit of winter wear and a symbol of terror.

In the bitter depths of this past winter, my friend Greg told me a story... I hope this isn't totally butchering it, as my memory is faint:

One night, having no car, he had walked to a gas station. As the temperature that evening was somewhere south of zero, he had bundled up to the fullest- which included putting on a black ski mask. I would imagine that third-shift gas station employees (a lonely type, to be sure) are united- if at all- by a common fear of being shot in the night by a ski-mask wearing lunatic...

Well, Greg caused no major controversy, but he did attract uneasy stares from the few people within. On his way out, a man (who had left his truck running so as to eliminate the possibility of the temperature in his cab dropping below seventy while he scurried in and out, probably for beef jerky or corn nuts) leaned his head out of his truck window and shouted something about how you shouldn't wear a ski mask on account of how menacing it looks. "Easy for you to say, you fuck," may have been the response. And so my ski-mask wearing friend most likely walked his bitter way home in the cold, taking little consolation in the fact that he looked like part of an underground militia or terrorist cell (I'm thinking about those guys in Half-Life: Counter-Strike, for those of you who have no qualms playing shooter games made up of snazzy, hyphenated word-pairs).

Encounters like this make me want to utilize the ski mask to the fullest this winter. This afternoon I think I'll sport a jet-black ski mask as I go to the bank to cash a check: "ALRIGHT, EVERYBODY LISTEN UP!" I'll shout after I've kicked the door in. "THIS IS A TRANSACTION! I FORGOT MY FUCKING ACCOUNT NUMBER! IF I PROVIDE PHOTO ID, CAN YOU PLEASE LOOK IT UP?!"

Worn Phrases

In my conversations with Julia, I constantly use commonplace terms which she has somehow managed to avoid becoming acquainted with. "Egg on my face," for instance, and "what a stuffed shirt that guy was." The latter phrase might not even be a commonplace... But it occurs to me that many of these phrases are truly strange.

Over Thanksgiving break, my sister and I puzzled out once and for all the phrase "A stitch in time saves nine." Neither of us had ever known what the hell that was all about. It turns out it has to do with sewing- kind of obvious in retrospect. My sister had always thought that the phrase referred to some sort of warping of the space-time fabric which allowed for illogically fast (and thus time-saving) travel- this is likely due to her having read A Wrinkle in Time as a child.

I prefer that explanation.

More...

Here's something on the comments to my earlier post "The Dawkins Type":

I think Kevin's comment is valid. A lot of this has to do with a war of definitions: truth can be defined in various ways. Richard Dawkins wants to limit truth to the scientific, then to use cultural values attached to truth to champion science at the expense of other ways of understanding existence. But this last step is culturally conditioned, historically particular, and thus not at all objective: you can locate absolute truths, but any value you attach from there is utterly subjective and impermanent. This last move is perhaps an example of something outside the realm of science and objective fact that Richard Dawkins sees as truth: that science is truth and truth is good and ought to be pursued by all.

Art can reveal truth by making our world more meaningful- by telling us things about the world which may well fall beyond the grasp of scientific observation. In his poem "Ode to a Nightingale," John Keats talks about a bird for several stanzas, and in so doing reveals things about the human struggle with mortality and human anxiety in the face of consciousness, death, memory, etc. A scientific account of the bird would say nothing of human experience, and thus the bird would not mean anything to us. Granted, if you want to understand the workings of the bird out of some curiosity or necessity, you must go to science. But the work of art, the process of art- that does something altogether different.

The work of art has the power to reveal (what we might call) truth about our existence to us. For instance, science can tell me about death- what causes it, how to tell when a body is dead, how to stave off this or that particular physical cause of death, etc. But can it help me to cope with or understand death as an existential phenomenon? Not really, but art can. This gets at my meaning when I say that art clarifies while science confuses- at times, anyway, this is can be the case. Death is a certainty, yet it is terrifying and confusing. Science can tell me only long lists of facts about what causes deaths, how to prevent deaths, etc. But this does nothing to change the fact of my mortality. One struggling with such a problem as anxiety in the face of death would be hard-pressed to find relief in scientific statements about death- but the Bible, or a Keats poem, or a stirring lecture from a dying man- these things utilize art to reach the human imagination, which cannot be satisfied by science alone.

Science gives us no real grounds for action in most realms of our existence, no grounds for the sorts of actions that really matter most to us- ethical dilemmas, facing mortality, experiences of love and hate, etc. They can't really tell us about those at all, and what they can tell us- perhaps something about chemicals in the brain or how cancer kills an organism- doesn't really help us to cope and act. The experience of being human is often untouched by science.

I choose not to limit truth to that which is true for everyone at all times- but definitions will vary. When I think of truth, I think of things that matter and are meaningful to me, things that make the world comprehensible to me, things which are not scientific truths but which nonetheless I treat as truths every day. Science explains, but usually in a realm all its own.

Also, the hardcore atheist types like Dawkins cannot seem to see any difference between what a myth sets out to do and what science sets out to do-- they see both as merely explaining origins, but in fact there's a world of difference between the two forms. The Adam and Eve story is a myth, not a scientific or historical account. If it matters to humanity, if it has power- well, that is not because it gives out some bite-sized facts about the origin of the universe. It has value because it reveals different kinds of truths about existence- truths which will certainly not resonate with everyone or be in any way static or universal. The Adam and Eve myth has all sorts of potential messages about the nature of transgression, guilt, punishment, justice, the pursuit of knowledge in all of its glory and horror- etc. etc.

To attempt to write it off as a "Bronze age myth" which was only waiting to be rendered obsolete by science- that's just poor reading and bad scholarship. The Adam and Eve story was not written to do the same things as a scientific or historical document. To ignore what it does do, though- that could be quite a loss.