Consider this a memo from a dying tribe.
Imagine a world in which every CD in the world still exists, in
multiple copies, but nothing to play any of them on. (A musical variant
of that wonderful Twilight Zone episode, “Time Enough at Last.” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b6ClcI5nTs8)
No CD players. No iPods. No computers. Nothing. Is that music even there
any more, in any real sense?
Now imagine a world in which every poem in the world exists, but
nobody knows how to read a poem. That’s not so hard to do; we’re almost
there already. These days, everyone wants to write poetry and nobody
wants to read it. (I heard recently that an award-winning poet doesn’t
read anybody else’s work. What hope is there for the rest of us?)
These days, no-one is told at high school what it means to read a poem:
high schools teach us to play with imagery and talk about mood, and
that’s it. Nothing about rhythm, nothing about sound patterning,
nothing about pronouns and tenses and internal progressions, nothing
about the imposition of form onto chaos.
Why not? Well, in part because it’s hard. But in part because
there’s a pervasive myth about literature, the residue of a misplaced
form of egalitarianism. The pleasure great poetry gives is indeed
available to all—it’s just not available right away. The egalitarian
truth is that anyone can enjoy a poem. The pseudo-egalitarian myth is
that no special skills are required. Standard linguistic competence,
the myth suggests, should be enough; we should be able to read lyric
poems the way we read newspaper articles. If we find ourselves unable
to, we are well within our rights to blame poetry (too obscure) and
professors of poetry (too snobbish).
Maybe you don’t care that much about poetry, but let me make a
prediction: little by little, this will happen to all genres. Today
poetry, tomorrow drama, next week the novel. (Someone complained to me
once that Toni Morrison spends too long, in Song of Solomon,
“getting to the point.” We as a culture have failed to help that person
appreciate fiction.)
That poem you love the most in the world will still exist, in one
sense, in a hundred years’ time. But if there are no minds equipped to
“play” it, it will not exist in any real sense. The human mind is the
apparatus on which we play a poem. Or rather, the trained human mind
is. If we abandon our efforts to train minds, certain kinds of human
pleasure will eventually fall forever out of reach. Poetry will look to
us like a technology we no longer know how to use, a dead language we
no longer know how to read. Linear A.
It is to the great credit of the human species that it has produced
summit experiences available only at the price of considerable
preliminary training: climbing Everest; piloting a space shuttle;
attaining zen-like peace of mind... Being moved by a great work of art
is one of them, but we’re on the verge of forgetting that. We don’t
want that to be true. In spite of the wonderfully
hilarious results when we try this out (http://www.naturalhistorymag.com/picks-from-the-past/12476/shakespeare-in-the-bush), we want to believe that
artworks move everyone, all the time, immediately; no prior knowledge
required; batteries included.
Somehow we’ve convinced ourselves, as a society, that a literary work
isn’t like a CD; it’s more like, I don’t know, a banana. Just peel and
eat.
