Alexander Pope

Moral and transmoral visions of human reality are constantly at odds. Where the moralist finds only natural evil and impiety and concomitant sufferings, the transmoralist discerns a delightful spectacle, a aesthetically self-justifying panorama of joy and horror, charity and bloodthirst, egoist and altruist: A masterpiece of black humor and happy absurdity. The moralist hangs every act of nature, god and man in the balance of good and evil. The transmoralist sets his heart and lights—confirms a rare and transcendent weltanschauung—beyond good and evil.

Alexander Pope's dizzying philosophical error is manifest in the first epistle of his famous Essay. Pope here presents the panorama of human folly and titan captiousness in a transmoral vision of perfection and “ORDER” (94); but adulterates his transmoral imaginings with a lukewarm and sophomoric—and completely inappropriate—attempt at theodicy: “To vindicate the ways of God to man” (91). Theodicy is a philosophical instrument appropriate to a moral vision of reality; becoming a ludicrous paradox when superimposed upon the transmoral lens.

The transmoralist, from a poetic height beyond good and evil, perceives the littleness of Man and the absurdity of his argument against the cosmos. This cold, sometimes nearly heartless, vision transcending the dynamics of human contingency, joy and horror and charity and suffering, is an ancient vista well-enjoyed by the master spiritualists of the East. Look to the Bhagavad Gita, where Arjuna may be understood as expressing the moral view, Krishna the transmoral view, of the overture battlefield spectacle:

Arjuna (overlooking the battlefield, 2.5 etc.): I can find no means to drive away this grief which is drying up my senses...It would be better to live in this world by begging than to live at the cost of the lives of great souls who are my teachers...If they are killed, everything we enjoy will be tainted with blood.

Krishna: (overlooking the battlefield, 2.11 etc.): Those who are wise lament neither for the living nor for the dead...the nonpermanent appearance of happiness and distress, and their disappearance in due course, are like the appearance and disappearance of winter and season...Do thou fight for the sake of fighting, without considering happiness or distress, loss or gain, victory or defeat...

Taking a more canny form in Pope, the rhetorical nuances of---“Respecting Man, whatever wrong we call / May, must be right, as relative to all”; “Then say not Man's imperfect, Heaven in fault; / Say rather, Man's as perfect as he ought:”; and “if the great end be human happiness, / Then Nature deviates; and can man do less?”—reflect a transmoral vision of reality. Nature and Heaven take little heed of mankind's happiness: Nature and Heaven lie along the transmoral plane; evidence a transmoral relation to human affairs.

Had Pope called it quits on arguing a transmoral relation between Nature-Heaven and humankind his philosophy of existence would ring nearly sensical. When, however, from this transmoral ground, he asserts the immorality of human resistance to transmoral conceptions of “ORDER” (here we discover the everpresent (everpresent in the ludicrous) Orwellian shadow: CHAOS is ORDER), Pope has mixed categories, has injected a moral effluence into a transmoral spectacle and defiled the purity of his transmoral imagining: “Men [who] would be Angels...[wish] to invert the laws of ORDER, [and sin] against the Eternal Cause.”; All this dread ORDER break—for whom? For thee? / Vile worm!—oh Madness! Pride! Impiety!” (96). 

To belittle the project of human happiness, to set it beyond human hope as in contradiction to the conations of Nature and Heaven, is the poet's delight; whereas to take account of the distress of the human heart in the face of so cryptically ordered a chaos is “Madness! Pride! Impiety!”

These absurdities spring from a fixed conception of the divine. God, when conceived (more scientifically) as the invention (and reinvention and reinvention and reinvention) of the human mind, may be modified as the wisdom of humankind increases. God, in pace with theologizing humankind, is born a child and only after grows wise. 

(One funny fact overlooked by the poet: If "Man's as perfect as he ought," his complaints in the light of the perceived imperfections of Heaven and Nature are perfect as well.)







Works Cited


Bhaktivedanta, A.C. Bhagavad-Gita As It Is. Bhaktivedanta Book Trust International, Inc. 1989.

Pope, Alexander. "An Essay On Man." The Norton Anthology of World Literature. Third ed. Vol. 1. New York: W. W. Norton, 2013. 90-97. Print.

Montaigne

The notion of the barbaric I would agree springs from an ipsocentric dichotomizing of mankind: The self, and those rare and comforting counterparts sharing in the cultural, political, theological, ideological, aesthetic or sexual (whatever the case may be) sensibilities and biases of the self, are understood to be in some abstract sense superior to the excluded peoples.

Looking to etymology and the rite of Babel: The root of "barbaric" ("barbar") echoes the prima facie nonsensical vocalizations of foreign-speakers speaking a foreign tongue. The myth of Babel may be the purest parable of the 'barbarizing' influence of language: A culture naturally feels an affinity for those who speak its native language; and the innate xenophobia typical of organisms serves to reject as stupid, absurd or uncultured ("barbarbarbarbar") those outlanders who, with their alien and threatening (because unintelligible) noises, make too obscure a music.

Montaigne, with a winking wit, underscores the folly of mankind in its attachment to these ipsocentric notions of superior-self and barbarous-other: "[W]e have no other test of truth and reason than the...opinions and customs of the country we live in. There is always the perfect religion, the perfect government, the perfect and accomplished manner in all things" (1653). It's the silliness and ignorance of mankind that seems to amuse Montaigne: for the fact that for every cultural inherence a vast nation of the "barbarous" horde encroaches on every side; every alien culture is a barbarous one: a chaos of folly and false polarity.

The culture of the U.S. Armed Forces is one I might call more barbarous than my own. Murder, patriotic deceit, anonymous heavy-handedness, Amerocentrism, espionage, collateral damage, interrogation under duress---these are concepts and behaviors so alien to my way of life and thought processes I might easily mistake them for the "barbarbarbarbar"-ing of a barbarian horde.

Montaigne, Michel De. "Of Cannibals." The Norton Anthology of World Literature. Third ed. Vol. 1. New York: W. W. Norton, 2013. 1651-1660. Print.

Sunjata

Outlandish superstitions give rise to bizarre behaviors. In the Sunjata the origin of the ritual carrying of the bride in West African culture is described. Sogolon Conde has a twisted foot and the dust of her awkward tread is in some sense objectionable to the wedding party. A bevy of co-wives therefore carry off the bride and escort her in this way to her husband, embroiled in odd diabolis of his own.



In a like spirit one fascinating, if  revolting, ritual practice is the Scottish blackening of bride and groom: A nauseating ceremony where family and friends douse bride and groom in disgusting concoctions---rotten eggs, treacle, feathers and flour--and making as alarming a ruckus as possible parade the happy couple through town in ritual humiliation. While the origins of this bizarre convention are obscured by centuries of cultural metamorphosis, it may once have served as a kind of defensive rite against trows and fairies--mischievous spirits fond of wedding-day kidnappings.

"Sunjata." The Norton Anthology of World Literature. Third ed. Vol. 1. New York: W. W. Norton, 2013. 1514-1576. Print.

Basho

Considering Matsuo Basho composed some of his most touching haiku playing pilgrim in the footsteps of the ancient masters, a montage of still images in motion, evocative of difficult journeys and the fleeting tableaux of the traveler, forms a suitable backdrop to a selection of his finer poems. The juxtaposition of images and poetic counterparts offers readers easy entrance to the magic of his words.

The videographer seems to have selected his images and couplings with precisely this purpose in mind: to ease the uninitiated into a deep appreciation of the loveliness and shock of haiku.

Also notable is the melancholy instrument, solitary in the background of image and poem, its plaintive airs possibly suggesting the forlornness and weariness of the traveler. It isn't easy to say whether such a melancholy ambience is appropriate to the spirit of the poet. Likely a Westerner's bias against arduous whimsical pilgrimage on foot played a role in the videographer's selection. If Basho's haiku are best experienced shot through with the melancholy strains of an eerie string instrument---nothing in the excerpt from the Deep North suggests it. Basho's presence on the page has the spirit of absence; the poet divorced, ghostlike, from the poem. (How creativity became such an ego-driven sport in the West is a mystery.)

Classic of Poetry

Bizarrely enough, aesthetics-centered romanticization of the yin archetype is intimately bound up (and in gross paradoxical sympathy) with the subjugation of women to the sexual and romantic mores of the patriarchal order. This commonplace dyad—domineering double-standard romanticism and an oppressive (frankly silly) passion for inaccessible archetypes--is at the heart of The Classic of Poetry. The libido-corrputing ideal of a virginal purity is affixed to the young girl's concept of romanticosexual dynamics in this compendium of poetic didact and dicta.

In “Fishhawk” the mesmerizing refrain “pure and fair,” and the lavishing of princely attentions on the “gentle maiden,” serve to inculcate notions of the preeminence of the submissive and virginal. The same aesthetic is evident in “Plums are Falling,” where the monogamous ideal is underscored; and more graphically, in “Dead Roe Deer,” where temptation is linked to the ugliness of death, and the originary terror of death is employed as an inculcative tool: loss of virginity is likened to a cadaver, and amorous desire to the barking of a “cur.” While in “Zhongzi, Please” the more canny fear of social isolation and rejection by father, mother and brother are called into play to discourage the extra-monogamous tryst.

These corrupt fixities and obsessions of the patriarchal mind have an aesthetic basis: The gentle virgin, conceived as more evocative of masculine passions and attentions, provides the masculine spirit and biochemistry with the profound omni-connective and self-and-time-transcendent sensations associated with appreciation of a masterly work of art. This subjugative mysticism—the wish to recruit and oppress a fellow lifeform for the purpose of perpetualizing the omni-connective sensation forming the heart of the mystical—has been a source of gender tension in the West as well, buttressed up for centuries (and millenia) by the chivalric and knightly marian ideal.










“Classic of Poetry,” Owen, Stephen, trans. Puchner, Martin, ed. The Norton Anthology of World
             Literature. Third ed. Vol. 1&2. New York: W.W. Norton, 2013. 756-766. Print.

Somadeva

"The Red Lotus of Chastity" paints the picture of a moral atmosphere accepting of deception and intrigue as a practical habit. The heroine, Devasmita, instinctively employs the deceptive arts to secure her happy ending, to the approving hearty laughter of king and all.

Devasmita looks to stories of past deceptions for precedent and encouragement in intrigue. The motif of the heroine in disguise serving to hoodwink a male authority seems to suggest the greater wit and cunning of the feminine mind. It may also imply a general distrust for feminine wiles. But taking into account Somadeva's patron queen, Suryamati of Kashmir, for whom he composed the bulky compendium of tales (and tales within tales), the motive of the author is clear: He sought to entertain his queen with agreeable conceits centering on the aggrandizement of feminine prowess in intrigue. One can imagine the queen satisfactorily entertained by the quick wit and strategic thinking, and edified by the devotion and constancy, of the heroine Devasmita.

The general ambience and thematic content of the work speak more to the relation of author and patron than to broad-brush male-female, culturally contextualized interactions, in my view. What the composition has to say about its cultural locus can hardly be pinpointed without extensive research into the character of patron and poet and male-female politics of the age and queendom.

Work Cited

Somadeva. "From Kathasaritsagara." The Norton Anthology of World Literature. Third ed. Vol. 1. New York: W. W. Norton, 2013. 1274-1279. Print.

Biography

David Evans is a spiritualist and student of the Creation, anti-citizen of the infamous hyperreality and aspiring Transcendant of the fickle, fairweather cadaver. Born to the Dark and Luminous Age---the superimposition of all times upon all times!---of the wild Western, strictly canny, schizo-capitalist experiment (maddest of sciences!), he has set his little spirit and voice against the anti-poeticomysticality of the terror-reign of the atom and its funny little quanta (but not, to be sure, against the (transparticular!) Mysteries beyond). He hopes to make Death proud.