Billy Collins - Goodness: The Pursuit of Art

Goodness: The Pursuit of Art

            Any notion of good presupposes some structure by which goodness is measured. The legitimacy of these structures as just or true ways of measurement shall be left to the philosophers and critics of our time. What matters is that art is in pursuit of this notion. At bottom artists if they publish their work desire some sort of compensation. This only happens if people interact with their work, thereby validating it as worthy or “good”. Billy Collins has had much of his poetry honored in this way. His book Sailing Alone Around the Room is no different. Collins most significantly was the U.S. poet laureate from 2001-2003 which presented him with the unfortunate task of honoring those lost on September 11^th. Collins’ work urges us over and over again to examine the mundane and the sublime and he does so with great respect to the intellectual context of a layman. Collins’ poems in Sailing Alone Around the Room persuade one that “good” art is created in a rigorous way, yet experienced existentially, all the while aiming at catharsis and causing life to change while imitating art.

            First a brief note on the ordering of argument. Nietzsche discusses concepts which precede Aristotle. However by viewing the Aristotelian concept of catharsis before Nietzsche, we have a greater understanding of what Nietzsche means by the Dionysian experience.    

            Aristotle posits the idea in Poetics that tragedy has a beginning, a middle, and an end which results in catharsis. More to the point catharsis is what results when incidents of fear and pity arouse intense emotions (Aristotle 63). This usually would occur at the end of a play after whatever tragedies befalling the protagonist have occurred. Catharsis would occupy the position of final cause in Aristotle’s four-cause analysis. And its primary purpose is to cause some form of purification or purgation in the audience. So what does Aristotle mean by beginning, middle, and end? Beginning is “that which is itself not, by necessity, after anything else but after which something naturally develops” (Aristotle 64). Middle is “that which is itself after something else and which has something else after it” (Aristotle 64). And logically the end is “that which is naturally after something else, either necessarily or customarily, but after which there is nothing else” (Aristotle 64).

             In Collins’ poem “Aristotle” this notion is drawn out on the page. All three stanzas begin with one of the following sentences: “This is the beginning…This is the middle…This is the end” (Collins 132-133). The first stanza has with it this sense of preparation. “This is the beginning. / Almost anything can happen…This is the first part / where the wheels begin to turn, / where the elevator begins its ascent, / before the doors lurch apart” (Collins 132). All of this as Aristotle says necessitates something else happening afterward. The middle for Collins is a time of immense turmoil: “Things have had time to get complicated, / messy, really. Nothing is simple anymore” (Collins 132). Furthermore:

            This is the thick of things.

            So much is crowded into the middle-

            the guitars of Spain, piles of ripe avocados,

            Russian uniforms, noisy parties,

            lakeside kisses, arguments heard through a wall-

            too much to name, too much to think about. (Collins 133)

The middle looks back to the beginning to the expectancy of young love, but now experiences the fights and arguments. Most of life falls into the middle. But with the end comes finality: “And this is the end / the car running out of road, / the river losing its name in an ocean…It is me hitting the period / and you closing the book” (Collins 133-134). The fear of death is palatable in these lines. And with it the pity for time lost. The notion that we cannot go back, that we cannot fix what happened in the middle sets in. But the end is “the destination we cannot help imagining, / a streak of light in the sky” (Collins 134). It is something “we have been waiting for” (Collins 134). We wait for it, we imagine it, and we see it as light because it is catharsis. This moment of fear and pity brings about a purging of the middle. A hope for purity, for cleansing is in the end. Therefore catharsis must be a central goal, if not the primary goal, of art. It is for this simple reason that it offers a light at the end of the tunnel and by experiencing it, it changes the audience, it purifies them.

            The development of a poem is done with great rigor. We see this first in “Advice to Writers” in which Collins notes “before composing a syllable. / Clean the place as if the Pope were on his way” (Collins 8). He then mentions “The more you clean, the more brilliant / your writing will be” (Collins 8). This pursuit of cleanliness is akin to the purist of purity in the poem “Purity” which describes the ritualistic removal of clothing, skin, and organs in the late afternoons, often on Wednesdays, alongside a pot of tea (Collins 40). The most poignant image is when Collins says:

            Finally I remove each of my organs and arrange them

            on a small table near the window.

            I do not want to hear their ancient rhythms

            When I am trying to tap out my own drumbeat. (Collins 40)

This contrast between ancient rhythms and his own drumbeat gets right at the center of what “Purity” is about. It is a near denial of the self in order to create something new. Much more there can be no interferences. What is most important is that no other sounds may enter in and in some way corrupt the art; it must follow its own drumbeat. What astounds me about this poem is its attention to detail. Most poets, one would imagine, would stop at removing the skin, and possibly even at that point imagine only a skeleton. But Collins makes us tangibly feel our way into the organs betwixt the bones.

            It is this rigor this attention to detail which is essential in what Nietzsche identifies as the Apollonian. Nietzsche describes Apollo as “the god of all plastic powers and the soothsaying god” (Nietzsche 440). He further restricts him by saying “the image of Apollo must incorporate that thin line which the dream image may not cross…even at those moments when he is angry and ill-tempered there lies upon him the consecration of fair illusion” (Nietzsche 440). He concludes that “Apollo himself may be regarded as the marvelous divine image of the principium individuationis (the principle of individuation)” (Nietzsche 440). The principle of individuation is simply that which differentiates the Self from the Other, the ego from the outside world (440). The Apollonian then is a dream-like illusion which is what separates the ego. In art and rhetoric it is akin to logic. Nietzsche views the pitfall of Greek tragedy as an intense focus on the Apollonian started by Socrates: “The Apollonian tendency now appears disguised as logical schematism” (Nietzsche 448). Socrates is “compelled to justify his actions by proof and counterproof, and for that reason is often in danger of forfeiting our tragic compassion. For who among us can close his eyes to the optimistic element in the nature of dialectics, which sees a triumph in every syllogism” (Nietzsche 448). Socrates is therefore pure Apollonian. And the optimism caused by the ‘truth’ his syllogisms results in the death of tragedy. “The virtuous hero must henceforth be a dialectician; virtue and knowledge, belief and ethics, be necessarily and demonstrably connected; Aeschylus; transcendental concept of justice reduced to the brash and shallow principle of poetic justice with its regular deus ex machina (Nietzsche 448). The Apollonian, without the Dionysian, therefore seeks a logical purity similar to the type of syllogisms used by Socrates. This purity is much like the rigor which the speaker takes in “Purity” to create a pure poem.

            However art is not experienced in this way. Art for the audience is an existential endeavor. Nietzsche urges that the Apollonian alone does not result in the best art and if we are truly to escape our fate of insignificance we must become intoxicated in art. This is what Nietzsche calls the Dionysian. So what is our fate? Nietzsche quotes Silenus, “What would be best for you is quite beyond your reach: not to have been born, not to be, to be nothing. But the second best is to die soon” (Nietzsche 442). It is from this pessimism that tragedy develops. It is a way through catharsis, or as Nietzsche calls it the Dionysian, to cope with this pessimistic reality. Nietzsche defines the Dionysiac rapture as the moment when man “begins to doubt the cognitive modes of experience, in other words, when in a given instance the law of causation seems to suspend itself” (Nietzsche 440). It is also the “shattering of the principium individuationis” (Nietzsche 440). Where the Apollonian is a dream-like illusion, the Dionysian is intoxication. The Dionysiac ritual is one of dancing in an intoxicated state. In it “the slave emerges as a freeman; all the rigid, hostile walls which either necessity or despotism has erected between men are shattered” (Nietzsche 441). It is by this moving towards equality that the principium individuationis is shattered. What is significant here is that the world is seen in a new way a way it was not comprehended previously. It is this artistic experience which is causing this shift of paradigm. And ultimately Nietzsche concludes “No longer the artist, he has himself become a work of art” (Nietzsche 441). The synthesis of these two concepts: the Apollonian and the Dionysian results in tragedy.

            Billy Collins shows a sense of this in “Marginalia” and “Another Reason I Don’t Keep a Gun in the House”. “Marginalia” describes the writing people do in margins of books. At one point Collins writes “And you have not read Joshua Reynolds, / they say, until you have read him / enwreathed with Blake’s furious scribbling” (Collins 95). There is a real change caused in the text by what has been added by some other reader. It causes you to see the text, or at least Reynolds work, in a new light. He concludes the poem describing his reading of The Catcher in the Rye as a teenager:

            and I cannot tell you

            how vastly my loneliness was deepened,

            how poignant and amplified the world before me seemed,

            when I found on one page

            a few greasy looking smears

            and next to them, written in soft pencil-       

            by a beautiful girl, I could tell,

            whom I would never meet-

            “Pardon the egg salad stains, but I’m in love.” (Collins 96)

This girls stains and margin writing has caused a very serious reaction in the reader, a concept we will return too, but now we must look at the role this ‘beautiful girl’ plays. She has re-worked the text, much like Blake previously. It can never be the same text again. It can never be the text that Salinger slaved over. Collins work even though he takes off his clothes, skin, and organs is too subject to this re-working. All texts can be redefined by some offhand pencil mark you or I make.

            In “Another Reason Why I Don’t Keep a Gun in the House” Collins expands this idea. The speaker hears a neighbor’s dog barking. So he puts on a Beethoven symphony as loud as he can. But he still hears the barking:

            and now I can see him sitting in the orchestra,

            his head raised confidently as if Beethoven

            had included a part for barking dog.

            When the record finally ends he is still barking,

            sitting there in the oboe section barking,

            his eyes fixed on the conductor who is

            entreating him with his baton

            while the other musicians listen in respectful

            silence to the famous barking dog solo,

            that endless coda that first established

            Beethoven as an innovative genius. (Collins 3)

Magnificently, the dog has become a part of Beethoven’s symphony. Beethoven, centuries after his death, is reinvented; in fact we now know why he was labeled a genius even though the cause only happened moments ago. This paradox is intriguing but even more so is the title of the poem. No gun is mentioned, but it looms throughout the text. The title implies that if he did have a gun, the dog would be dead. So in not having a gun is he restraining himself? And since he has restrained himself he has now experienced a classic piece of art anew. And with it comes the realization that no music happens completely in a vacuum. Outside influences will always exist. Even if the sound is pure, and all other noises blocked, there are still four other senses to tamper with our perception of it. There is no such thing as a pure experience of music, and therefore no such thing as a pure experience of any art. The Dionysian is all about seeing the slave as a freeman. Seeing things a different way, after being caught up in intoxication. This is clearly happening in both of these poems. Also, both poems present outside forces affecting the art and causing the viewer to become immersed or intoxicated in the art. And most importantly both poems highlight how the viewer, i.e., the audience re-works the art and thereby becomes a part of it. “He has himself become a work of art” (Nietzsche 441).

            This all leads towards the real change in the life of anyone experiencing art. Oscar Wilde argues that “Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life” (Wilde 495). He argues that this “results not merely from Life’s imitative instinct, but from the fact that the self-conscious aim of Life is to find expression, and that Art offers it certain beautiful forms through which it may realize that energy” (Wilde 495-496). Another way he puts it is that “Life is Art’s best, Art’s only pupil” (Wilde 489). What does this mean? To some degree it must mean that all of our perceptions and notions about ourselves find their start in art. What I mean is that if reduced to ‘first things’ as Descartes would do, we would be left with art according to Wilde. Like I said at the outset these larger philosophical issues must be left to more ripe minds. What is important is how Collins’ poem “The Three Wishes” vividly displays this notion. The poem begins by telling the story of a woodsman who has three wishes. His first wish is wasted on a skillet of hot sausages, his second wish his wife wastes by wishing for the skillet to be stuck to her husband’s nose, and the third is therefore wasted as well in removing the skillet from the poor woodsman’s nose (Collins 154). He of course could have wished for gold or even golden skillets “and that is the cinder of truth / the story wishes to place in one of our shoes” (Collins 154). This story has delighted and instructed the audience of which the narrator is one of, “Three wishes is three wishes too many, / I mutter piously as I look up from the story” (Collins 155). But what happens next is quite interesting the narrator comments:

            But every time I think of it,

            all I ever really feel besides a quiver

            of sympathy for the poor woodsman

            is a gnawing hunger for sausages- (Collins 155)

The speaker’s life is imitating art. But even more profoundly, the first time I read this poem, and even now as I type I have this unbelievable urge to eat sausage! The poem is effectively working on two levels. It is describing life imitating art and it is causing it. This makes clear the notion that art is most effective after it moves beyond delighting and instructing and begins to dictate a reaction in the audience who is experiencing the art.

            The Apollonian art attempts to make something great, something on the level of the logic of Socrates. “Purity” shows how this rigor is in pursuit of perfection. Collins, however, seems to urge that maybe we need to write in the margins, maybe we need a dog to bark during Beethoven so that we can see it again, maybe even for the first time. It is through experiencing art in a Dionysian way that we experience something akin to catharsis. Understanding fear and pity and the finitude of man allows one to come out on the other side of these truths newly alive. Art affords us this possibility. Life therefore must imitate art. Art allows life to have meaning.