The Perfection Of The Coutier

I’m on a commenting rampage as of late. I’ve been reading a few other blogs, inside this class and also out side of this class and I’ve realized that this whole blogging thing is some kind of phenomenon. There are blog groups that you can join to post your thoughts and keep aware of the thoughts of others and comment on those thoughts. It all seems very interesting…

This is my last entry that on the subject of Sir Phillip Sidney. After this I will be moving on to tackling Dryden and seeing just what he has to say to the world. I’ll tell you right now I have no idea what to expect. I’m not an English major but a Linguistics major so anyone with ‘dry’ as the first part of their name worries me a little bit.

But I did like Sidney, young courtier of old. He seems to be a person who was more concerned with exercising his wit than anything else. Which is probably why he wanted to be the best courtier. As a courtier, it seems, you wear your charm and wit on your sleeve and present it to the world every time you step into the royal court. On top of that, this same wit and charm is your only tool to use when, as a courtier, you are abroad representing the queen and country. Its understandable then that‘…the highest expectations of him were high indeed.’

I can see why expectations would be high! It would be so easy to have a negative view of a courtier. If someone is going to go around saying that they represent the interests of a nation and of royalty they better do a damn good job of it. After all, as a diplomat, they are in a station of esteem and, as a diplomat, they should possess some qualities that would make those around them think that they are deserving of that role. Any less would cause people to think that they were fools. I think something similar happens to people everyday. We go around representing ourselves at some levels, our communities at others and sometimes, like when we’re on vacation, our nation.

Sidney’s contemporary’s all thought of him as possessing the qualities well suited to bringing his role great esteem. ‘He appeared as a living refutation of the common Italian assumption that all Northern Europeans, and the English in particular, were uncultured barbarians’. His concern for keeping a sharp wit manifests itself in his works, where it seems that at every point of discourse he wields a razor.

My favourite work is ‘the Defence’ where in a sort of fun way Sidney sets about the task of bringing the station of the poet some esteem. I especially like how he takes Plato who seems to look at poets unfavourably, and makes Plato one of their advocates. He does a good job of showing the right side of poetry, by turning criticism of poetry on its head. ‘…as Plato banishing the abuse, not the thing, not banishing it, but giving due honour onto it, shall be our Patron and not our adversary’

I think that the aim of ‘the Defence’ was to show that there is a positive way to approach how we view imaginative writing and that by looking at it with a positive frame of mind, we will be able to see its merits. By looking at imaginative writing the right way we can then see how a poor treatment of poetry, like a bad poem, has no place in poetry at all. Our condemnation of poor work shouldn’t be a condemnation of poetry itself, it should instead, serve to give us guidelines that will help develop its perfection.

I think what Sidney was striving for in his work and in his life was some kind of ideal. Where he would, at each step, seek to educate himself to refine his thoughts and wits. Sidney’s main drive seems to be more along the lines of self-enrichment where he could take a task and develop it to its perfection to satisfy his own desire of being the best person that he could be.

Fitzroy Ford “Bloggers Unite”

Faculty of Contemplation

Faculty:

Middle English faculte, from Old French, from Latin facults, power, ability, from facilis, easy.
Any of the powers or capacities possessed by the human mind.

A quote for you kids…….

“Understanding is discursive; Reason is fixed. The Understanding in all its judgments refers to some other faculty as its ultimate authority; The Reason in all its decisions appeals to itself as the ground and substance of their truth. Understanding is the faculty of reflection; Reason [the faculty] of contemplation.”

(sourece:-http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/stc/Coleridge/resources/dictionary.html)

I think that we need some kind of course that teaches us the roots and meanings of the words that we use in everyday language. This should be taught in grade school, early in our development. As humans, we literally build our language on a foundation of metaphor. Language, I would say, is probably our first attempt to identify ourselves with the world. The words that we choose to identify objects that we perceive in our minds, is also a product of our minds. Words are our way of identifying objects out in the world to create a picture in our heads so that we can communicate with ourselves and with others. In fact, I can take a group of words about a tree that I saw today in the park, describe the fall colours and the crisp air of that day and present those words to someone else a thousand miles away and they will be able to ‘see’ what I’m talking about in their own minds. My words become a metaphor for the metaphor of light revealed to my mind through my eyes.

That is pretty straight forward, but things get more complicated when we start to talk about abstract ideas and thoughts. The words that we use to describe the abstract represent things that are several degrees removed from the real world. Most times, when people are trying to communicate with others, their communication is based on words that are metaphor. But our society doesn’t really take the time to teach children where words come from. These children eventually grow up to become people like you and I. We continually use words that are removed from their sources by several degrees. This seems to me to present a poverty of introspection or contemplation when we decide on which words we are going to use to speak with.

In Sidney’s time the few that were educated knew Latin as their base of communication. Using this as a foundation an idea could be developed from the tiniest seed and grow in complexity through exacting metaphor for each flowering thought. In reading the ‘Defense of Poesie’ Sidney talks about how he went to learn horsemanship from a gentleman named Pugliano. Sidney came away from the experience not only learning about horsemanship but also learning a bit about Pugliano who ‘sought to enrich our minds with the contemplations therein which he thought most preciuos’. He describes Pugliano as exercising ‘his speech in praise of his faculty’. I had to do some investigation into the meaning of the word faculty, which you see above, because the word occurs several times through out the work. Then when I went back and reread those lines I thought:

‘what a god damn perfect way of talking about another persons abitlity to express their stuff’

Fitzroy Ford “A Blogger”

Retrospection as Saviour

The habit of blogging has been the hardest for me to start. Even though I am up to date with my readings. So here I am trying to develop a balanced approach to blogmania. In my last blog I noticed that it seemed a bit long and that it wasn’t too easy to follow for most people. I myself, after looking at it, felt that it was a bit confusing but I’m appreciative of the lone comment that I did get on it.

I realized that in the passion of composing or reading a work people often get carried away and have a hard time reeling in their thoughts into something that centers on a truly coherent theme. Often what composed in passion may at the time seem to be of something noteworthy, it is often only after a stroke of some retrospective editing does it actually become readable. This all leads me to wonder why is it always only in retrospect do we ever see things more clearly?

This question has its beginnings in my reading of the fourth, eighth and eleventh songs in A.S. These are the only sequences in which Stella is actually given a voice and it seems that throughout the three songs her message is consistent. She is politely telling Astrophil to please go away and stop pursuing her. Yet for love sick Astrophil this message doesn’t seem to sink in. How long after Stella’s final rejection of Astrophil did he pine after her? There is a whole sequence on the theme of absence, rejection and sorrow that carries through from the eleventh song straight to the end of the sequence for a total of thirteen more compositions. Sidney manages to create such a sorry picture of black sadness that you almost forget that Astrophil’s sorrow is clearly disproportionate to the reality of the situation. It seems of little surprise then, that A.S. wasn’t published until after his death because I don’t think Sidney would have ever allowed for a work that so closely resembles his real life, to be released during his lifetime.

Astrophil continually does those things that make any self-respecting/retrospective man’s heart sink. The kiss that he steals from Stella while she is asleep comes to mind as an act that makes him seem irrational and overtly foolish. At each syllable as Astrophil commits the act you want to scream out no, because the truth is that he has no place or right to kiss her. Also the fact that for all intensive purposes, Stella is out of his league and promised to someone else would make a normal man take the path of least resistance and rightfully pursue another. But Sidney instead has Astrophil continue on his course towards inevitable self-malice. This action is something that, I think, exposes the line of separation between Astrophil the character and Sidney the man and also demonstrates the skill with which Sidney paints the picture of the tortured soul. If A.S. does bear some semblance of Sidney’s real life it also serves to satisfy our notion of it as an illusion. This is accomplished through Astophil’s lack of retrospective, which thankfully helps to save the average man from being the fool.


Fitzroy Ford “Bloggers Unite”

Communication Of Skill

It is at this time of year that they talk of the blahs. The aftermath of supposed expectation, I guess. The blahs seem to have a cycle that loosely follows the change of the seasons. I feel sorry for the blahs, such a tired and regular schedule. Marching out in January, mulling about in the late spring, poking up in mid summer and early fall. Why after a nice change of damnable routine we are met once again by damnable routine?

It all becomes routine after a while I suppose, walking, running, swimming, jumping, living breathing doing something, anything. After a while it becomes that which we are all trying to escape. It’s what forces us to strive for new experiences. All this bookishness is making me one of several things. Firstly, It makes me sound like I’m from another era. Secondly it makes me restless because I’m not being active.

Although I feel intellectually I have more tools at my disposal, it really just seems like all I have is more scores of metaphor. Or should I say more stores of metric score. It’s all a poetic mess that comes from hundreds of years ago. Slowly reprogramming me into the ‘Earl of Whositwhatsit’. What does this new knowing give me in terms of communication with my community of peers?

Latin was the mode of communication for intellects all over the Elizabethan world. It established what one could regard as a community of some sorts, like the genius club or Mensa. This community of like-minded people could thus find comfort that their words and style were being accepted into a classroom where everyone has done all their readings, and even the most obscure passage has been memorized. But if I understand Professor Kuin correctly it wasn’t what we know as rote memory work that was of interest to the Elizabethans, it was the skill of language use that they admired.

Reciting from memory is like describing an event using words written on a wall. Those words say the detail of the happening but impart none of your own experience. You are simply a mouthpiece. By reading words off a wall you are imparting a certain kind of knowledge. Specifically you are saying ‘Hey, I can read, look at me!’. Or rather you’re saying ‘look I remember how to read and am demonstrating that skill thusly.’ Saying something from memory is of course the same thing “Hey look at me I can memorize! I’m a memorizing machine!’

In class I learned today that there was more going on than simple poems written in the metaphor of a bygone era. That reading ‘Astrophil and Stella’ in Elizabethan times was filled with a certain kind of technical knowledge that made the reading even more enjoyable than it’s A-B-A-B format suggests. 16th century communication was a meta-communication of skill.

What those 16th century smarty-pants-club members where doing was demonstrating the wielding of a skill that would combine with paper to impart to others of the club an experience that was unique to the composer and not the composition.

So what of this world of cell phones and computers? I think people are still interested in how one handles his words with others and of course it is all based on the language and metaphor of our modern day. But what is our skill? The knowledge of the 16th century was seemingly won through birthright, privilege and intense schooling. Where completion of your schooling then finally gave you passage into a community of your peers. It wasn’t enough to be rich you had to be rich and smart. Its like winning the lotto only to discover that you’ve also won 5years of hardcore Latin instruction in a country who’s language you don’t even know- ouch my brain!

What is it that makes us feel that we are in league with those around us? What tool have we all worked for that gives us the sense of passport into an established community? Is it something that I am taking for granted? Or is it something that people have forgotten to talk about. Maybe it’s the reading and writing that I learned in grade one. Now that everyone is literate how special is the mastery of that particular faculty? Maybe we honor that faculty every time we send an email or write in a journal…

Beyond that, I know that I am part of a community, and my friends and I share something unique, I know it and love it yet can’t describe it. I may be held in esteem among my peers for something, even though I may not recognize what that something is. A community exists nonetheless. We all have grown up having access to all the same tools of freedom, literacy and unrestrained expression. It is these tools that we wield to harness this world and demonstrate our skill at living. The adeptness with which I put that skill to use may over time come to be seen as my own composition.

Fitzroy Ford “Bloggers Unite!”