Learning Something New
Reorientation around the obvious which I had missed
I know several folks whose work is, for me, like that of Johnny Appleseed. They scatter ideas, images, or heuristics which, soon enough, reshape the intellectual and affective terrain through which they passed.
Some are living, some are dead. I won’t name them all but just a few: my dad (David Whalen), Fred Amrine, John Boyd, Greg Glassman, Ivan Illich, etc. These are all relatively recent. The older ones you will find in many curricula.
I read recently a short essay by the Columbia English professor Mark Van Doren. It’s not the first time he’s done it, but a particular comment he made in his essay about “The Possible Importance of Poetry,” gave new shape to my understanding of human relations.
Van Doren notes that the strength of Homer’s reputation as a poet among the admiring Greeks was not chiefly because of his linguistic chops. It was not because he was a master of the poetic forms.
“They had in [Homer] a lord of language, but they noticed this less than they noticed how well he understood the passions, the ideas, and the absurdities of men. They watched Achilles learning what honor means; they watched Odysseus coming home; and they saw the soul of Hector reflected in the love of those around him—his family, his comrades, and his friends among the gods.”
This sounds right to me regarding the relative poetic merits of, pardon the ham-fisted distinction, form and content. But it’s not what provoked the thunderclap of reorienting recognition.
Often, the conceptual reshaping I experience strikes me as remedial. I have finally learned to see something which, however long I failed to see it, is obvious. The moment of recognition, then the splashing out of its consequences over every adjacent thing, seems retrospectively inevitable.
What was it?
Van Doren noted in passing that we see Hector clearest—we see his very soul reflected—in the love those around him have for him. It’s why his end is so poignant. It’s why he is more attractive than Achilles, or Odysseus, or Ajax, or Paris. We see him most truly in the web of his relations with others.
The idea was this simple.
But if you can imagine not knowing it, then you might imagine how learning it would reshape the terrain on which you stand: your self-understanding; your reading of history; your sense of friends and family.
Look directly at the sun and it won’t be long before you see nothing. What will you learn about it before everything goes dark? Whereas, if you look around you at the things illuminated by the sun—at the earth or the moon reflecting the sun’s light; if you see the way plants react to the sun, then you begin to know what the sun is like.
I think each one of us is like this in our relations.
And probably, this recommends a certain indirection of approach when seeking to know or name something accurately. That is, after all, the way poetry proceeds with naming and knowing: through the indirection of metaphor; the resistance to immediate apprehension; the displacement of parallelism; and the just-likeness of narrative.