Posts on Poetry Pt. 2: Brutal Honesty

In my last post, I spoke on the formal and basic attribute of poetry that is conviction. In speaking about it, I mentioned honesty a couple of times, and with a bit of difficulty (as we all have difficulty in being perfectly honest, even about honesty) I feel I ought to speak about it as the material side of things. One does not have a conveyance without something conveyed, nor an expression without something expressed; and if one wants their expression to reach impression, if they want their poetry to be impressive, as all good poetry fundamentally is, one needs to have something worth conveying. But this is the real first step behind seeking the form to fit the matter, namely, seeking the knowledge of the matter itself.

Everybody's got something to say, I said in the last post. This is well and good, but telling someone that somewhere inside them is an interesting person waiting to jump out and wail at the world is cliched if one does not at the same time tell them that there is perhaps no more difficult thing in the history of poetic composition than the eduction of that inner voice. To give an idea of how difficult a thing it is, I am again going to present you, my dear reader, with the brutal honesty of a man wounded in the expression of Taylor Mali, because the man is a most excellent poet and knows precisely how to examine himself in front of a crowd in such a way that the crowd is brought into that examination. I will not give any context; the poem, I think, is enough.

And as I think of this it occurs to me to provide a second example from his body of work on the same subject, or as it were subjects, or as it were now, part of a subject, bruised and battered.

As you can no doubt see, poetry can be very brutal. In fact, it should be, at least at times. The child speaking with conviction about his toy is in no way as expressive as Mali's anguished lament in sheer content, though very much more so in volume. One may screen out the child's wailing lament, but the silent gravity of Mali's self-baring pierces, perhaps as many times as we watch it, into our very souls, as we for just an instant are led into the way he sees himself and the one who borrowed his soul, only to return it, unexpectedly and expectedly, in another condition. What gives his poetry this bitter power? The answer is that he is brutally, brutally honest.

But what is honesty? We must certainly have some concept of it, since every poetry teacher ever has informed their class that honesty is not just the best but the only policy when it comes to poetry. Poetry of the most fiery sort requires first that the poets drag themselves over the coals of self-examination, and some of their substance is going to suffer in the act. This dragging-over-the-coals, this act of self-examination whereby one confronts and determines oneself is honesty; but it is more primary than this, it is more than an act. Honesty is a virtue, a habit whereby one is in the habit of expressing the truth and confronting it, without compromise, even when one feels that the part of oneself that confronts may be, so to speak, broken in the battle. Thus, a Lear goes insane when confronted with the real character of the situation of his ungrateful daughters, Regan and Goneril:

You think I'll weep
No, I'll not weep:
I have full cause of weeping; but this heart
Shall break into a hundred thousand flaws,
Or ere I'll weep. O fool, I shall go mad!

Lear's madness is rational because its cause, his honesty, is rational, and because its effect, his seeming despair at the rational order of the universe, is the normal result (in the Greek world, anyway) of confronting the tragic order of things. Orestes must be chased by the Furies. Oedipus must suffer until Colonus. And yet in doing this, in confronting that order, a remarkable thing occurs. Mortality is given new meaning. Achilles must become mad with rage in confronting his own mortality and that of Patroclus, dragging Hector around Troy seven times by chariot mercilessly; but this sets the stage for the meeting with Priam, the character of paternity and justice himself to Troy, who nevertheless will kiss the feet of Achilles, murderer of his son, in supplication. And in Achilles' greater story, though to all the world Hector looks to have failed his city, his family and himself, Hector, breaker of horses, has tamed swift-footed Achilles. He has succeeded. Homer writes this and it becomes the original poem of all Greek and ultimately Western civilization. When Gilgamesh stopped being quoted, the Iliad still continued. The Iliad was an honest look at mortality itself, a look which begins in fear and despair but ends in the realization that whatever it is that ends our lives is a gift, not a withholding; the very gods envy us for mortality.

If one wishes to see how we see this in everyday life, and more specifically in semi-popular art, one could do worse than look at Mr. Blue Sky by Electric Light Orchestra: “Mr. Blue, you'll get it right, / but soon comes Mr. Night, / creeping over, now his hand is on your shoulder, / never mind, I remember you this...I remember you this way!” Sleep is an analogy to death. “Do not go gently into that good night, / Rage, rage against the dying of the light” would be the way Dylan Thomas or immature Achilles would look at it, and pensive Hamlet thinks to himself “but in that sleep of death what dreams may come / must give us pause.” Honesty dictates that we remove our presuppositions based on deception of ourselves, and is tied to conviction in the way Mali speaks in his poem on conviction: “Contrary to the wisdom of the bumper sticker, it is not enough to 'question authority.' You have to speak with it, too.” Honesty is, in other words, the proper submission of one's belief to the authority of truth and her ministers.

As seems to be the style, the reader may object: “What about certainty? Isn't certainty the highest authority? Wouldn't honesty just be tied to 'thinking for ourselves'?” I would say that that was the case, if we ourselves were the only authority we could trust. And indeed, we do get something out of trusting ourselves. Mostly, we get what we had before we started our self-examination, varying degrees of truth and falsity. We do not derive, trusting only ourselves, anything new about ourselves, since what you finish with is that with which you start. If anything, one is in danger of losing something, since we are prone to second-guess what we believe ad infinitum out of the sometimes rational but usually irrational fear of being wrong. And when do we get a rational indication that we are wrong? Precisely when we open ourselves to the rational authority of something outside that which accepts authority. In other words, true honesty comes from due trust in what is, at least in part, not the one trusting, such that we may rightly redetermine ourselves to the truth. And this authority, this owed nature of trust, comes about precisely from union with the truth. In other words, to be honest with oneself is to seek the truth about oneself through her ministers.

Now, this almost seems like a homily. And in point of fact, according to most speakers on spiritual discipline, it is the result of the first step, since honesty is developed by discipline, something which most would-be poets could use. Poetry is in many respects an attempt to convey reality as experienced, and reality is experienced more deeply in honesty than in deception. Indeed, one can ask whether a life of being deceived is any life at all. As Socrates said, the unexamined life is not worth living, and to allow oneself to deceive oneself, I should think, is even worse. Poetry itself is an attempt to represent the life of a human being to another, both in relation to itself and in relation to other things. If one wishes to know oneself, such that one may know other things, one must acquire the virtue of honesty.