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.

Posts on Poetry Pt. 1: Speak With Conviction.

I'm going to start a series of a few posts on the virtues of a poet. Specifically, if one wishes to write poetry, though I am no great poet myself, I am going to give a few pointers I have learned from listening to great poets, from mystical poets like Bernard to troubadour poetry to the sonnets of Shakespeare to modern slam poetry I myself have had the mixed experience of hearing. Why am I doing this, singularly unqualified as I am in actual poetry writing? Because the pointers of a poet to a poet are pointers of technique and experience; the pointers of an audience to a poet are pointers of the interconnection of persons that comes from having someone bear the innermost thoughts of their soul to a willing audience, and therefore pointers which are much more obvious, but still deserve great study for any would-be poet. These pointers will not be such as “write in rhyme”, or other assorted tips given by assorted people all of whom have views on technique. A Shakespeare is not the same as a Joyce, nor a Chesterton a Ginsberg, nor even an Eliot a Dante, except in an influential sense. I will not profess on who is better or worse; that is for critics, and I am the sort of critic who speaks to the poet as he writes and not the one who compares apples and oranges as fruit after they have fallen from the tree and been consumed.

And although I had told someone that I was thinking of writing on love, that comes after a few more immediate pointers, which have consequences in technique but are not technique itself. I'm going to start with that basic condition of public speaking and testimony, conviction and its needed root. I think it would be fun, in these posts, to show some examples in Spoken Word poetry that I think exemplify particular aspects, and I can think of none better to start with than Taylor Mali's “Totally like whatever, you know?”, also known on the Internet as “Speak With Conviction.”

Taylor Mali is an English teacher who has become very popular on the Spoken Word circuit. He is very versatile, but I think he is never more entertaining (though he is always entertaining) than when he is speaking on education, teaching, and language.

What is it to speak with conviction? To use Mali's working definition, it is to “say what you believe in a manner that bespeaks the determination with which you believe it.” To use the Thomistic way, it is to employ a linguistic form, definite, determinate language, that fits the matter, the interior belief of the speaker. In order to understand how vital this is to any poet, it is important to understand what one does in expressing something.

When one speaks a sentence as simple as “I think it is going to rain today”, one is not materially expressing a whole lot when the sentence is delivered in a monotone. Inflection permeates communication, though, and gives new expressiveness to a formerly very dull sentence. “I think it is going to rain today” implies a disagreement with another, or an emphasis on one's own authority. “I think it is going to rain today” implies an uncertainty, or an emphasis on the act of thought, in contradistinction to a meteorological knowledge; or if inflected in a testy manner, implies a somewhat tetchy correction of the preacher of a coming blue sky in the daytime. “I think it is going to rain today” implies a definition of the subject of the act of raining, like that particular cloud over there, that one, over there that I am pointing at as we lie back in the grass. “I think it is going to rain today”, implying an unexpected torrent on the horizon that has just suddenly become far more likely. “I think it is going to rain today”, implying that it is not yet, but bring your umbrella to the bluegrass concert anyways. “I think it is going to rain today” doesn't mean much on the face of it, but shows something about inflecting prepositions, that the inflection is led back into the “going” and ends up much the same in meaning; or perhaps one is making a linguistic-philosophical correction, that it is not “going rain” today, whatever that would mean. Finally, inflecting “rain” indicates that it will rain and not shine.

Why this extended, dull, English teacher explanation? The sentence I chose was terribly mundane for a reason. Something which seems very limited in meaning suddenly takes on no less than ten different meanings, simply based on a slight change in sound. Certainly the inflection is not built into English, as it is in Ancient Greek or Chinese, but it is tremendously potent when we apply it to our speech. Accordingly, people emphasize the spoken word, actual or imagined, as the emotional and even intellectual principle of interpretation of any work of writing. Even a line as simple and materially elegant as “Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?” is absolutely pregnant with meaning when a careful use of emphasis is applied in this fashion; thus one sees as many possible expressive significances in a single line as there are words to inflect and poets to inflect them. And lest one thing be assumed for every possible kind of inflection, let us not forget that inflection admits of degree and volume. That line from the sonnet takes on a very strange character when one shouts it angrily as a hastily retreating former lover, sarcastically and angrily, than when it is read softly and gently in a country field. Perhaps the former interpretation would be a violence to the sonnet, but none will deny that through the meaning of the sonnet that linguistic act has been given a particularly potent and bitter meaning when thus inflected.

This is very general. When applied to poetry and public speaking, it becomes very specifically relevant. Conviction bespeaks determination. Determination bespeaks sincerity. Sincerity bespeaks a penetrating, interested mind, capable of yielding something about reality which none have seen in quite the same way. When one lacks conviction, one lacks the ability to convey even the most basic interest of what one is saying; a poet who lacks conviction is a poet everyone has heard before, in their own mind, when they confront that awkwardness that is relationships, when they confront their own terrified fear of what they do not know and the fact that they do not know it; and if one wished to hear a poet without conviction, they could go to their average English department and listen to the bored attempts to write poetry just to get a grade. Poetry without conviction is forced, poetry for the sake of that for which poetry was not made to be. Poetry without conviction is a poet stopping in the composition of a poem, not knowing what to say, and instead of stating their own conviction of their own unknowing, which is itself a sort of honesty, trying to gloss over this real thing with a fake persona, a disingenuous attempt to convey strong knowing where there is none. Poetry without conviction is no poetry, no making, no poesia at all.

And what if I am wrong? Perhaps, the reader might think, they should be wary of my stating with such conviction the need for conviction itself. If not for the conviction of my diction, I respond, with conviction, the reader cannot ask that question at all. And if poetry cannot leave you with a real answer, an answer which arises from the honesty that produces conviction, it is better than nothing (and sometimes better than an answer!) that it leave the reader with a question. This article is, of course, not poetry. But I deliberately and decisively (that is to say, with conviction) write with poetic elements, because it illustrates my point in a way that dry prose cannot hope to achieve. And I do think the tradition of conviction is the answer to provide to the question “how ought I to speak poetically”, because even that poetry that writes seemingly in a non-convicted manner can only be fruitful as poetry when it is founded upon an even deeper conviction that it has something real to say, that this pouring-forth of the tormented or loving or angered or hopeful soul is not just a random mass of pointless spontaneity.

But let us say that the one asking about poetry is really and genuinely convinced (and being convinced is the foundation of conviction) that one has nothing of interest to anyone to say? The immediate answer to that is that there is conviction even in that statement, which when evinced in poetry can be a statement about its cause. The more distant answer is that in fact everyone has something to say, unless their mind is a blank slate and their life so distant from any sort of real contact with reality that they literally have nothing which breeds a most passionate response to that reality. And as even a child can pronounce that it is not right to take their toy away, or that they really do deserve to go to Disneyland, to deny that human beings always feel strongly about something requires some particularly extraordinary change in everything that motivates them. The child who wants that toy, and insists upon their deserving to have it in some way, has a very specific opinion on the justice of a situation; when one reflects upon this, to say one deserves anything becomes a reflection on justice in general (because no case of deserving, no matter how seemingly insignificant, says nothing at all about justice.) We grown-ups have, we fancy, much greater concerns about justice, although insisting that one has some injury dealt to them by the illegality of, for example, marijuana seems in some cases rather similar to the child with a bottle having it taken from them. For the most part, we do have greater concerns, the stuff of popular music. Why does she leave me? Why do bad things happen to good people? Why didn't I go to class? (Because I got high. This is seen as a self inflicted wound in the titular song, and the justice of its consequences does not escape such a one as Afroman.)

If one can make song of these things, one can make poetry. After all, spoken poetry is a species of song, having rhythm as its basis, and occasionally melody. The fact is that every human, as a willing being having human desires, priorities, dreams and cares, is a born poet in matter; the real desire in the poet seeking to write is for the form. And the first “form” of form in poetry is conviction.

Posted today on Facebook: Uniformity, Pluriformity, and Virtual Presence

There is a question predominant in the understanding of modern and Aristotelian science, the question of the current understanding of the character and role of substantial form.  While I myself am convinced of its unity against the pluriformists, and of its utility even to modern science, I am, like many others, dissatisfied with some of the lingering dark places left unexplored in general by the modern attempts to adapt the ancient to the modern, and would like to see some discussion by those who are interested in exploring these wonderful realities.  Principally, I am concerned with the need for a greater understanding of "virtual presence" and participation in the application of substantial form to modern science.

The World Outside of Yonkers: Introducing Formal Cause

I have recently been studying the relation of substantial form to modern science in both my Philosophy of Nature and Divine Action classes.  To this end, I recently read Dr. Goyette's "Substantial Form and the Recovery of an Aristotelian Natural Science" (http://www.thomist.org/jour/2002/October/2002%20Oct%20A%20Goyette%20web.htm) and his following article, "St. Thomas on Substantial Unity against the Pluriformists" (http://www2.nd.edu/Departments/Maritain/ti01/goyette.htm).  While Dr. Goyette's arguments were all very well, and even convincing, they have also left a number of people dissatisfied with the state in which the field has been left.  To explain why this is, it is necessary to summarize his arguments a bit, with attention to some particular terminological uses.

Dr. Goyette begins (in "Substantial Form and the Recovery of an Aristotelian Natural Science") by laying out the Thomistic understanding of substantial form with great clarity, and explaining the nature of the difference between accidental and substantial form.  Accidental form is a sort of character of the thing as composed and ordered, but the substantial form is that principle by which the parts are, let alone by which they are ordered.  From the substantial form, we say that the thing is one organism per se; from the accidental form, we say that the thing is one per accidens, as a house is one thing and yet nothing more than the composition and order of the materials.  He then proceeds to defend the concept of substantial form against three modern "scientific" objections:

Objection 1: DNA.  If we are composed of little material-efficient causes which, by their interaction and the information contained within them, construct us into a living being, isn't the doctrine of a metaphysically prior principle unnecessary?  Dr. Goyette argues otherwise, claiming that the information is, first, not reducible to the material (as informative words cannot be reduced to a composition of uninformative sound waves,) and second, left uninterpreted in a materially reductive hypothesis, because words do not interpret themselves, and likewise DNA requires a prior principle of interpretation of a kind different than a material bearer of information.  Moreover, although DNA is potentially expressive in each gene, only some come to be expressed; as a lung, or a heart, or suchlike, even though the same DNA is present in every cell.  Something prior, a principle of order, is needed to determine how the DNA comes to be expressed.

Objection 2: Organ transplants.  We can now keep an organ alive outside the body; that is, outside the participation the organ has in the substantial form of a living human being.  Before this was possible, it is often claimed, this was thought impossible under the doctrine of substantial form; myself, I am inclined to think it was not explored at all, not being a current concern.  That being said, when it came to be known to be possible, substantial form seemed a less likely explanation.  Goyette responds that in fact, since the organ needs to bekept alive, there might be a way in which even organ transplants testify to the understanding of substantial form.  Inside the body, the organ does not require artificial life support, but is sustained in being by being part of a living organism.  Outside, it requires an imitation of the natural system in which the organ is sustained internally in order to maintain it.  Clearly there is some state in which one is aiming to maintain the organ.  Left to itself, the organ quickly decays past this state, just as the transplant, put within a human body, quickly adapts itself into the whole if accepted.  Goyette posits that there are intermediate states between "human" or "living" organs and "dead" organs, such that the organ is a human organ in potency in the state wherein the transplanting agent preserves it.  This state is characterized by the organ being properly disposed to accept the participation in the higher substantial form of a living being.

Objection 3: Formal vs. Mechanical Causality.  If there is already a mechanical explanation, why does there need to be a formal one?  Don't we already have an explanation for how it works?  Dr. Goyette capably answers this by explaining that nature acts in a similar way to art.  If, seeing an artifact, we are compelled to consider the role of the artist in its composition, order and identity as an artifact, we must also understand that complex organisms do not come to be purely by chance.  If something comes to be always or for the most part thus (as in reproduction), and not by some direct artistry on the part of an artist, but by nature, on that account one must posit an explanation in the thing itself whereby the natural organism comes to be thus.  Material configuration cannot explain itself; it answers the how (according to what the thing does) but not the why (the question of how the material became thus "configured.")  Thus we posit the substantial form.

These objections are neat, tidy, and well-refuted, but the difficulty in any refutation is that that by which one refutes it is often itself in need of clarification.  What is substantial form?  Some others, the pluriformists, posited it to be the form of the substance in a hierarchy of governed forms.  Thus, each part has its own substantial form, and each part is changed by being under some higher part which has a more dominant form.  This is not the understanding Goyette expresses, as he makes clear in a second paper on the Unity of Substantial Form.  The second part of the introduction to my question requires a similar explanation of this paper.

Put on Your Sunday Clothes: Against Substantial Form as an Addition Producing Order

The pluriformists, looking at the same things as Dr. Goyette, conclude that there is in fact a multiplicity of forms in the being; the ruler form being the chief form by which we name the whole, "man", and which subordinates the forms of the other things (so that the heart, the lungs, etc all have special substantial forms by which they are what we call them, but are also the heart, lungs, etc of a man) into the divisible totality of the organism.  Goyette provides several objections to this:

Objection A: Being vs. Being Ordered.  The pluriformists claim that a single body can be informed by multiple substantial forms: thus, water is water by the substantial form of water, but part of blood by being ruled by the substantial form of blood.  Yet as Goyette notes, the substantial form of water is that by which the water is, simply, as well as that by which it is water.  To add another substantial form does not give the water being, but this is precisely what a substantial form does.  Thus, Goyette claims, it were better to call it an accidental form, so that water could come to be blood or cease to be blood and still remain water.  But the pluriformists, he claims, disagree on the basis that the form of blood directs and orders the water to a further end (which is, indeed, an act of substantial form).  This does not answer the problem of the water alreadybeing prior to the blood-form ordering it.  What is attributed to the blood-form is rather the character of an efficient or moving cause, by which something already having being comes to be changed to some ordered state accidentally.  Thus, the soul (being even more distant from the being of the parts) is not the formal cause but the ultimate efficient mover of the human being, intermediated from the parts by several degrees of lesser moved movers, the ultimate form of "substance" being that by which any part (and thus the whole) has being.  Thus, that by which "such-and-such" a thing is simply becomes not the form of "such-and-such" a thing (as Aristotle postulated rather sensibly, that by which a man is a man is the substantial form of "man") but the form of "thingness most basic", either matter itself considered as a thing (bad) or matter to which the most elemental form (whatever that means) is added; the form, I suppose, of "substance" said exclusively.

The soul thus has only the character of an efficient cause or mover.  Yet when the form of man departs, as Goyette notes, the parts begin to corrupt and decay and the thing ceases to be a man; so in the first place, the form of man seems to be prior in being to the form of the parts, not posterior.  The problem of organ transplant does not really present a problem according to the reasoning in Objection 2 above; the form of the organ may be understood as transitional.  The most difficult objection to address, really, and the cause of this note, is the question of how every part of the being has its form from the whole.  After all, it's easy enough to see it from the organs, but our bodies are 70 percent or so composed of water, which is water outside as well as in (at least in some manner.)  Goyette admits this, and claims something remarkable from the writings of St. Thomas, namely that the higher form ("man", in the example) contains "virtually" all the perfections of the lower forms that constitute his parts taken separately, and accordingly these things keep their character without requiring unique substantial forms.  As far as this goes, it saves the appearances; but pluriformism still seems possible, if not hylomorphic, so that Goyette educes three further objections to pluriformism as it seems to oppose the empirical evidence from which it was prompted.

Objection B:  Sensing Our Own Unity.  We sense that we, body and soul, are one thing, intrinsically and empirically.  It is difficult to empirically posit a living body distinct from the soul, or vice versa.  Yet if we are in fact an incredibly multiple series of movers, we are not one thing, even in species, but a composition of many things different in both species and number, unified only by a tenuous ruling form, governing through many ministers.  In this way, that by which we are human is the least of all, according to being that by which we leastare, while at the same time that by which all the parts are somehow ordered to what is best; moreover, form being recast as a mover requires us to educe some other principle of being simply in the thing, which posits a dualism.

Objection C:  Immaterial Being and Immortality of Form.  If our form is thus given its own being as a mover, it must have being distinct from what is moved (because, as Aristotle proves, there can be no self-mover; moreover, if there was, one must deny the First Way of St. Thomas, which requires great trepidation indeed!)  Yet if the form exists distinctly as mover of the whole, it must be distinct from the matter moved, and thus immaterially existing, and thus immortal, as matter is the principle of corruption of the hylomorphic subject.  Thus, the human being comes to be composed of a magnificent multiplicity of immortal forms, and not one immortal soul.

Objection D:  Nature Follows Intrinsicality of Form.  If our form is recast as an extrinsic mover, there is no nature of the thing itself, but only the nature of substance to which nothing is added, or some substantial recharacterization of prime matter, which is then sculpted into the character of this thing by a multiplicity of efficient causes acting in hierarchy; "all things are full of gods."  But we believe and empirically experience the nature of the thing to be intrinsic to the thing, so that this ought to give us pause. 

Now, each of these convince me well enough.  This is not the matter of the question, as such, but an introduction.  So here's my question:

What the heck is virtual presence of lower forms?!

Define Dancing: introit quaestio

Some time back, in TAC's Sophomore Lab program, whilst studying atomic theory and the philosophical foundations thereof, we students were given an article by Dr. Christopher Decaen entitled Elemental Virtual Presence in St. Thomas.  (http://www.thomist.org/jour/2000/April/2000%20Apr%20A%20Decaen.htm)  This article made some inroads into discussing the character of the virtual presence of elements in the composition thereof, and I think it will prove helpful in seeking an answer to the mysterious character of the participation virtually of the lower forms in the substantial form of the organism.  Here, I suppose, I'll give my thoughts on the matter, but I must warn you, dear readers, that the article is in some respects almost as confusing to me as Mr. Sean Collins' force paper (which, intriguingly enough, may rear its head in this very discussion, if the enormous importance of virtual presence is as important as I think it is); and like the force paper, this is not for its being badly written (it is written as well as one might hope such a thing to be written) but for the subject itself being so far from ready understanding.  A sign of this is the headache it regularly gives me when I try and define the "powers" of an element in composition, the difficulty of the element not being regarded as substantially actually present when the very bonding of "this substance" to "that substance" in a structural order produced "this other substance", and so forth.  But here's my hazarding of a guess on how the elemental virtuality gives us an understanding of virtual presence of the lower forms.

Decaen argues that since the distinction between potency and act is indeed exhaustive for St. Thomas, and the elements are not in act, they must be, at root, in a kind of potential existence.  Yet this is not pure potentiality, because prime matter has potentiality to every form, not just that of the elements said to be virtually present.  It is rather (on the side of potency) the potential presence of the substantial forms of the elements.  But there is also an actuality present, the presence of the accidents (namely, "anything that is not the primary substance or its substantial form"), and not just as they are in the elements (because if so the new element would be both hot and cold at the same time, or suchlike in theory) but as they reach a mean according to their proportion in the mixture.

This bears a striking similarity to our picture of the human person.  Within the human, there are various organs, the form of which we take to be the substantial form of the whole human.  Yet they clearly have their own shape and function, which led the pluriformists to propose the seemingly obvious idea that they have their own substantial forms, and which led Thomas to refute them with virtual presence.  Likewise, we now look at the individual water molecule and discover, in an electrical dance, the component elements, seemingly existing as a system bonded in its parts.  We are thus expected to say, just as Thomas said of the form of "man" and the presence of the lower forms of his organs, that hydrogen and oxygen have a virtual presence in water, while nevertheless having only potential presence of the substantial form.  Looking at them, though, we feel a certain sympathy for the pluriformists, because, well, look at it!  It's hydrogen, and oxygen, isn't it?  Totality in the organism seems mystical when you have the guts laid out upon the table.

The situation only gets odder as one moves down to quarks, as it happens.  I do not feel qualified to undertake that particular investigation (...yet) but I imagine it would follow in a similar way, quarks being more elemental than hydrogen and oxygen.  What happens when one moves up, though?  The elements become part of bodies, lower forms virtually present in a larger combination with various emergent qualities and such.  These in turn become part of a vegetative animal, and so on.  This is laid out explicitly in the Summa Contra Gentiles, III, 22:

As we said, since any moved thing, inasmuch as it is moved, tends to the divine likeness so that it may be perfected in itself, and since a thing is perfect in so far as it is actualized, the intention of everything existing in potency must be to tend through motion toward actuality. And so, the more posterior and more perfect an act is, the more fundamentally is the inclination of matter directed toward it. Hence. in regard to the last and most perfect act that matter can attain, the inclination of matter whereby it desires form must be inclined as toward the ultimate end of generation. Now, among the acts pertaining to forms, certain gradations are found. Thus, prime matter is in potency, first of all, to the form of an element. When it is existing under the form of an element it is in potency to the form of a mixed body; that is why the elements are matter for the mixed body. Considered under the form of a mixed body, it is in potency to a vegetative soul, for this sort of soul is the act of a body. In turn, the vegetative soul is in potency to a sensitive soul, and a sensitive one to an intellectual one. This the process of generation shows: at the start of generation there is the embryo living with plant life, later with animal life, and finally with human life. After this last type of form, no later and more noble form is found in the order of generable and corruptible things. Therefore, the ultimate end of the whole process of generation is the human soul, and matter tends toward it as toward an ultimate form. So, elements exist for the sake of mixed bodies; these latter exist for the sake of living bodies, among which plants exist for animals, and animals for men. Therefore, man is the end of the whole order of generation.

Wondrous as this map is, it has still more wondrous implications when one considers the subject; virtual presence becomes fundamental to the understanding of the entire order of creation.  To clarify:

The lower elements are virtually present in the mixed bodies.

The mixed bodies are virtually present in the animals having lower souls.

The lower souls are virtually present in the souls of the higher animals.

Man is the highest animal.

Simply put, virtual presence is fundamental, not just to the understanding of the elements, but of the participation of all created reality in Providence; to the ultimate end of each sort of living thing as that sort of living thing up to man; and who knows what theological significance it has.  I can only wonder at what role it has in the Beatific Vision, when man enters into the unio caritatis with the very highest order of being, God Himself, the Wisdom who laid the foundations of the universe in measure, and number, and weight.  I think it pretty important to understand, from a philosophical and theological point of view; but it is also the place of great contention, as Dr. Decaen stated in his paper, and a better understanding of the relation of virtual presence and empirical science is not just useful, but crucial to understanding both nature and divine action.

Any thoughts on virtual presence or what I've written here?  There could be a paper in this.