Lyric Culture: Ontological Design for Back Loop Realities (pt 2)

Introduction to 2024 Course (Jan- July)

Extinction

This beginning of a new paragraph made its way into the previous post where it didn’t belong. I pick up the story here:

[In a recent episode with Nate Hagens, Peter Brannen used the surprising phrase “kill mechanisms intrinsic to the earth’s natural systems.” In his book, The Ends of the World: Volcanic Apocalypses, Lethal Oceans, and Our Quest to Understand Earth's Past Mass Extinctions, Brannen…. ]

I am reading about the ends (plural) of the world. Peter Brannen’s book is about how the world ended not once, not twice, but 5 times before. And here we are, situated in another ending. The five ends:

450 MYA (Million Years Ago) End of the Ordovician: 86% of species lost
425 MYA End of the Devonian : 75% of species lost
250 MYA End of the Permian: 96% of species lost
200 MYA End of the Triassic: 80% of species lost
60 MYA End of Cretacous: 76% species lost

We are talking about periods so devastating that almost nothing of our culture would survive the evolutionary record. Only the rocks and the sediments, and a few fossils, would be left behind to tell a tale. Brennan begins with a quote from Henry Beetle Hough:

Something more than death has happened. … We are looking upon the uttermost finality which can be written, glimpsing the darkness which will not know another ray of light. We are in touch with the reality of extinction.

and a story of walking along the banks of the Hudson with Paul Olsen, a paleontologist, looking at the New York City skyline and wondering aloud if anything of New York City would be preserved for for future geologists to discover:

“You might hace a layer of stuff,” he said dismissively, “but it’s not a sedimentary basin, so eventually it would erode away to nothing. You’d have bits that would make it out into the ocean and would be buried and might show up— some bottle caps, maybe. There would be some pretty heavy-duty isotopic signals. But the subway system wouldn’t fossilize or anything. It all would erode away failry quickly.”

Looking at my beer bottle cap on the floor of the tack room down in the barn, I saw it differently. Not a message in the bottle, I thought. A message from the bottle. Would some creature marvel at how the edges are flared and collect them as some already do now?

Vintage Bottle Caps for Sale on Ebay

Could they imagine our world from this flimsy evidence alone, or perhaps, someone might get lucky, like this man from Pompey, and “live” to tell more of our story:

Oh.. and the dog.

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The salient point in the book is that the Earth is agentic. It has causal powers over everyone and every thing — it creates and destroys. That phrase “kill mechanisms intrinsic to the earth’s natural systems” — eerily resonates within me. “

The forces of the earth are metamorphic.

How to face metamorphosis without falling into a crisis mentality, requires us to shift our view:

Time, Change and Causality - Notes toward a metamorphosis of mind pt 7 - Metamorphosis & a Coda

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Brennan completes the story by evoking the geologists’ sense of very deep time:

It is from this disorienting perspective that geologists operate to them, millions of years run together, seas divide continents, then drain away, and great mountain ranges erode to sand in moments. It’s an outlook that’s necessary to cultivate if one wants to get a handle on the staggering depths of geological time, which recedes behind us hundreds of millions of years and stretches out before us to infinity. If Olsen’s attitude seems dispassionate in the extreme, it’s a symptom of a lifetime’s immersion in Earth’s history, which is both vast beyond comprehension and, in some exceedingly rare moments, tragic beyond words.

When we enter deep time, we experience everything as fleeting, like soap bubbles. There is a short moment in time before the soap becomes a bubble, and there is a short moment when the soap is a bubble, and there is the next moment in time when the soap is no longer a bubble. My phrase for this experience is that the soap bubble is “there and not there at the same time.” Lately, I’ve begun to see animals, people and mountains and rivers the same way: sensing how they are there and not there at the same time.

Here today,
Gone tomorrow
It’s all a vanishing act.

Recently my horse, Gypsy Wings, died suddenly. She was perfectly normal at 2pm, and 9 hours later she was dead. Now I look at my other horses more perfectly, seeing that they too are here and not here at the same time. The eternal on-goingness of reality are experienced by us mortal beings as passages. Passages in time, passages through time. People of my age have traversed through three loops of the panarchy cycle. An individual traces out the very same phases in their lifetime that the epochal earth traverses in deep time. But now the entire world, the entire planet is encountering back-loop dynamics. And so, we are beginning to re-think reality. We are beginning to become Lyric.

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Becoming Lyric

Listening to music, we might ask “where is the meaning?” Is it in any particular note, or in the rhythm, or in the relations between notes, or is it somehow in the whole piece, or maybe its in the actualy passing, the passage that we experience? Lyric is attending to the reality as passing through like music. Each note is singular, every note and timing is irreducible, but the meaning is in the passing through of them. They pass through time, the music passes through us. “Lyric thought means the way music does, writes Jan Zwickey. “It is thought whose structure is resonant in which each aspect is turned by the whole.”

Listen to these words as they pass. As text, they sit lifelessly on the screen. But…

as you pass the words through your mind, you give them life.

Becoming Lyric- In the Shadows of the Axial Age

In Vol 2 of this 3-vol cannon on Logological Investigations: The Beginnings of European Theorizing: Reflexivity in the Archaic Age, Barry Sandywell describes how the lyric form originated from a critical reflection against “the Homeric art of the roal bards and the dominant choral traditions of Archaic Greece.” The Homeric, Sandywell will argue, carries within it the seeds of the Greek, Socrative culture and its logos-centered (logological) reflexivity which comes to dominate European thought and spreads over the globe. The grammar of logological reflexivity is what I previously called thinking-with thoughts. Lyric culture has to come to terms with this, and cultivate a new vernacular. I wrote:

“Coming to terms with” TWT (thinking with thoughts in our heads) means

» Rejecting the notion that the structure of reality is something like the structure of TWT
» Rejecting the idea that truths can be summoned by TWT
» Rejecting the notion that contemplative praxis entails TWT
» Rejecting the notion that communicative praxis is fundamentally something like TWT
» Rejecting the idea that the self is fundamentally constituted by TWT

It means coming to grips with the fact that

Reality is neither undiscoverable nor discoverable by the intellect alone, but by the whole embodied being, senses, feeling, intellect, and imagination. ~ Ian McGilchrist

and that thinking with thoughts in our heads, strips reality of its concrete universalism, i.e. its sacredness, by replacing it with vicious abstraction

Abstraction, functioning in this way, becomes a means for arrest far more than a means of advance in thought. It mutilates things; it creates difficulties and finds impossibilities; and more than half the trouble that metaphysicians and logicians give themselves over the paradoxes and dialectic puzzles of the universe may, I ma convinced, be traced to this relatively simple source. The viciously privative employment of abstract characters and class names is, I am persuaded, one of the great original sins of the rationalistic mind. ~ William James

And while abstraction can help us see the structure of some truths in the same way that radiology can help us photograph the structure of the bones, using abstractions to get at ‘the Ulimtate Truth’ is like pulling the bones out of a body so that the skeleton can dance.

Sandywell writes: The lyric genre “creates the possibility of a non-Homeric conception of the nature of reality— what we might call an ontology of the particular. He quotes from Theodore Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment:

The lyric work hopes to attain universality through unrestrained individuation.

“The celebration of the concrete particularity of experience,” Sandywell writes, “suggests something like a different sensibility or ‘world-view.' It is a world-view constructed of “sensuous images rooted in a recognizable world of everyday objects and experiences;” “displaying a resolutely personal response to the natural world— an experience liberated from the limited patterns of earlier mythical symbols and the formular design of Homeric verse.”

With the discovery of the syntax of personal expression we see the emergence of the possibility of literary mutation: the legacy of poetic genres is not eternal; they can be modified and changed, under the impress of personal experience. Hesiod’s … [lyric] vision thus outlines a sense of nature that is still open for exploration and poetic naming. For lyric expression as a form of signification, truth lies in the detail and the particular. Lyric is the act that names the salt of our tear, the texture of skin, the unconsolable pain of loss. The simple discovery made by these poems is that the ‘naming of the world’ has not been exhausted by the work of mythos. Other acts of signification, other genres of speech, are possible.

Other points Sandywell makes about the origins and potential of lyric culture in-bewteen the archaic and Socratic ages:

• [Lyric culture] marks the appearance not only of a distinctive individual voice, but of the idea that the universe unfolds in a play of different ‘perspectives’— that the worlds of human experience are manifold in form and heterogenous in their modes of manifestation.

• The older generic constellations of myth and epic narrative are being eclipsed by the ‘desiccating’ light of new poetic principles and practices.

• The lyric voice rises like the Pheonix from the eclipsed body of the collective folk-tale and rigidly structured martial epic.

• Lyric’s power lies in negating all ideologies, with the exception of the ideology of authentic selfhood.

• The choral lyric is an explicitly collective genre… the choral poet ‘composed for others to sing, and these represented not an individual but a society.’

• The subject— whether composer or reader — does not use the lyric form for expressive purposes; rather lyric form creates new kinds of subjectivity.

In the following 50 pages, Sandywell surveys the different lyrical fragments and their poets through a century of Greek history, mostly pock-marked by strife and war. Lyric culture, Sandy concludes, was a “child of its time; which had all but disappeared by the time of the Persian Wars, with “the last and most powerful inheritor of the tradition of lyrical reflexivity … [being] the Theban poet, Pindar (518-438 BC).”

Lyric reflexivity was an experiment which pushed back against the conceptual assault of the Homeric culture whose virtues were the mimetic replication of universal and eternal values. Against this assault, the lyric voice sang of an adventure in personalized self-reflexivity, which served as a radical intervention against the performative canons of early Greek culture.

Of course we cannot directly trace ourselves from there to here. In the modern era, I definitely see lyric culture in Rilke and Goethe, and today, in the transformative writings of Jan Zwickey, Barry Lopez, Christopher Alexander, and others. A lyrical vernacular has persisted through the ages. It is to these new voices that we will turn in subsequent posts.