About these Two Ghazals, Lane comments, “It proceeds by couplets not necessarily linked together by rational thinking.” This is correct. The poems are irrational. But then he adds, “They are examples of poetic logic.” This observation is a foolish follow-up because logic is ‘rational thinking,’ which is hardly irrational. Logic is the science of reasoning, or the ‘grammar of reason,’ as R. C. Trench calls it. Irrationality and logic are antithetical to each other. The poems cannot be examples of both. Logic is the process by which conclusions are reached through methodical thinking; and methodical thinking cannot be irrational thinking. The poems cannot be both irrational and logical, for something that is logical has gone through a process, not of irrationality, but of reason. Logic goes, then, with reason, not irrationality. That something—even a poem—is both irrational and logical at the same time, is a contradiction and impossibility. If the parts of something are not linked by rational thinking, it is absurd to assert that that something is logical. Contradictions of this kind are the norm in circles where truth is treated as relative. Truth as relative is itself a contradiction; therefore it is no surprise that irrational poems and irrational criticism flow from that secular tenet. The idea that truth is relative is a proposition that what is true for one person may be false for another; but relative truth is a chimera: that which exists in the imagination alone. We might imagine that one person believes that bread is nourishing while his fellow believes that a stone is nourishing and that neither person judges the other for what he eats and that each one eats his choice of food to good effect. That bread is a source of food is true. That the stone is a source of food is false. This is a fact no matter what a person imagines the truth to be. A stone for food only works in the imagination; irrational poems that are logical, likewise. “If a son shall ask bread of any of you that is a father, will he give him a stone?” (Luke 11.11.) Postmodern poetry is as dumb as stones. We ask for nourishment instead. It would be cruel to teach infants that stones will nourish their bodies. It is cruel to teach children that avant-garde poetry will nourish their minds. Only cruelty would coerce pupils to admire nonsense and to imitate the writing of it. But that is what postmodern poets and philosophers of relative truth, through academia, are guilty of. They push their chimerical inventions into classrooms and libraries because the only way people will pay a moment’s attention to what they write is by duress or by accident. People do not want to read material that is close to being absolutely incomprehensible. It is true that sinners are naturally bent against metaphysical truth as we have it in the Bible. But the rejection of God’s truth is near the top of our slippery slope. Near the bottom is the denial of common sense. Denial on this level is not to everyone’s liking because not everyone is as close to the bottom as experimental writers are. And this is where coercion and peer pressure come in. Even when modern art is as ugly as debris—even when innovation in poetry is imbecilic—what student couldn’t be pressured with a frown into denying the testimony of his intuition? Postmodern poetry is a playground for persons pretending to be poets. It could be ignored except for the fact that defenseless pupils are forced to read it, accept it, and even participate in it. At the back of the bus the other day, a mentally disadvantaged man blurted out, in fits and starts, words that seemed chosen at random. This is what the newest poetry is like, except for the fact that our poets don’t have acute mental illness for an excuse. A couple of teenage girls giggled embarrassingly each time the disabled man blurted out. We might blame them for this; but we should not blame them at all for laughing at retarded poetry.
No comments:
Post a Comment