Aesthetics, Criticism, & Other Non-Fiction
2012
Regression to the mean. All creators ought to fear it. Because if you create something really really wonderful, something great (“Money,” “Lolita,” “The Monk”) you should fear that that’s it; I’m done; everything I’m going to do after this is going to be really second rate (compared to this). Well, I don’t know about most cases but I do know this about Chandler: The Big Sleep. And that’s it, really. But I don’t think it’s because of regression to the mean. I really don’t. I’m willing to bank on a lot of other factors. Like alcohol. Like character flaws (I mean, his character flaws). Like the normal temptations all humans face—like if I write this quickly I’ll get some money. Come to think of it, all creators ought to fear all sorts of things, not just regression to the mean. So I take that back.
I wrote this for a really simple reason: I was struck—dumbfounded, really—by the fact that someone can be great with respect to their grasp of some aspects of language, and profoundly mediocre with respect to other aspects. That language is that complicated, that grand, and that our mastery of language is that piecemeal, that jagged, that gerrymandered, that greatness is rare in any case, but that when it shows up in someone (almost by accident, really) it can as a result cut a very narrow swathe, and rely on a very narrow skill set. It’s shocking, really, that something like this can be true.
1999 (2001)
Of course I had Wittgenstein’s Tractatus in mind — although not particularly in mind. I don’t know (and didn’t worry about) what he took his own numbering system to indicate. What I borrowed from him I understood to indicate a sequence of statements accompanied by footnotes themselves involving further footnotes, and so on. (I rather like footnotes, and so a structure primarily composed of a system of integrated footnotes appeals to me.) I also thought it important to indicate what sort of say/show distinction I was willing to commit myself to, and how it would play out in a particular bit of aesthetics.
Because it was published in a book of poetry, more than one individual thought it actually was a poem. That would have involved quite a bit of textual irony — given especially the footnotes to the footnotes to… to the footnotes to line 3. But it’s not a poem.
It’s a piece of philosophy — but an odd sort of philosophy: one where all the arguments (pretty much) have been left out. Still (or so I’d like to believe) what the arguments have to be can be reconstructed by the assiduous reader. You, for example.