Ten Years Ago Today

Divine aporia

By Moristotle

[Originally published on June 12, 2007, not one word different.]

I have long regretted that I didn’t study much classical rhetoric in college. My knowledge of technical terms in poetics and prosody has barely kept me afloat as I’ve tried to tread water reading literary essays and criticism. So my interest was piqued last October when a young Hollywood screenwriter [JD Payne] suggested I look at M. H. Abrams’s Glossary of Literary Terms. And I’ve since discovered Chapel Hill’s own English Professor William Harmon’s Handbook to Literature. Not bedside reading for everyone, but I delight in both books.

Once again

If I am right that freedom is the seminal contradiction that makes "all things possible," we have a fundamentally new way of interpreting the works of Sam Harris (The End of Faith) and Christopher Hitchens (God Is Not Great, which I am currently reading). And a new way of interpreting scripture and the works of devout Hebrews, Christians, Muslims, and anyone else who writes about "God." More about that tomorrow.

But am I right about freedom? No one has challenged me on the point, but I suppose it could be because no one has understood me, or those who think they have understood me may simply think me insane.

In case I'm not being understood (and to give those who tend to think me insane more information on which to judge), let me try to explain it. The problem might be that my idea is simpler than they have supposed.

Are humans free? If we are, it means that we may act contrary to the causes that otherwise determine our actions and cause us to act in ways that are, in principle, predictable. That is, if we are free, then our actions are not completely determined. The fabric of causality has a tear in it. If we live in a cause-effect world, then when we exercise our freedom we perform a miracle.

But if we aren't free—if there are no miracles (as strict scientists contend), then...who's writing this? You might as well go have a beer or a cup of tea.

I'm not claiming that human freedom is the seminal contradiction of the Cosmos. Men and women are terrestrial beings—creatures of the Earth. It would be "God's" freedom that is the seminal contradiction that makes "all things possible" and makes it prudent for us to "believe all things" (rather than hold on to a particular dogma, especially one that might prompt us to stone to death or blow up people who believe otherwise).

Divine Aporia

I have long regretted that I didn't study much classical rhetoric in college. My knowledge of technical terms in poetics and prosody has barely kept me afloat as I've tried to tread water reading literary essays and criticism. So my interest was piqued last October when a young Hollywood screenwriter suggested I look at M. H. Abrams's Glossary of Literary Terms. And I've since discovered Chapel Hill's own English Professor William Harmon's Handbook to Literature. Not bedside reading for everyone, but I delight in both books.

This morning I had occasion to look up a technical term in Harmon, for last night I came across a passage in David Lodge's Nice Work that seemed to bear on my recent infatuation with seminal contradictions and their seeming to provide a ground for the concepts of "believing all things" and "all things are possible"—which, for me, are admirably expressed by Howard Nemerov's short poem that I am fond of citing¹.

Robyn Penrose's term of shadowing Vic Wilcox under the Industrial Year Shadow Scheme has come to an end, but an inspired Vic has wangled an extension of the program by which he will now shadow Robyn. In the first of Robyn's tutorials that he will observe, the discussion has turned to a line from Tennyson's "Locksley Hall" whose use of the word "grooves" seems to defy interpretation: "Let the great world spin for ever, the ringing grooves of change."

"It's an aporia," said Robyn. "A kind of accidental aporia, a figure of undecidable ambiguity, irresolvable contradiction. We know Tennyson intended an allusion to railways, and, as Helen said, we can't erase that knowledge...But we also know that railway trains don't run in grooves, and nothing that does run in grooves seems metaphorically adequate to the theme. As Simon says, trams aren't very poetic. So the reader's mind is continually baffled in its efforts to make sense of the line." [p. 243]

I turned to Harmon for more²:

Aporia: A difficulty, impasse, or point of doubt and indecision. Used to describe a species of irony in which a speaker expresses uncertainty but intends none, as in this sentence: "I don't know what scares me more—your stupidity or your dishonesty." Aporia has also been used by recent critics to indicate a point of "undecidability" in a text, which indicates the site at which the text most obviously dismantles or deconstructs itself.

I muse whether "God" intended the irony implicit in the seminal contradictions of the Cosmos (freedom, for example). The overarching "divine aporia" seems to be that in dismantling and deconstructing itself, Being creates and constructs all, including in the food chain and the inexorable opposition of Good and Evil, not to mention another that affects us all: the fact that because we were born we will also die.
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1. "Creation Myth on a Moebius Band":

   The world's just mad enough to have been made
   By the Being his beings into Being prayed.

2. Fifth edition of A Handbook to Literature. New York: Macmillan, 1986.