a response to thomas, more on infinity and wittgenstein

Thomas - I’m moved by what you have to say about grief and I’m coming to see what you mean by “emotion”.

First, I want to address your remark: “the sentence defines grief,” which you say was inspired by Tony Tost’s remark that “the sentence converts grief into language.” I’d like to quote a bit of it, because I think your notion of “definity” is profound.

I want to introduce the notion of "definity", a bringing-to-the-end. This happens in language. The sentence (the strophe or the remark) defines grief. This cannot, of course, happen in the moment of loss, which is infinite in the sense you propose AND intractable to poetry (if I'm right). And ordinary language does indeed operate on the basis of these show-stopping infinities. When I speak of "definition" I mean this not as we encounter it in dictionaries, but in musculatures, i.e., embodiments. Bodies are finite.

I would like to attempt to sketch the possibility of a bridge between your notion of “definity” and my ramblings about infinity (and perhaps your wordplay “definitiy”/”infinity”already embodies the essence of such a sketch). Here are some notes that occurred to me as I was thinking about the possibility of that bridge -- and thinking, too, about my own changing relationship to Wittgenstein and what this means for me in terms of the project of deriving a poetics from the Tractatus).

• To my “but emotion doesn’t go deep enough”, your reply might have been “aren’t you overlooking how ‘deep’ emotion can go? If we’re looking for ‘profundity’, we needn’t go all the way to (or past) the horizon. Just a few steps away from the front door will suffice.”
  
  
• Wittgenstein drew (or drew our attention to) limits. Your characterization of poems as expressions of emotions draws analogous limits. In this sense, I think you’re closer to the spirit of Wittgenstein than I am when I describe poetry as a projection from something infinite (mind you, however, not a projection of infinity as a totality, but a projection from some part of an infinite field). We may read Wittgenstein against himself, but we shouldn’t abuse him, no? And I can see that my talk of infinity runs that risk.
  
  
• Although the project of deriving a poetics from the Tractatus still interests me, particularly as it relates to refuting solopsism – and I think Gary’s recent posts have offered one interpretation of what “poetic solopsism” could mean – the results of this project may be ultimately incompatible with a poetics that I would define (or adopt) for myself. I am willing to accept this possibility, though it’s an outcome in which I would be disappointed.
  
  
• It strikes me I would make this claim of incompatibility for one of three reasons. 1) I fully grasp and agree with, but do not take seriously,Wittgenstein’s injunctions about how to comport ourselves as thinkers (i.e., I’m deliberately unethical or a coward), or 2) I think that they (or aspects of them) are flawed; or 3): I do not fully grasp them. Most “Wittgensteinians” would, I think, out of charity, presume the 3rd possibility. As someone who once considered himself a “Wittgensteinian” I will of course claim the 2nd. But this claim is nevertheless tinged with a haunting fear that the 1st possibility is really the case. The psychological paralells between moving away from Wittgenstein toward other thinkers and “falling out of grace” with regard to previously-held religious beliefs are striking.
  
  
• A quote from Deleuze, in What Is Philosophy? . . . I think my “truth” or “the real” is trying to get at something similar to what Deleuze calls “chaos” in this passage:
  
  In a violently poetic text, Lawrence describes what produces poetry: people are constantly putting up an umbrella that shelters them and on the underside of which they draw a firmament and write their conventions opinions. But poets, artists, make a slit in the umbrella, they tear open the firmament itself, to let in a bit of free and windy chaos and to frame in a sudden light a vision that appears through the rent – Wordsworth’s spring or Cézanne’s apple, the silhouettes of MacBeth or Ahab . . .
  
  Art takes a bit of chaos in a frame in order to form a composed chaos that becomes sensory . . .
  
  
• I want to make it clear that by infinity I do not mean “absorption into the divine”, I do not mean “the mysical feeling of imagining the world as a limited whole”, and I do not mean “attempting to go beyond the horizon.” These are what I would provisionally call transcendent or “vertical” infinities, whereas I’m positing the existence of a strictly imminent or “horizontal” infinity, an infinity in which we’re always already situated. I believe that Wittgenstein showed us the fallacies inherent in thinking so-called transcendent infinities and that the horrors of the last century have forever stripped them of their veneer of innocence. With regard to the last point, you state it poignantly when you say
  
  It is because the reader's body and the body of the poem are finitudes that we must be very careful with the gesture that indicates what lies beyond the horizon.
  
  But, I want to say, I’m not talking about beyond the horizon, I’m talking about here, and there’s no horizon in sight. And what’s here exceeds my grasp by an infinite and immesurable degree, and we can call it the “real” or “truth” without making a totalitarian gesture because those words don’t mean anything more than this or that poem. What does “truth” look like, what does it say? We’ll, here’s a haiku, and here’s the Maximus Poems, and here’s some language poetry, and here’s the Wasteland.
  
  At the same time, I think your notion of “definity” comes so very close to what I’m attempting to articulate. “Definity”, yes, but the poem or strophe doesn’t “define” emotion exclusively. It defines truth (or, say, “the real”). When that truth consists of an emotion, then, yes, the emotion comes to definition in language. But it could also be a thought, an idea, an ephiphany, an insight, even a bored observation, a desire. Why isn’t it science then? The observation, the thought, the epiphany – these aren’t empirical facts, or even possible empirical facts. Facts might find their way into poems, but then the point of them being there isn’t to simply inform the reader. What about politics? Off the top of my head, I would say that just as poems don’t consist of mere empirical facts qua empirical facts, neither do they consist of political injunctions qua political injunctions.
  
  
• If Wittgenstein didn’t address the notion of an “immanent infinity” then it may be possible to use his arguments to refute solipsism while at the same time grounding a poetics in the “immanent infinite” without violating the spirit of his work.