You Must Change Your Life

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Preface

“But never can any advantage of nature be taken by a trick.”

— R.W. Emerson

What follows in an attempt to work philosophically with poetry, and in a way that respects its manner of presentation. Of course, one could attempt to ferret out conclusions and their supporting premises, approaching the poem as a kind of argument. To do so, however, forgoes a dialogue with the poem in its objectivity and effectively reduces its form of presentation to ornamentation, thus suggesting, if only implicitly, that poetry is petit bourgeois ratiocination. Unwilling to begin by translating poems into a so-called ‘properly philosophical idiom,’ I have thus, in a manner that owes much to Heidegger, tried to fashion a site where poems and philosophical questions, reflection, and argument might meet and complement one another in response to what, after Jean Luc Nancy, I have termed the birth of sense, “sense” denoting the principal character with which something exists or occurs, e.g. as a part of a large whole, as the creation of a creator, or as atoms collecting and dispersing in a void according to the whims of efficient causality.

My title, You Must Change Your Life, an ambitious one, is drawn from Rilke’s poem, “Archaic Torso of Apollo.” The point is not to install poetry at the vanguard of self-help. Nor is it to suggest that poetry is a potential font of practical maxims by which we might live. Rather, I will try to convince you that certain poems enable us to experience the birth of sense in such a radical fashion that they transform the sense of all that is, e.g. ourselves, others, rocks, lichens, asteroids, and orbits. Unfortunately, we haven’t a proper feel for those kinds of poems or that kind of import. In writing this essay, my hope is cultivate that feel, to sharpen the ears we bring to certain poems so that we might see how thoroughly they are able to change our lives.

As a dialogue between philosophy and poetry this text is designed for an audience beyond but including professionally philosophical circles. My hope is that poets as well as philosophers will find something fresh here, both with regard to my notion of ur-poetry as well and its import. To the end of a wider audience, I have not sacrificed whatever rigor I thought the matter at hand demanded, however. Given that so little if anything is obvious, it is justifiable to demand clarity and to berate a clarity that obscures. To my mind, one’s obligations begin with one’s subject matter, and it is out of that obligation that one should determine what clarity and communicability involve as well as what relation one’s diction and syntax should have to ordinary language, if there is such a thing. In other words, I have tried to say things as plainly as possible, and at times this has required me to go against the currents of ordinary language. If I’d only held my nose right, I could have done better. However, I do not think I could have tried harder.

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