Reading: The Republic by Plato

So I’ve started reading Plato’s Republic, one of the classics in Greek philosophy, although I’m not very far into the book. So far I’ve found it to be much more amusing than I expected, as well as being exactly as thought-provoking as I expected. One thing that I’m not yet certain will persist throughout the book is the fact that Socrates appears to be the “main character”, instead of Plato himself. I also was not expecting the book to be more like a debate club rather than simply laying out exactly how he thinks the ideal world should be run. Once again, I may be corrected from this assumption later on in the book, but so far it has been Socrates conversing with an old man and arguing with two other guys about justice and the nature of justice. So far, Socrates has not really made an argument himself, but rather spent a good amount of time tearing apart everyone else’s ideas about justice, the first being “he who is just does good to his friends and evil to his enemies” and the second “justice is just when it serves the interest of the strong”. It is very interesting to listen in on what I can perfectly picture in my head as Greek men filling a room and gathering around the two debating while listening intently and in general worshipping Socrates for his intellect and argumentative skills. It is interesting to think that this was a pastime that both the Greeks and the Romans would enjoy very much and it seems a shame that most people do not really care for intellectual debates much anymore. College debates nowadays seems to be about who can prattle off as many arguments as they can as quickly as possible, while presidential debates are also limited tremendously by time and always incredibly vague. Both candidates in presidential debates very obviously are trying to simply say what will be able to please the most of amount of people in the crowd rather than formulating a well-thought out argument. After reading even just a little of The Republic makes me wish Socrates was alive today to critique the arguments of our presidential candidates, it would certainly make a much more interesting show - at least for me. I wish the debates aired on television would take as much time and evaluation as they do in the book. You may get fewer viewers but at least the debates will actually mean something more. It’s not like many people watch them anyway.

What I found interesting about Pound but did not really mention too much in my essay was Pound’s treason charges and his time spent in St. Elizabeth’s insane asylum. It is indeed very interesting how a man who was presumably insane could possibly have been as influential (at least in the literary field) and as great of a poet as he was. I suppose it is easy to see how an insane person could be a very creative and original person; it is more difficult to imagine him having a lasting impact on poetry and literature in general. I suppose what they say about genius and insanity is true after all. It does seem fitting that no normal person would attempt to write poetry after being arrested for treason and locked in a cage for a week.  Pound, as it turns out, was arrested because of his weekly radio broadcasts denouncing the United States’ involvement in World War II and openly supporting Mussolini and Hitler. This of course caused great controversy in the States as more people unfortunately knew Pound more for his political views and treason arrest than for his poetry. The effect of this controversy can still be felt today as the copy of The Cantos that I own has a total of four pages censored due to the fascist views presented in them, which seemly to me completely hypocritical and more than a little ironic. I never support censoring or burning books or trying to erase ideas. If the ideas are so wrong then why try to destroy them? It seems to me to be much more beneficial to simply provide a counterargument and explain carefully and completely why the ideas are wrong. Does this mean I support fascism? No, but it does mean I support free speech. It really did annoy me when I found out that there were pages missing from the book, more than maybe it should have.

After reading through some of Ezra Pound’s poetry I have learned one thing in particular: I do not really enjoy reading Ezra Pound’s poetry. As I’ve said before, Ezra Pound impresses me more with his ability to find talented writers than he does with his own work. I appreciate everything he has contributed to poetry and how much of an influence he was on the modernist movement, however I am simply not a huge fan of his work, especially the very hard to digest cantos. The fact that I don’t really enjoy reading his cantos is most likely more my fault than it is his own, however. They are some of the most confusing poems I have ever read and it doesn’t help when plenty of them are in another language and at least one is a piece of sheet music. As a rule, I also simply prefer prose to poetry any day of the week anyway so maybe it wasn’t the best idea to pick one of the more complex and slightly convoluted poets out there. I really enjoyed the poem “In the Station of a Metro” a lot, however, as it seems to be a variation of a haiku that really manages to capture the sort of dreary feeling of a rainy, dark metro station beautifully in a mere two lines. The first line, which compares the faces of the people to apparitions, helps capture the feeling of a bleak perspective of people in dark raincoats and pale faces that look like ghosts. The second line, which compares the faces with petals on a wet black tree branch, made me think of Van Gogh’s painting of the blossoming almond tree, only much darker and of course wetter. It actually became clear to me that I appreciate his shorter poetry much more than I do his longer cantos, although that may simply be due to me not being able to fully comprehend his cantos.

It has become clear to me now that Pound’s poetry can be a bit difficult to swallow. He is one of the defining poets of the modernist movement, in fact he is considered one of the principle founders of the movement, and as a result can be a little hard to follow. One quote that I found interesting by him was “No good poetry is ever written in a manner twenty years old,’ he wrote in 1912, ‘for to write in such a manner shows conclusively that the writer thinks from books, convention and cliché, not from real life.” This quote explains quite clearly that, although conservative in the political sense, Pound was definitely progressive in the artistic sense. His poems are filled with allusions to histories and myths of all sorts of different cultures, which make them all the more rich but at the same time all the more difficult to understand. Often I’ve found in his cantos completely different languages as well as Chinese characters in the margins. This makes for a very slow journey throughout the cantos and as a result I’ve starting looking for different poems to use as examples other than the cantos, perhaps his Personae. Either way, there’s no denying that Pound was an interesting man and I’m looking forward to reading more of what he has to offer. 

                I’ve found it interesting to hear about his friendship with James Joyce, because I had not realized before I picked him as the poet that I should write about. I guess no matter what, all of what I read seems to come back to James Joyce. As a side note I found that Ezra Pound thought Finnegan’s Wake was trifling and ridiculous, and his patron tried many times to dissuade him but Joyce went ahead and published it anyway. If there’s one thing I respect about Joyce it’s his dedication and persistence in the service of his vision.

“This is water” is a commencement speech delivered by David Foster Wallace that rings all too true in the ears of Americans. He points out our natural view of having the world completing revolving around our wants, needs, feelings and how this is not the case. However, it’s not just when we wait in line and get annoyed with the people around us that we forget that other people go through the same trials and tribulations that we do.  When we mess up we tend to blame outside people and forces for our own mistakes, but when we succeed we tend to put all of the glory on ourselves. When we were children we were constantly told “if you believe in yourself then you will succeed”, but it’s obvious from the start that only a few will succeed. The effect of this is the jaded, mindless droll of modern day life. I blame this outlook on life not as flawed personalities that we naturally have, rather I believe that nurture plays a bigger part in this than nature. I do not believe the answer is as simple as Wallace puts it in this video.

I blame unbridled capitalism and globalism for the problems described in the video. This is something Karl Marx and I have in common. The thing we don’t have in common, though, is the solution. Marx wanted to stamp out the ashes of the old world; I want to reignite the flame. The 21^st century man has no culture or country to die for, and no moral values to uphold. What better way to create a profit than by convincing  the population that the best way to live is to spend absurd amounts of money on fleeting frivolous nonsense like alcohol, tattoos, fashion, and clubbing. Obscenity attracts attention and sells better than modesty and virtue. Why settle down and start a family when you could be out partying? The national unity is consumption, not spirituality, ethnicity, philosophy, or any common humanist goal. Who cares about the good of the nation when you have your own problems? Most political movements only exist to increase consumption. They preach hot-topics like gay marriage, abortion, and try to find any sort of racism so they can latch on to it and make a profit. They sell bumper stickers, wristbands, rainbow flags, and support groups but are sure not to solve the issue because then the money supply ceases. People preach pseudo-politics like privilege and are so convinced that despite their trust fund and college education that they are the victims of society. People get stuck in their boring, useless, easily-replaceable jobs and look at the world with nothing but apathy and boredom at a country that is fading ever forward into oblivion. This is what I blame the jaded feeling of the modern world on. It's not that we don't know what other people go through, it's that we don't care.