zaterdag 15 september 2018

Gerald Stern (1925), Amerikaans dichter en essayist, schreef ook in een essay over #Spinoza


Deze grote Amerikaanse dichter, zoon van Oost-Europese joodse immigranten in de VS, schreef niet “zomaar vanuit het niets” het mooie gedicht over Spinoza waar ik gisteren mijn blog aan wijdde, maar had duidelijk studie van Spinoza gemaakt. Zo bleek uit het korte essay “Demystification” dat verscheen in

Gerald Stern, Stealing History. Trinity University Press, 2012 - 224 pagina's – books.google

In what could be boldly called a new genre, Gerald Stern reflects with wit, pathos, rage, and tenderness, on 85 years of life. In 84 short, intermingling pieces that constitute a kind of diary of a mind, Stern moves nimbly between the past and the present, the personal and the philosophical. Creating the immediacy of dailiness, he writes with entertaining engagement about what he’s reading, be it Spinoza, Maimonides, John Cage, Etheridge Knight, James Schuyler, or Lucille Clifton, and then he seamlessly turns to memories of his student years in Europe on the GI Bill, or his political and social action. Unexpected anecdotes abound. He hilariously recounts the evening Bill Murray bit his arm and tells about singing together with Paul McCartney. Interwoven with his formidable recollections are passionate discussions of lifelong obsessions: his conflicted identity as a secular Jew opposed to Israel’s Palestinian policy; the idea of neighbors in various forms — from the women of Gee’s Bend who together made beautiful quilts to the inhabitants of Jedwabne, who on a single day in 1941 slaughtered 300 Jews; and issues of justice.

Het liefst zou ik het hele korte essay “Demystification” hier overnemen, maar dat zou een schending van het copyright inhouden. Een deel is na te lezen in books.google en de hele tekst is te vinden in “Do You Write Poetry?”[PDF], aan het eind waarvan het korte essay is opgenomen. Welnu, hieronder volgt wat hij daarin schrijft over Spinoza – en, komaan, ook de concluderende slotparagraaf neem ik mee [Interessant is om even na te lezen wat Lucy Biederman in » “And I Go On and On”: Gerald Stern’s Poetics of Protest « [PDF] schrijft over dit slot van “Demystification.”]:

Baruch Spinoza was surrounded by “friends” who were shocked that he didn’t believe in Jesus’s resurrection or Lazarus’s awakening. His tongue was sharp and what he hated most were “the shackled minds of zealots.” When they talked to him about miracles, this is what he said: “This I believe is the reason why Christians are distinguished from other people not by faith, nor charity, nor the other fruits of the Holy Spirit, but solely by an opinion they hold, namely because, as they all do, they rest their case simply on miracles, that is, on ignorance, which is the source of all wickedness.” Spinoza also rejected claims to Jesus’s supernaturalism. “As to the additional teaching of certain doctrines, that God took upon himself human nature [in Christ], I have expressly indicated that I do not understand what they say. Indeed, to tell the truth, they seem to me to speak no less absurdly than one who might tell me that a circle has taken on the nature of a square.” Unquestionably he was thinking of his own excommunication in Amsterdam in 1656, “for not believing in angels, the immortality of the soul, and the divine inspiration of the Torah; and other not-named abominable heresies practiced and taught by him; and for committing monstrous acts” (unnamedsource). There was anathema and cursing and someone played with the lights—for mystification’s sake. As to his resort to “reason” and his “intellectual love of God,” he was, in his demystifying mode, letting a thousand dogs loose, not housing them. I love using my college textbook History of Philosophy—after sixty-five years—in Frank Thilly’s translation. I guess Spinoza believed that God is everything and everything is God, only he used the word God for convenience’ sake since there’s no other word for it. Certainly he didn’t believe God was a person or there was a person called God who, for example, punished or rewarded you according to your behavior or for behaving in a certain way, say leaning more to the left or to the right. God had—God has—no consciousness, as humans understand that word. Prayer may be useful psychologically—it is— but it is useless otherwise. It is surely useless, he might say, geometrically. In his letters, Spinoza rejects the identification of God with nature, whatever he meant by nature, but he did say that God and the universe are one; and the Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy emphasizes nature as being the same as “God” when it discusses Spinoza’s metaphysics and his theology. I could see how one could argue that Spinoza replaces one mystification with another, given his unusual radical nouveau system, but he is not interested in using it or having it be used to force, or persuade, anyone to do or not do anything. One may see a certain coldness or heartlessness in his approach or even a naïveté in his trust of the intellect and his presumed expectation of its fairly widespread use, but that’s an optimistic sin, or a sin of optimism, and anyhow it’s “determined” or, as the Presbyters say, predetermined, or as the modern philos say, necessitarian. I am touched by his mode of living, an enviable “attribute” of simplicity and dignity that almost looks like wisdom. He ate only porridge, with a few dried grapes, twice a day, and probably would have slept on the floor if it didn’t cause too much attention. What excites me about him is not his devotion to reason (seventeenth century) or even his love of the spirit (nineteenth century), but his vision of interconnectedness, infinity, and unity, which shows an anticipation of twentieth-century thought—in physics and elsewhere—as well as an echo of the medieval mystics, Jewish, Christian, and Muslim, a connection with Kabbalah, a reflection of the thinking of Maimonides as well as Averroes, and an amazing connection to—a parallel thinking with—the Vedas. He who would have fixed my watch with his enlarged eye so perfectly attuned to his crystal mind, my watch that fell who knows when, dislodging the perfect innard and jarring the circular outer, so that it wouldn’t stay and I had to bring it back to my jeweler who restored it for me and charged thirty-two dollars.

I believe human beings should pay very close attention to each other. They should reach out beyond the family and help the oppressed, the trapped, and the sick. They should insist on security for and from the larger society. They should pay attention to the past, live with grief, make charity personal, teach without end, share food, listen patiently to the young and honor their music, turn their backs on corporations, advertising, and public lying, hate liars, undermine bullies, love June 21, and, on that day, kiss every plant and tree they see. They should love two-lane highways, old cars and  old songs. They should eat with relish, and study insects. They should never stop raising children. They should fight for schoolteachers, pay them, give them tenure, let them make the rules. As Coca-Cola does. They should insist that no one be paid more than ten times anyone else, no matter what or where. They should make fun of war, flags, uniforms, weapons, pulpits, oval offices, square ones, oblong ones, circular ones; and robes, and titles, especially the titles of “Dr.” given to education degree holders in state colleges who address each other as “Doctor.” They should respect all dogs, love one breed intensely, eat fruit, eat root vegetables, read Lear endlessly, and be suspicious of Gertrude Stein—with the exception of her war plays. They should love New York, know two foreign languages, practice both regret and remorse, love their own cities, forgive but not forget, live in at least three countries, work in a gas station, lift boxes, eat pears, learn a trade, respect pitch pines, believe in the soul. They should stop throwing rubbish out the window, they should sit on park benches, marry young, marry late, love seals, love cows, talk to apes, weep for tigrons, cheer on the carp, encourage the salmon and the shad, and read twenty books a year. They should talk to their neighbors and eat herring and boiled potatoes.
Gerald Stern

night of December 17, 2009, 1 a.m.

 

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