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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