Henri Bergson, Louis MacNeice, and William James

 But first the poem by Louis McNeice which clearly shows the influence of Henri Bergson:

This is a republication of an earlier post with an addition and proper tags:

Louis MacNeice

August

The shutter of time darkening ceaselessly

Has whisked away the foam of may and elder

And I realise how now, as every year before,

Once again the gay months have eluded me.

For the mind by nature stagey, welds its frame

Tomb-like around each little world of a day;

We jump from picture to picture and cannot follow

The living curve that is breathlessly the same.

While the lawn-mower sings moving up and down

Spirting its little fountain of vivid green,

I, like Poussin, make a still-bound fete of us

Suspending every noise, of insect or machine.

Garlands at a set angle that do not slip,

Theatrically (and as if for ever) grace

You and me and the stone god in the garden

And Time who also is shown with a stone face

But all this is a dilettante’s lie,

Time’s face is not stone nor still his wings

Our mind, being dead, wishes to have time, die,

For we being ghosts cannot catch hold of things.

Was Louis MacNeice a Bergsonian? In Creative Evolution I find:

“Such is the contrivance of the cinematograph. And such is also that of our knowledge. Instead of attaching ourselves to the inner becoming of things, we place ourselves outside them in order to recompose their becoming artificially. We take snapshots, as it were, of the passing reality, as these are characteristic of the reality, we have only to string them on a becoming, abstract, uniform and invisible, situated at the back of the apparatus of knowledge, in order to imitate what there is that is characteristic in this becoming itself. Perception, intellection, language so proceed in general.”

(pg.332, Mod.Library edn.)

Poems enact duration in such a way as to bring us into the reality of what makes knowledge possible, what Aquinas called connaturality. We find our way into the being of things through such artefacts.

Addiition: The spatialization of time, its mathematization, is an example of a useful fiction that becomes taken for reality. (cf.Matter and Memory) We ‘catch hold of things’ by freezing the flow. In an interesting speculation that has mythic dimensions Bergson envisages godlike duration:

And would not the whole of history be contained in a very short time for a consciousness at a higher degree of tension than our own, which should watch the development of humanity while contracting it, so to speak, into the great phases of its evolution? In short, then, to perceive consists in condensing enormous periods of an infinitely diluted existence into a few more differentiated moments of an intenser life, and in thus summing up a very long history. To perceive means to immobilize.

(from Matter and Memory)

Not only is MacNeice influenced by Bergson but the following extract from a lecture by William James has a similar catenary of images.  

But all these abstract concepts are but as flowers gathered, they are only moments dipped out from the stream of time, snap-shots taken, as by a kinetoscopic camera, at a life that in its original coming is continuous. Useful as they are as samples of the garden, or to re-enter the stream with, or to insert in our revolving lantern, they have no value but these practical values. You cannot explain by them what makes any single phenomenon be or go—you merely dot out the path of appearances which it traverses. (from lecture VI.on Bergson’s Critique of Intellectualism in  A Pluralistic Universe by William James)

Bergson's Nobel Prize

Henri Bergson won the Nobel prize for literature in 1927 for the brilliant skill with which he presented his ideas. Arguably his closest connection to literature as such was when Marcel Proust acted as best man at his wedding. The concept of duration influenced Proust of course and I have in past posts mentioned T.S.Eliot and Louis MacNeice in relation to ‘duree’. If he had turned his attention to literature as usually conceived then I have no doubt that his fertile imagination would have thrown up luxuriant scenarios. Here is a quick sketch during a discussion on primitive culture and curious tribal customs:

We have all come across one of those very united, self-satisfied families, who keep themselves to themselves, because they are shy or supercilious. It is not unusual to notice certain quaint habits among them, aversions or superstitions, which might become serious if they were to go on fermenting in a closed vessel. Each one of these singularities has its particular origin. It was some idea which occurred to one or another of the family, and which the others have taken on trust. It may be a walk they took one Sunday and took again the next Sunday, and which then became a settled thing every Sunday of the year: if they should have the misfortune to miss it once, goodness knows what would happen. In order to repeat, to imitate, to follow blindly, we have only to relax; it is criticism that demands an effort. Now take a few hundred centuries instead of a few years; magnify enormously all the little foibles of a family living in isolation: you will have no difficulty in imagining what must have occurred in primitive societies which have remained self-centred and self-satisfied, instead of opening windows on to the outside world, of dispersing the foul vapours as they gathered about them, and of making a constant effort to broaden their horizon.

(fromThe Two Sources of Morality and Religion

The Zen of Galen Strawson


After ten years of apprenticeship, Tenno achieved the rank of Zen teacher. One rainy day, he went to visit the famous master Nan-in. When he walked in, the master greeted him with a question, "Did you leave your wooden clogs and umbrella on the porch?"
"Yes," Tenno replied.
"Tell me," the master continued, "did you place your umbrella to the left of your shoes, or to the right?"
Tenno did not know the answer, and realized that he had not yet attained full awareness. So he became Nan-in's apprentice and studied under him for ten more years.

If Galen Strawson were to be put into that story would his answer be ‘what umbrella?’?

I can understand his position as he has outlined it in his Aeon essay
life story
which incidentally seems an incipient classic in the ‘what it’s like to be ’ genre. He is steeped in the reality of the present moment and there he joins Bergson. Duration is the nearest we can get to the compressed rolled up history of the past. There is no need for a story because it is all there in the instant. It was Sartre in Being and Nothingness who reminded us that our most intense moments have no element of the ‘reflective cogito’ and how everything that we are can be wrapped up in a gesture or a walk. In the same way we can offer a dubious simulacrum of ourselves that apes that gesture. This is ‘bad faith’.

Does G.S. have ‘madeleine moments’ which cut a plane through through the ‘memory cone’? He doesn’t say.

Suggested correct answer to : Did you place your umbrella to the left or to the right of your shoes?

If you say another word I will hit you with it

Louis MacNeice and Henri Bergson

This is a republication of an earlier post with an addition and proper tags:

Louis MacNeice

August

The shutter of time darkening ceaselessly
Has whisked away the foam of may and elder
And I realise how now, as every year before,
Once again the gay months have eluded me.

For the mind by nature stagey, welds its frame
Tomb-like around each little world of a day;
We jump from picture to picture and cannot follow
The living curve that is breathlessly the same.

While the lawn-mower sings moving up and down
Spirting its little fountain of vivid green,
I, like Poussin, make a still-bound fete of us
Suspending every noise, of insect or machine.

Garlands at a set angle that do not slip,
Theatrically (and as if for ever) grace
You and me and the stone god in the garden
And Time who also is shown with a stone face

But all this is a dilettante’s lie,
Time’s face is not stone nor still his wings
Our mind, being dead, wishes to have time, die,
For we being ghosts cannot catch hold of things.

Was Louis MacNeice a Bergsonian? In Creative Evolution I find:

“Such is the contrivance of the cinematograph. And such is also that of our knowledge. Instead of attaching ourselves to the inner becoming of things, we place ourselves outside them in order to recompose their becoming artificially. We take snapshots, as it were, of the passing reality, as these are characteristic of the reality, we have only to string them on a becoming, abstract, uniform and invisible, situated at the back of the apparatus of knowledge, in order to imitate what there is that is characteristic in this becoming itself. Perception, intellection, language so proceed in general.”

(pg.332, Mod.Library edn.)

Poems enact duration in such a way as to bring us into the reality of what makes knowledge possible, what Aquinas called connaturality. We find our way into the being of things through such artefacts.

Addiition: The spatialization of time, its mathematization, is an example of a useful fiction that becomes taken for reality. (cf.Matter and Memory) We ‘catch hold of things’ by freezing the flow. In an interesting speculation that has mythic dimensions Bergson envisages godlike duration:

And would not the whole of history be contained in a very short time for a consciousness at a higher degree of tension than our own, which should watch the development of humanity while contracting it, so to speak, into the great phases of its evolution? In short, then, to perceive consists in condensing enormous periods of an infinitely diluted existence into a few more differentiated moments of an intenser life, and in thus summing up a very long history. To perceive means to immobilize.

(from Matter and Memory)

Louis and Henri

Louis MacNeice
August
The shutter of time darkening ceaselessly
Has whisked away the foam of may and elder
And I realise how now, as every year before,
Once again the gay months have eluded me.

For the mind by nature stagey, welds its frame
Tomb-like around each little world of a day;
We jump from picture to picture and cannot follow
The living curve that is breathlessly the same.

While the lawn-mower sings moving up and down
Spirting its little fountain of vivid green,
I, like Poussin, make a still-bound fete of us
Suspending every noise, of insect or machine.

Garlands at a set angle that do not slip,
Theatrically (and as if for ever) grace
You and me and the stone god in the garden
And Time who also is shown with a stone face

But all this is a dilettante’s lie,
Time’s face is not stone nor still his wings
Our mind, being dead, wishes to have time, die,
For we being ghosts cannot catch hold of things.


Was Louis MacNeice a Bergsonian? In Creative Evolution I find:

“Such is the contrivance of the cinematograph. And such is also that of our knowledge. Instead of attaching ourselves to the inner becoming of things, we place ourselves outside them in order to recompose their becoming artificially. We take snapshots, as it were, of the passing reality, as these are characteristic of the reality, we have only to string them on a becoming, abstract, uniform and invisible, situated at the back of the apparatus of knowledge, in order to imitate what there is that is characteristic in this becoming itself. Perception, intellection, language so proceed in general.” (pg.332, Mod.Library edn.)

Poems enact duration in such a way as to bring us into the reality of what makes knowledge possible, what Aquinas called connaturality. We find our way into the being of things through such artefacts.