Thisness, Part 2

Earlier this week I mentioned “thisness” -- “haecceity” – which sparked the interest of several readers and reminded me of J.V. Cunningham’s “Haecceity”:

“Evil is any this or this
Pursued beyond hypothesis.

“It is the scribbling of affection
On the blank pages of perfection.

“Evil is presentness bereaved
Of all the futures it conceived,

“Wilful and realized restriction
Of the insatiate forms of fiction.

“It is this poem, or this act.
It is this absolute of fact.”

If I understand Cunningham correctly, he is radically reinterpreting the notion of haecceity – “thisness” – as promulgated by Duns Scotus and other medieval philosophers. For them, as described by Timothy Steele in his introduction to The Poems of J.V. Cunningham, “goodness was identical with realized being.” I’m admittedly treading in deep waters here, far beyond my first-hand knowledge, but this reminds me of a portion of St. Anselm’s ontological argument for God’s existence – namely, it is greater to be real than merely ideal or potential. If God is that than which nothing greater can be conceived, and it is greater to be real than ideal, then He must exist. Even for an atheist, the reasoning is elegantly dazzling.

For Cunningham, who was raised as an Irish-American, working-class Catholic but who later lost his faith, “thisness” is appalling and inspires a sense of metaphysical vertigo and disgust. In one of his essays, “The Quest of the Opal,” included in The Collected Essays of J.V. Cunningham, he discusses the poem “Haecceity.”

“The subject of that poem was metaphysical evil, evil as a defect of being. Any realized particular, anything which is this and not that and that, is by the very fact evil. For to be this is to exclude not only any other alternative but to exclude all else in the universe. Perfection is in possibility, in the idea, but that which is realized, specific, determined, has no possibilities. It is precisely this and nothing else at all. It is lacking in all the being of the universe other than its own particularity. The more realized a thing is the greater its defect of being; hence any particular choice is as such evil though morally it may be the best choice.”

To this point, I was not certain whether Cunningham was simply being provocative and contrary, extending the logic of the Schoolmen and beating them at their own game. Part of the reason I love his poetry is its reliable crankiness, coolness and clarity – the three c’s not of diamonds but of diamond-hard poems. His is a poetry of statement, not hints and images, though it should never be confused with philosophy, theology or autobiography. His poems denote; they do not connote. He tells us what he means, and in “Haecceity,” I think he means exactly what he is saying. A few lines after the above passage, he writes:

“Haecceity, or thisness, is the primal and ultimate compulsion of one’s life; it is the principle of insufficient reason. But there is considerable human danger in too sharp and awareness of this truth. For if choice is purely arbitrary, as essentially it is, there is no reason we should not be purely arbitrary in choosing. Hence one’s choices may have in them a good deal of the precipitancy and doggedness of despair.”

That final phrase is chilling, but think about it: How many significant, even life-changing choices have you made abruptly, impulsively, stubbornly, defiantly, against your best judgment? My answer makes me uneasy. I see in Cunningham’s grim but logical vision an expression of the peculiarly Irish Manichaeism of a writer like Flann O’Brien. This world is hopelessly fallen. As Cunningham writes in the sentences following the last quoted:

“The problem is certainly central, and very likely insoluble. For it is not merely philosophy but one’s life.”

This is a long way from the sense of haecceity I intended in my posting earlier this week. In that case, I was thinking strictly of physical phenomena – the poignant specificity of things. At dinner last evening, an electrical storm that had threatened for much of the day moved in quickly from the north – not an unusual event in the spring, in Houston. Hail stones clattered on the sidewalks, cars and the roof. They fell so fast, you could see them only as bounced up, like popcorn from a popper. The sun shot through the clouds and the canopy of oaks as the rain and hail kept falling. My five-year-old ran outside in his underwear to collect hail and preserve it in the freezer. I fancy he will remember this experience for the rest of his life. Despite all the signs, no rainbow appeared.