“Thoughts
of different species take wing and play round one another, responding to each
other’s movements and provoking one another to fresh exertions. Nobody asks
where they have come from or on what authority they are present; nobody cares
what will become of them when they have played their part. There is no
symposiarch or arbiter, not even a doorkeeper to examine credentials. Every
entrant is taken at its face-value and everything is permitted which can get itself
accepted into the flow of speculation.”
No,
I’m wrong. That’s Michael Oakeshott on “The Voice of Poetry in the Conversation
of Mankind,” a 1959 essay collected in Rationalism
in Politics (1962). The word “conversation,” debased into feel-good
meaninglessness, is reclaimed by Oakeshottt to mean “an unrehearsed intellectual
adventure.” It’s what people do. It’s tradition unfolding, “the flow of
speculation,” unplanned, decentralized, spontaneous, rudderless, anarchic in
appearance but not in day-to-day experience. It’s not a rant, sermon or
cold-blooded exchange of facts. After brute survival, it’s the essential human
act, and it makes some people uncomfortable. Oakeshott continues:
“As
civilized human beings, we are the inheritors, neither of an inquiry about
ourselves and the world, nor of an accumulating body of information, but of a
conversation, begun in the primeval forests and extended and made more
articulate in the course of centuries. It is a conversation which goes on both
in public and within each of ourselves. Of course there is argument and inquiry
and information, but wherever these are profitable they are to be recognized as
passages in this conversation, and perhaps they are not the most captivating of
the passages.”
I
reread Oakeshott’s essay the same day I read Cynthia Haven’s post about Notting Hill Editions, a new English publishing venture “devoted to the best in essayistic
nonfiction writing.” Their catalog is mostly impressive, and Cynthia highlights
two of my favorites, writers I’ve been touting for years – Zbigniew Herbert of
Poland and Hubert Butler of Ireland. Like all good good essayists, they are non-aligned
and idiosyncratic, and can be readily absorbed into Oakeshott’s metaphor of
human conversation. Since Montaigne we’ve known that essays are attempts,
trials at least as tentative and experimental as good converation. There’s no
script and no party line. As in blogging, it’s just you and the tradition.
Included in Still Life with Bridle, the Herbert collection
reprinted by Notting Hill Editions, is “The Price of Art,” which closes like
this:
“It
is we who are poor, very poor. A major part of contemporary art declares itself
on the side of chaos, gesticulates in a void, or tells the story of its own
barren soul.
“The
old masters – all of them without exception –could repeat after Racine, `We
work to please the public.’ Which means they believed in the purposefulness of
their work and the possibility of interhuman communication. They affirmed
visible reality with an inspired scrupulousness and childish seriousness, as if
the order of the world and the revolution of the stars, the permanence of the
firmament, depended on it.
“Let
such naïveté be praised.”
1 comment:
“Let such naïveté be praised.”
Agreed!
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