interesting & one is left wondering
in moral theories about the merits of
the non natal virws (e.g.) by D Benatar
viz. in BETTER NEVER TO HAVE BEEN
still availbla at oxfords un prss
On Thu, 31 Aug 2017 at 07:36 Lawrence Helm <lawrencehelm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
Torgeir,palma, apgs
*"Antenna-forest"*: In this poem, the city has replaced the forests and
where there were trees, there are now antennas on roofs. The antennas
apparently look like crosses and at the end the poet asks "Who's resting
here / in these deep graves?" The implication being (I'm guessing) that by
replacing forests with cities, we are not only killing nature, replacing it
with unnatural structures, but by doing this we are sealing mankind's
doom. Considered from the roofs, the buildings are graves in which people
rest.
I don't agree with this very popular environmentalist position. It could
happen, but only if mankind does nothing to correct this trend. The
Unabomber (Ted Kaczynski) once infamously insisted that we return to a
pre-industrial life style and killed a few people with letter bombs to get
his manifesto read, but Kaczynski and perhaps Rolf Jacobsen take a short
view. I'm also an environmentalist, but don't believe it would be good to
abandon scientific and technological progress in favor of Luddite
existence. Jacobsen doesn't say quite what Kaczynski does and maybe at
times I've been this pessimistic but given homo sapiens *modus operandi, *so
to speak, I anticipate that we will move to the moon, then to Mars and from
their perhaps to one of Saturn's moons. In other words we are not doomed
(IMO) to die (as a species) in the sterile structures we have replaced the
forests with. At the present time we in our Liberal Democracies still
count on growing populations to finance our entitlements, but if we can
quit doing that we needn't turn the earth into something like the planet
Trantor from Isaac Asimov's *Foundation. *
*"Guardian Angel": *This poem begins a bit like a pessimistic
environmentalist poem. The Guardian Angel is the bird that knocks on your
window that you cannot know? Why can't you know it? Because you are
blind. The birds that knock at your window are "the blossoms that light up
for the blind." In the second stanza the Guardian Angel is the "glacier's
crest above the forests." There are no glacier crests above the
Californian forests, nor do we haven any cathedral towers (or at least not
many inasmuch as I've never heard of any here) so the Guardian Angel is
probably Norwegian. The Guardian Angel declares that the (Norwegian)
reader of the poem loved this angel long ago, implying that the reader no
longer loves him even though the angel walks along side him by day and
speaks to his heart even though the reader doesn't know it. Lutheranism
doesn't emphasize Guardian Angels, Roman Catholics do, or have. This
Guardian Angel sounds a bit like the Holy Spirit. The last stanza
describes the angel as a "third arm" and "second shadow, the white one, /
whom you don't have the heart for and who cannot ever forget you." If
Jacobsen intends this as a Christian allusion it isn't quite orthodox in
Protestant theology although it might be acceptable in the Roman
Catholicism sense. The Holy Spirit is described in the *New Testament*
as providing help to all those who belong to the Lord. However, the
recipient of the Angel's poem is described as not having the heart for this
angel, and by extension the Holy Spirit; so if this is a Protestant
Christian allusion then the theology behind it is Universalistic, i.e, all
will be saved. The two Protestant orthodox positions are (1) those whom
God chooses will be saved, and (2) those who choose God will be saved.
Perhaps the recipient is Catholic and is at least estranged from the
Catholic Church. But perhaps he belongs in some sense to the Catholic
Church "who cannot ever forget you."
*"Sand": *This strikes me as a naturalistic poem which expresses the
Second Law of Thermodynamics and is not placing the blame for this entropy
on *homo sapiens. *"The starry worlds above our heads" are subject to
this Law as well as earth. I've attempted to keep up with the latest
cosmological theories and the cosmologists are not as certain of the
position expressed in this poem as Jacobsen is.
*Note: *I didn't initially read Dag Solstad's comments but went straight
to the above three poems referenced in
http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/390357.html
I read Solstad's comments afterward but they don't shed much light on the
individual poems.
Lawrence
On 8/29/2017 2:47 PM, T Fjeld wrote:
In the review "Rolf Jacobsen -- a sarcastic and bitter poet"
(Klassekampen, 1979) acclaimed and still living author Dag Solstad comments
on a then-recent collection of poetry by Jacobsen, _Think About Something
Else_ (Tenk på noe annet).
Jacobsen was at the time recognised as one of his country's foremost
voices of modernist poetry, a position he had held ever since his first
ground-breaking collection appeared in the 1933. _Earth and Iron_ (Jord og
jern) "brought technology into Norwegian literature," the encyclopaedia SNL
comments (https://snl.no/Rolf_Jacobsen).(*) He had a crucial blot on his
reputation, however: as a newspaper editor he had supported the German
occupation, after having joined the national-socialist Quisling party
National Front in 1940. For this he was sentenced to three and a half years
of hard labour in 1945 and barred from membership in the Author's Guild
until 1953.
In Solstad's review (don't forget that the Nazis murdered communists, and
Solstad was a card-carrying member of the Maoist AKP party at this time)
Jacobsen's early futurist poems, supplemented as they were by verse that
hailed nature and a simple life, are contrasted with the voice of the most
recent collection, thus:
"As in all his recent poetry, Rolf Jacobsen describes excessive Western
society and its pursuit of the wind: Western excessive society's desire for
gold and profit. The Western World is unnatural, evil, and noisy. And it is
so powerful that it has subdued the earth and its nature, and destroyed it."
Jacobsen "despises" modern civilization, writes Solstad; he [Jacobsen,
that is] is a "grumpy misanthropist." Finally, it is Jacobsen's lack of
faith in humanity that serves as the cause of what it is that distinguishes
Jacobsen's analysis of our current predicament from Solstad's:
"It is something about his _attitude_ that's unbearable; not the fact that
he is disappointed, disillusioned and bitter. ... He observes our planet's
life with a sarcastic, sly grin that may have as its basis a tragic
attitude, but which also gives voice to a cold contempt for the tiny human
creep who lives his life in stupidity, without a coherent meaning that can
bring together his fragmentary existence and his bleak destiny."
So much for Solstad and his Jacobsen. What remains, as one poet observed,
is the human being and what he consumes to stay alive.
(*)In Norway Jacobsen is mostly known for poetry from his oft anthologised
collection _Secret Life_ (Hemmelig liv, 1954). Note, for instance, this
verse from Secret Life, translated by Roger Greenwald:
“Landscape with Steam Shovels”:
*De spiser av skogene mine.
Seks gravemaskiner kom og spiste av skogene mine. Gud hjelpe meg for en
skapning på dem. Hoder uten øyne og øynene i baken.*
*They’re eating up my woods.
Six steam shovels came and started eating up my woods. God help me! what
creatures they are. Heads without eyes and eyes in their rumps.*
Three more Jacobsen poems translated by Greenwald into English here:
http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/390357.html
Mvh. / Yours sincerely,
Torgeir Fjeld, PhD
http://torgeirfjeld.com/
--
