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Mar. 21st, 2005 11:20 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
proximoceptionBut of course Clockwork's argument is that you can't remake people. You can control them externally to some extent, you can drive them mad, kill them. But deep change is impossible because we don't understand ourselves well enough; and, were it found possible, it would be undesireable (compared to imprisonment, say) because it maims the human mystery in the subject, at a level comparable to the worst they could have done to the human mystery in their victims. "Every Harlot was a Virgin once/Nor shalt thou ever change Kate into Nan." Burgess makes an effort to see as Kates the rapists who made a wreck of his life. And perhaps he joins Blake in recognizing an innocence in evil itself. "The Son of Morn in weary Night's decline."
Obviously I'm having trouble rationalizing the humanist outlook lately but the alternatives seem to me to make far less sense. One of Wordsworth's best earlier poems, The Old Cumberland Beggar, can't quite find a basis for finding individual human life valuable as such either, but I think it means to. The beggar in question is to be kept out of the workhouse because he binds the community together by awakening sympathy and charitable urges. A bit like Wordsworth's Nature of later poems, he's an unwitting pedagogue. I think Wordsworth argues his social value so pressingly because he doesn't know how to argue his real belief, or anyway real wish: that there's value in and to itself for this infinitely reduced life. Or maybe he's being subtle and showing it, through the man's actions in the awesome opening and closing passages. And the sympathy business...maybe the point there is that the cottagers he passes are awakened out of mere social values and into human ones. Still, I think the poem at least wavers. Resolution and Independence, his famous masterpiece of a few years on, has Wordsworth finding--and conveying--an ultimate consolation in how much remains in the life of another barely subsisting ancient man. But what's left of the earlier man, presumably older still, is perhaps mere motion and sensation and "animal tranquility".
Our sense of what's good in us that isn't itself us, or at any rate that might be outlived by our bodies, seems like a kind of social value, to me; or at any rate seems similarly arbitrary, next to the deeper value, the question of the existence of a deeper value. Political reforms, joys of sport and art, sexual success are all just fuel for a preexisting flame. Or at any rate a "prior" flame, as many nowadays hold that social values light it, that narcissism (or what you will) is taught.
This one is falling through my fingers again. Kafka: "There are questions we could never get over if we were not delivered from them by the operation of nature."
Obviously I'm having trouble rationalizing the humanist outlook lately but the alternatives seem to me to make far less sense. One of Wordsworth's best earlier poems, The Old Cumberland Beggar, can't quite find a basis for finding individual human life valuable as such either, but I think it means to. The beggar in question is to be kept out of the workhouse because he binds the community together by awakening sympathy and charitable urges. A bit like Wordsworth's Nature of later poems, he's an unwitting pedagogue. I think Wordsworth argues his social value so pressingly because he doesn't know how to argue his real belief, or anyway real wish: that there's value in and to itself for this infinitely reduced life. Or maybe he's being subtle and showing it, through the man's actions in the awesome opening and closing passages. And the sympathy business...maybe the point there is that the cottagers he passes are awakened out of mere social values and into human ones. Still, I think the poem at least wavers. Resolution and Independence, his famous masterpiece of a few years on, has Wordsworth finding--and conveying--an ultimate consolation in how much remains in the life of another barely subsisting ancient man. But what's left of the earlier man, presumably older still, is perhaps mere motion and sensation and "animal tranquility".
Our sense of what's good in us that isn't itself us, or at any rate that might be outlived by our bodies, seems like a kind of social value, to me; or at any rate seems similarly arbitrary, next to the deeper value, the question of the existence of a deeper value. Political reforms, joys of sport and art, sexual success are all just fuel for a preexisting flame. Or at any rate a "prior" flame, as many nowadays hold that social values light it, that narcissism (or what you will) is taught.
This one is falling through my fingers again. Kafka: "There are questions we could never get over if we were not delivered from them by the operation of nature."
