Video Meliora, proboque; Deteriora sequor

Is There Virtue in the Obscure?

How much of reading or writing poetry is a desire towards mindlessness? That last post prompted a revisit of Walker Percy's nonfiction work The Message in the Bottle. Percy, who could probably fairly be called a Thomist, writes that "likeness and difference are canons of discursive thought, but analogy, the mode of poetic knowing, is also cognitive" (uh, what he said):

One is aware of skirting the abyss as soon as one begins to repose virtue in the obscure.

Once we eliminate the logical approximation, the univocal figure, as unpoetic and uncreative of meaning - is it not then simply an affair of trotting out words and images more or less at random in the hope of arriving at an obscure, hence efficacious, analogy? and the more haphazard the better, since mindfulness, we seem to be saying, is of its very nature self-defeating? Such in fact is the credo
of the surrealists...If, as so many modern poets appear to do, one simply shuffles words together, words plucked form as diversified contexts as possible, one will get some splendid effects. Words are potent agents and the sparks are bound to fly. But it is a losing game. For there is missing that essential element of the meaning situation, the authority and intention of the Namer....Once the good faith of the Namer is so much as called into question, the jig is up. There is no celebration or hope of celebration of a thing beheld in common. One is only trafficking in the stored-up energies of words, hard won by meaningful usage.

It is a pastime, this rolling out of pretty marbles of word-things to see one catch and reflect the fire of another, a pleasant enough game but one which must eventually go stale.

I've written on my blog how the mundane can become fascinating if it's read by someone generations hence. I read gape-jawed of accounts of farm life in the 1800s which, to farmers of the 1800s, would presumably be jaw-gapingly banal. Percy says with respect to the power of words:

A word, by the very fact of its having been lost to common usage or by its having undergone a change in meaning, is apt to acquire thereby an unmerited potency.