Poetry and the Senses

Abstract

Y. A.: Giambattista Vico points out that the degeneration of the senses began to take place with the birth of reason in ancient Greece. This degeneration is further accelerated with the rise of modern science and its cultural logic. We have been continuingly losing the sensibility of our ancestors, who could imagine a universe in a grain of sand, who could respond the language of nature, for whom everything was intelligible in terms of Jove. But now everything is intelligible merely in terms of political, economic, psychological and linguistic units; our sensibility is divided into so many units. Do you not think it is the degeneration of our senses? [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] S. S.: It seems to be part of the heritage of Platonism that we set up the senses in opposition to the reason, and Vico turns this philosophical position into a kind of [hypothetical] historical fact. At the same time, there is undoubtedly some truth in the idea that rationality spares us a great deal of impulsive action [and fear!] and new tools mediate our relation to the sensual world-but do our senses degenerate in consequence? How would we know? I'm not sure that we have lost the sensibility of imagining a universe in a grain of sand-after all, you have pictured the universe in a grain of sand in your question and this seems to me to be more a matter of using the imagination than knowing well the actuality of a sand grain. I am sure I don't find the world intelligible, as you suggest, according to discrete or according to scientific method. Intelligibility strikes me as an ongoing synthesis in which the senses have a primary role. Perhaps we in contemporary Western societies do not see nature as a language-that is, as organized at a coherent, sacred, level of signification-but certainly most of us respond to nature-even at the most rudimentary level, with a kind of biophilia. Living things call out to other living things. Y. A.: In art, the degeneration of senses is clearly visible. Our heroes (even though whether they can be called heroes or not is debatable) like Gregor Samsa, Willy Lowman and the like in modernist literature, unlike Jove, Prometheus and Achilles (possessed with enormous vitality and power) are reduced to mere social, political, economic and psychological units. In a context where our poets are reduced to socio-cultural linguistic units, their intimacy with the natural world is replaced by their relationship with the machine. Their 'tactile senses' neither smell/touch the 'clay' nor communicate with the Zove. In a culture, as you pointed out in your book Poetry and the Fate of the Senses, in which the entire spheres of sense experiences are gone and even their names will be soon gone, what changes took place and what not in our senses when we traveled from Zove through Prometheus down to Willy Lowman? Where do you locate the roots for the ill-fate of our senses? S. S.: I would think that protagonists who are victims of absurdity, mechanization, or anomie, are of interest to us because they remain the exception and call for our sympathy-a sympathy that continues to exist in the world of literature, of readers and writers, regardless of those economic forces, or state powers, or social demands for conformity that are wreaking havoc upon such characters. Although certain kinds of speed are synonymous with ecstasy, and could in fact be considered to be heightened instances of sense experience, I was concerned in the conclusion of my book with the promulgation of speed for its sake. And I was worried more deeply about the related practice of reducing natural phenomena to objects or things for use only. I saw these problems as a pervasive development and not located in one milieu more than others. Nor do I consider our sensibility to be degenerated. Imagining the tragedy of Willy Loman seems to me to be a more complex and interesting task than picturing Jove, who, after all, reciprocally represents those forces of nature that are his attributes. …