Good and Evil
W.B. Yeats gathered together some fragmentary poems from Blake’s notebooks for the Modern Library edition of William Blake’s poetry, the same edition that I feel relatively sure is the primary source for most of the early Modern poets’ reading of Blake. It’s a cheap little book, quite gorgeous and pocket sized. I have no doubt that it was found in the pockets of many poets for years to come, including the Beats. What seems really odd to me, is that Yeats felt that these poems were best classified in a section he titled “Ideas of Good and Evil.” It sets the stage for a sort of cascade of misreading, because close reading of most of Blake’s catalogue shows that he felt these binaries were dangerous and non-productive.
To a large extent, that’s what Blake’s work The Marriage of Heaven and Hell is all about. The perception of what constitutes a heaven, or a hell, is dependent largely on a person’s point of view. But it seems to be a fundamental human characteristic to itemize these things and set them apart in lists, particularly the bad things. It’s an attempt to create a balance sheet for spiritual economics. Blake’s point was that the world is made up of both, and perception depends on who is making the list. The same thing applies to cultural economics.
Well she likes Dinosaur Jr. but she can't tell you whyThese forces are in place in Walker Evan’s work. He became list obsessive; but he wasn’t the first. I found an interesting congruence in Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe
She says if you like country music, man, you deserve to die
She's got that whacked-out hair, got them second-hand clothes
She's got an itemized list of everything she loathes.
Well she’s so political, so sophisticated
She will swear in court that everything is overrated“Idiot’s Delight” — Bottle Rockets, Brooklyn Side
Crusoe also made lists. The popularity since then hasn't abated. List generated about 117 million hits when I last checked. I remember last semester being quite frustrated when asked to make up a list of pros and cons as a decision making strategy. My brain isn’t really wired that way. I make lists quite often, but never as an oppositional strategy. I suspect though, this method of weighing oppositions is the dominant mode. In making sense of his presence on the island, Crusoe made this list:
Evil | Good | |
| I am cast upon a horrible desolate Island, void of all hope of recovery. | But I am alive, and not drown'd as all my Ship's Company was. | |
| I am singl'd out and separated, as it were, from all the World to be miserable. | But I am singl'd out too from all the Ships Crew to be spar'd from Death; and he that miraculously sav'd me from Death, can deliver me from this condition. | |
| I am divided from Mankind, a Solitare, one banish'd from humane Society. | But I am not starv'd and perishing on a barren Place, affording no Sustenance. | |
| I have not Clothes to cover me. | But I am in a hot Climate, where if I had Clothes I could hardly wear them. | |
| I am without any Defence or Means to resist any Violence of Man or Beast. | But I am cast on an Island, where I see no wild Beasts to hurt me, as I saw on the Coast of Africa. And what if I had been Shipwreck'd there? | |
| I have no Soul to speak to, or relieve me. | But God wonderfully sent the ship in near enough to the Shore, that I have gotten out so many necessary things as will supply my Wants, or enable me to Supply my Self even as long as I live. | |
Upon the whole, here was an undoubted Testimony, that there was scarce any Condition in the World so miserable, but there was something Negativ or something Positiv to be thankful for in it; and let stand this Direction from the Experience of the most miserable of all Conditions in this World, that we may always find in it something to comfort our selves from, and set in the Description of Good and Evil, on the Credit side of the Accompt.
Evans lacks all of Crusoe’s optimism. He exchanged “itemized lists of everything he loathes” with James Agee in the mid-thirties. But before that, he was making up lists of things, and photographing lists as well. Was it a decision making strategy? I don’t think so. I think it was a means of testimony, as Crusoe put it, to his position in time. The lists were not made public. Evans made good on his promise to keep his “inner thoughts” private, though it seems that contempt was one of his guiding voices.
However, underneath Evans' lists also seem like Crusoe’s ledger, though purely an inventory of external, rather than internal states. I feel myself a bit torn, perhaps a bit closer to Crusoe than Evans in this respect. I think that there has been an often unspoken optimism which holds society together, an optimism that is ignored by choice by many Modernist voices.
When shaped into quasi-narratives, list poems are an interesting thing. That’s on tap for later on today.
