#shc20: Reverence & Revelry from the Inside with Mice

In my previous post, I looked at the terms reverence and revelry from the outside, starting with standard definitions and then measuring how they interact with their respective environments. These are traditional analytical approaches to understanding things in our world: pare down the thing to its essentials (a definition) and measure how it interacts with its environment. In this case, I found some definitions on the Internet from reliable, authoritative sources, including the Oxford English Dictionary, and I used a dataset from Google Books and Google's NGram tool to measure the rate of usage of each term from 1800 to 2000 and compared those rates to each other and to a couple of other benchmark terms.

I learned a little that I did not already know about reverence and revelry, and I created some genuinely new knowledge, perhaps some knowledge that no one else has ever brought to light about these two terms together and how they have behaved over the past two centuries as they traced their own, unique trajectories through English letters. This knowledge is useful in a modest way, but I'm not sure it illuminates much. It's a small knowledge.

This little knowledge also leaves me with the feeling that perhaps reverence and revelry have become irrelevant to 21st century writers of English. They are not concepts that readily come to mind in the everyday commerce and conversation of writers. There seems to be little room in books about business, technology, and science — or even in books about art and philosophy and religion — for reverence and revelry.

But perhaps I'm not looking correctly.

I've become aware over the past few years of Edgar Morin's call for a different way of exploring and thinking about our world — he calls it complexity thought — and I think that it might be the right way, or at least, a more illuminating way to think about reverence and revelry. I could start with Morin's own writings — and I will get to those — but I prefer to start with a Billy Collins poem, "Introduction to Poetry". After all, I am an English instructor and still teach writing and literature. (And yes, I'm aware that American English requires that I put the period inside the concluding quotation marks in a sentence, but I much prefer the continental style which puts the period outside the quote unless it is actually a part of the quote. The quotation marks go around the title of the poem, and that title has no period in it; thus, the period belongs to the entire sentence and not to the title alone. That makes more sense to me. Now — should I put a period after this concluding parenthesis?)

Sorry for the digression. To the poem:

Introduction to Poetry

BY BILLY COLLINS

I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide

or press an ear against its hive.

I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,

or walk inside the poem’s room
and feel the walls for a light switch.

I want them to waterski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author’s name on the shore.

But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.

They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.

There's Morin's method in a nutshell: "Drop a mouse into a poem and watch him probe his way out". Define the poem from the inside out, not from the outside in. Ally yourself with the mouse, and let your method of analysis emerge as you follow the mouse toward meaning. Do not start with a meaning and method and then pare the mouse down until he fits that meaning and that method. Don't work from the outside in. In a 1956 interview in The Paris Review, William Faulkner says of his own method for writing Nobel-quality novels: “It begins with a character, usually, and once he stands up on his feet and begins to move, all I can do is trot along behind him with a paper and pencil trying to keep up long enough to put down what he says and does.” I do not know if Morin read Faulkner, but they seem to be saying much the same thing, at least to my mind. The observer, whether poet or scientist, must position themselves in the middle of things and record as much as possible, working outward toward meaning. Bruno Latour seems to take the same approach in his influential actor network theory of sociological research. These are all bright fellows, and I'm inclined to follow their advice.

Fortunately, Morin says more about his method. He wrote a six-volume work collectively titled La Méthode (not all of which has been translated into English) and the shorter book On Complexity which was my introduction to his thought about systems and complexity and is available in English. And others, notably for me Michel Alhadeff-Jones, provide analyses in English of Morin's French writings. Regrettably, my high school and college French is not commensurate to the task of reading Morin's untranslated work.

So let's drop two mice — reverence and revelry — into a maze and watch them probe their way out.