Three Philosophical Poets: Lucretius (pt. 1)

I finally managed to sit down and start reading George Santayana's  Three Philosophical Poets. I must confess I find it quite dense, and am only slowly making headway in my navigation of his ideas on Lucretius. In the opening statements, Lucretius is found casting his hands and eyes towards the heavens, exclaiming, "The All is One!" Here, he has stumbled upon something. In some regards, this seems to be a cry of defiance to the god or gods of the ancient mythologies. In others, it seems a question,

it is to ask how things hang together, and to assume that they do hang together in one way or another.

Lucretius has hit upon the idea that all things, in some manner or fashion, fit together. He has assumed a commonality, a unity, an order, to nature. An obvious part of nature is the cyclical pathway it follows, and its constant movement towards a greater, more fit being or object or thing. Santayana writes,


when they vanish, nothingness does not succeed; other things arise in their stead. Nature remains always young and whole in spite of death at work everywhere; and what takes the place of what continually disappears is often remarkably like it in character. Universal instability is not incompatible with a great monotony in things; so that while Heraclitus lamented that everything was in flux, Ecclesiastes, who was also entirely convinced of that truth, could lament that there was nothing new under the sun.

It seems that in some regards, these early poets and philosophers were deconstructionist, though only in some regards. They sensed a world where, though new things might sprout up, a shadow or remembrance or recollection of the old, the previous, remains.

Today I was thinking about how, ultimately, we repeat the same mistakes of previous generations over and over and over again. I think what catalyzed these questions was the fact that I had just finished watching the movie trailer for Cloud Atlas. I plan to see it this Friday and remain assured that I may write more of it over the weekend, seeing as I am anticipating an encounter with Stevens as I watch it. Anyways, history...after I set off on this tangent, I recalled a clip from a movie that I saw in high school, which was also reference my sophomore year of college in my Bible as Lit. course. The movie is Waking Life, and in it the characters discuss a novel I read a year ago: Philip K. Dick's Flow My Tears the Policeman Said. Shortly after writing it, Dick goes to a party where he meets people who share the names of his characters, who share the relations of those characters, and who seem real despite the fact that for him, at least initially, they were merely members in his fiction novel. Startled by this realization, he leaves the party, encounters a man whose car is out of gas, and helps this man. He again becomes starkly aware of the fact that this, too, is part of his novel.

Dick then makes his way to a priest, and tells him of his experience. The priest tells him everything is from the book of Acts. Dick reads it and concurs. He develops this idea that we are frozen in time, merely reliving the same events over and over and over again until Christ's return. Much of this resonates with the Gnostic view that the demiurge created time as an illusion to convince us that the return of Jesus is a ways off, despite the fact that it will happen very soon.

What this has to do with Lucretius is the fact that "what takes the place of what continually disappears is often remarkably like it in character." In many regards this mirror the happenings in Solaris; the beings that arise out of Solaris itself are striking resemblances to the actual thing, though not the thing itself. How can this be if they are derived from the idea of something rather than the reality itself? How is it possible for a physical mimicry, mimesis, to take place when what it mimics is an idea rather than a physical reality? Here we enter again into Stevens's constant conflict between the imagined and real, but before we go there I must say that this hearkens to a holiday only shortly passed. November 5th. Remember, remember, the 5th of November...This day has become a holiday thanks to the popular graphic novel, and now popular movie, "V" for Vendetta where a sole revolutionary transforms the political state of London from tyranny to freedom with his belief that, though you might kill him, "You can't kill an idea." Is it not the same Santayana's analysis of Lucretius or Solaris or, as we will later see, Stevens? The first two we can concede, the last will come in due time.

Given this fact though, we see the plausibility of a physical manifestation of remembered and recalled lovers in Solaris. We see the probability of a figure emerging, "though the place there-of knows them no more" (according to Santayana), because it is not their physical form that need survive, only the idea of them. This is how we come upon the advancement of progression of ideas. They are shared and passed on and reconsidered and reevaluated and shaped and transformed by societies and cultures and thinkers. And this, this, is how we come upon the greatest idea, according to Santayana, that humanity has ever hit upon. We have done so, vicariously, through Lucretius...


It is that all we observe about us, and ourselves also, may be so many passing forms of a permanent substance. This substance, while remaining the same in quantity and in inward quality, is constantly redistributed; in its redistribution it forms those aggregates which we call things, and which we find constantly disappearing and reappearing. All things are dust, and to dust they return; a dust, however, eternally fertile, and destined to fall perpetually into new, and doubtless beautiful, forms. This notion of substance lends a much greater unity to the outspread world; it persuades us that all things pass into one another, and have a common ground from which they spring successively, and to which they return.

IF "all things pass into one another", we have hit upon this idea of some kind of spirit or soul or life-force that persists through time and space. It takes different forms and different shapes but, if we again operate from a perspective that deconstructs, we are but dust and ash. What lives on? It is the idea. Cloud Atlas, an interesting movie-though falling short of my expectations-dealt with the idea of a continuity of spirit in a somewhat interesting way. It seemed to suggest that the complexity of a man, the good, the bad, the beautiful, the sublime, the physical, the spiritual, the sin, the apathy, all passed on, but manifested in different ways at different times in varying fashions and places. This is where we hit upon Stevens. I do not think Stevens rejects any one view or, to simplify, either imagination or reason, reality or surreal. Instead, I think he sees people as green, rational and reasoning, as blue, imaginative, as red, reality, as white, representing death in some cases, and new life, or simply life itself in other cases. We do not merely contain rationale or creativity, but instead play with each of these, exist in an imbalance of them, and struggle to understand how our particular set of "colors" informs our understanding, interaction with, perception of and, ultimately, materialized experience of the world. A man does good and a man sins. Humanity continues to do good and to sin, and every generation claims their sins as far more depraved than those of the previous generations, if not for pride's sake, for ignorance's sake, for we are little different than them, save for technological advancement. This is not to reduce or deconstruct humanity to the point of ambiguity and insignificance, but to understand the shared spirit and life of humanity. Santayana continues:


Here was a much richer theme for the poet and philosopher, who was launched upon the discovery of the ground and secret causes of this gay or melancholy flux. The understanding that enabled him to discover these causes did for the European what no Indian mystic, what no despiser of understanding anywhere, suffers himself to do; namely, to dominate, foretell, and transform this changing show with a virile, practical intelligence. The man who discovers the secret springs of appearances opens to contemplation a second positive world, the workshop and busy depths of nature, where a prodigious mechanism is continually supporting our life, and making ready for it from afar by the most exquisite adjustments. The march of this mechanism, while it produces life and often fosters it, yet as often makes it difficult and condemns it to extinction. This truth, which the conception of natural substance first makes intelligible, justifies the elegies which the poets of illusion and disillusion have always written upon human things. It is a truth with a melancholy side; but being a truth, it satisfies and exalts the rational mind, that craves truth as truth, whether it be sad or comforting, and wishes to pursue a possible, not an impossible, happiness.

I think Santayana is pointing out an interesting idea. To focus upon the material, nature itself as it specifically pertains to Lucretius, brings about a level of "intelligence" and scientifically encounters life in new and profound ways, at the same time "makes it difficult and condemn it to extinction." We have this thing called matter, and matter composes physical nature. But what of human nature? What of the nature of God? From what I can gather, science has successfully reproduced all things, save for the human soul, life itself. This material understanding, this great awakening in which we have reduced all things to a consistent matter, atoms,  all at once unifies all things. We are all dust. However, it only accounts for one half of the equation, and again we experience the Stevensian duplicity of reality and imagination. I hold that these are separate, and that their separateness is a necessary idea. Though language limits these to one being more "real" than the other, I would contend that neither intends to force fictitiousness upon the other. It is Picasso's painting of Gertrude Stein, more real than the "actual" Gertrude Stein. Again, is this truly, truly, the case? The point is not in the physical matter of Gertrude Stein, whether paint on canvas or flesh on bone, but instead, the idea of Gertrude Stein. However, it is always important to note that there was a physical, material Gertrude Stein, and to some regard is a material Gertrude Stein immortalized in the painting by Pablo Picasso. In this material painting we also have an idea of Gertrude Stein, but the idea of her transcends that image. People act and think in ways that she did, people are influenced by the ideas that manifest in her writings. But the words, the paint, they are not the thing itself. They are merely physical pieces pointing to the true nature, the true "thing".

I think I have said enough for now. I would encourage everyone to take some time with Santayana, as it is highly probable that my interpretations of his writings are inconsistent or misrepresented. I apologize for the length of this post, as well as the likely repetitiveness of it. I think I am in over my head, but I don't think Sexson would expect anything else.