Bullies by Proxy

In the darker moments of the soul, and I know many like me have felt the same, I am overcome with pessimism motivated by the apparent tolerance, advocacy even, of the worst form of oppressive power. People seem drawn to power hungry leaders who, if one is at all observant, clearly have no interest in the people over whom they rule, but are simply anxious, grasping, selfish souls who strive to overcome their own desperate feelings of inadequacy by controlling others and everything in their possible purview. Our own Prime Minister, for example. One need not be particularly astute in political terms to understand that he would do anything to gain and hold on to power for the sole purpose of aggrandizing his warped and childlike ego which is profoundly weak because the man has no soul and no humanity. And thus he surrounds himself with spiritually small and intellectually miniscule men who, like himself, have not the empathy to reach out to others. They cannot fight for the vulnerable or console the down-trodden because they are themselves so desperately weak and wounded that they rail against the defenseless or those at risk as though they might raise themselves up to the level of powerful ‘MEN,’ when it really just demonstrates their pathetic limitations. Real human, and humane, strength is demonstrated not by our ability for bluster and bullying, but by our ability to put our own egos aside and take ourselves down to the level of the weak and vulnerable and raise them up.  

And yet angry and aggressive people, who feel that they are superior to others, or secretly suspect that they aren’t even equal to the rest, seem to like to have bullies for their representatives because they are ersatz images of themselves. Thus average conservative voters can be bullies by proxy. This political fact troubles and depresses me more than any other.

Oh, that the free would stamp the impious name

Of KING into the dust! or write it there,

So that this blot upon the page of fame

Were as a serpent’s path, which the light air

Erases, and the flat sands close behind!

 

               - Shelley

Shelley and the power of poetry

In the past generation a major revaluation of Percy Shelley has been taking place. There have traditionally been two public images of Shelley: one was of a selfish rouge, an atheist with little or no regard for others; and the other image was of an ethereal, fairy like, asexual, sprite. Slowly there has been emerging a more life-like picture of a genuine flesh and blood creature with all the emotions and feelings of a man of his age. One important part of the revaluation of Shelley has been that of his ideas of poetry. Newer readings of Shelley great essay A Defence of Poetry have concentrated on the ambiguous and ambivalent attitude toward poetry that Shelley displays there.

John Hodgson, in his book, Coleridge, Shelley and Transcendental Inquiry, contends that far from having a positive, transcendental view of poetry, Shelley harboured deep-seated negative view of poetry’s potential. Without going into the details of Hodgson’s long and turgid arguments, I say that what is wrong with Hodgson’s view, and most academic notions about poetry and art, is that he is unable to view Shelley’s work with the eyes of a poet. Hodgson makes far too many demands concerning logical consistency and fails to understand that Shelley possesses ambivalent views of poetry because, as a great artist, he could not do otherwise. Shelley’s essay, for all of its remarkable insight, must express an underlying ambivalence because the project of art is one that constantly moves from doubt to transcendence. In his brighter moments Shelley, like most artists, is certain of the transcendence of poetry and insists that a poet is someone who “must put himself in the place of another and of many other; the pains and pleasures of his species must become his own. The great instrument of moral good is the imagination; and poetry administers to the effect by acting upon the cause. Poetry enlarges the circumference of the imagination by replenishing it with thoughts of every new delight, which have the power of attracting and assimilation to their own nature all other thoughts and which form new intervals and interstices whose void forever craves fresh food. Poetry strengthens that faculty which is the organ of the moral nature of man in the same manner as exercise strengthens a limb.”

But this is the optimistic side of the great artist speaking: the youthful sprite who is able to see the universe in a grain of sand. But the pendulum of an artist like Shelley must swing in both extremes if he is to be the creative force that he is. Thus in the same essay Shelley can express this much darker and pessimistic view of the poet’s life: “a poet is a nightingale, who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds; his auditors are as men entranced by the melody of an unseen musician, who feel that they are moved and softened, yet know not whence or why.”

The ground on which great artists must stand is never secure, it shakes and moves; at one moment it crumbles into an abyss of blackness and then in the next moment it rises up to God. Look for this ambivalence in the great artists you admire and it will enrich their work while it enriches you.