-----
The 140-character bar of Twitter.com might be the haiku of a post-modern generation. The site allows people a very small space to express what they are doing, feeling, expecting, hoping, or dreading. Others read these life-captions and respond with their own. The task has gone from merely ranting about the line to check out at Target to expressing the emotions of a particularly complex moment. I once used my allotted space to say, “If orange/guitar string/cilantro/sandpaper were a mood, that'd be the one of today. Vibrant but strangely conflicted.” Twitter tells me I posted this at 1:39 PM on September 15. At that point, I am certain I knew little or nothing of either Freud’s omnipotence of thought or of Ruth Benedict or Edward Sapir. I did know, however, that I felt “orange/guitar string…” and I knew that a friend of mine responded that she knew exactly what I meant.
Sigmund Freud argues in Totem and Taboo that primitive people and modern neurotics share the omnipotence of thought. That is, these people believe that the inner workings of their psychic lives will change the world around them. “Omnipotence of thought [is] the unshaken confidence in the capacity to dominate the world and the inaccessibility to the obvious facts which could enlighten man as to his real place in the world” (Freud 116-7). This is drawn from the animistic traditions of primitive people and from the obsessive-compulsive tendencies of neurotics. Believers in animism could use incantations to create order and safety in the world through manipulation of spirits. Neurotics might associate unrelated items, phrases, or actions to forewarn of danger or to fashion a psychic haven for themselves. Freud goes on to relate this thought process to the developmental stages of sexuality. He says that the second phase of sexual development, out of which people never fully ascend, is called narcism. Narcism is the stage in which “sexual impulses which formerly were separate, have already formed into a unit and have also found an object; but this object is not external and foreign to the individual, but is his own ego” (Freud 116). Thus, sex will always be, at its core, about gratifying the ego. According to Freud, the world should follow this same pattern for the primitive or neurotic individual. Sexuality and the mind should shape the universe in a way that gratifies the ego. Freud concedes that in society at large this is not the case; only in art has omnipotence of thought been retained in modernity. The artist conceives of something and then creates it in order to satisfy his own ego and, “thanks to artistic illusion, calls forth effects as if it were something real” (Freud 118).
The poet shapes the universe through language. Ruth Benedict and Edward Sapir presented opposing ideas on the personality and psychology of cultures. However, they both used poetry as a medium with which to express their anthropological and personal revelations. “Sapir and Benedict found the aesthetic of hardness compelling as a model for the artist’s personality and work. For both, harness combined passion and intellect—represented, that is, an emotional, personal commitment to aesthetic craftsmanship and intellectual striving” (Handler 131). This idea of hardness was really a search for authenticity in an emerging intellectual generation. In fact, T.J. Jackson Lears defines the movement as an “‘anti-modernistic’ reaction against weightlessness—people’s search for ‘reality’ and ‘real experience’ in the past, the primitive, the natural, the exotic” (Handler 129). This poses an interesting parallel to Freud’s understanding of art as the reconnection of modern man with primitive omnipotence of thought.
Furthermore, Ezra Pound, a leading voice of this generation of poets, maintained “sincere expression—considered the essence of Art—depended (in poetry) upon an absolutely original use of language, because the individual’s unique experience could not be conveyed through conventional language, encumbered as it is with dead metaphors and cliché” (Handler 129). The insistence upon originality forced poets to push beyond the restrictions of form, meter, and rhyme, and to create something new. T.E. Hulme commented on the nature of language, saying, it is “a communal thing; that is, it expresses never the exact thing but a compromise—that which is common to you, me and everybody. But each man sees a little differently, and to get out clearly and exactly what he does see, he must have a terrific struggle with language” (qtd. Handler 129). This “struggle” is the desire for omnipotence of though in a different realm. Not only the universe is being manipulated, but also the minds of others are bending to the thoughts of the poet.
When my tweet referred to cilantro and sandpaper, I was trying to do just what Freud said I could and Pound encouraged. I was trying to achieve omnipotence of thought. With one friend, I achieved just that. I pressed for an original expression that could bend the mind of someone to my will and hence gratify my own ego. I never would have termed it so villainously, but I suppose the early 20th century thinkers were heading the same direction I am one hundred years later.
When my tweet referred to cilantro and sandpaper, I was trying to do just what Freud said I could and Pound encouraged. I was trying to achieve omnipotence of thought. With one friend, I achieved just that. I pressed for an original expression that could bend the mind of someone to my will and hence gratify my own ego. I never would have termed it so villainously, but I suppose the early 20th century thinkers were heading the same direction I am one hundred years later.
-----
As you can probably tell, somewhere around the end of the final body paragraph/beginning of the closing, I got a call from a friend to go out for the night. I'm afraid the ending was a bit hasty, but it will do. Honors paper long overdue but submitted: Check. Everything else: Pending.
But what a night I had...
T
No comments:
Post a Comment