TR & Tanner on Real reality // the marx connection

[alice wellintown]

The Romantic strain, and, as Tanner admonishes, one can drown in the
subject of Hawthorne and Romance, in American Literature is quite
evident in its nature writings and in the american renaissance utopian
outcrops that Hawthorne, who is confused with Melville, a truly happy
and playful soul who would not swing in Emerson's halter under his
rainbow, but sad Nate was a man who was rather serious and grave and
searching for America's blackness never to feel as Melville did after
his wicked book, spotless as a lamb, well...Hawthorne's BR, as Tanner,
so clever is Tanner, points out, has much of romance and much of the
puritan legacy, a soul in every stone. A Puritan or a Romantic, after
one trip to Bryant's Central Park, where the exposed history of the
rocks is there speaking, saying, I am alive, I am not as solid nor as
fixed as the enlightenment would fix me in there formulas and phrases.
Reminds me that King, friend of Henry Adams, geologist, is said to
have moved in some romantic circles in the black community around
central park.



It is the preterite condition, the position of the unfortunate masses
that provides us our defintion of labor and that excludes play and
contructs walls seperating play from labor or work. Work and Play are
not so seperate, as Dewey, our great pragmatist and educational
theorist, following Aristotle noted some time ago. Play and Work
involve ends. All activities aim at some good. Both involve materials.
And both involve processes. But in Play, the activity is its own end.
This makes it a happy activity. For the greatest good is happiness and
happiness is an activity of the soul in accord with moral and
intellectual virtue. Whistle while you work, Hitler is a jerk...  And,
although both Play and Work may include considerable planning and
objectives that extend far into the future, Work usually involves a
longer course of activity (tell that to fans of the gentelman's game
or Cricket) with a greater demand for continuous attention.  Play and
Work and Art too,  involve emotions, imagination, and skill. The
distinction becomes more marked, so work and play and art are set in
binary or agon when preterite condition, when the masses are most
oppressed. Dewey, though essentially a pragmatic Aristotelian,
maintained his Hegalian dialectic and so rejected rigid distinctions.

A poem by a working man about the work he has learned from his father
and his father's father.
Seamus Heaney  (1939-)


Digging

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests; as snug as a gun.

Under my window a clean rasping sound
When the spade sinks into gravelly ground:
My father, digging. I look down

Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds
Bends low, comes up twenty years away
Stooping in rhythm through potato drills
Where he was digging.

The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft
Against the inside knee was levered firmly.
He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep
To scatter new potatoes that we picked
Loving their cool hardness in our hands.

By God, the old man could handle a spade,
Just like his old man.

My grandfather could cut more turf in a day
Than any other man on Toner's bog.
Once I carried him milk in a bottle
Corked sloppily with paper. He straightened up
To drink it, then fell to right away
Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods
Over his shoulder, digging down and down
For the good turf. Digging.

The cold smell of potato mold, the squelch and slap
Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge
Through living roots awaken in my head.
But I've no spade to follow men like them.

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I'll dig with it.


- from Death of a Naturalist (1966)




On Fri, Aug 12, 2011 at 1:53 AM, Michael Bailey
<michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com> wrote:
> nobody even mentioned the Blithedale Romance in my presence before, or
> if they did I wasn't listening - Hawthorne is all about the scarlet
> letter and the 7 gables - found a copy of the book you mention, Alice,
> in a nearby library via worldcat, will pick that up posthaste
>
> so now let's see, it's all about work
> - was poking around on marxists.org, that old Marx has a 50 volume
> collected works that they recommend which was compiled and published
> by a joint effort of a CCCP, London and New York publishing concern
> betwixt 1975 and 2000
> http://marxists.org/archive/marx/works/cw/index.htm
>
> sure was prolific.  I admire that.
> (would also like to read the collected works of Rudolf Steiner sometime)
>
> So they urge you to have your library purchase the set, or buy a CD
> for $1000 that has them all
>
> Meanwhile, they've already transcribed the first 10 volumes on the
> website (is that legal?)
>
> anyway, old Marx, right - has this theory of surplus value, which is
> where the hoity toity make the hoi polloi work for less pay than the
> value of what they produce
>
> it's really not so hard to imagine things working a different way.  a
> lot of things about the above system "bite the weenie"
>
> but I don't really get what he intended to happen instead (naturally,
> I have plenty of ideas for a replacement system, myself) or why so
> many peasants had to be killed - weren't they the ones this was
> supposed to help?
>
> obviously a major malfunction
>
> Anyway, there is this other mysterious entity called "base and
> superstructure" which means that he was able to discern the most
> important thing and show how everything else flowed from, or grew
> upon, that, right?
>
> Somebody - maybe Bellow? - refers in several places to "book 3 of
> Capital" to reading which there was some cachet attached - only one
> reason why it's evidently worth some study, though.  A lot of people
> acted on that vision and did cool things they would not otherwise have
> done (like acid...???)
>
>  Also there was this guy, Theodore W Allen, who wrote about the
> invention of the white race: apparently Irish were not white for a
> long time.
>
> But interestingly, a search on "base and superstructure" among other
> things yields a bunch of science fiction crit...
> we have Gnostic criticism of Pynchon and Lacanian, I suppose there is
> a lot of Marxist critique also?
>
> anyway, it's all about the work.  maybe work is the base, and play is
> the superstructure?
>
> or, work is the play, and bass is the subwoofer
>