Why Percy Shelley Irritates Me

For years I have had trouble teaching Percy Shelley's poetry; and his works--unlike those of Keats, Wordsworth, and Blake--wouldn't even come close to being on my desert island list of books. Why? It hit me a few years ago--it's his cowardly atheism. I like a courageous atheist, like James Mill; but cowardly atheists--whether ancient or the more commonly-encountered postmodern variety--give me a pain. There's a glaring contradiction in their worldview: if you don't believe in God, how can you believe in anything? What is the source of consciousness? Blind chance? Mere luck? Shelley irritates me because he's a clever cop-out. Like most smart-ass undergraduates, he adopts a smug skepticism instead of a commitment to a position about which he could be said to have some passion.

Look at the first line of the third verse paragraph of "Mont Blanc": "Some say that gleams of a remoter world / Visit the soul in sleep." Some say? What game are you playing? Grow a pair, and commit yourself to something for once in your life! Don't play with me--say something! Take a stand! Kierkegaard, in Either/Or, says, "I have the courage to doubt everything, but I don't have the courage to affirm anything, to believe anything." That's Shelley in a nutshell--substituting a cagey skepticism for the courage to affirm anything. Make a decision! Say what you think--don't throw out a bunch of half-statements, and expect me to give you my admiration.

Of course you don't say what you think, because if you commit to following where your beliefs lead, you might have to commit to something else--a single woman, a way of life, a purpose. Like many lucky men, you found a woman who was intrigued by your slipperiness, and she lets you get away with it--even encourages your lack of commitment, because it brings more drama into her life, and allows her to continue her childhood pattern of being a victim of men. It saves her from the existential challenges of commitment, which involve the assumption of responsibility, either for others or for oneself. Mary stayed with Percy because she was with him but not with him, because he gave himself the option of splitting once a new impulse washed over him.

It's very convenient, this failure to commit--it lets you do whatever you want, to try on different, even mutually exclusive ways of life, to marry one woman, and leave her for another woman when she comes along, and then leave for another when the fancy strikes. We laud people for the "rebellious courage" they show in refusing to submit to custom or more, but we're conditioned by the unquestioned mythos of Byronism to view the commitment to a set of beliefs as "surrender" to unjustly constituted conventional authority.

But automatic skepticism is easy--all that's needed is to question everything, and the magic and majestic thing about consciousness is that it's fungible enough even to doubt its own existence. There's no trick to skepticism--it's just a more placid and contemplative version of the Byronic everlasting No! Believing is harder, and therefore more courageous, because courage is the quality that enables us to do what's hard, what's difficult. It's highly ironic that the story of Shelley's death has his heart surviving the funeral pyre. His heart endured, perhaps, because in life it was never really tried. Taking heart, courage, endurance, committing to one way of life--these Shelley never did.

And it's a shame, because he really was talented. He was the most musical of the Romantics, and the best at handling complex rhythms. But I utterly reject his worldview, which I find impossible to respect. He's an interpersonal and philosophic coward. There's the cowardice of excessive conformity; but even more distasteful is the cowardice of knee-jerk skepticism. By establishing a pre-determined end point for the thought process, both serve as means to short-cut the hard work of thinking things through. Shelley's thoroughgoing skepticism serves as a means of avoidance--avoidance of having having to be pinned down to a position from which he can be criticized. If I affirm nothing, he says in effect, I can deny everything. What's refreshing and superior about Coleridge, Blake, and Wordsworth is their shared refusal to buy into this convenient, self-serving skepticism. They believe in something, and through their works avow that belief. Shelley believes in nothing but his own pleasure, his own convenience.

Anatomy of a Mid-life Crisis

A student, working on an article for a features-writing journalism class, asks, "Why do professors endanger their careers and livelihoods to have sex with their students?"

Ah, to answer this question is to unlock one of the academic heart's profoundest secrets! The mid-life crisis has become such a pop culture cliché that it's now difficult to fathom how real and wrenching this phenomenon is to those who experience it. But it is all too real to wake up one morning, and suddenly realize that the number of days you've lived now exceeds the number of days have left. You're then quickly flooded by a list of things you never did, a list that will likely include the standard adventures ("I've never seen the pyramids! I've never driven a race car!"). But the most galling realization at that moment for the middle-aged professor is what his years of self-denial during youth (because the professor single-mindedly pursued the monastic discipline of advanced academic study) made him miss. When he was 22, he wasn't surfing or skiing every day, and nailing a smörgåsbord of delectable chicks every night. Add to that the fact that most professors are/were nerds when they were in their early twenties, and that therefore the young women in their early twenties who were the object of those professors' longings looked at them like they were some kind of disgusting insect, and the pain of having arrived at the sunset of one's days becomes even more acute.

But into this gloom, this despair, though, a ray of sunshine breaks when a beautiful young woman, 21 or 22 years old and therefore the reincarnation of the gorgeous babes who wouldn't look the professor's way when he was that age, longingly gazes at him, or even (I hear this sometimes happens, though it's never happened to me) throws herself at him. What's he to do? Very few men are capable of turning down an offer of freely available sex; and when that offer comes in the midst of a thoroughgoing existential crisis, it's even more irresistible. At that moment, other considerations fly out the window--"I thought," says the professor to himself, "that I was finished, that Death was walking beside me with his spectral arm around my shoulder, whispering sweet blandishments and leading me gently on to my eternal sleep; but this young woman wants me! She's heaving with vitality and flushed with desire! FOR ME! For this desiccated shell of a man, in whom the fires of passion have long since burned out, and for whom the giddy transports of youthful ardor are just dim memories! For me, who was always an outcast from life's feast! For me, in whom professional ambition and temperamental timidity have conspired to keep me living life at an arm's length from the elemental passions I've been too frightened or too busy to experience! I've studied life, but I've never LIVED! And here is life, throbbing, beautiful, and authentic, offering itself to me in the very twilight of my days! I've still got it!"

When that much is at stake, when life itself seems to be slipping through your fingers, what do job, family, and reputation matter? "This is my last chance!" cries the professor to himself. "When I was young, I never lived, and now death is staring me in the face! I'm entitled to grab one last morsel of life before I die! I've served humanity selflessly; now it's my turn to get a reward for all that self-denial, for all the looking-on I did when everyone around me was indulging in life's bacchanals! If I don't do it now, I never will, and I'll die in an agony of torture because I'll know that when life gave me once last chance, I turned it down!" How can something as meaningless and trivial as "career" stand up to realizations like these?

Of course, I could be reading entirely too much philosophy into what is, in the end, just male horniness, which can never bag too many hot babes.

Mountains and Memory

The secret Strength of things
Which governs thought, and to the infinite dome
Of heaven is as a law, inhabits thee!
And what were thou, and earth, and stars, and sea,
If to the human mind's imaginings
Silence and solitude were vacancy?

--Percy Bysshe Shelley, "Mont Blanc"

When we're small, and our eyes first acquire the power to focus on distant vistas, we naturally look up and away, and the first imaginatively stirring thing we see when we do so is the line between earth and sky, between the inhabited or inhabitable world and empty space. Childhood is ringed round with vertical perceptions--trees, rooftops, ridgelines--and those horizons of our childish worlds, engraved first and therefore most deeply on our forming minds, retain a vividness that impressions acquired later in life can never hope of approximating, even remotely. This is the source of the haunted quality of the landscape of one's childhood that Wordsworth made a poetic career of trying to describe. In the presence of those original stimuli, the old synaptic pathways fire again.

But when those synapses do fire, the feeling you get isn't pleasure or delight or joy or elevation or deep calm (or any of the other descriptors that Wordsworth trotted out to try to nail it down). It's familiarity. It's the sense you get of seeing something that's exactly where it's supposed to be, when your glance has fallen on it, expecting to see it, and seeing it when it sees it. I'm not surprised or delighted when I see my right thumbnail or the way I tuck my right foot behind my left heel when I type. And I'm not surprised when I crest the hill on the eastbound 24 freeway as it leaves the Pleasant Hill Road on ramp and approaches the 680 interchange, and the massive two shouldered hump of Mt. Diablo appears. It's beautiful, to be sure--symmetrical, variegated, at once gentle and imposing, a stout grandfather of a mountain: big, but not too big, and with an inviting lap. But above all, Mt. Diablo is just whereit is, and where it's always been, and it looks just as familiar today--even though I've lived away from it for twenty years--as it did when I saw it on my way to work or school or in the background of a million other everyday glimpses through the thousands of days and nights when I lived in its prodigious shadows.

Mountains store memories. Or, better, they silently inspire us to develop memories, and then they wait, patiently, kindly, effortlessly maintaining their momentous outlines, for the moment when our glance falls on them and an ancient impression awakens, as vivid as the moment it was created. As Shelley wrote,

Mont Blanc yet gleams on high;--the power is there
The still and solemn power of many sights,
And many sounds, and much of life and death.

I realize now that the power Shelley's talking about isn't the mountain's power of rock and snow and height and age and mystery--the potential energy that could be, and periodically is, converted to kinetic energy by avalanche and snowmelt, as I've been wrongly telling my students for years. The only important power that Mont Blanc has is the power to create and then access memories. My experience this weekend, repeated now with predictability that has now solidified into scientific law, shows that Mt. Diablo is my Mont Blanc. Still and serene, but as familiar as my own body, it drew my senses from the finite into the infinite, for which I am now, as a professional intellectual (whatever that means) deeply grateful. But I don't greet Mt. Diablo as a Wordsworthian nature worshipper or effusive scenery enthusiast. Mt. Diablo's greatest significance in my life may be that it has so little specific symbolic or biographic meaning. As Edmund Hillary supposedly said of Mt. Everest, it's there. But that's all a mountain has to be. Our minds do the rest.

Triumphing over Repetition

After having not seen them for more than twenty years, I saw and heard Tower of Power at the Los Angeles County Fair in September 2000, and have attended every one of their concerts at that venue since. Every time I see them, I cry almost continually through their performances. Why? What is it about them that produces this extraordinary effect? For all effects must have causes, as Leibniz taught us.

It's something to do with the problem Keats took up in "Ode on a Grecian Urn" and "Ode to a Nightingale," whose voice "was heard / In ancient days by emperor and clown." I heard Tower of Power, and became a fan of their music, 27 years ago; their song, like the song of Keats's nightingale that found a path "through the sad heart of Ruth," found a path to my heart, then so young and--though I wouldn't have said this of myself then--so fresh and free, so innocently loving. In the words of Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey":I cannot paint / What then I was. The sounding cataract [or the squealing tenor saxophone] / Haunted me like a passion; the tall rock [or the tall Funky Doctor, Stephen Kupka], / The mountain and the deep and gloomy wood, / Their colours and their forms, were then to me / An appetite; a feeling and a love, / That had no need of a remoter charm / By thought supplied, nor any interest / Unborrowed from the eye." Do I go along with Wordsworth to the next lines, the passage that shuts the door on these haunting reminiscences:

--That time is past
And all its aching joys are no more,
And all its dizzy raptures.

Is that time past? And do I faintly mourn, or murmur? As I'm dancing around, screaming, and singing along, is there another me standing beside myself, assessing, criticizing, passing judgement? Am I trying to make up in one evening for those years when, self-exiled, I nominated myself an outcast from life's feast?

Tower of Power's existence, and my response to it, is a testament to a triumph over the sterility of repetition. Kupka blows those baritone scoops with the same precision and freshness he always did; he refuses to despair or scream in protest against the necessity of eternal return to playing, for the three or four thousandth time, "Down to the Nightclub." Mimi still digs on James Brown, still tells us that you got to funkifize, still sends "You're Still a Young Man" out to all the friends of Bill W. Night after night, gig after gig, for 38 years.

Repetition and return are usually unspeakably oppressive, a cycle of crushing despair, rolling the stone up the mountain through eternity. Or it can be an occasion for joy, the particular and peculiar joy that inheres in working and working well, in saying to oneself, "I got it right that time." Most of our lives pass in numbing boredom or half-assed shirking, doing what's required to get by, satisfying the minimum in a state of limp anomie. Tower of Power aren't headliners--they play clubs and county fairs; they make a record every now and then. They're not famous--Stephen Kupka is in the phone book, for Pete's sake! I could dial his home number right now! I could drive to his house! Yet the members of this band appear to approach every concert with a professionalism that belies their modest position on the pecking order of show business fame. They're not trying to climb the ladder of pop music success. They're content to get it right, whether they're at Humphry's By the Bay, The Manitowoc Indian Casino, or the Los Angeles County Fair.

But I don't love them just for their professionalism or out of nostalgia. I love them because their professionalism affirms life, and they enact their affirmation of life in every show. I love them for their manifestly present, stubborn refusal to let their lives drift into bitterness and despair and self-loathing for not having "made it" (or for having once made it and then lost it).

In Middlemarch, George Eliot wrote that "the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs." Despite their devoted following and the thousands of people who, over the years, have bought their records, Tower of Power is composed of individuals who, in the long run, will rest in unvisited tombs. But they have lived faithfully, and continue to do so. This is indescribably heartening to someone like me, to whom despair is a ubiquitous temptation because of the repetitiousness of my work (teaching) and the constant push in my profession to advance by trumpeting "the latest thing." There is redemption in doing something that takes great skill over and over and over again.