About Writing. Samuel R. Delany
has a precise economy and its own beauty. We can enjoy that, too. But the other—through that combination of specific statement and implication—puts a higher percentage of readers closer to the pulse and texture of the incident. Rhetorically, it makes a greater number of educated readers feel there’s a shorter distance between words and occurrence. What we are talking about here is the (very real) pleasure of good writing versus the delight of writerly talent.
If an early nineteenth-century essayist had written, “The true and the beautiful are largely the same and inextricably entailed. That is one of the few self-evident facts of the modern world. Indeed, I believe, if you have understood that, you can pretty much negotiate the whole of modern life,” I doubt anyone would remember it today.
But around 1820, at the conclusion of his poem in five ten-line-stanzas, “Ode to a Grecian Urn,” Keats wrote:
Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all
Ye know on earth and all ye need to know.
The economy, symmetry, and specificity here—the performance of its meaning through implication, accuracy, and bodily rhythm (the rhythmic and alliterative emphasis on “all,” “need,” and “know”; its encompassing of both wonder and “on earth” despair)—lift it to a level of immediacy that won’t shake loose from the mind. “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,” is, of course, in the same rhetorical mode as “Sunlight fell through leaves.” But “—that is all / ye know on earth and all ye need to know” is a statement that implies a broad and complex argument. As you unravel those implications, you can find yourself facing a declaration of the tragic limits of what, indeed, can be known: you really don’t know anything else, and the bare sufficiency of that basis for knowledge has been the universe’s great gift to humanity, a gift from which all law and science and art have been constructed. For behind all we presume to be knowledge, whether correct or incorrect, some correspondence between elements in the world must have been noted at some time or other, a correspondence that was once assumed beautiful, fascinating, or at least interesting—before anyone could go on to judge it useful, efficient, or functional. A correspondence must be noticed before it can be evaluated, can be judged. What makes us notice anything is always some aspect of the aesthetic. The three categories—the useful, the efficient, the functional—already must at least begin as aesthetic constructions, which, only after they have been established through aesthetic correspondences, can go on to support usable judgments on what subsequently we can find in them. That is how all knowledge—however useful—has its basis in the apperception of the beautiful—even to the hideously ugly and the painful. When Keats’s words have impelled my thoughts in this direction, his lines have made me weep the way the tragic knowledge we took with us on our expulsion from Eden occasionally does.
To have that response to the Garden of Eden story, I have to read the text very slowly, leaving out the first chapter of Genesis that contains the famous seven days of creation (introduced by the P-Writer—or Priestly Writer—some three hundred years later). I have to follow what the J-Writer in the eighth century BCE alone put down, word by word, phrase by phrase; and I have to follow the Hebrew version beside two or three English translations, as my own Hebrew is simply not good enough to read it in the original unassisted. I have to pay particular attention to the humor of the text (“I bet you thought snakes always crawled on the ground,” the J-Writer, who first wrote her tale in the later years of the Court of David, jests with her audience; “I bet you thought all human beings had been born out of women for all time.” Critic Harold Bloom and biblical scholar Richard E. Friedman both feel that the J-Writer was likely a sophisticated court lady in the late years of King David’s court). I have to pay particular attention to the multiple meanings of the infinitival intensifiers in the Hebrew, sometimes indicated by italics in the King James version, as well as all the specific information we learn from overhearing the words of YHWH, first in his poetic explosion at the serpent, and finally in his anxious mutterings as he sets the angels with their flaming sword to guard the way back into Eden—which mutterings, of course, reveal to us, after the fact, the most important thing that Adam and Eve (she gets her name only after God gives her and Adam clothes of skins) learned when they ate of the tree of the knowledge of what’s good and what’s bad (etz hada’at tov v’ra): “We are doomed fools; we made a tragic choice; we ate from the wrong tree! We ate from the tree of the knowledge of tov (good) and ra (bad), and the ra (the bad thing) we now know in our bones is that we should have eaten from the other tree—the perfectly licensed tree of life! We now know our choice was mortally bad—for immediately we had to become too busy with our shame to compensate for our error: the knowledge of our mortality (one with the knowledge of how we missed out on immortality), which we have just gained—the knowledge that shuts us out of the garden.”
Those textual details lead me through the implications that such are the inevitable repercussions of all human learning. To learn anything worth knowing requires that you learn as well how pathetic you were when you were ignorant of it. The knowledge of what you have lost irrevocably because you were in ignorance of it is the knowledge of the worth of what you have learned. A reason knowledge/learning in general is so unpopular with so many people is because very early we all learn there is a phenomenologically unpleasant side to it: to learn anything entails the fact that there is no way to escape learning that you were formerly ignorant, to learn that you were a fool, that you have already lost irretrievable opportunities, that you have made wrong choices, that you were silly and limited. These lessons are not pleasant. The acquisition of knowledge—especially when we are young—again and again includes this experience. Older children tease us for what we don’t know. Teachers condescend to us as they instruct us. (Long ago, they beat us for forgetting.) In the school yard we overhear the third graders talking about how dumb the first graders are. When we reach the third grade, we ourselves contribute to such discussions. Thus most people soon actively desire to stay clear of the whole process, because by the time we are seven or eight we know exactly what the repercussions and reactions will be. One moves toward knowledge through a gauntlet of inescapable insults—the most painful among them often self-tendered. The Enlightenment notion (that, indeed, knowledge also brings “enlightenment”—that there is an “upside” to learning as well: that knowledge itself is both happiness and power) tries to suppress that downside. But few people are fooled. Reminders of the downside of the process in stories such as that of Adam and Eve can make us—some of us, some of the time, because we are children of the Enlightenment who have inevitably, successfully, necessarily, been taken in—weep.
We say we are weeping for lost innocence. More truthfully, we are weeping for the lost pleasure of unchallenged ignorance.
Before the Enlightenment stressed the relationship between knowledge and power, there was a much heavier stress on the relationship between knowledge and sex. Freud retrieved some of that relationship in Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood. (The first intellectual problem almost all children take up, Freud pointed out, is where do babies come from, the pursuit of which soon catapults us into the coils and turmoils of sexual reproduction.) It perseveres, of course, in the concept of “knowing” a woman or a man sexually. It is there in the J-Writer’s version of the Adam and Eve story as well: To know that sex leads to procreation is immediately to want to control it (especially among beleaguered primitive peoples), to set up habits (covering the genitals or other body parts) to dampen the sexual urges. But any effort to keep them under control is to instill habits that produce shame and embarrassment when violated, even in pursuit of procreation itself, to say nothing of innocent, guilt-free copulation. As a deeply insightful “pre-Enlightenment” text, the Adam and Eve story figures this aspect of the tale forcefully just as it figures that death will come before we can do anything about it: that knowledge is the burning blade preventing reentry into the garden and a return to the tree of life. The tragic implications repeatedly produce real tears in me—as I suspect they have for many readers over the centuries.
The story of Eden is a short, ironic tale to teach children a religious tradition—that can make an adult (and, in my case, an adult who happens to be an atheist) weep. That’s among the things that, through statement and implication, stories can do. Such implications as nestle in Keats’s ode and the J-Writer’s Eden story are so broad that, today, most of us would probably figure, “Don’t even try it!”