Friday, February 1, 2008

A LETTER

It seems Lord Chandos is upset about his inability to express a unity with nature and his surroundings, that he feels, via words or poetry. As a literary poet or writer this could be very frustrating.
He calls his inability to write "a mental illness" so it could be called a psychological crisis. On the other hand I believe it could be looked on as an ethical crisis because through characterizing or describing something or some experience quite often the thing that is described is singularized or expressed as something separate from everything else and this is how we identify things. This, however would conflict with the unity that he is experiencing in a particular moment and would in fact nullify the entire experience. "I felt an inexplicable uneasiness in even pronouncing the words "spirit," "soul," or "body." (5th page in) This shows his uneasiness with words and how they separate things into their own little categories. When experiencing a moment as a unified-thing it would seem wrong or "unethical" to express it in singular and separated words. Or at least it wouldn't do the moment any justice.
It also seems conflicting that his experiences are all related to nature (or at least the wording used to describe things is very nature-esque) and presenting these experiences with mechanical words wouldn't seem to be very representative.

1 comment:

Lasica said...

I agree with your assessment that his inability to use language to adequately describe nature is really at the heart of the problem. The quote you chose definitely describes his discomfort with language as a medium for expression. His crisis definitely has elements of a psychological crisis but I am inclined to view it as more of an ethical crisis. He does have issues with his desire to express his thoughts accurately, yet part of his problem seems to lay in his ‘over-thinking’ the purpose of his words. What is he really trying to say? Why does he have difficulties saying it? Is it his need to break away from the mundane and find new ways to describe the world around him as he sees it? Perhaps, but it definitely plays into his need to unify separate words into one unified, whole, thought.