Monday, April 10, 2006

A Last Blast On West's Chaucer

The beauty of reading diffuse texts, real books, the bound and paper-type that you can pack around with you is that you can trundle through, back through, over, and again dump them back on the shelf and let them gather dust in the mind whenever and wherever you like. You can really bulldozer about in the topics of books, perhaps learning gears and landscaping. To get closure on a text often takes numerous read-throughs if you are really trying to assimilate some selected knowledge and trying to percolate out a taste of its possible teachings. While (hopefully) I get to trace out a few related ideas through ruminations upon these stacks (with a little time left for mental fermentation which some topics richly deserve) I always discover midterms preparations come earlier than I expected. So I leave tail pieces on a few topics that need finishing, as a final flipper or fin for the soup to gnaw upon while I pretend that I am distracting myself or forgeting my paid duties.
I deferred writing upon the final chapter of Richard West's "Chaucer 1340-1400: The Life and Times of The First Poet" simply out of awareness that I would have something left to write about this account of a pioneer poet. Something certainly remains to be said about poetry in general, and poets in particular which West obviously has not pandered to. It would leave me to debate and procrastinate on his apparent omission.
The most important point is that very few poets have nothing to contribute to societies in general and the modern age in particular and Chaucer would obviously be singularly the first among all of them in the English language; he remains the best example of this essential aspect of poets and poetry in English. Necessary and essential if simply as rude alarms for cultural asphyxia. Yes, a tolerance and respect for poets and poetry has always served the same purposes as a barometer or a yellow canary in a coal mine. Forget that Chaucer was a fairly cosily ensconsed royal court clerk. He spent enough time praising his cheque-writers that in modern times he might just be a regular corporate ladder climber let alone an artist of note. His artistry in words is obviously contrasted to the somewhat less wordy artistry required of successful business people in the developed world today. They may not be running around blurting out rhyming couplets, but they certainly seem to relish the spare arrows or beheadings of corporate safe guards, government regulations, continuing to quiver the fine feathers of graft, and the rallying, whispering salvos of scandal and corruption, so little actually seen, and the severance of human rights workers standards from consumer concepts of quality and product or service values at the same time. Namely, they no longer mind that their bards say almost nothing about their antics and they find it harder and harder to perceive or intrinsically remember what bards actually do.
Without them cultures may be said to wither and quite die in business mindsets. It is hard to say if poets have issued a full retreat to the hills of developed world business society because of the exploits of their purely business-minded colleagues, especially the kinds which might once have been considered "up-start crows" as Shakespeare might have once supported through his own contributions. Remember even that bard was penning cheap plays for charnel house spectators, he was bound to stir up a few critics. But in Chaucer's case, the argument is that gilded poets are merely the first phalanx of sacrificed artists, who know their proper places, the first fired, the last hired, chiefly and principally among the gilded meats and graceful lilys of thrashing, savage, highly unromantic cultures. That artistic/creative types are actually valued in corporate culture should be fairly obviously a misconception as they hold a pride of exception. It is all mostly talk a moulding of or remoulding of the definitions of culture, little real writing on the topic. But I would suppose that that which is truly creative and artistic still remains fairly inscrutable and thus unprofitable. Best to write to please the masters and create something unique upon the side?
As of Chaucer's life and times, the land grabs and tax grabs, the massacres, the burnt-out French, what more did the English really have to take righteous pride in attaining other than some croking and fanciful first verses? Namely, their own language burbled into being out of this poet, their own language dabbler printed out a legacy for them, namely Chaucer at the helm. Such a poet in a dissimilar setting excluding that of the English might have otherwise been considered dreary, drab, morose, uninspired or even an unreadable ape. He may have been perceived similarly to vast copses of literature today, and our dung and heaps of previously realised, pre-modern human knowledge, all lit by dint of age or crust of foreign accents and deemed worthless as a result. All deemed irrelevant or unreadable seemingly by most, much as of vast previous prominent cultures risen, fallen and long past. I would only exclude the English from such dismissiveness, in haughty irony here out of West's insistence that the English uphold strongly the characteristics of:
1. tolerance (or indifference)
2. self-deprecation (or arrogance)
3. diffidence (or standoffishness)
So the English take a few of their writers jokingly, have seriously considered them as cultural intangibles, but never really? West even drags Orwell's ghost into his observance that Chaucer possibly similarly reveled in his countrymen and their general inability or ill desire to remain abreast of the world at large particularly in any expectiation that they should then take the world on the world's own terms. The English are no strangers among many national cultural identities; it would be simply impossible to remove the glasses through which each may appear somehow in stasis, unchanging, ever immobile, impermeable to foreign influences or observation. But perhaps it is in "The Complaint of Chaucer to His Purse" that one sees or reads the real reason for the demise of the court poet or jester in modern times.
In an accounting dominated assessment, these poets have proven simply too costly a luxury to calculate. Not easily deciphered; they continue to amuse? However their language remains forever the backdrop upon which this bastard language so heavily appears to lean.

No comments: