INTERVIEWER

What comes up often in reviews of your work is the idea of an overly intellectual bent; in recent reviews of The Triumph of Love, often the word difficult comes up. People mention that it’s worth going through or it isn’t worth going through.

HILL

Like a Victorian wedding night, yes. Let’s take difficulty first. We are difficult. Human beings are difficult. We’re difficult to ourselves, we’re difficult to each other. And we are mysteries to ourselves, we are mysteries to each other. One encounters in any ordinary day far more real difficulty than one confronts in the most “intellectual” piece of work. Why is it believed that poetry, prose, painting, music should be less than we are? Why does music, why does poetry have to address us in simplified terms, when if such simplification were applied to a description of our own inner selves we would find it demeaning? I think art has a right — not an obligation — to be difficult if it wishes. And, since people generally go on from this to talk about elitism versus democracy, I would add that genuinely difficult art is truly democratic. And that tyranny requires simplification. This thought does not originate with me, it’s been far better expressed by others. I think immediately of the German classicist and Kierkegaardian scholar Theodor Haecker, who went into what was called “inner exile” in the Nazi period, and kept a very fine notebook throughout that period, which miraculously survived, though his house was destroyed by Allied bombing. Haecker argues, with specific reference to the Nazis, that one of the things the tyrant most cunningly engineers is the gross oversimplification of language, because propaganda requires that the minds of the collective respond primitively to slogans of incitement. And any complexity of language, any ambiguity, any ambivalence implies intelligence. Maybe an intelligence under threat, maybe an intelligence that is afraid of consequences, but nonetheless an intelligence working in qualifications and revelations . . . resisting, therefore, tyrannical simplification.

So much for difficulty. Now let’s take the other aspect — overintellectuality. I have said, almost to the point of boring myself and others, that I am as a poet simple, sensuous, and passionate. I’m quoting words of Milton, which were rediscovered and developed by Coleridge. Now, of course, in naming Milton and Coleridge, we were naming two interested parties, poets, thinkers, polemicists who are equally strong on sense and intellect. I would say confidently of Milton, slightly less confidently of Coleridge, that they recreate the sensuous intellect. The idea that the intellect is somehow alien to sensuousness, or vice versa, is one that I have never been able to connect with. I can accept that it is a prevalent belief, but it seems to me, nonetheless, a false notion. Ezra Pound defines logopaeia as “the dance of the intellect among words.” But elsewhere he changes intellect to intelligence. Logopaeia is the dance of the intelligence among words. I prefer intelligence to intellect here. I think we’re dealing with a phantom, or as Blake would say, a specter. The intellect — as the word is used generally — is a kind of specter, a false imagination, and it binds the majority with exactly the kind of mind-forged manacles that Blake so eloquently described. The intelligence is, I think, much more true, a true relation, a true accounting of what this elusive quality is. I think intelligence has a kind of range of sense and allows us to contemplate the coexistence of the conceptual aspect of thought and the emotional aspect of thought as ideally wedded, troth-plight, and the circumstances in which this troth-plight can be effected are to be found in the medium of language itself. I could speak about the thing more autobiographically; it’s the emphasis where one is most likely to be questioned, n’est-ce pas?

SOURCE: Hill, Geoffrey. Interview by Carl Phillips. “Geoffrey Hill, The Art of Poetry No. 80.” The Paris Review. Web. 10 January 2012.

“New Year’s Day… now is the accepted time to make your regular annual good resolutions. Next week you can begin paving hell with them as usual.”

— Mark Twain

“I am typing this having just had an injection to try to reduce the pain in my arms, hands, and fingers. The chief side effect of this pain is numbness in the extremities, filling me with the not irrational fear that I shall lose the ability to write. Without that ability, I feel sure in advance, my ‘will to live’ would be hugely attenuated. I often grandly say that writing is not just my living and my livelihood but my very life, and it’s true. Almost like the threatened loss of my voice, which is currently being alleviated by some temporary injections into my vocal folds, I feel my personality and identity dissolving as I contemplate dead hands and the loss of the transmission belts that connect me to writing and thinking.”

– Christopher Hitchens (13 April 1949 – 15 December 2011), “Trial of the Will,” Vanity Fair (January 2012)

Christopher Hitchens died yesterday, 15 December 2011, at the age of 62. The cause of death is reported to have been pneumonia, a common complication of the esophageal cancer for which he had been receiving treatment.

“In whatever kind of a ‘race’ life may be, I have very abruptly become a finalist.”
— Christopher Hitchens, “Topic of Cancer,” Vanity Fair (September 2010)

OBITUARY AT BBC NEWS:

Christopher Hitchens dies at 62 after suffering cancer

British-born author, literary critic and journalist Christopher Hitchens has died at the age of 62.

He died from pneumonia, a complication of the oesophageal cancer he had, at a Texas hospital.

Vanity Fair magazine, which announced his death, said there would “never be another like Christopher”.

He is survived by his wife, Carol Blue, and their daughter, Antonia, and his children from a previous marriage, Alexander and Sophia.

Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter described the writer as someone “of ferocious intellect, who was as vibrant on the page as he was at the bar”.

“Those who read him felt they knew him, and those who knew him were profoundly fortunate souls.”

Hitchens was born in Portsmouth in 1949 and graduated from Oxford in 1970.

He began his career as a journalist in Britain in the 1970s and later moved to New York, becoming contributing editor to Vanity Fair in November 1992.

“Prospect of death makes me sober, objective”

He was diagnosed with cancer in June 2010, and documented his declining health in his Vanity Fair column.

In an August 2010 essay for the magazine he wrote: “I love the imagery of struggle.

“I sometimes wish I were suffering in a good cause, or risking my life for the good of others, instead of just being a gravely endangered patient.”

Speaking on the BBC’s Newsnight programme, in November that year, he reflected on a life that he knew would be cut short: “It does concentrate the mind, of course, to realise that your life is more rationed than you thought it was.”

Radicalised by the 1960s, Hitchens was often arrested at political rallies and was kicked out of the Labour Party over his opposition to the Vietnam War.

He became a correspondent for the Socialist Workers Party’s International Socialism magazine.

In later life he moved away from the left. Following the September 11 attacks he argued with Noam Chomsky and others who suggested that US foreign policy had helped cause the tragedy.

He supported the Iraq War and backed George W Bush for re-election in 2004.

It led to him being accused of betrayal: one former friend called him “a lying, opportunistic, cynical contrarian”, another critic said he was “a drink-sodden ex-Trotskyist popinjay”.

But he could dish out scathing critiques himself. He called Bill Clinton “a cynical, self-seeking ambitious thug”, Henry Kissinger a war criminal and Mother Teresa a fraudulent fanatic.

‘A great voice’

He also famously fell out with his brother, the Mail on Sunday journalist Peter Hitchens, though the pair were later reconciled.

Hitchens could be a loyal friend. He stood by the author Salman Rushdie during the furore that followed the publication of his novel The Satanic Verses.

Writing on Twitter after the announcement of Hitchens’ death, Mr Rushdie said: “Goodbye, my beloved friend. A great voice falls silent. A great heart stops.”

Former Labour Prime Minister Tony Blair publicly debated religion with Hitchens at the Munk Debate in Toronto in November 2010.

“Christopher Hitchens was a complete one-off, an amazing mixture of writer, journalist, polemicist, and unique character,” said Mr Blair.

“He was fearless in the pursuit of truth and any cause in which he believed. And there was no belief he held that he did not advocate with passion, commitment and brilliance.

“He was an extraordinary, compelling and colourful human being whom it was a privilege to know.”

The MP Denis McShane was a student at Oxford with Hitchens.

He said: “Christopher just swam against every tide. He was a supporter of the Polish and Czech resistance of the 1970s, he supported Mrs Thatcher because he thought getting rid of the Argentinian fascist junta was a good idea.

“He was a cross between Voltaire and Orwell. He loved words.

“He could throw words up into the sky, they fell down in a marvellous pattern.”

The publication of his 2007 book God Is Not Great made him a major celebrity in his adopted homeland of the United States, and he happily took on the role of the country’s best-known atheist.

He maintained his devout atheism after being diagnosed with cancer, telling one interviewer: “No evidence or argument has yet been presented which would change my mind. But I like surprises.”

The author and prominent atheist Richard Dawkins described him as the “finest orator of our time” and a “valiant fighter against all tyrants including God”.

He said Hitchens had been a “wonderful mentor in a way”.

Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg, who once worked as an intern for Hitchens, said: “Christopher Hitchens was everything a great essayist should be: infuriating, brilliant, highly provocative and yet intensely serious.

“He will be massively missed by everyone who values strong opinions and great writing.”

Hitchens wrote for numerous publications including The Times Literary Supplement, the Daily Express, the London Evening Standard, Newsday and The Atlantic.

He was the author of 17 books, including The Trial of Henry Kissinger, How Religion Poisons Everything, and a memoir, Hitch-22.

A collection of his essays, Arguably, was released this year.

“Right at the very end, when he was at his most feeble as this cancer began to overwhelm him, he insisted on a desk by a window, away from his bed in the ICU. Took myself and his son to get him into that chair, with a pole and eight lines going into his body, and there he was, a man with only a few days to live, turning out three thousand words to meet a deadline. And then finishing it, and thinking, “Well, I’ve got maybe an hour or two, I’ll write something on Memorial Day in English poetry.” And he was dozing off between sentences — the morphine would overwhelm him — and then I’d watch him just jerk himself awake and get down another sentence. He would never give up.”
— Ian McEwan on BBC News – Today (16 December 2011)

“While I am carrying on a conversation with someone, I find that I am drawing with my eyes. I find myself observing how his shirt collar comes around from behind his neck and perhaps casts a slight shadow on one side. I observe how the wrinkles in his sleeve form and how his arm may be resting on the edge of the chair. I observe how the features on his face move back and forth in perspective as he rotates his head. It actually is a form of sketching and I believe that it is the next best thing to drawing itself. I sometimes feel it is obsessive, but at least it accomplishes something for me.”

—Charles Schulz

“I lived for a time in Canada, and found myself fascinated by the slavish pride of a culture basking in a self-recriminating joke. ‘A lobsterman turned his back on three catches in an uncovered bucket. A bystander worried the lobsters would escape, but the lobsterman waved him off, saying, “No problem, these are Canadian lobsters. If one reaches the top the others will pull him back in.”‘ Yet who, lately, seeing how transparent the Internet-comments culture has made our vast leveling rage, our chortling conformism and anti-intellectualism, our scapegoat-readiness, could keep from thinking: ‘We’re all Canadian lobsters on this bus.’”

—Jonathan Lethem, “Advertisements for Norman Mailer: Salvage from an Infatuation,” Los Angeles Review of Books

“I find that it’s not enough to just draw and copy things. I have to try to understand the why of what things look like. Otherwise I am just making superficial copies of a specific pose without being able to draw other poses later.

“So when I am copying, I look for knowledge and understanding. Not just the specific shapes I am copying, but the general forms and relationships causing the specific shapes. I try to find things that make some sense and then write them down in the hopes I remember them and can put them to use later.”

—John K., “Stiff Warm Ups and Studies,” blog entry, posted 25 August 2010, accessed 13 September 2010.

“We are all hungry and thirsty for concrete images. Abstract art will have been good for one thing: to restore its exact virginity to figurative art.”

—Salvador Dali, The Diary of a Genius (1952–63) (1964; London: Hutchinson, 1990), p. 95.

I think the line that really gets me is this: “With the Lampoon for instance I am free to do whatever I want with my page.” A single page of unconstrained artistic freedom every month: that’s the modest but essential standard by which Jeffrey Jones judged proposed projects in 1973, five hectic years into his career in commercial art.

Small things, even ill-favoured things, are treasure when they are truly one’s own.

———-

Thanks to Rob Pistella for inviting me to use scans from his CAF gallery on this blog. Rob has a terrific and growing collection of artwork (and ephemera!) by Jeffrey Jones, and I am delighted to be in a position to highlight some of those items here.

—via —

“Existential anxieties are by-products of evolved emotions, such as fear and the will to stay alive, and of evolved cognitive capacities, such as episodic memory and ability to track the self and others over time. For example, once you can track even the seasons—and anticipate that leaves will fall off the tree in autumn and that squirrels will bury nuts—you cannot avoid overwhelming inductive evidence favoring your own death and that of those you are emotionally bonded to. Emotions compel such inductions and make them salient, and terrifying. This is ‘the Tragedy of Cognition.’ Dying is by nature not a telic event because once the process of dying starts (from birth on) it cannot be stopped to avoid the inevitable end state. By introducing a supernatural agent, religion resolves the Tragedy of Cognition. Dying is converted into a telic event whose goal state is an extended afterlife. The result is, in part, an allaying of an otherwise recurring and interminable existential anxiety…”

—Scott Atran, In Gods We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion (Oxford UP, 2002), p. 66.

Bonus Link:

Born Believers: How Your Brain Creates God

“It is told that Buddha, going out to look on life, was greatly daunted by death. ‘They all eat one another!’ he cried, and called it evil. This process I examined, changed the verb, said, ‘They all feed one another,’ and called it good. Death? Why this fuss about death? Use your imagination, try to visualize a world without death. The first form of life would be here yet, miles deep by this time, and nothing else; a static world. If birth is allowed, without death, the resulting mass would leave death as a blessed alternative. Death is the essential condition of life, not an evil. ”

—from page 40 of The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, the posthumously published 1935 autobiography of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, author and lecturer.