To follow knowledge like a sinking start,No, says Tennyson, it does not suffice to stay home. Humans yearn for knowledge and know it must be sought elsewhere. Tennyson, by the way, was himself following the brilliant example of Dante. In the Divine Comedy, written centuries before Tenysson’s poem, Dante had the mythical hero Ulysses sailing after knowledge – but more on that later.
Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.
Knowledge is of several kinds. When my Siamese cat Francis was twelve weeks old, he saw a tree for the very first time in his life. He promptly scampered over to it and climbed up several feet. That meant (1) recognizing what he saw as something for a cat to climb, and (2) knowing the rather intricate sequence of extending and retracting claws, to get a grip and let go. It’s not something he’d ever been taught, even by example. It’s innate, inborn knowledge, a spectacular endowment of cats and dogs and horses. Humans have vast innate abilities, mostly abilities to learn: notably, to learn to walk, talk, to learn languages. The innate knowledge of cats is highly specific. And highly mysterious. How on earth did Francis recognize that tree as something to call forth his climbing knowledge?
Then there’s the unforeseeable knowledge we gain from journeys, the kind Tennyson had in mind for the Ulysses of his poem to sail after; and that shades into the knowledge we may earn while onlookers imagine we’re wasting our time. When Edison was developing his lightbulb, he spent weeks trying out materials for the filament; the first one had been a piece of carbonized thread, which crumbled rather quickly. Someone offered sympathy for the time he was losing. “Not at all,” Edison replied, “I know know three hundred things that won’t work.” A later American inventor, Buckminster Fuller, put that still more briefly: yes, we can always learn more, “but you can’t learn less.”
Or we can learn by watching transpositions: in 1957 the great Bugs Bunny animator, Chuck Jones, issued “What’s Opera, Doc?” in which, he likes to claim, we’ll find Wagner’s twelve-hour, four-opera Ring cycle compressed into six minutes. The film’s music was performed by the Burbank Symphony, which was under instructions to avoid any orchestral clowning. And in 1989, at Northwestern University, a professor or music history informed a survey class of music seniors that this week’s subject would be the Ring cycle. All forty students promptly burst into a massive rendition, of “Kill the wabbit!” They surely weren’t mocking Wagner, nor was Bugs Bunny. High and low culture aren’t in opposition; the more you know of either, the more you enjoy the other.
So, in Ezra Pound’s presentation, he and Aunt Frank, by travelling, had been learning; to what effect, he’d still by meditating nearly five decades later.
And behind their movements we may discern a German publisher named Karl Baedeker, whose red-bound guidebooks to major European cities sought to eliminate the need for guided tours. As the Baedeker books were continually revised, they came to underwrite lists of place one “did,” with the tour guide’s monologue rising like steam from the page. Always, by convention, the phantom guide addressed a group. You stood where the text told you to, then read “On our left, we see…”
By the 1920s, the great Irish novelist James Joyce, commencing his last book, could feel confident that a mere first-person plural pronoun on his printed page would summon the voice of the tour guide. On the very first page of Finnegans Wake, sure enough, the eastward run of the river “brings us back… to Howth Castle and environs.” The “us” says “tour guide,” as it will repeatedly throughout the book. We’re brought “back” because the first sentence began at the bottom of the book’s last page, where after eleven words it broke off to resume at the top of page one. As for Howth Castle, it’s on the Hill of Howth which overshadows the north of Dublin Bay. Sure enough, fans of Joyce have been going there ever since.
uit: The elsewhere community - Hugh Kenner
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