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| Edward Steichen: Photo montage of Carl Sandburg. 1936 |
"Style is the Man Himself". I may enjoy reading and listening to persons ever so far to the right or to the left, and actually enjoy a variety of dialects, including the yets of New Orleans, but when a man gets a microphone and enunciates "bra...ai...n" and "blo...oo..d" (two of his favorite words) and in the same sentence deplores the "cerebral" poets (as if they were something new), his being about 80 years old is no excuse. His brother in law Edward Steichen would never talk that way. Neither would Studs Terkel. Have I already overemphasized that it is not Sandburg's socialism that annoys me? Anyone my age has coped already with -isms, I hope.
What is it, then, that makes me detest Sandburg so much? It must be more than having been compelled to stand up and recite "Fog" so many times. One can get over that.
Is it that he seems never to have seen himself as others, assorted others, saw him? He seems never to have exhibited real humor. He seems never to have understood that Floridians and Californians and Hawaiians and Louisianans (unless of course they were jazz musicians or folk singers) were just as American as he was, that lots of other lands of origin were just as good as Sweden? Oh, well, I like Denmark best, anyhow.
And, helped along by looking more like the famous Bog Man the older he got, and by Steichen's loving to photograph him, I don't think we ever had a public figure so in love with his own image as Carl Sandburg.
I do admit liking all mixed up social and political opinions better than systematic ones. Just today I was relishing thinking of politicians as flatlanders, just as Edwin Abbot Abbot intended (and, by the way, the EB 11th edition of 1910, s.v., Abbot, Edwin, reports that his article on The Gospels in the 9th edition of 1985 caused quite a stir, and, when I checked I found that he contributed nothing to the 11th! Just because writing was discrete a century ago doesn't mean that you can't tell what they thought). I was not surprised to learn that no one in his lifetime thought him to be a very perfect Circle or Sphere!
Abbott's 'Flatland' is a peculiar book. Geometry as moral lesson. Are you alluding to the saying 'God is a circle whose centre is everywhere and circumference nowhere' in your last sentence. It's attributed to De Cusa, Empedocles, Sir T.B. and Voltaire . I like your ' anyone my age has coped with -isms' !
ReplyDeleteI am reading Abbott's Flatland in the annotated edition of Ian Stewart who is at Warwick University. I think you would enjoy that a lot, since he puts all the ideas in the context of the Victorian intellectual world and, among other things, does suggest which ancient Greeks defined the circle philosophically. But on the Kindle, it is hard to locate just one reference, especially in this book. Anyhow, it is someone no later than Empedocles, and I should guess no later than the 6th century BC. As soon as they got beyond just surveying their fields, etc., having no math except straight-edge-and compass geometry, it is evident that they spent a lot of time looking at circles, because of the puzzle of how to measure its area. http://www-history.mcs.st-and.ac.uk/HistTopics/Squaring_the_circle.html This article cites all the very early approximations to pi. To say that god is a circle must have come fairly quickly. I mean, much later but still early, consider Vitruvian Man. Sir T.B. (I thought of him, naturally) would have loved everything that had been published, and that was quite a lot. Abbott book is a wonderful jeu d'esprit, too, so typical of his generation. I love it.
ReplyDeleteThe article s.v. Geometry in the 1910 Britannica says that Egyptians studied the circle first, whence Milesians got it, and first Greek documented is Thales, from whom Pytyagoras at Samos and his disciples. It is a very good article, and I doubt if I'd find more in a recent survey (the 3rd ed. of the OCT, though by a good authority, is only about four columns long, and merely subsumes Geometry in Mathematics). Getting the formula for the area of the circle and proving it was useful and came first, but as soon as they had that, the Pythagorean were quick to see philosophy in that figure that has no angles to its boundary.
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