Posted by Casey Fuller on February 06, 2002 at 19:33:34:
In Reply to: Re: beauty posted by Polly Quigley on July 11, 2001 at 07:37:18:
Excuse me if I butt-in on a three-year-old conversation, but I see no dualism in "The coast crying out for tragedy like all beautiful places." There perhaps is only perceived dualism, as C Owen argues, between flawed human beauty and eternal beauty. But this wrong. As Jeffers knew and wrote, as in, say, "The Great Explosion," the universe’s generation could be described materially, elementally. Or, said differently, the universe-—and all its makeup—-is natural. Thus to Jeffers, the world, humans, hawks, buildings, planets, Roosevelt, Hitler, the Tor House, Garth, toilet paper, even Una decomposing in her grave (which is the subject of one of his best lyrics)—-all had to be beautiful, because all was from nature. But their are gradations of beauty with Jeffers. The less fractured one is from nature the more beautiful. Hence the unfractured beauty of hawks, and conversely, the fractured characters in his narratives. And we Jeffers buffs, we know this. But what some us fail to see, I think, is how untragic Jeffers use of "tragedy" is. His "tragedy" is not ours. His tragedy is a progression, a gradation of beauty. His tragedy unfractures human consciousness because is usually kills us; it makes us more beautiful because it makes us elemental, like the basic material of the universe; and like us humans, all nature, all material, can become more elemental. To Jeffers more elemental is more natural and more natural is more beautiful. It’s odd way to sum up Jeffers; but the syllogism works. Thus when Jeffers says in "The coast crying out for tragedy like all beautiful places," he isn’t contradicting himself, there isn’t dualism here; he simply wants the beauty he sees to be even more beautiful; he wants the coast to be more beautiful by being more elemental, more basic in material composition, which is always possible-—that is, until beauty is refined into the total beauty, the non-elemental nothingness of God.
As for "Transhuman Magnificence"—-is this not the hydra-headed monster that follows Jeffers around?—-I can only say that I think it to be a way of seeing the gradations that make-up the cyclic totality of material in a metaphysical way. (Which is equally hydra-headed, is it not?) A good friend of mine thinks it to mean a fancy way of saying impermanence (after he tells me this he loves to quote "The Epic Stars": "We don’t know enough, we’ll never know.") I think my friend is on the right track, in that Jeffers is getting at things Occidentally that have only gotten at Orientally before—-which can lead to a far more accurate interpretation of "On an Anthology of Chinese Poems" than Helen Vedler’s lunacy.
CNF