Quotes from Uncle Albert

from The Expanded Quotable Einstein, edited by Alice Calaprice

if what is seen and experienced is portrayed in the language of logic, then it is science. If it is communicated through forms whose connections are not accessible to the conscious mind but are recognized intuitively, then it is art.

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I feel myself so much a part of everything living that I am not the least concerned with the beginning or ending of the concrete existence of any one person in this eternal flow.

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Strange is our situation here upon earth. Each of us comes for a short visit not knowing why, yet sometimes seeming to divine a purpose. From the standpoint of daily life there is one thing we do know: That we are here for the sake of others, for the countless unknown souls with whose fate we are connected. My inner and outer life is built upon the labors of people, both living and dead, and how earnestly I must exert myself in order to give in return as much as I have received.

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The true value of a human is determined primarily by how he has attained liberation from the self.

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The betterment of human conditions the world over is not strictly dependent on scientific knowledge but on the fulfillment of human traditions and ideals.

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Only a life lived for others is a life worthwhile.

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I believe that a simple and unassuming life is good for everybody, both physically and mentally.

Moralizing vs. Experimentation 4

Another aspect of "experimental" poetry that seems to get the formalists' blood boiling is non-linearity: non-linear narrative, non-linear presentation, non-linear progression.

I am interested in Albert Einstein's comment that: The only reason for time is so that everything doesn't happen at once. In fact, everything is always happening at once, and we sort it, cognitively and neurologically, into stories. We make stories up from the world. (The world is made of stories, not atoms. —Muriel Rukeyser) We turn our lives into narrative, and call it creation myth, call it memoir, call it autobiography, call it factual. But it's still invented, made up from whole cloth, a literary creation. All traditions were once invented traditions.

The argument is often presented that "one must learn the rules in order to break them." In poetry, what this often means is that you are expected to become a master at form and meter, before you undertake any other, more experimental styles of writing. I'll set aside for the moment the recurrent problem in education that the more structure you impose on the student's mindset, the harder it is for them to see outside the box, later on. There is often a process of unlearning, after an intense formal education, in order for an artist to get back to where their own voices had originally led them, to where they can hear their own intuitions and inner guidance again. Many never make it back to inspiration, after being immersed in form. School is very good at teaching technique, and lousy at supporting vision.

Here is the danger of the "learn the rules first" attitude: if in fact you do learn by heart all the rules, you risk never again being able to think outside the conceptual frame encompassed by those rules.

And if you never go on from there, or always stay there, and believe you should always stay there? Believe that poetry belongs there, and should never stray from there? What do we call that?

We can call it (neo-)formalism. We can call it limit. We can call it the box.

We can call it boring. We can also call it masterful execution of traditional methods. There are indeed poets who spend their entire careers in one place; mining the same vein, perfecting their art within the small scope of their interests and abilities.

Of course it's perfectly valid to stay there, do that. Not everyone is suited for thinking outside the box.

I'm going to get into the "you've got to learn the rules to break the rules" cliché more, later on.

There is an anti-[anti-innovation] argument that can be made on purely psychospiritual artistic grounds: that innovation is necessary if only because it resists the downward pull of the tide of entropy.

If you want to stay in the same place in an entropic universe, you still have to move forward; merely treading water and staying in the same place is actually a downward regression. (One thinks of ivy-covered professors in ivy-covered halls, who haven't made a real contribution in decades, and their poetic equivalents.)

This isn't an argument promoting innovation for its own sake. It's physics: If you even want to stay in the same place, or appear to, you still have to make something new from what you are doing, even if you don't want to actively accelerate forward. Stasis is stagnation, and stagnation is death. Holding position is ultimately retrograde. The Universe will expand onwards, with or without you. If you don't move forward, the world will leave you behind, one way or another.

So, one counter to the argument against orthographic innovation (that it gets in way of clarity of reading) is the argument that staying in the same place, artistically, is tantamount to creative stagnation (that always doing the same thing is deadening and boring). Even avowedly conservative poets are still writing new poetry, not old poetry (unless they're simply rehashing the past, which is arguably not the same thing as writing poetry at all). Even avowedly conservative thinkers, focused as they are on the past, must be aware on some level that they are living in the present, not the past. (Unless of course they are genuinely driven by pure ideology. The ivy tower is divorced from reality no matter what political stance it might take, if it refuses to see what's actually going on, but prefers to only look at ideas.) Even a poet who rejects all forms of innovation must at some point realize that if they're not moving forward even slowly enough to hold position, they're actually moving backwards. Of course, maybe they want to do that.

The arguments against innovation and experiment, and the arguments for them, will no doubt continue forever, and no doubt remain unresolved. I think that is probably a good thing.