[Newspoetry] footnote 2-- Seeing Things, the liberal truth

[DL Emerick]

Chaos is complexity made flesh.
Rationalism fails from ground up
because world is chaotic, complex
-- without animating force of will --
that comes from the top to direct
the dust beneath its trampling feet,
to become masses of a foundation,
and higher up there is always god,
refusing to justify his own power,
for making up things from thin air.
It is not god that we mortals fear,
but the society of gods in league,
in conspiracy, when gods gang up,
and come down upon us en masse,
saying theirs is the one way to live.
But for me, I shall stand my ground,
and be a humble dust, opposing thus,
the vacuity of those who overpower.

 <http://webpages.ursinus.edu/rrichter/trilling.htm>
http://webpages.ursinus.edu/rrichter/trilling.htm
Richard P Richter -- some extracts

Trilling's essays time and again suggest that an acknowledgment of
"complexity" holds the best hope for correcting the liberal democratic
program. Complexity for Trilling was the rich tangle of ideas that animated
morals, manners, philosophy, and art in a culture.

Trilling hopes that Americans would conceive of ideas "as living things,
inescapably connected with our wills and desires, as susceptible of growth
and development by their very nature...." (p. 293).

In Trilling's view of art and culture, ideas were to moderns what gods were
to the ancients. (p. 187) They generated the energy to create. While they
were identifiable, they presumably were like the gods--unpredictable and
never fully susceptible to capture. Ideas for Trilling thus had the
delightful quality of evasiveness combined with potency. It was always
possible to interpret their caprices in a new way. And when you read his
essays, you come to expect a twisting trail from idea to idea in surprising
directions. There is always the chance of one more qualification, one more
"refinement" (a favorite word that accompanies "complexity"), before he
concludes.

***

The essay is worth reading if you are me.

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