A Poet’s Appeal to Personalism: a Note on Alyosha (Augur Press, 2016)

by Daniel Gustafsson

Two things, it seems to me, threaten the irreducible reality and dignity of the personal life today: reductionism and relativism.

In the struggle against these twin tendencies of a depersonalised age, philosophy should resign its role as the henchman of science – let’s be done 

With doubt, with your school-yard squabbles and hair- 

splitting, your wisdom’s distrust of delight... –

and accept instead its vocation as the shield-maiden of poetry. Personalist thought, certainly, must be responsive to both ‘extra-utile’ and ‘extra-rational’ sources of value and revelation.   

Hence my fond invocation of Alyosha Karamazov, saintly foil of the sceptical Ivan. Alyosha’s loving response to his brother’s venomously disenchanted worldview – his relational and symbolic refutation Ivan’s rational-empiricist argument – should be the riposte of the poet and personalist alike to the negations of materialism.      

He tells you, don’t look, don’t love, only think!

It’s enough to make the world shrink…

For the world does shrink, and we with it, if scientism and solipsism prevail against our mutual and ek-static mode of being. Poetry, meanwhile, is entirely premised upon the personal. The relational and irreducible is not only the subject matter of poetry, but its very medium and material – manifesting the ineffable in the corporeal, the invisible in the apparent: 

Grant us beauty to cleanse our vision…

 

For beauty is a radiant proof of that in human experience which overspills or oversteps the merely causal and mechanical. It is one of the surest signs of our moral and spiritual dignity and potential. Beauty should therefore be no less a source and aim of the personalist, than of the poetic, endeavour:   

That true design may vanquish false powers… 

For it is the poetic mode of apprehension, and the poetic mode of re-presentation, that safeguards a world abundant in its offerings of splendour and significance:  

The ground is littered with anemones,

And the finches are in flitting and flight…

Hence these poems seek to give place to wonder and reverence, the origin of real philosophy: not a practice of academic speculation, but a life lived in response to wisdom’s incarnate and ineffable disclosure.     

It is an unshakable tenet of personalist thought that we are dialogic beings. We exist face to face and, as it were, mouth to mouth; for language is an essential aspect of our inter-personal reality:  

Our lives are unfolded in language,

And we languish without conversation…

Language, for beings like us, is not only the functional projection of thought. Reflective, diachronic and metaphoric, the fabric of language itself offers new possibilities of meaning and of personal expansion. In poetry, this dialogic mode may be realised in its most distilled form. Dialogue can change us, improve us, and involves us in mutual transformation:

This is the fabric of our passion,

This is how we fashion ourselves… 

The lack of a dialogic sense has repercussions for the way we inhabit the natural as well as the cultural world. In a post-colonial and post-modern climate, pathologically uneasy about inherited goods and values, it becomes difficult to motivate care for a shared world, a shared language and a shared place. Our own time, zealous in its pursuit of progress and levelling, is impatient with reflection and disdainful of cultural preservation. Also our efforts to salvage the environment may, I believe, suffer from a lack of a relational anchoring and approach.  

These poems enjoin us, therefore, to care for a world endangered by entropy, deconstruction and desecration:  

          this frayed and threadbare fabric

Is not ours to unmask or unmake;

Our task is to love…

When gratitude is replaced by entitlement, mutual responsibilities by individual rights, resulting in a loss of historical as well as situated consciousness, personalism should serve to affirm those relations that make us who we are, as persons inhabiting – as well as inheriting – a particular time and place. We are not self-sufficient. Nor are we simply consumers. We are heirs and stewards, and the world is ours by trust: 

                   Now that we are of the living,

This long-cherished landscape belongs to us

Only in the lasting need of giving…

      

We live at a time when reductionism is becoming increasingly politicised. In the discourse of rights, the personal is entirely overshadowed by the individual and the collective, the quantifiable monads and masses susceptible to standardised solutions. To speak, as I believe we must, of the spiritual aspects of personal dignity and relationality is becoming all but impossible; indeed, religiously indebted and inflected language is becoming increasingly unintelligible.  

Hence my fervent invocation of Yuri Zhivago; for this poet and physician, an object of mockery for the materialist-determinist powers that be, was persecuted for his defence of the personal in conditions too like our own:         

And you’d never enlist with your scalpel,

The quill and chisel of your healing arts,

For their cure-all campaign of negation:

You have witnessed their botched operation…

We too have witnessed the wasteland of utility and universality, of platitude and bureaucracy; the reduction of all that is most particular, precious and perplexing in life to calculations of the lowest common denominator; and we summon against this malaise the healing arts of empathy and imagination; for we know 

That life is all muteness and misery

Unless blood is married to metaphor,

Unless the heart-walls and the measured floor

Break open to music and mystery…

Daniel Gustafsson is a bi-lingual poet and philosopher. Working at the intersections of philosophy, theology and the arts, he seeks to affirm the irreducible nature of language, beauty, and personhood. Daniel received a PhD in Philosophy from the University of York in 2014. Debut collections of poetry in both English (Alyosha, Augur Press) and Swedish (Karve, Axplock) appeared in the summer of 2016. Daniel currently works in secondary education and divides his time between Yorkshire and his native land. In his spare time, he practises the patient arts of angling and tea-drinking.