I was reading Nietzsche's Human, All Too Human and found this struck a cord with me when considering CAS, he did focus on the bygone (fantasy) days.


148: How poets ease life. Poets, insofar as they too wish to ease men's lives, either avert their glance from the arduous present, or else help the present acquire new colors by making a light shine in from the past. To be able to do this, they themselves must in some respects be creatures facing backwards, so that they can be used as bridges to quite distant times and ideas, to religions and cultures dying out or dead. Actually, they are always and necessarily epigones. Of course, some unfavorable things can be said about their ways of easing life: they soothe and heal only temporarily, only for the moment; they even prevent men from working on a true improvement of their conditions, by suspending and, like a palliative, relieving the very passion of the dissatisfied, who are impelled to act.


You can read the whole book here:
[www.publicappeal.org]

I've always considered CAS, especially the younger CAS, to be the absolute antithesis of backwards-looking. It may seem so superficially, in matters of form or taste, but I can think of few poets less retrospective than CAS, with his meditations on the outer cosmos and the infinite. Given our age that pretends to worship originality in the arts (in fact, it worships distraction and novelty, instead, but that's another matter ), one would think that the originality of Sterling and CAS 's cosmic poetry would be far more widely acclaimed and recognized than it is.

Stirring the language pot, there isn't any real difference between "outer cosmos and the infinite" and "making a light shine in from the past" any consideration not in the ultimate present is equally an aspect of fantasy. Perhaps this is why Science-Fiction and Fantasy as genres are so closely related.

My point is simply that the outer cosmos, the infinite, science fiction, etc. are traditionally ideas and genres that are related to the future and to forward-thinking, not backward-thinking, as Nietzsche posits. Neither is there anything especially "consoling" in the themes of cosmicism and the infinite. Witness the poetry of Sterling.

Oh I totally agree, I understand both, to the point that I think it may be a mere semantic issue.

past-future, two sides of same coin.

I more than occasionly read an argument for one side and think that's right; then read the argument for the other side and think that's totally correct as well.

B.

P.S Looks like the outage scared every one off, but I'm moving to a better host which should improve things all round.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 2 Jul 05 | 04:15PM by Boyd.

Not quite: you're still stuck with me, as you may gather from my submissions yesterday.

I'm just being quiet, well, I was being quiet, that's all.

*Author of Strange Gardens [www.lulu.com]


*Editor of Calenture: a Journal of Studies in Speculative Verse [calenture.fcpages.com]

*Visit my homepage: [voleboy.freewebpages.org]

Boyd:
I have revised an essay on CAS recently and am wondering if I could send it to you. I also have done an exhaustive glossary which Scott Connors may be using, but so far I'm not sure if this will be drastically shortened if you are interested in posting these please contact me at our email address. Please understand that this is contingent on whether or not either or both is planned for publishication.

John Hitz
hitz@gehlbach.com