Who loves literature?
Most people do not, especially those who work in it.
Why?
Because literature is too big. There is too much of it—too many writers, too many countries, too many languages, too much philosophy and history to absorb.
Even as the most dedicated and grey-haired scholars study and write—there it is, behind them, and looking over them, the truth: the most “learned,” when it comes to literature, are still dwarfed by what they don’t know.
That’s the first thing.
Secondly, literature is a grave. There is no youth in literature—literature is old: the literature we are privileged to survey and read and study and experience is but the tip of an old iceberg—and since literature, like law, is all about precedent, to know literature is to reach after the past, and every study you make of literature is by its very nature, false, since other languages and other times have already expressed, many times over, points you are not only making now, but points you have never even dreamed of, and, as you go back into the past, you find the literati decades and centuries ago knew more languages than you could ever hope to know, never mind understand fluently. You, who pride yourself as a student and lover of literature, how fluent are you in the ancient languages which birthed literature itself: Latin, Greek, Arabic, Hindi, Chinese, and thousands of ancient or national languages and dialects? Even if you knew every single language ever written or spoken, fluently, how much philosophy, history, and ancient or foreign custom do you know? History, customs, philosophy—which includes both science and religion—can never be separated from literature. Otherwise it would not be literature. The most learned can only specialize; in literature, the grey beards are infants. Every scholar and poet is an insect.
Thirdly, literature is one discrete object; it had a birth, a linguistic and historical beginning, a childhood, an adolescence, a slow and painful maturity, and most of this is completely removed and hidden from poets today who scratch away on their island for their 100 friends in their own tongue.
Because literature is one, discrete object, it cannot be known in part; the specialist is only a specialist; the whole—and this includes its birth and its every poem and its every adventure—cannot possibly be known in specialization.
Since one cannot specialize in a million directions at once, the necessary act of specialization (so one is not an amateur) cuts off the specialist from literature completely. From literary ignorance there is no escape.
Fourthly, because we cannot know literature, how can literature know itself? It cannot. Language cannot know language. Poems don’t know anything. They only express what they express, not what lies beyond them, or underneath them. And so in this sense too, literature is a grave—the silent headstone which marks the grave.
Fifthly, because literature is the expression of human beings, human beings who are mostly dead, and because death is the most salient fact of life, literature also resembles a grave—in the silence of its books, in the pessimism of its expression, and in its elegiac and poetic focus on impending death. Every literary movement is, at bottom, distinguished by how it deals with death.
And finally, literature is like a vast tomb because literature can kill you—student and poet. You can read a haiku written by someone on the other side of the earth hundreds of years ago which makes your head explode. You realize in a few moments that here is an expression more pressing, more lofty, more beautiful, more all-encompassing than anything you have written, or thought in your entire life, even as you need to be somewhat learned to appreciate it. Despite all that’s been said, about how literature is essentially hidden from you and unknown to you, literature can still be known to you and know you (or out-know you) in a way that makes you feel even smaller and more insignificant than it does when it is hidden and unknown. Literature kills you—as a student of literature, you become the grave.
You shrug off this pessimism—you cannot finally confess you hate literature (if you’ve read this far I’m sure this is true).
I can hear you saying, “Well, despite all this ‘grave’ talk I still know enough literature to enjoy it.”
Of course, and this is what reality (in its mercy) grants us—two things can be true at once. You can be ignorant of a subject and still ‘get something out of it.’
As long as you understand. The fact that you can ‘get something out of it’ in no way cancels anything said above.
And one more indictment must be made.
People use their interest in literature as a jacket and tie, something to adorn themselves with.
People use literature as a way to 1. make themselves feel special and 2. to make their opinion known about some current event.
Literature, for most people, is this crossroads: Me and Current Events.
For those who don’t use literature as an excuse for an obscure pose (which is beyond worthless) this is what nearly all people use literature to do:
“Here’s what I feel about sex or religion or the coronavirus.”
But this is the opposite of what literature promotes; this is the very opposite of what literature is.
Literature is not about you.
Nor is it about current events.
If you think these two things are true, than you don’t like literature. Nor do you know what literature is.
I hear people say that Scarriet’s Poetry Baseball has nothing to do with literature; it’s silly and pointless, it puts literature in a box, it’s reductive and self-indulgent.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
Poets write for fame (and they write for money because money often equals fame) and they write for fame because fame equals whatever is larger than race, country, history, or the individual. And the greater the poet, the more they transcend these things, even as they, on a crude level, ‘write for money and fame.’ And further, money can be given out by individuals and organizations which ‘swear off money’ just as much as by entities which are ‘all about the money.’ Crude political demarcations have no place in literature. The poets who sink into frantic denials of ‘money and fame’ miss this. And this has nothing to do with politics—nothing simplistic and crude, applied in a general way, has any place in literature, unless as an object of satire.
Literature is a discrete object, and it is organized, not by contemporary political likes and dislikes, or bullhorn campaign promises, but organized it is—poets do not escape organizing principles any more than anyone else.
The Scarriet Poetry Baseball league—with its twenty five teams reflecting interest and influence and toil in categories which transcend simplistic political and social divisions—is actually a serious attempt to organize world historical literature on a scale never before attempted, from Homer to the present.
The anglophilic Voltaire, who betrayed republican principles in a deeply cynical but learned manner, finding himself playing for Mao’s China is a “roster choice” not made lightly. Neither is Pushkin playing for Franklin’s “American” team.
The role of a team’s pitcher—representing practical applications of ideas unfolding in a literary lifetime, and backed up by a defensive infield based on the excellence and cooperation of its versifying technique is just one more way Scarriet Poetry Baseball is organized in a highly serious and literary manner.
The playing out of the season, including trades and injuries and every imaginable particular, using poets from all genres, eras and ages, is the greatest attempt we know to bring literature as a discrete object to life.
There is a method to all this madness, and those who support literature should appreciate the way this league is organized.
Those who love literature (and not highly dubious and selfish substitutes) should be fans of Scarriet’s Poetry Baseball.
—Marla Muse