It seems to us there are three truths to life worth knowing.
The first is the truth of efficiency—the one thing everyone wants and needs, and this is divided into two: first, efficiency in practical matters, such as a house with a convenient number of bathrooms, living close to where we work, a life of peace and quiet, if that is what we want, a life of excitement, if that is what we want, in terms that make it easier, not more difficult, to obtain whatever we happen to want at any given time.
Second, efficiency in non-practical matters: beauty, poetry, art, with the understanding that a well-built house and a well-built poem are similar, with the only difference being a house is practical, and a poem is not.
Every issue comes down to efficiency: how quickly can happiness be obtained? All other matters are extraneous and vain.
This leads us to the third truth. Efficiency belongs to human manipulation and effort; happiness, however, is a given, and belongs to nature, or what we might call God, or, if we prefer, chance or accident.
If we lose sight of this: that efficiency is all, and think instead that we can create happiness—the final goal of our efficient actions—if we mistakenly believe that the happiness is what we create; when instead, happiness already exists for our enjoyment, we fall into the error of inefficiency and bad taste.
If what we seek to obtain is a manufactured pleasure, rather than pleasure as it already exists, we violate the Efficiency principle; we do extra work to manufacture what is already obtainable in its raw form. We dress up the lady who is more beautiful naked. We witness this principle all the time— in the tasteless and gaudy parade of our fellow human beings, who distort and make ugly the human body with unnatural eating habits, tattoos, garish clothing, tasteless jewelry, cheap perfume or cologne, ape-like manners, grunts, grimaces, loud laughter, ostentatious displays of attention-getting—all of this, when not due to illness or accident, is because the vanity of the deluded man or woman mistakes efficiency in obtaining a good for the good itself. They wear a tattoo on their leg because they think putting a tattoo on a leg makes that leg better. Words don’t exist to explain why a tattoo is in bad taste, but it has something to do with the effort made by the tattoo artist to improve the human body, an effort which, in the grand scheme of things, is inefficient. The person of good taste recognizes this immediately; the person of bad taste does not, and here we see how the efficiency law continues to operate, even in matters in which its own principle becomes manifest. Immediacy, such as when beauty immediately strikes our eye, is efficiency in operation, so that efficiency and beauty are the same, though we are conscious of the beauty, not the efficiency.
Once effort has been exerted, pride takes over, and convinces us the effort was worth it; after the tattoo is done, the tattoo artist and the tattoo wearer will defend their act of bad taste—because for the time being it is efficient to do so. The same principle is involved when we finish a long book, or travel to a nice place, or attend a popular music concert: we are forced to say our experience was “wonderful!” It is too late to remove the tattoo. The check is cashed and the moment has been converted to pride. Now it will take even more effort to remove the effort’s work. This is why we cannot admit wrong; it violates the Efficiency Principle; and so error rules the world.
This is why the true artistic genius is lazy; they never make effort where none is required; they study, in fact, to be lazy, to make no effort where none is required; this is their secret, and why they seem so odd to the world; and then, of a sudden, after they have watched and studied in great solitude, contemplating the strange greatness of the world, they amaze us with their energy as they bring effort to where, previously, effort never seemed necessary at all. They have not discovered effort; nor have they discovered novelty, but only joy as it already existed. And this is how we recognize joy—it was already there, but the genius helped us see it.
And this is how we reject it, or appreciate it:
If we have good taste, we appreciate it. If we have bad taste, it offends us and we reject it.
If it is Beethoven’s music, for example, we need no knowledge of music—none—to appreciate it, and if we bend our ear to decipher profound music, we will miss it, because what Beethoven discovered and gave to us is joy, not the rules of music or any other technicality.
If we reject Beethoven, we make up some excuse, like, “I don’t enjoy classical music,” which is a lie a person tells to themselves; the truth is, they are a person of bad taste, a person who has bought and practiced the lie that effort is all; the truth is that Beethoven offends them by showing up their efforts as comparatively useless.
Effort’s pride is offended by joy too easily obtained.
The laziness of the genius offends the dullard’s meandering devotions.
The brief poem of genius, written in an afternoon, offends the novelist who traveled the world to write that lengthy and complex work.
Like a tyrant, that novel demands respect, and professors the world over will flock to serve the tyrant’s wishes; children are killed by tyrants, who are offended by the beauty of children not their own—a beauty created too quickly and too easily.
On the other hand, raising children requires a great deal of effort, which justly and appropriately protects them in the commonplace world where effort alone is sacred.
Effort without efficiency still demands our respect; sweat and care, even if it is clumsy, has to be applauded, even to the point where the world says it was Beethoven’s sweat alone which produced the music: yet how can divine music be sweat? Yet this is how the effort-mongers think! If one can call it thinking—it is really pride, the pride of the creature who merely sweats and therefore profoundly and desperately resents all that Beethoven is.
To love Beethoven requires no special genius; to love Beethoven does not require we be Beethoven or even know or feel anything Beethoven knew or felt: it is the perfect relationship, because it is free of all obligation; it is the purest gift. But it is refused, purely and absolutely refused, by the sweating mud dweller for one reason—pride. The pride of mud, the pride of sweat and mud, is the highest and most horrific kind of pride, for it is ignorance denying a gift, the only gift possible for the creature—even in its ignorance—to receive.
Now it is true there are musical and cultural qualities which belong to tribes—if people existed purely in vacuums, then Beethoven’s music would impact them immediately, but the truth is, they might be Muslims immersed in Islamic culture, or youth immersed in youth music, which connects them to their friends, and therefore it is their culture which makes them reject Beethoven’s music, not their individual existence as a proud slave to effort. We grant this.
But here again, even as we use the fancy and significant term, ‘culture,’ and include thousands of individuals, we are still talking of a tattoo placed on a person by a tattoo artist and the pride which defends the tattooing effort against a kind of action which is not aware of any effort at all—because it is beauty, efficiency itself, which is the essence of its action. A mistake is a mistake, whether it is practiced by one person or ten million.
Efficiency belongs to human perfection, and pleasure is the mere result; there are no shortcuts to pleasure, as we all know. Efficiency, and its manifestation, beauty, is the means, not the end, to joy and pleasure—the end (pleasure) belongs already to pure Being, to God, to Nature, so the highest achievement cannot be in the realm of pleasure (this realm is beyond human reach) but only in the realm of Efficiency. The rose cannot pick itself: we cannot take pleasure up in our hand; effort is made towards something—happiness, we hope, but as much as our effort is efficient, only then will we experience joy; otherwise we will be like those who work hard, but in despair that “no one appreciates us;” our effort, even if we vaguely sense it is doing “some good” for someone, seems to us tedious or a “waste.” Effort is a curse; it bores us and wears us down. Efficiency, which perfects effort, is the only joy we ourselves can possibly effect.
Now of course Beethoven was embroiled “in effort” even as we maintain here that effort is an odious thing. Efficiency is the only thing which makes it less odious.
This can be reduced to a simple formula, obviously: how much pain for how much pleasure? Are we merely saying this is the only formula worth knowing to the creature who experiences pain and pleasure? Are we doing nothing but elaborating a truism?
In practical matters, nothing interesting can be said, and the truism just alluded to is the formula par excellence. We are adding this caveat: pain belongs to us (effort) but pleasure does not. Effort, which is tedious, belongs to pride and ignorance, and efficiency is the secret source of not only intelligence and material skill, but beauty and good taste; we are removing pleasure from the formula, not in any Puritan effort, but rather to extol efficiency in obtaining pleasure as the ultimate pleasure. So we alter the truth this way: not “how much pain for how much pleasure,” but rather “how much efficiency?” Efficiency is all ye know and all ye need to know. This is where Keats’ Beauty and Truth meet: in Efficiency.
And now we reach that realm in which interesting things can be said: Aesthetics—precisely because here we escape the practical. Or, we think we escape it. We really do not. The fool thinks the practical can be escaped, that the principle of efficiency can be escaped, that the pleasure from art is different from the pleasure from life, but it is not, and the illusion qua illusion of art is that very thing which has this one purpose only: to hit the fool in the face with morality which cannot be escaped. We ‘show up’ the fool with art; art is a show—that is all it is: a ‘showing’ in the context of a reality which continually demands efficiency. Work is efficient—or not—in the practical world; art is beautiful—or not—in the (apparently) impractical world. Practicality, by its very nature, will manifest itself more strongly in terms of how far-reaching it is; but practicality must also be felt by the individual, who, by nature, is guided less by practicality than the millions are; but since Efficiency is a universal law, it must operate in the individual qua individual, as well, and it does so aesthetically. The aesthetic is nothing more than the perfection of efficiency as it applies to the individual.
We say of the perfected poem: not one word more, not one word less.
What other standard is there? What standard but this intimates beauty and truth, or our new term: efficiency?
It is the peculiar law of Efficiency that it is the more itself the less necessary it is, for after all, Efficiency finally belongs more to beauty than to necessity, even as it facilitates everything practical and necessary. This is because efficiency can always be improved upon, and what is necessary cannot—or else it would not, as itself, before it was improved, be what it is: necessary
Because the poem is less necessary, the well-built poem is more efficient than the well-built house. This might seem naive to say in the vastness of a volatile world—in which sometimes it seems poems have no reason to belong. Yet how often does efficiency seem absent? How often does efficiency not seem to belong to the world, either? How often are we aware of delays and sorrow, the chief reason being inefficiency?
The poem and efficiency—both are equally absent from the world. There are attempts at poetry, attempts at efficiency in practical matters, but the thinking person is reminded constantly how often the result falls short of the blissful ideal.
We have little control of how efficient the greater world is—there is perhaps nothing more than this which makes us feel helpless and futile; and we should also add that efficiency is not in everyone’s interest—the criminal rejoices in the inefficiency of the police department, for instance. And this leads us to a further point: we find in every instance that it is morality which finally figures into the whole efficiency trope: this should not surprise us: it is easy to see that Beauty/Truth (Efficiency) is concerned with good in the highest sense. This is not to say that a criminal avoiding the police cannot write a wonderful poem: the poem as a just act in itself is certainly within the purview of this essay.
This is precisely what we mean by the highest good. The aesthetic allows the individual to be efficient in a radically efficient way—since the practical world demands efficiency (often without getting it) as a matter of course. The aesthetic makes no such demand, and the demand, or lack of one, in this case, applies to the very important inner life of the individual, the dreams one has at night, for example; are not dreams a manifestation of everyone’s unconscious aesthetic? Yet who would ever think of demanding dreams be more efficient? Yet if we follow our general argument, here is what we do “demand.”
The more efficient dream would simply be one more densely packed with meaning and pleasure. Dreams, in as much as they move us, make us feel nostalgic, and fill us with longing and poignancy upon waking, attempt to do this already, or we would not be aware of them as dreams—oh beautiful dreams!—that we ourselves are having.
There is more complexity in one of our more interesting dreams than in the lives of the population at large as they go about their dreary existence, pushed about by necessity.
And this is precisely why a well-built poem (which is like a dream) is more efficient (or has the potential to be more efficient) than a well-built house.
Ultimately we are talking about the same thing in both cases: efficiency.
For the house, we can debate as to which is more efficient: three bathrooms, or two? And all sorts of contingencies which change over time will determine the answer, so what is most efficient will most likely never be known. But the practical world keeps demanding, at least ideally, efficiency, forever.
The poem differs only in this: it is impractical and belongs to the vast complexity of the inner dreaming individual, where the principle of efficiency operates just as it would anywhere else, but here provides the opportunity for the individual to practice efficiency and find, therein, happiness. There is nothing more practical than happiness effected by efficiency—here then, and here alone, is how aesthetics—in the realm of the “selfish” individual—works its practical and societal good.
Philosophers have long wrestled with the notion of how art justifies itself: the dilemma is: art either exists profoundly for itself, and is cut off from all practical affairs (with this being art’s whole point) or art is endowed with all sorts of attributes which turns it into either 1) a piece of propaganda or 2) a useful item—such that it no longer has any aesthetic qualities at all. And hovering over the whole enterprise is the Platonist critique that art does not tell the truth, and is immoral.
The Platonist critique is so morally powerful that it threatens to destroy even our thesis: a pickpocket is bad, and yet a pickpocket can be “efficient.” How, then, can we make efficiency our ultimate measure?
The answer is, that since efficiency is a happiness in itself, but does not necessarily lead to happiness, we don’t need to assert that efficiency in pick-pocketing leads to more happiness; and further, the more efficient the pickpocket, the more efficient we have to be to catch the pickpocket; so we still feel confident that we can rest on Efficiency as the greatest ideal.
The efficient face is the beautiful face, the kind of face one falls in love with, but falling in love with a beautiful face is certainly no guarantee of happiness; in fact, there is a good chance the efficiency of that face will make you miserable. True happiness is reserved for the lucky; the efficiency of someone else is no guarantee of your happiness. Think of our example of Beethoven. We may assert with great conviction that his music is the glory of the world; but earlier we discussed how he is resented— the glory of Beethoven, to millions who suffer from bad taste, equals annoyance or pain. Just so: how does the existence of magnificent mansions ease the burden of the poor in their hovels? Or the poor in their novels? On the other hand, how does it help the poor to resent the rich? How is that efficient in any sense? It is never efficient to resent Beethoven. It is never efficient to envy.
It is efficient to love efficiency, however. There is nothing more efficient—in terms practical or aesthetic.
Poetry, when it was known as verse, once held forth on all sorts of practical matters—Virgil on beekeeping, Lucretius on the universe, Shakespeare on history and human nature, Pope on Criticism, and to this day, poetry which amuses us, that is, poetry which belongs to the world of practical affairs, is called Light Verse.
But critically esteemed poetry, as opposed to mere verse, in our day, is completely removed from the practical, almost by definition; it belongs to Pater’s “hard, gem-like flame,” to T.S. Eliot’s “pure vision,” and it all began with Coleridge saying poetry has as its immediate object, pleasure, while truth belongs to works of science.
Valery wrote that philosophy has no place in poetry. Prose has clipped the wings of Coleridge by taking away all the science, and even all fiction of any length, from poetry, to the consternation of many a critic and poet. The poet is told: you cannot be Shakespeare; that is no longer done; today you are trivial. ‘But can’t I be Coleridge, at least?’ the poet asks, but the verse of Coleridge is no longer practiced either; so, no. And the modern poet appears more trivial, still. It is as if there were a conspiracy against the poet. But not really. It is simply efficiency working its will.
Beekeeping is learned from bee keepers; is it efficient that bee keepers be poets—in order that they might teach us about beekeeping? No, and for the simple reason that it is easier to become an expert in one field than two; we shouldn’t have to ask that beekeepers also be poets; this is not efficient, plain and simple.
It would be a lovely thing if all bee keepers were poets.
This is a crucial point: it is not that there is something about poetry itself which keeps poetry from addressing bee keeping.
The critics anxious to reserve for poetry a special vision, or a place for poetry alone, belonging only to itself, removed from practical matters entirely, would deny poetry and beekeeping a place together for the wrong reason: they diminish poetry and beekeeping both—but we have already shown how it is merely the efficiency principle which keeps the two apart.
Poetry can be learned from the ancient models, but the ability of the would-be poet to inhabit that kind of Vast Practical Knowledge with his or her poetic wit is something which cannot be purchased or learned—and this is the reason why the great poet is rare.
So, yes, it would indeed be a lovely thing if all beekeepers were poets. But now, because of our Efficiency principle, we see the true reason why such a thing is impossible. It isn’t because poetry and beekeeping themselves are at odds.
Prose is more efficient than poetry, not from any reason pertaining to the nature of prose itself; prose is more efficient as a tool of general use because of a real lack in the material skills of human beings, who do not have the time to practice to be the kind of poets who can write on beekeeping.
Poetry does belong to the practical world as much as anything, but poetry is prevented from belonging to it for two reasons: the false theory of its irrelevance perpetrated by the art for art’s sake school, and the efficiency principle which finds it too difficult a demand that all beekeepers be poets.
Edgar Poe is correct that a long poem does not exist, but there is no reason why treatises on beekeeping could not be broken up into small poem-like essays.
Poe’s narrowing of poetry’s definition, following the trend of the moderns to move away from verses on beekeeping towards a definition more purely ‘poetic,’ owed more to the efficiency principle than we might realize. It is unlikely that a businessman, a person in the trades, a busy and responsible citizen, such as a beekeeper, will have the temperament to pursue poetry. A gentleman mourning the death of a beautiful woman is merely Poe’s way of saying in a very practical sense: the poet is most likely to be a lover simply because those who have the leisure to learn poetry will likely have the temperament and position in society to love beauty and court women with philosophy, with words, with what me might call poetry—while (from purely practical reasons, mind you) the businessman will pursue women and beauty (if this interests them) in the typically busy and distracted pursuit of wealth.
The whole matter of Poe’s well-known poetic theories (hijacked by the art for art sake crowd in a radical error) is a perfectly practical one, based on the higher efficiency principle as it pertains to society and its mundane necessities. The lover is the poet for a simple, efficient reason. The beekeeper doesn’t have time to be a poet. The lover does, and this fact generates all that follows.
We have hinted already at what allows us to call the impractical poem efficient: if naked is good, don’t add dress; if dress is necessary, add just enough. We should say something about the mean: a poem ought to balance less with more, the balance determined by the poem’s own measure. An efficient house requires x number of bathrooms, and this always signifies a mean: just the right number. The principle should likewise always be present in the construction of the poem.
The building of the poem and the house are radically similar.
The reason for the house is self-evident.
The poem for this reason must also be self-evident.
The poet comes up with a theme—a moral/practical theme–and all that follows obeys the law of measurement governed by the most efficient (or most immediate) unfolding of the theme. Brevity is what the poem traditionally does well. But too much brevity leads to inefficiency, as with too much length. A dense, excessive, meandering may be called for, and even this, as every great artist knows, must be expressed—efficiently. There is efficient torture, there is efficient pain, there is efficient madness, there is efficient roaming to where, in perfect composure, efficiency waits, bound, in the most gentle manner possible, by a golden string.