Eureka!
I've finally got a fair grasp, I think, on Poe--insofar as it's possible to without sitting down with all his letters and reading him very closely for ten years. Or maybe that wouldn't even help--the problem with nailing a reading of Poe down is that Poe himself won't be nailed down--his sense of humor, his love of the hoax, his profound tendency to deny his own weaknesses and project them on others--he's more than unusually elusive.
But Eureka helped--_Eureka_ is Poe's last major work: a bizarre long mixture of joke, summary of contemporary physics and astronomy (his contemporaries, that is), and Attempted Visionary Account of Everything.
According to Poe, the universe is collapsing. And the cause of its collapse is the cause of its coming to being in the first place. A double urge to creativity and self-destruction that inspired God, at the beginning of time, to break itself into a gazillion pieces, all portions of his consciousness, and inspires those pieces, eventually, to seek their self-destruction in an attempt, through nullity, to get back to the primordial unity.
I know that story.
Poe's account has found some sympathetic readers among modern cosmologists, who point out that his system points out the need for black holes, and their own emphasis on the need for imagination or intuition to make sense of the universe.
It also gives the possibility of multiple universes existing in parallel, invisible to one another, and finally makes a case for a cyclical universe--a big bang followed by a big crunch back into God, and then a redispersal: like the beating of a great cosmic heart. That same cycle, he argues, takes place in the psyche of each of us.
It's interesting stuff--and Poe shows more signs of having taken it seriously than any of his other cosmological or religious speculations--all of which he tended to turn on with a snicker or conceal even more securely in fraud. I'm tempted to think, though, that he's always less ironic than he appears to be.
But . . . I'll wait and work on him again next time I teach the course. Now on to Hawthorne, with his semi-reactionary attitude, his bizarre guilt, his doublesided views of marriage and his blessed rejection of simple answers.
I do sort of like the 19th Century.
But Eureka helped--_Eureka_ is Poe's last major work: a bizarre long mixture of joke, summary of contemporary physics and astronomy (his contemporaries, that is), and Attempted Visionary Account of Everything.
According to Poe, the universe is collapsing. And the cause of its collapse is the cause of its coming to being in the first place. A double urge to creativity and self-destruction that inspired God, at the beginning of time, to break itself into a gazillion pieces, all portions of his consciousness, and inspires those pieces, eventually, to seek their self-destruction in an attempt, through nullity, to get back to the primordial unity.
I know that story.
Poe's account has found some sympathetic readers among modern cosmologists, who point out that his system points out the need for black holes, and their own emphasis on the need for imagination or intuition to make sense of the universe.
It also gives the possibility of multiple universes existing in parallel, invisible to one another, and finally makes a case for a cyclical universe--a big bang followed by a big crunch back into God, and then a redispersal: like the beating of a great cosmic heart. That same cycle, he argues, takes place in the psyche of each of us.
It's interesting stuff--and Poe shows more signs of having taken it seriously than any of his other cosmological or religious speculations--all of which he tended to turn on with a snicker or conceal even more securely in fraud. I'm tempted to think, though, that he's always less ironic than he appears to be.
But . . . I'll wait and work on him again next time I teach the course. Now on to Hawthorne, with his semi-reactionary attitude, his bizarre guilt, his doublesided views of marriage and his blessed rejection of simple answers.
I do sort of like the 19th Century.