The Curse of Finity

The Curse of Finity

The bliss of finity, like any discipline or intoxicant, is dangerous. The danger lies in its ubiquity, its ease of application. This results in extension and over-use. When that happens, boundaries disappear. In practice, this threat manifests as dissipation of effort. Tempted by a plethora of finite tasks whose tidy resolution can become addictive, we risk frittering ourselves away on trivia. The trick is to balance the thrill of near-omnipotence in small tasks with the thrill of being overwhelmed by large ones. Great things can come of attention to detail, but only if we exclude most if not all the other small demands on our time and attention. If we pay attention to lots of small matters, we have nothing to invest in large ones, except regret.

Personally, I fight and lose the balance battle frequently. As you may imagine, allegiance to the mirage-like appeal of the timeless infinity of art is easily overwhelmed by the alluring demand of the finite mundane. The yard, the house, the critters, the houseplants, the garden, the housework –laundry, meals, etc consume my day. Family takes its share. Suddenly, the day is done and I’ve written not one word. Yeats wrote that all things could tempt him from the craft of verse. Ain’t it the truth. The bliss of finity is cursed treasure, one whose infinity of appealing forms can steal the souls of all but the strongest pilgrims.

I think that the curse of finity may be partly behind our cultural dismissal of poetry. In other times, when the world was clearly bounded, and god was in his heaven, the liberty of infinity was pleasurable to consider. Time without end. The everlasting life of the immortal soul. These were ways out of a celestial prison, ones that the repetition, the rhyme, and the rolling meter of poetry helped convey. As a result, poetry was popular.

Today, the situation is different. Confronted with the infinity of the universe and the immense scope of problems in a populous world, finity beckons and we prefer prose. We do so because whether novel or non-fiction, the work itself is finite, self-contained, with a beginning and an end. This closure is at least as comforting as the heightening of reality that attention to storyline or fact pattern provides to readers assaulted by the need to reconcile their appreciation of the recent fruits of science with a long cultural allegiance to religion. In other words, religion once infused the world with meaning. Today, science says this is all there is: you must provide meaning yourself. Prose fiction and non-fiction helps fill that gap by heightening reality as omnipotent authors edit the clutter and assign importance for us. The fact that they’ve always done this – somebody wrote the sacred texts – is not inconsequential, but that aside must wait.

Another reason we prefer prose today is that the babble of prose dampens the echo of its rhetoric. This keeps it from rolling down time’s infinite corridors, taking us with it. Because prose seldom sweeps us off our feet, its safe and comforting in an unsettling millennium. Yes, there are evocative prose works – the Gettysburg Address springs to mind – but almost all are very nearly prose poems (an oxymoron whose existence I deny) that deal with big questions, matters of enduring human import.

That’s what good poetry does too. A poem may be finite, it may start and end on the same page, with the same sounds even. But it rings like a bell. And being small, it can be infinitely tinkered with. Prose you can slap down, rough into shape, and let be in good wabi-sabi fashion. A poem is much more disciplined finity, one that demands perfection or at least its approach. In a busy, trivia-filled world, that sort of commitment is as hard to justify as it is summon. So poetry suffers. And we do too.