Monday I downloaded Mark Turner’s Death Is the Mother of Beauty: Mind, Metaphor, Criticism from CYBEREDITIONS and, bothered by my inability to place the title reference, googled it. It’s a line (actually 2 lines) from Wallace Stevens’s “Sunday Morning,” of course — a poem which like almost all of Stevens’s work has seemed to me too meandering and florid. No doubt that’s a personal problem, but Monday the poem surprised me, and I read it over several times, more and more impressed.
That Google search also returned, on the first page, this 2005 blog entry from Chet Raymo’s Science Musings. It’s good, both on the poem and on the biological consequences of death, and it led in some fashion I can’t remember to an article on Mark Ridley’s The Coopoerative Gene and how meiosis — Mendel’s Demon — makes multicellular life possible. No meiosis, no Wallace Stevens, no "Sunday Morning." Does that make meiosis the father of beauty?
That night I read the poem to Krys, who was also impressed. But read aloud, its wordiness nearly overcame its virtues. I tried reading a few others to myself, and was quickly irritated and bored. Guess I still have that personal problem. Turner, on the other hand, just gets more exciting.
11:28:33 AM 
|
|
