I had another look at I A Richards' little book Science and Poetry. He suggests that poems work as poems not because of the statements that they make but because of the impact that they have on us - on our psyche with all its internal peculiarities that block us off from truth reason or whatever. I know that Richards was an early theorist of "practical criticism" - a teaching methodology developed in Cambridge where a group focuses on the poem and tries to tease out their response to the work. Good works trigger a great response - a beneficial response. This is literature on the run from science - you might even say literature as a narcotic.

I was driven to think about Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes - in Cambridge thirty years later. Hughes believed that the poem was something that you wanted or needed to say - in that sense it is a statement after all. But that you were not fully conventionally aware of your need. So you tried to externalise whatever it was that needed to be said and then when the work was out there you might get some idea of whatever it was that you wanted to say. Hughes studied anthropology rather than English and you can see his theory drawing on ideas of say ritual which might be "taken for granted" within a certain society. The meanings of the ritual might be only dimly perceived by many of those participating. I have tracked across some of this ground with Chris - educated at Cambridge and a succesful anthroplogist. His view is that when you have finished your anthroplogical analysis it should make sense to some of the people involved directly in the practice.

I certainly think that you may well not know whatever the current art-work in your life adds up to or means until some time after you have finished. I can think of countless examples of this from my own experience. (I am tempted to try to place J H Prynne in this sequnce...but maybe not today.)

I suppose Huxley agreed with Richards - the society which he imagined in Brave New World was such that people no longer needed literature as a narcotic because they had plenty of real narcotics. Thats the whole point about "The Savage". He is appreciates the works from the canon - Shakespeare, Dante etc. He isn't really "a savage" - he is someone who has a foot in both camps - the primitive society and the more civilised society. It is this uncomfortable posture which makes it possible for him to understand literary art and for the meanings to live within him. At the end of the novel he decides that he doesn't want to be "cured" and that although there is a lot of psychological pain involved he wants to stay at this halfway house. Huxley is still exalting art as the highest value - but he is saying that art is a relatively slight compensation for all the hurt and pain that exists in the world. A rationally ordered society would tackle the hurt and pain more directly. He is not the only author to dramatise this trade-off .... Peter Schaffer's Equus is in a similar place.

I keep coming back to Hegel --- he thinks that the posture of calm acceptance of the world as portrayed by science - trying to accept this world and conform ourselves to - say like the Stoics did - inevitably leads to unhappiness.

It does seem to be the biological sciences that give us this difficulty. Physics and cosmology are a triumph of human reason and elegantly beautiful, full of wonder. We are amazed both that the world should be like that and that we should have produced people capable of working some of it out. The world becomes enriched.

We can be amazed at the beauty say of the double-helix and the triumph of Watson and Crick in working out its structure. But we are tempted to believe those reductionists who tried to persuade that reality is best understood by "selfish genes". That altruism (say) isn't reallly what it seems to be but is just another trick of genes to guarantee their replication. Huxley with his biological heritage and scientist friends plus his fair share of bad luck in terms of illness and disease found this negative perspective hard to resist in the first half of his life. Peversely he wrote better books when he was in the grip of this theory.

I looked at some Cage piano pieces today fro the first half of the 1940s. There is a link between Cage and Huxley in that they were both pioneers in bringing elements of Eastern philosophy to engage with Western Concerns.

I was trying them on guitar - and they seemed to work well. One is just octaves and a very occaisional fifth - rather like Arvo Part but a lot earlier; another was stacked fourths. There seemed to be a meditative element about these works (as is very much the case with Part) - I was pretty impressed with them.

Andrew mailed about the current state of postmodernism and I mailed back a few thoughts. I think there is a movement around to get beyond the emptiness and paradoxes of pomo but not to pretend that it never happened or that all its arguments are faulty.

I knew a guy called John McCabe a bit when I was a student who was at the centre of a Cambridge controversy in the English Department. They wouldn't give him a lectureship, allegedly because he subscribed to pomo. I think he ended up in the British Film Institute.

Birmingham tomorrow - I think I'll try the route via Newbury and Oxford again.