tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-786207835641480928.post7774904466340628947..comments2024-03-28T12:59:41.910-04:00Comments on NeverEnding Story: Cool Announcement: Seamus Heaney's One Christmas Day in the Morning and New York Times's Op-DocsChen-ou Liu, 劉鎮歐http://www.blogger.com/profile/06235248170011255532noreply@blogger.comBlogger2125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-786207835641480928.post-71992813522718810732013-12-25T11:24:33.134-05:002013-12-25T11:24:33.134-05:00I just added one excerpt and my response haiku bel...I just added one excerpt and my response haiku below:<br /><br />teenage boys stare<br />at the nativity star ...<br />pop, pop, pop of gunshotsChen-ou Liu, 劉鎮歐https://www.blogger.com/profile/06235248170011255532noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-786207835641480928.post-31490374832805351992013-12-25T10:37:20.876-05:002013-12-25T10:37:20.876-05:00Below are the concluding paragraphs of Conor Carvi...Below are the concluding paragraphs of Conor Carville's essay:<br /><br />There is one detail of the poem that I want to consider in conclusion. Heaney speaks of the "zings" of the pellets hitting the bell. These break the narrator's day-dream and bring him back to the everyday world. In order to do this however the zings must be somehow in excess of the memory they form part of, outside or beyond it. We are, after all, usually returned to our senses by an external stimulus. These tiny zings have an ambiguous status, then: they do not fully belong to the memory, yet they are outside the present, for it is clear that the narrator is the only one who „hears. them. In The Redress of Poetry Heaney envisages a poetry that is „imagined but which nevertheless has a weight because it is imagined within the gravitational pull of the actual..38 It is worth emphasizing the way this definition delicately balances the actual and the imagined. The ambivalent status of the tiny chimes, the way they hesitate between the material and the real, the actual and the virtual, seems to me an exact portrayal of the relationship between the ethical and the political in Heaney's work as I have been describing it. They are beyond our senses yet they bring us to our senses. They also capture the way the end of the poem moves between an acknowledgment and acceptance of the actual conditions of the moment, the local tensions the narrator has exposed himself to, and an appeal to an alternative space, to the possible suspension of those conditions. <br /><br />In other words these zings are a figure for poetry itself, for what Heaney calls: "the imagination pressing back against the pressures of reality."39 One most accord the two terms "press" and "pressing" their true weight and mutual antagonism here, noting the element of tension between the ideal and the material. The imagination comes first in this formulation, but its priority is immediately qualified by its description as a response to the always already asserted pressures of the ontological. Similarly in the neighbour poems the moment of ethical rapport is only achieved in the wake of, or at least alongside, an experience of the tensions of the political. Heaney's notion that poetry, while imagined, always takes place in a space that is „within the gravitational pull of the actual. further captures the way the ethical aspects of his work are grounded deeply in the material continuum which runs from the body's affective responses, through the antagonisms of cultural difference to broader territorial tensions and rivalries. To put this another way, where Levinas. ethics, despite their attention to sensibility and affect, quickly translate these into an incommensurable otherness Heaney's poems, although equally attentive to such questions, always fold their gaze back into the world. In this sense when the poems speak of the face-to-face, they are describing a relation that is asymmetrical, as it is for Levinas, but in a wholly different manner. Rather than being overwhelmed by the infinity of the absolute other the voice of these subtle, demanding poems is again and again drawn back down into the materiality of history and politics by the creaturely finitude of the neighbour's body. <br />Chen-ou Liu, 劉鎮歐https://www.blogger.com/profile/06235248170011255532noreply@blogger.com