Two Metaphysical Traditions

Rountable Abstract

“Tiutchev is often spoken of as a poet-philosopher,” wrote Lev Pumpianskii in 1928. “But to speak this way is possible only for those who would silently imply that metaphysics is an integral part of philosophy – and so it is, therefore, not possible for us. Metaphysics is not a philosophical phenomenon; it is an aesthetic one.”

This roundtable takes as its central focus a comparative theme: the metaphysical tradition in nineteenth-century Russian lyric and in contemporary American pop country music. We hope to examine the thematic and formal overlap between the metaphysical, Christian-inflected naive mode of (e.g.) Faith Hill, Kacey Musgraves, and the Dixie Chicks and that of Tiutchev, Baratynsky, and Fet.

Following Pumpianskii and taking him further, we understand the metaphysical tradition not only to aestheticize in the name of philosophy but also, crucially, to philosophize a certain aesthetic. To this end, speakers will treat, variously, the set of formal and political concerns evoked by both traditions: lyrical and musical voice, gender, human culture’s relation to nature, religion and spirituality, conservative nationalism, socio-economic class, the way philosophy is encoded in sound.

Finally, in establishing a dialogue between two such seemingly disparate lyrical traditions, we intend to foreground and interrogate the affordances of comparative analysis when applied to texts unmediated by a direct line of influence. For example, one interpretive pathway that this pairing opens up is a consideration of a larger, historically and geographically unbound Christian metaphysical tradition in which a particular lyrical stance – common to both these genres – plays a crucial role.

Draft of Paper

Support Our Tropes: Liberal Tropes in Faith Hill and Baratynsky

Growing up in New York City and rural Washington I have always been curious about the counter intuitive appeal of country music among broad demographics of people even those who don’t like chicken fried steak, believe in god, or even own a truck (joke 1)! This is not so much a phenomenon that I’ve found with Russian metaphysical poetry (joke 2). American country music and Russian metaphysical poetry can be considered genres that have a conservative ethos (valorizes nature, rural life, god, etc), yet this overlap is problematized when we consider that Russian metaphysical poets are generally apolitical and often look back to a liberal aristocratic moment whereas American country music more often explicitly espouses conservative values. However, a comparison of these two lyric traditions allows us to trace a thread where the lyric subject is sometimes the same as the desiring subject in a way that develops a liberal ideology where loss and compromise is aestheticized. In this paper, I will compare Baratynsky (“поцелуй”), Tiutchev (“последняя любовь”) Faith Hill (“This Kiss”), and Kip Moore (“Somethin’ ‘Bout a Truck”) to trace a non-naïve and naïve mode of knowing that connects these lyrics across time and distinguishes differences between contemporaries in order to assess what such a comparison can help us understand about the relationship between liberal and conservative ideologies.

One of the first comparisons we can make is between a desiring lyric and an immanent/possessing lyric within each of the different genres. Sarah Pratt has noted the difference between a naïve and non-naïve relationship between the poet and experience as mediated by language. Some pets like Fet or Tiutchev attempt to capture and possess experience, whereas Baratynsky is more self-aware and pessimistic of the project and there is a notable difference between Tiutchev and Baratynsky in how they conceptualize or don’t conceptualize the role of the poet. Likewise, there is this same possessing-vs-desiring lyric distinction within country music by the post-Iraq division of country music which either became explicitly political through pro-war jingoism or anti-war (prowar: Toby Keith, anti war: Willie Nelson, Merle Haggard and Dixie Chicks) and a more feminine country music which is preoccupied by topics that are deserious—the ahistorical and “universal” tropes of love, loss, god, and nature as well as the role of the poetic vocation (singers such as Faith Hill, Taylor Swift, but also the Dixie Chicks).

In these desirous tropes, we find a natural affinity between Baratynsky and, we’ll take for example, Faith Hill. By coincidence they both wrote a lyric more-or-less titled “This Kiss,” which we can use to examine the trope of the inability of the speaker as poet to recapture a transcendental erotic moment and how that can help us understand the role of metaphysical tropes in the formation of liberal subjectivity. In the Baratynsky poem (handout 1), our subject matter is a seemingly cliché topic of a kiss. However, it is immediately experienced in the particular “Сей поцелуй” and the lyric is concerned with what this kiss means for the poet. Notably not what this kiss is in itself. A kiss “bestowed by you” to someone else is routine, yet it has a profound effect on the poet and lingers in his imagination. But what is important to the poet is the unexpected nature of experiencing something ordinary in this transcendental way. However, should the poet dream about it to recapture the sensation, the deception (obman) (which is the joy) goes away and leaves only exhaustion (iznemozhenie). This exhaustion is the result of the movement of examining what the kiss is, to what the kiss is to him, to what the kiss could be. Never is there a “softly gave in my mouth the seedcake warm and chewed” moment. Baratynsky is a scientific poet and this analytical process of the poem arrives at the discovery that the poetic vocation can never capture a moment of experience: it can only describe it or define the circumstances under which it could occur or become something else.

The poet’s role then is to deal with loss, either the loss of experience or of their own poetic ability and this circumstance illustrates a defining feature of Baratynsky and Faith Hill and company: their lyrics are defined by an optative mood expressed either through the use of conditional clauses (as we see in the Baratynsky poem also in his “Autumn”, and soon the Faith Hill lyrics) or various imperatives that lose their injunctive force (as in Faith Hill, or the Dixie Chicks or Taylor Swift, see playlist). For Baratynsky, he can only make something of this kiss under the condition “Should sleep descend on me and shut my eyes.” His poetic powers to transform experience into poetry and arrive at the conclusion that he “has only love” can only operate outside of the indicative world of facts and description. Here we also find a connection to the English Metaphysical poets and their use of conditionality and conceits. We need look no father than Marvell, where the annoying and boring reality of chastity is ignored and transformed into hyperbole: “My vegetable love should grow / Vaster than empires and more slow; / An hundred years should go to praise / Thine eyes, and on thy forehead gaze.” Much better than simply not having sex.

The desiring or wishful nature of these lyrics can be further examined when we turn to the Faith Hill rendition of “This Kiss.” In this song, the singer also attempts to define a past transcendental erotic experience. Like Baratynsky’s poem, what is important to the singer is what the kiss means for her instead of how to define it. Rather it is circumscribed by either metaphysical tropes (e.g. “centrifugal motion,” “perpetual bliss,” “the way you love me,” or “impossible”), a rather queer mise-en-abîme (with Cinderalla telling Snow White to “Ride me off into the sunset / Baby I’m forever yours”), or conditional/imperative statements (“You can kiss me with the windows open / While the rain comes pouring inside, oh”). Nonetheless, this kiss cannot be captured in song. She and Baratynsky come to the exact same conclusion, all that is left is “It’s the way you love me baby,” but in this song we hear the movement of the sung word towards inarticulable expressions of desire (the ohs and ahs). All we have is the knowledge of the loss of experience and a definition of the poetic vocation as one who makes poems out of knowledge of being a loser. In country music, this is the genesis of the didactic female-to-female-knowledge sub-genre, where women country singers sing about the “harsh realities of life” trope for a younger female audience. For Baratynsky, he writes for the thinking poets such as in Autumn (maybe for the Symbolists) to show them their lot in life as well. In either case, the analysis of desire through the creation of the poem constitutes a starkly different relationship to knowledge than the immanent lyrics and forms a liberal subject that may wish for something different, but resigns themself to how thing are.

This non-naïve and optative mode of knowing by Baratynsky and Faith Hill is in direct opposition to the more naïve and more immanent/possessing mode of Tiutchev and Kip Moore. For lack of time, they can in short be defined as wholly indicative. For them everything exists and further their poems put things into existence. In Последняя любовь, Tiutchev directly addresses whom he is speaking to: first the “прощальный свет”, then the “вечерний день”, finally equating them with “О ты, последняя любовь!” Things are what they are—Ты и блаженство, и безнадежность “You are Both Bliss and Happiness”. And notably these things are not always really things but the poem becomes the function of reification. In this same way, Kip Moore’s song “Somethin’ ‘Bout a Truck” acts to transform “human beings into thing like beings which do not behave in a human way but according to the laws of the thing world” (Petrović). Particular instances are given of things as they are (a stanza about a truck, a stanza about a beer, a stanza about a creek, a stanza about a girl, importantly leading to “more”/“Moore” the name of the singer himself) and then explicitly brought together as a string of “somethings” in one stanza that add up to a totalizing world view: “And there’s somethin bout a truck in a field And a girl in a red sundress with an ice cold beer to her lips beggin for another kiss And there’s somethin bout you and me and the birds and the bees And lord have mercy it’s a beautiful thing Ain’t nothin bout it luck, There’s somethin bout a truck.”

To return to our initial question about the widespread appeal of country music, we see that it is only one part of this conservative genre that has affinity with liberals, the desiring and feminized lyric. So there is not only an interesting reversal of the women-immanence-vs-man-transcendence trope, but we also highlight a contradiction within the lyric genre’s celebration of immanence. These lyric offers a glimpse of liberation (orgasmic/divine/revolutionary/nationalistic) through experience but, like all liberal takes, that becomes the end goal itself as fetish. Marvell would not have written “To His Coy Mistress” if he were actually having sex with her. The liberal formation is one of loss and fantasy, so it is not hard to see how these lyric traditions are picked up by the symbolists and podcasts producers (see Dolly Parton’s America) alike and clandestinely raise the banner for nationalism, be in the eschatological acceptance of a “Russian” revolution, or the jingoistic post-911 nativism which can equally praise in a non-contradictory way both the Iraq War and Obama.

A final question may be then, is the lyric inherently a liberal genre? This on the surface seems an obvious question and the answer is yes. However, the epic lyric of poets like Mayakovsky and Whitman as well as the fact that there have been many more and greater communist poets than novelists may make us think that the embodied nature of the lyric subject allows for a greater concern than the self-identification of the subject within the logic of a social milieu, isn’t this the whole metaphysical concern after-all? And this may be a good place to end for further discussion.

Handout

Е. А. Боратынский. Поцелуй (1822,1827)

Сей поцелуй, дарованный тобой,

Преследует моё воображенье:

И в шуме дня, и в тишине ночной

Я чувствую его напечатленье!

Сойдёт ли сон и взор сомкнет ли мой,-

Мне снишься ты, мне снится наслажденье!

Обман исчез, нет счастья! и со мной

Одна любовь, одно изнеможенье.

Ф. И. Тютчев. Последняя любовь (1851-1854)

О, как на склоне наших лет

Нежней мы любим и суеверней…

Сияй, сияй, прощальный свет

Любви последней, зари вечерней!

Полнеба обхватила тень,

Лишь там, на западе, бродит сиянье, –

Помедли, помедли, вечерний день,

Продлись, продлись, очарованье.

Пускай скудеет в жилах кровь,

Но в сердце не скудеет нежность…

О ты, последняя любовь!

Ты и блаженство, и безнадежность.

Faith Hill. This Kiss (1998)

I don’t want another heartbreak I don’t need another turn to cry, no I don’t want to learn the hard way Baby hello, oh no, goodbye But you got me like a rocket Shooting straight across the sky

It’ s the way you love me It’s a feeling like this It’s centrifugal motion It’s perpetual bliss It’s that pivotal moment It’s, ah, impossible This kiss, this kiss Unstoppable This kiss, this kiss

Cinderella said to Snow White “How does love get so off course All I wanted was a white knight With a good heart, soft touch, fast horse Ride me off into the sunset Baby I’m forever yours”

It’s the way you love me It’s a feeling like this It’s centrifugal motion It’s perpetual bliss It’s that pivotal moment It’s, ah unthinkable This kiss, this kiss Unsinkable This kiss, this kiss

You can kiss me in the moonlight On the rooftop under the sky, oh You can kiss me with the windows open While the rain comes pouring inside, oh Kiss me in sweet slow motion Let’s let everything slide You got me floating You got me flying

It’s the way you love me It’s a feeling like this It’s centrifugal motion It’s perpetual bliss It’s that pivotal moment It’s (ah) subliminal This kiss, this kiss It’s criminal This kiss, this kiss

It’s the way you love me baby It’s the way you love me, darlin’

It’ s the way you love me It’s a feeling like this It’s centrifugal motion It’s perpetual bliss It’s that pivotal moment It’s (ah) subliminal This kiss, this kiss It’s criminal This kiss, this kiss

It’s the way you love me baby It’s the way you love me darlin’

Kip Moore. Somethin’ ‘Bout a Truck (2012)

Somethin bout a truck in a farmers field A no trespass sign, and time to kill Nobody’s gonna get hurt, so what’s the big deal Somethin bout a truck in a farmer’s field

Somethin bout beer, sittin on ice After a long hard day, makes it taste just right On that dropped tailgate, on a summer night Somethin bout beer sittin on ice

And there’s somethin bout a girl in a red sun dress With an ice cold beer pressed against her lips In that farmers field, will make a boy a mess There’s somethin bout a girl in a red sundress

And there’s somethin bout a kiss that’s gonna lead to more On that dropped tailgate back behind the corn The most natural thing you’ve ever felt before There’s somethin bout a kiss that’s gonna lead to more

And there’s somethin bout a truck in a field And a girl in a red sundress with an ice cold beer to her lips beggin for another kiss And there’s somethin bout you and me and the birds and the bees And lord have mercy it’s a beautiful thing Ain’t nothin bout it luck, There’s somethin bout a truck

Somethin bout a creek, around 2 a.m. After a few of those beers, you wanna dive on in You don’t need no clothes, so just hang em on a limb There’s somethin bout a creek around 2 a.m.

And there’s somethin bout a truck in a field And a girl in a red sundress with an ice cold beer to her lips Beggin for another kiss And there’s somethin bout you and me and the birds and the bees And lord have mercy, it’s a beautiful thing Ain’t nothin bout it luck, there’s somethin bout a truck Ain’t nothin bout it luck, there’s somethin bout a truck