Another Response Post

It's shocking how rarely I do the things I intend to - even when there really is enough time and no worldly reason not to. When you tell yourself over and over that this time you will be more disciplined and stick with your work and you always fall through - does that mean the discipline simply isn't there and no decision you make can change that? The answer would seem to be yes, but I have to live in hope that it isn't. All this to say the entries I planned to make last weekend and didn't fit in with a number of more important responsibilities I've been neglecting. There are plenty of things I hope to write here in the next few days simply because they'll naturally accompany things I"m doing otherwise (plus I would kind of like to make an extra entry as aside on Medea and maybe Aristotles poetics which I worked with a certain amount over the past week, even though those are subjects I don't really have to continue thinking about now)
I don't know what you mean when you say the dichotomy between inspiration and craft is bogus. That the dichotomy has been made and has been taken up as an important topic in various times and places, especially during the renaissance is indisputable and there is clearly plenty to be said about it. If you mean that the two things can't really be separated, that in anything worthwhile one isn't separate from the other - I agree and I think I said as much in my last post. It doesn't amount to much more than saying that behind every worthwhile product of intellectual labor is something innate and something acquired, or to be more accurate, there's part of the creative process that you do have control of and part that you don't have control of - it's as logically evident as talking about nature and nurture - clearly who we are is determined in part by biology, who we are and are programmed to be when we pop out of the womb and partly the external circumstances of our lives and who our experiences make us - what other option could there be. If by saying the distinction is bogus you mean it isn't worth talking about, either because it is so evident or because not much definite can be said about it... I don't really agree. It isn't something I would want to take as a central topic for reflection - I don't find it interesting enough for that, but sometimes stating simple things as clearly as possible can be helpful in not getting muddled when you talk about things that are less obvious - and I do think that interesting things can come out when the dichotomy is looked at more closely and breaks down into other less obvious things. Do we really have no control over inspiration? Is it entirely innate, and innate in what way? What is it that is accessed? I think it is obvious why those questions present themselves forcefully to so many people - especially artists who want to have a greater deal of control over their own inspiration - want to be able to provoke it, fuel it, make it last and increase its intensity. It IS kind of interesting to look at what makes a person a great writer/ thinker/ actor whatever, and to what extent that ties in with other aspects of a personality and the way a life is lived. For myself I think I kind of fetishize craft, because I'm lazy, and want to stop being lazy. It is a dream of being rigorous and disciplined and of having control of the things that can be learned and controlled. It's funny - growing up, I always had a thing for the figure of the scholar or the monk, cloistered away from the world and selflessly devoted to some object of study or other - the word 'archive' gives me a little thrill, though I don't actually have the patience to spend all that much time digging through archives. We are attracted by our opposites- some of us at any rate... In Yeats' little scheme of things - the opposite phase of the moon.
As to Plato and Phaedrus - after I write what I'm about to write, I'll have to go back and double check what exactly you wrote, to see that this response makes sense. When condemning sophistry, Plato writes that a sailor will speak better about sailing than a poet whose characters sail to war, that a doctor will speak better about medicine than a poet whose characters are wounded and needing mending, trying to say it is knowledge of the contents of a speech rather than the craft of making a speech that should be of preeminent concern... I'm just trying to put this together with what you said. To some extent division of labor seems to me more relevant than literacy when talking about whether or not a poem or something of the sort can be used as a repository of public knowledge. In a culture where different members of a society need to be competent in the same things, that sort of transmission seems natural enough to me - or on subjects that are of concern to everyone, such as morality, religion, politics and history. For specialized skills that sort of transmission makes no sense. Anything of sufficient length and specificity to be of use to a specialized trade would be too long and uninteresting for other members of society to want in the middle of their epic poems. Maybe cobblers had rhyming pneumonic devises that only spread among cobblers, and so forth, but would those have been heard or known by the general public. I recognize that we are talking about the fact that Plato would be living at the time when this system would have clearly outlived its usefulness and been dying off - and it is impossible to ignore how often he has Socrates quoting poets to aid him in serious discussion, and all of this argues for the idea that this was by no means unusual and that it must have been normal to consult homer on various topics - the fact that doing so no longer made much sense for most practical subjects is part of what the argument seems to me to be... and this would mean that in attacking poets as authorities, in a sense Plato's Socrates would be taking the side or reading and writing AGAINST oral transmission. Rhyme and repetition are the opposite of dialogue. Words must be fixed in their places for a rhyme to work, for meter to persist. Nothing an be changed. Authority would be harder to shake and challenged when everyone knows something by heart. Perhaps you are right in saying that a written text cannot stand up and defend itself - but it can be analyzed and altered, and opens itself up to closer scrutiny than the long-winded speeches that Plato wants to pin on Gorgias and his ilk. The question and answer practiced by Socrates seems to invite the slow examination of each line of something, which I can more easily associate with writing, than acting on general impression, on the sort of emotional signals that can be given in the performance of a speech regardless of it's contents (if you read out the dictionary as though it were an impassioned speech, people would recognize what you were doing with out having to be told - showing just how much of public speaking relies on something other than analytical thought). Can a mathematical proof stand up and defend itself? Some would say it carries its own defense around with it. These are just my first thoughts reading what you wrote...