What is poetry which does not save Nations or people?

When I started teaching many years ago, one of the maxims I kept primed in my pedagogical kit bag was “repetitio est mater studiorum” which translates to “repetition is the mother of learning.”

Many teachers share the same view but express it in a kind of syllogistic trifecta: “Tell ’em what you’re going to say; say it; then tell ’em what you said.”

Repetitio is a fitting salve for America today because so many Americans are not good listeners; indeed some have closed their ears entirely, which is one of the reasons the American philosopher Allan Bloom penned “The Closing of the American Mind” a dozen years ago.

The spirit of my maxim offers an opportunity to revisit something I wrote a while back about the great Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz (1911-2004), in particular what he had to say about the kind of vision poets have, the unique way they see. After all, they are called “seers.”

Those familiar with Milosz know that in 1980 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature — a very big deal. During a week-long celebration in Stockholm, he was presented with a diploma and a medal, and was then invited to give a talk about how he came to be, that is, about the work he was being honored for.

During his Nobel Lecture on Dec. 8, he described to the audience the nature of his poetic soul.

He started by calling attention to Selma Lagerlöf, a Swedish writer he loved as a child — who happened to be the recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1909, the first woman to be so honored.

Milosz said, when he first read Lagerlöf’s “The Wonderful Adventures of Nils,” he was drawn into the world of a boy, Nils Holgersson, whose “chief delight,” she says, “was to eat and sleep, and after that he liked best to make mischief.”

Because of the mischief, Nils gets shrunken to the size of a human thumb and then finds himself flying on the back of a goose — the family pet, Martin — surveying the lakes and mountains and cities of Sweden from high up above. They soon merge with a pack of wild geese, and Nils’s consciousness spirals.

Lagerlöf says the boy “had grown so giddy that it was a long time before he came to himself. The winds howled and beat against him, and the rustle of feathers and swaying of wings sounded like a great storm. Thirteen geese flew around him, flapping their wings and honking. They danced before his eyes and they buzzed in his ears. He didn’t know whether they were flying high or low or in what direction they were traveling.”

That kind of poetry is as good as Joyce in the opening paragraphs of “Araby.”

The dust jacket of the 1947 edition of Nils’s escapades by Pantheon shows the boy sitting on Martin soaring through the air with his left arm raised high like a soldier in victory.

He looks like Slim Pickens riding the “Noo-ku-lar” bomb in Kubrick’s “Dr. Strangelove,” the air filled with the resounding chorus of “Wha-hoos! Wha-haas!”

But the point Milosz is making is that Nils “flies about the Earth and looks at it from above, but at the same time sees it in every detail.” That is, Nils has double vision.

On the back of Martin, high above the world, he sees all clearly with an overview and on the ground sees clearly each particular thing — but he sees both ways simultaneously.

And that is how poets see, Milosz says; they see clearly what’s right before the eyes but at the same time see clearly from high above, sub specie aeternitatis, which means seeing things in context, seeing with the eyes of eternity if you will.

This is not the time or place to develop a typology of personalities according to how a person sees — comparing those who see things clearly up close with those who see things clearly from high up — and of course those who see clearly both ways simultaneously, the poets.

Clinicians, who have studied the cognitive function of personality development, associate seeing things from up above, as Nils does, with a person’s ability to conceptualize, to engage in what they call “abstract thinking.”

Equipped with an overview, a person is able to grasp notions like “freedom” and “democracy” and to understand the language of metaphor and irony and things that do not readily reveal themselves.

In laying out the stages of human personality development, the great Swiss psychologist and philosopher Jean Piaget says kids start developing abstract thinking powers when they become teens but that some never get there.

That is, limited to the data the sense world offers, they experience great difficulty contextualizing what their eyes report; their world is the world of here-and-now, of right-and-wrong framed in black and white.

Clinical social worker Eileen Devine in a wonderful essay called “How to Help Your Concrete-thinking Child Navigate an Abstract World” describes how her daughter, beset with “brain differences,” had a hard time maneuvering in the world of abstract thought. She could not see conceptually, could not grasp an idea like “ownership.”

The issue there, Devine says, is “when a wallet is sitting on a table without anyone around, comprehending that it still belongs to someone who is not present at that moment (and therefore is not available for you to take).”

Without that level of reasoning, a person finds himself in a psychological hole because, as Devine says, “We live in a world filled with abstraction, required to understand concepts that are real, but not tied to concrete physical objects or experiences.”

She says abstract thinking allows a person “to absorb information from our senses and then make connections to the wider world based on that information.”

And without being able to do so, we lose out on a psychological steering mechanism that helps us develop a balanced personality. And without that, we are prone to let others take charge of our abstract thinking to compensate for our failure.

Thus, we see people of all sorts become fodder for preachers, ministers, and hucksters who peddle a salvific overview of life designed to heal the identity of an aggrieved-victimized self — and the veracity of that self is only as good as the veracity of the person selling the salvation.

You can understand why then I — who embraced the abstract world’s concepts of justice and freedom and non-violent social change eons ago — am still having a hard time digesting the riot on Jan. 6 three years ago, when Americans, armed with American flags, busted into the United States Capitol and beat fellow Americans — policemen with flag-patches on their arms — to death — with the very same flag my father held high as he walked proudly around the kitchen in our house on the Fourth of July when I was growing up chanting “The Stars and Stripes Forever.”

You can understand as well why I — a devoted student of representative government — am appalled by any huckster peddling violence to take over an election.

My O’Sullivan grandfather, Denis, and my O’Sullivan grandmother, Barbara, immigrants from Ireland, cherished the vote. In a family memoir, my Aunt Cass says my grandparents “took their citizenship in the United States seriously … Come election day they were both up early and dressed in their Sunday clothes to be the first people to the polls to vote. There was a certain honor for them to be the first ones to vote.”

And their son was the guy who marched around my childhood kitchen with the American flag held high chanting his love of democracy.

We do not need a sociological wizard versed in cognitive personality development to tell us there are now generations of Americans — inveterately-aggrieved victims — who will never see reality again. 

The more worrisome part is that many of them, unable to see the world in its multi-colored complexity, are now fodder for ideologies like fascism that promise to make every victim a “new man.”

Is there a poet in the house who can help explain all this?