Either/Or (Part I)

Here are some of my reading notes on the first part of Kierkegaard’s Either/Or.

‘that eternity which lies not outside time but in the midst of it’ [51. Compare, regarding actualizing the eternal in the temporal (Bergman), the reference on 37 to ‘an idea that joined the finite and the infinite’. Cf. also 54, for instance the remark that ‘Only where the idea is brought to rest and transparency in a definite form can there be any question of a classic work’ (compare 103: ‘the stillness of the moment’). These references to rest and stillness are themselves worth comparing with Kierkegaard’s (hereafter SK’s) notion of ‘suspension’: ‘The art of recollecting and forgetting will also prevent a person from foundering in any particular relationship in life – and assures him complete suspension.’ (295) This effect of an ‘artistically [vs. ethically] achieved identity’ of forgetting and recollecting seems to me to correspond to the Buddhist meditative condition of detachment or acceptance; for me mindfulness can be what SK, on the same page, calls ‘the Archimedean point with which one lifts the whole world’. Suspension - also because it is an aesthetic position - is of course a relativistic state: one ‘does not hoist full sail for any decision’ (293).] 

‘When was it that the hetairias became common in Greece except at the time when the state was in the process of disintegration? And does not our age have a striking likeness to that age, which not even Aristophanes could make more ludicrous than it actually was? Has not the bond that in the political sense held the states together, invisibly and spiritually, dissolved; has not the power in religion that insisted upon the invisible been weakened and destroyed […]’ [141. These statements, like the similar ones in Irony, seem to evoke the conditions of Weimar era Germany – as well as the conditions of our time.]

‘Our age has lost all the substantial categories of family, state, kindred; it must turn the single individual over to himself completely in such a way that, strictly speaking, he becomes his own creator.’ [149. Cf. the ‘subjectivity reflected in itself’ on 143, and the quotation from Hegel’s Philosophy of Right regarding ‘the right of subjective freedom’ on 626 n. 13.]

 

‘since we […] acknowledge as characteristic of all human endeavour in its truth that it is fragmentary, that it is precisely this which distinguishes it from nature’s infinite coherence, that an individual’s wealth consists specifically in his capacity for fragmentary prodigality […]’ [151. Cf. the advocacy of concise communication – ‘simple statements’, ‘time-and-talk-saving pithy aphorisms’, ‘economizing’ – on 465. Cf. too the recommended ‘venture in fragmentary endeavour’ in line with ‘the disjointed and desultory character of unfinished papers’, and a vocation of obscurity, on 152 (& 137).]    

[quotation above from 151 regarding ‘fragmentary prodigality’ continues with:] ‘what is the producing individual’s enjoyment is the receiving individual’s also, not the laborious and careful accomplishment or the tedious interpretation of this accomplishment but the production and the pleasure of the glinting transiency, which for the producer holds much more than the consummated accomplishment, since it is a glimpse of the idea and holds a bonus for the recipient, since its fulguration [Fulguration] stimulates his own productivity […]’ [152. 629 n. 36 glosses ‘Fulguration’ as a loan word in Danish, meaning ‘a sudden flashing (for example, the flashing of molten gold or silver)’. Compare, therefore, 129: ‘Then in the most distant heavens, far off on the horizon, one sees a flash; it speeds away swiftly along the earth, is gone in an instant. […] it seems as if the darkness itself has lost its composure and is starting to move. […] There is an anxiety in that flash; it is as if in that deep darkness it were born in anxiety – just so is Don Giovanni’s life. There is an anxiety in him, but this anxiety is his energy. […] Don Giovanni’s life is not despair; it is, however, the full force of the sensuous, which is born in anxiety; and Don Giovanni himself is this anxiety, but this anxiety is precisely the demonic zest for life.’ In this relation, compare too SK’s constellation of aesthetic-intellectual love, risk and a Nietzsche-like terror of natural contingency (contingent even in its ‘infinite coherence’). ‘With what kind of love do we embrace nature? Is there not a secretive anxiety and horror in it, because its beautiful harmony works its way out of lawlessness and wild confusion, its security out of perfidy? But precisely this anxiety captivates the most. So also with love, if it is to be interesting. Behind it ought to brood the deep, anxious night from which springs the flower of love. Thus the nymphaea alba [white water lily] rests with its calyx on the surface of the water, while thought is anxious about plunging down into the deep darkness where it has its root.’ (424; cf. 294) On 102 Don Giovanni is posited as ‘absolutely musical’ because, unreflective and nonverbal, he ‘does not have that kind of [intellectual] continuance at all but hurries on in an eternal vanishing, just like the music’.]

‘love is always present tense’ [226]

‘the repelling force always required in the negative, which is actually the principle of motion. It is not merely repelling but infinitely repulsive, and whoever has the basic principle behind him must necessarily have infinite momentum for making discoveries.’ [285. Cf. Hegel’s infinite absolute negativity adopted in Irony, and Hegel’s definition of negativity as ‘the turning point of the movement of the Notion […] the innermost source of all activity’ quoted in 641 n. 3. Cf. with this principle of motion the ‘movement of thought […] in the service of reflection’ discussed on 188, where, for the will (mediation, and the ethical) to begin, or to free itself from serving reflection, it ‘must be altogether impartial, must begin in the power of its own willing; only then can there be any question of a beginning’. The logic of this replacement of the principle of (aesthetic-)intellectual motion by the free exercise of the will (the decision, ethics), seems to me to be analogous to the meditative logic wherein mindfulness emerges from (within, ‘in the power of’) the body’s own wisdom: the breath. Cf. also, however, SK’s opposition of spirit-motion to the perpetual motion imposed by the capitalist work ethic. He writes of the ‘businesslike zeal with which they work at the office’ on 289: ‘There is an indefatigable activity that shuts a person out of the world of spirit and places him in a class with the animals, which instinctively must always be in motion.’ (Cf. SK on ‘busy bustlers’ on 25, and critiquing working for a living on 31).]    

‘There is so much talk about man’s being a social animal, but basically he is a beast of prey, something that can be ascertained not only by looking at his teeth. Therefore, all this chatter about sociality and community is partly inherited hypocrisy and partly studied perfidy.’ [288. Cf. the quotation from Aristotle’s Politics in 642-43 n.12: ‘man is by nature a political [social] animal. […] the natural outcast is forthwith a lover of war; he may be compared to an isolated piece at draughts’. Cf. 22, and also Hobbes?]

‘Every erotic relationship must always be lived through in such a way that it is easy for one to produce an image that conveys all the beauty of it.’ [390. Cf. 418: ‘For love, everything is a symbol […]’; ‘Erotic love is much too substantial to be satisfied with chatter, the erotic situations much too significant to be filled with chatter. They are silent, still, definitely outlined, and yet eloquent, like the music of Memnon’s statue. Eros gesticulates, does not speak; or if he does, it is an enigmatic intimation, symbolic music.’]     

‘To have an understanding of the moment is not such an easy matter, and the one who misunderstands it is doomed to boredom for life. The moment is everything, and in the moment woman is everything; the consequences I do not understand.’ [433. Cf. the seducer’s statements with the references to the moment on 90 and (as 658 n. 209 points out) The Concept of Anxiety, 82-91.]

As in my previous post on The Concept of Irony, the page numbering here refers to the relevant volume of the Princeton edition of Kierkegaard’s Writings. 

The Concept of Irony

Some Reading Notes

Here is the first in what I hope will be a series of occasional posts presenting some of my notes from the work of thinkers of central importance to Weimar thought. These notes may be on texts by thinkers of the Weimar period itself (Carl Schmitt, say), or alternatively on texts by earlier philosophers, such as Hobbes and Kierkegaard, who significantly influenced Weimar era theorists.   

Kierkegaard’s dissertation, The Concept of Irony, is referred to substantively in Adorno’s second Habilitationsschrift, Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic (1933). Page references here are keyed to the relevant volume of the Princeton edition of Kierkegaard’s Writings.

‘Socrates, in assigning to insight, to conviction, the determination of men’s actions, posited the Individual as capable of a final moral decision, in contraposition to Country and to Customary Morality, and thus made himself an Oracle, in the Greek sense. He said that he had a daimon(ion) within him that counselled him what to do, and revealed to him what was advantageous to his friends.’ [Hegel, quoted on 161. Compare Hegel’s reference to self-knowing and freedom cited on 162; Kierkegaard (hereafter SK) on subjectivity versus ‘the established’ on 163 (cf. identity vs. the established on 126); & the remarks on heteronomy, subjectivity and decision in Hegel on 163-65 (cf. 263, 264).]

‘When we take into account that even in our countries, where the state, precisely because it has undergone a far deeper mediation, allows subjectivity a much greater latitude than that which the Greek state could allow, when we take into account, I say, that even in our countries someone living on private means is always a dubious person, we may infer from that how the Greek state must have regarded Socrates’ attempt to go his own way and live as a private person.’ [179. Cf. 447. Compare too the remark on Socrates’ ironic and ‘purely personal relation to individuals’ on 180-1. Compare also the remarks on the ironist, the Taugenichts (good-for-nothing) and a vocation of obscurity on 281 (& on Hamann: 434).]

‘True freedom, of course, consists in giving oneself to enjoyment and yet preserving one’s soul unscathed. In political life, true freedom naturally consists in being involved in the circumstances of life in such a way that they have an objective validity for one and through all this preserving the innermost, deepest personal life, which certainly can move and have its being under all these conditions but yet to a certain degree is incommensurate with them.’ [182-83]  

‘we do find [in Socrates] a most consistently sustained irony that lets the objective power of the state break up on the rock-firm negativity of irony. […] In this way he becomes alien to the whole world to which he belongs […] ; the contemporary consciousness has no predicate for him – nameless and indefinable, he belongs to another formation.’ [196. Cf. 447. Compare too the note on Socrates’ ‘negative relation to life’ on 39; & the remark on his inability to ‘contract any real relationship to the established order’ on 178. Cf. dissident consciousness: Schmitt-Luhmann-Konrad (etc.); & the category of the extraterritorial as in my ‘Vortex Out of German London’ (Kracauer: here)? See also the counterposition of ‘fear of the law’ to ‘conscious knowledge of why he acted’ on 228.]

‘In many ways, the Athens of this period calls to mind what Rome was at a later time. Intellectually, Athens was the heart of Greece. Thus when Greek culture approached its disintegration, all the blood rushed back violently into the chambers of the heart. Everything concentrated in Athens – wealth, luxury, opulence, art, science, recklessness, the enjoyment of life – in short, everything that, as the city hastened toward its ruin, could also help to glorify it and illuminate one of the most brilliant intellectual dramas conceivable. There was a restlessness in Athenian life; there was a palpitation of the heart intimating that the hour of disintegration was at hand. But from the other side, that which was the condition for the decline of the state proved to have immense significance for the new principle that was to appear, and the disintegration and decay became indeed the fertile soil of the new principle.’ [200-1. Compare the Weimar/ interwar period?]

‘It [‘the contemporary age’] does not permit one to stand still and to concentrate; to walk slowly is already suspicious; and how could one even put up with anything like that in the stirring period in which we live, in this momentous age, which all agree is pregnant with the extraordinary? It hates isolation; indeed, how could it tolerate a person’s having the daft idea of going through life alone – this age that hand in hand and arm in arm (just like itinerant journeymen and soldiers) lives for the idea of community?’ [246-47. Community as a mere temporary alliance of the self-interested or combative: so that now, the phrase ‘care in the community’ means nothing at all. Cf. the comment on irony as ‘isolation according to its concept’ on 249.]

‘dissimulation denotes […] the objective act that carries out the discrepancy between essence and phenomenon; irony also denotes the subjective pleasure as the subject frees himself by means of irony from the restraint in which the continuity of life’s conditions holds him – […] Irony […] has no purpose; its purpose is immanent in itself and is a metaphysical purpose. […] irony, in which the subject has no purpose.’ [255-56. Irony as a freeing from contingency; beyond this, for SK, is the sort of acceptance of heteronomy commented on (in terms of assigned virtuous tasks) at 235. Compare the important remarks on a religious reconciliation with actuality on 297, 298 (on the latter page SK writes of ‘becoming clear and transparent to oneself, not in finite and egotistical self-satisfaction but in one’s absolute and eternal validity’, anticipating Either/Or, part II (& cf. 445, 299 here)).]

‘Here, then, we have the idea […] as the infinite absolute negativity. Now, if this is to become something, the negative must assert itself again in a finitizing of the idea – that is, in making it concrete. [> existentialism?] The negative is the restlessness of thought, but this restlessness must manifest itself, must become visible; its desire must manifest itself as the desire that actuates the work, its pain as the pain it engenders. If this does not happen, then we have only the unreal actuality of contemplation, devotion, and pantheism.’ [312. Compare SK’s reference to infinite absolute negativity on 26, the sourcing Hegel quotation on 476, and 131. Cf. also 305 (‘In no way is the true ideal in the beyond’); 319 (‘The true actuality becomes what it is; the actuality of romanticism merely becomes.’) Cf. too 271.]

‘if our generation has any task at all, it must be to translate the achievement of scientific scholarship into personal life, to appropriate it personally. [On subjectivity as truth (cf. in Bergman, Dialogical Philosophy), compare the note on 219 and 552 n. 189 (>Postscript etc.).] […] Irony as a controlled element manifests itself in its truth precisely by teaching how to actualize actuality, by placing the appropriate emphasis on actuality. In no way can this be interpreted as wanting to deify actuality in good [socialist] St. Simon style or as denying that there is, or at least that there ought to be, a longing in every human being for something higher and more perfect. But this longing must not hollow out actuality; on the contrary, life’s content must become a genuine and meaningful element in the higher actuality whose fullness the soul craves. [Actualized actuality an element of transcendental(-ized) life: the quotation continues onto the next page.]’ [328]  

Behind the Mountains

The world of the prose pieces of Robert Walser’s assembled in the collection Masquerade and Other Stories is one of those who hold to ‘modest being’, as Walser phrases it in ‘Tobold (II)’. It may be easy, at first sight and when one is aware of Walser’s own history of depressive illness, to confuse such modesty – perhaps particularly when expressed in terms of an abdication of agency or occupation – with mental incapacity. In his ‘Introduction’ to the collection, William H. Gass describes Walser’s eventual institutional mode of existence, when he deliberately abandoned his lifelong, modernist vocation of obscurity.

‘His mind pleads incompetence. Asylums are asylums. There he can guiltlessly surrender his fate and pass his days at the behest of others. He will no longer need to write in such a way that its public obscurity is assured. He will no longer need to write. The daily walk will suffice.’

Yet, in the course of his description of the narrator’s unemployment in ‘Marie’, Walser places depression – or the radical form of modesty which is a personal refusal of occupation – in dialectical relation to an impulse towards freedom. Even as he is ‘confined, restrained, imprisoned’ by, or reified within, his obsessive negative thought patterns, Walser’s narrator ‘should have liked to wander far off, out into the bright, wide, open, healthy world’. However self-ironizing, repetitious and concentric Walser’s depressive’s prose may be here, this conjunction shines out: ‘I was free, then suddenly wasn’t at all free.’

‘Sometimes I did in fact reproach myself most sternly about my idleness, but without being too terribly worried about it. Employment was always on my mind; I resolved to get to work, but for all that was still a long way from working, and instead kept running around jobless, without anything at all in the way of occupation. Melancholia and pensiveness held me strangely captive; all day long I was unable to free myself from any number of thoughts, found myself bound by my ideas. I was, so to speak, both prisoner and prison, felt confined, restrained, imprisoned. I was free, then suddenly wasn’t at all free. […] I should have liked to wander far off, out into the bright, wide, open, healthy world, but then again didn’t have the least desire, the slightest urge to do so, though I was by no means really too indolent.’       

Precisely the unfreedom of the narrator in ‘Marie’, the way in which he is crippled by his depression, conditions his particular form of freedom, which consists of an impulse towards freedom or a desire to be free: the ‘certain ardent searching and longing’ upon which Walser expands on the following page. Walser’s hyper-irony notes that this longing too is a mode of unfreedom, though one that we ‘should not even strive’ to escape. Indeed, as (in) a sort of beneficient infinite recursion, it is itself ‘desirable’, and more so than any utopian end-point:

‘Around this time I went for a walk across the mountain with an honest, straightforward man. I vividly recall a good and most agreeable conversation we had along the way, in the course of which the person in question, my walking companion, pursued a train of thought according to which we humans, as long as we live, are generally incapable of freeing ourselves from a certain ardent searching and longing, and should not even strive to; that our longing for happiness seems far more beautiful, always far more sensitive, more significant and all in all probably far more desirable than happiness itself, which perhaps need not even exist, since the fervent, gratifying pursuit of happiness and an everlasting, deep desire for it perhaps not only suit perfectly our needs, but satisfy them far better, far more profoundly; that being happy is by no means to be taken casually, unquestioningly as the meaning of the world, the goal and purpose of life, and so on.’

The physical activity of exploring nature – the mountain walk – is an appropriate stimulant of these cogitations on this ‘ardent searching and longing’: in later pieces Walser explicitly conceives of longing in organic, natural terms. ‘The One of Fairy Tales’ has the phrase ‘The mountain fire of longing’. A 1927-28 ‘Prose Piece’ ends with this sentence:

‘Waves and branches have snakelike shapes, and there come moments when we know we are no more and no less than waves and snowflakes, or than that which surely feels, now and then, from its so wonderfully charming confinement, the pull of longing: the leaf.’

 

Whilst this prose piece highlights the passivity of a plant’s experience of longing, other pieces of Walser’s, such as ‘Fritz’, do emphasize human active longing and its attendant agencies. Fritz would dazzle his potential employer with his general positivity, his resolve and ‘willingness to lay it on as thick as possible’, in order to satisfy his ‘profound longing for rewarding and long-term employment’. Yet his ironical attitude towards all this is reinforced by the page’s typography.

‘She remarked that only ardent

OPTIMISTS

who had a mind to go all the way could be taken into consideration, whereupon I replied I was resolved to be every bit as ardent and to go ever bit as far as I thought would please her; she’d be astonished. I was beyond all doubt an optimist.’

The narrator of ‘Tobold (II)’ again foregrounds longing, ardency and resolution: ‘Some day what I have long wished to do should and must be achieved.’ With this emphasis on will and courage, Walser here could be said to promulgate a radical decision theory:

‘That an act requires courage is, in my opinion, enough to make it worthwhile, that is, healthy and honest. Whether or not the enterprise has a chance of succeeding strikes me, as I said before, as irrelevant. What really counts, what has weight and significance, is showing courage and firmness, not failing to undertake some day the thing you’ve proposed.’

Yet because decisive undertaking is more about pure will than carried-through, practical action or the achievement of an objective goal, and because Walser’s narrators tend to verbalize or theorize undertaking rather than actually undertake anything, it is easy to describe Walser’s creations as passive, depersonalized selves, as does Gass.

‘Walser’s narrators (and we can presume, in this case, Walser himself) have become will-less wanderers, impotent observers of life, passive perceivers of action and passion. Only on the page, will the Will risk the expression and exercise of its considerable means.’ 

Tbc.

A Return to Postwar Humanism?

I am interested by the statement made by the leftist London cultural historian Ken Worpole, in his response early last year to new editions of novels by Alexander Baron [here], that ‘we sorely need’ a ‘return’ to the ‘vital postwar humanist “moment” in European cinema, fiction and intellectual life’. I can certainly identify the category of postwar humanism in terms of (what I have called elsewhere on this blog) ‘English existentialism’: Murdoch, Wilson, and quite probably Gascoyne, Read and Baron himself. Karl Jaspers is presented by Chris Thornhill as an – perhaps the – exemplary German humanist thinker of the immediate postwar period. But as I read more deeply in Thornhill’s books, I am realizing that the postwar German moment of reconstruction was far from straightforwardly humanist: there is also the functionalist strand of social thought, or social philosophy, which culminates in Luhmann’s antihumanism. I wonder too whether, within the British context, Worpole’s category of postwar humanism is not rendered similarly paradoxical by the development of welfare state ideology: the British functionalism?  

I found Worpole’s article via Susie Thomas’s worthwhile piece for the Literary London Journal, ‘Alexander Baron’s The Lowlife (1963): Remembering the Holocaust in Hackney’ [here]. I have written about Baron's wonderful novel myself elsewhere, though I have not been able to approach its treatment of the war. Thomas notes of Baron’s protagonist Harryboy Boas:     

‘Harryboy's longing for oblivion, and his repeated failure to retain any material possessions, is also connected to the fate of the Jews in postwar Europe: in particular to the need to be exonerated of the guilt of surviving. At one point Harryboy considers becoming a slum landlord in the East End: “I could get a whole tribe of immigrants in here, straight off the boat, paying me a pound a week each to kip on mattresses on the floor. My golden future”. But he loses the houses in a crap [sic] game: “Empty, the burden of possession lifted from me, I walked away”. Only by having nothing can he remain innocent.’

This resonates, I feel, with my own strangely innocent and contactless life, as a London-born, guilt-born son of an East German refugee, and in particular with the idea of a 'vocation of obscurity', which I propounded in my book Iain Sinclair and then, on this blog, in relation to Hamann's early form of Christian existentialism. It is as if already with Hamann, humanism is contiguous with a more Eastern-style, Zen or Daoist detachment from the subject, an abdication of agency; in the same way, perhaps, as a dialectic of humanism (manifesting for example as post-Kierkegaardian decisionism) and antihumanism (Heideggerian indifferentism/fatalism; Schmitt?) later emerged to vividly characterize interwar German thinking.

Irregular Language: Betz's Hamann

Vulnerability and the Vocation of Obscurity

In his After Enlightenment: The Post-Secular Vision of J. G. Hamann, John R. Betz follows Frederick Beiser and John Milbank in presenting Hamann, correctly I feel, as a figure whose ‘influence on the history of philosophy, while obscurely mediated, was, in fact, profound’. Betz’s landmark English-language study thus concretizes the recent rehabilitation of Hamann as a thinker who cannot be reduced to the sort of marginal irrationalist that Isaiah Berlin made of him in The Magus of the North. Hamann himself foresaw the obscure diffusion of his influence in his 1786 text ‘Divestment and Transfiguration: A Flying Letter to Nobody, the Well-Known’, when he noted the Christ-revering intent of his work. ‘The little stream of my authorship, despised like the waters of Shiloah that flow gently, was poured out for the sake of this king, whose name, like his reputation, is great and unknown.’ The obscure yet profound, at once ‘great and unknown’ influence of Hamann’s writing, is in keeping with his rôle as – in Betz’s words – ‘the first and arguably profoundest modern Christian thinker of language’.

The stream of Hamann’s writing flows indirectly; or, its banks are notoriously hard to bridge. Betz cites Ernst Jünger’s remark that Hamann thought ‘in archipelagos with submarine connections’, following on from his own comment on Heraclitus: ‘A confluence of ideas and sensations in that living elegy of a philosopher made his maxims into a group of small islands, lacking the bridges and ferries of method that would have established a community among them.’ Hamann’s texts constitute a practice of indirect communication, and require the reader to build the bridges, make the connections, herself. As Betz notes, a text like the Socratic Memorabilia has a ‘highly stylized public, dramatic, gnomic, allusive, oblique, ironic, pseudonymous, prophetic form’, which is grounded in Hamann’s ‘conviction that faith “cannot be communicated like merchandise”’. Hamann’s is an ‘elusive’, proto-modernist textuality, showing ‘endless associative links’ and a ‘defiance of any single significance’.     

Such strategies reveal a lack of trust in – or an ironizing of – his own communicative capacity. You could say that Hamann’s lack of trust derived from his stammering behaviour; whilst the ironization derived from his Christianity. The flight from direct communication is a form of self-denial, and Hamann’s authorship is (as Betz argues) ‘quite possibly the most rigorously Christian of modern times – both in its content and in its self-denying form ’. In some important phrases in Golgotha and Scheblimini, Hamann wrote of ‘the symbolic connection between the earthly crown of thorns and the heavenly crown of stars, and the relationship mediated in the form of the Cross between the opposing natures of the deepest abasement and the loftiest exaltation’. Betz summarizes how these phrases are an assertion of the Christian coincidence of worldly vulnerability and otherworldly, spiritual empowerment:

‘[T]his passage provides a clue to the whole of Hamann’s mimetic “cruciform” authorship: whereas the outward humility, folly, and (to rationalists) sheer incomprehensibility of his self-denying style mirrors the humility, apparent folly, and incomprehensibility (to Jews and Greeks) of Christ’s self-sacrifice on the Cross (Golgotha), the inner sublimity of his inspired, prophetic message shares in the power and the glory of the Spirit of the resurrection (Scheblimini). In short, we come to understand that the only thing that can make sense of Hamann’s writings is Christ – in the double aspect of majesty and abasement, of a glory hidden from the “wise and learned” beneath a rejected outward form.’  

Hamann’s elusive textual practices, guided by what Betz calls a ‘Christian irony and humour’, thus invoke a humility reminiscent of the statement St Paul made about himself, when quoting his critics, that ‘“His letters are weighty and strong, but his bodily presence is weak, and his speech of no account”’ (2 Cor. 10: 10). Betz notes that, more generally, the recognition of humility is ‘the fundamental intuition of Hamann’s thought’. He quotes Hamann’s comment that,

‘It belongs to the unity of divine revelation that the Spirit of GOd [sic] should have lowered himself and emptied himself of his majesty just as the Son of God did in assuming the form of a servant, and just as the whole of creation is a work of the greatest humility.’

The creation of the Bible by the Holy Spirit is another act of condescension, whereby the Holy Spirit (as Hans Urs von Balthasar wrote) ‘conceals himself, as Hamann strikingly puts it, “under all kinds of rags and tatters,” “under the rubbish” of the letter of Scripture.’ As Hamann writes in his Biblical Meditations :

‘How much did God the Holy Spirit humble himself when he became a historian of the most particular, contemptible, and insignificant events on earth in order to reveal to man in his own language, in his own history, in his own ways the plans, the mysteries, and the ways of the Godhead?’

To assert with Luther that, as Betz puts it, ‘there is no exaltation of the creature apart from Christ’s humility, which is the key to the economy of salvation and the logic of every ascent’, is also to maintain a Lutheran emphasis on human humility qua passivity and a dependence on – or readiness to accept – what ‘God accomplishes in and through human beings’, or ‘what only God can give: ontologically, the grace that heals our nature from sin; noetically, the faith that enlightens the darkness of ignorance’. To depend on ‘the grace of God’s prior condescension, in the absence of which Christianity is easily distorted into a kind of Promethean asceticism’ – a work ethic, muscular Christianity – is to resist ‘what we might claim for ourselves as something owed, whether through inheritance or through virtuous works’. Betz enables us to see how Hamann associates divine condescension and human humility alike with suffering and hence with true cognition. When ‘in Christianity God suffers on account of his loving proximity to human beings’, Betz notes, ‘for Hamann, Christ is the model of all true learning in that he “learned […] through what he suffered” (Heb. 5: 8)’.

‘In other words, for fallen human beings, just as authentic reasoning begins with the suffering of reason’s “insufficiency” and a corresponding recognition of one’s need for the light of faith and the guidance of revelation, true moral learning begins with the suffering of one’s moral weakness and a corresponding recognition of one’s need for grace.’

As Hamann notes, recognition of dependence on divine condescension renders proud, self-sufficient rational aspiration irrelevant: ‘The condescension of God to the earth; no tower of reason whose spire reaches to heaven’. Indeed, as Betz observes, for Hamann ‘the purpose of reason is precisely to deconstruct all proud knowledge falsely so called, the kind of knowledge which is really doxa but nevertheless opposes itself to faith, so that true knowledge can begin’. Importantly, this rational project of undermining proud rationalism looks forward to Jaspers’ existentialist critique of neo-Kantian epistemological reification. It also looks back, to Augustinian and then Lutheran resistance to late medieval conceptions of philosophical rationality, as Betz suggests when he traces the ‘modern doctrine of reason’ back beyond Renaissance humanism to late medieval distinctions between philosophy and theology, which ‘ceded to philosophy (and to reason) far greater capacities than the Augustinian and, later, Lutheran traditions allowed, each of which remained more profoundly impressed by the degree to which reason is affected by the fallenness of the will’. (It would be interesting to consider the unstable, post-juridical rationalities – shaken by paranoia or drug use – of Philip K. Dick, and perhaps of Robert Walser, in this context). The political dimension of Hamann’s critique of proud reason is also worth noting here; his distance from Moses Mendelssohn’s modern conception of rights as being ‘as it were, pre-possessed by reason and claimed by independents in the manner of private property, [whereas] for Hamann, they are something received in faith from the Creator by dependents as a covenantal gift’ (Betz).

Betz stresses Hamann’s underlying intention to develop, and not curtail, rationality. Quoting Hamann’s remark that ‘the true genius knows only his dependence and weakness, or the limits of his gifts’, Betz observes that Hamann’s Christian mode of cognition ‘glories ironically in weaknesses and limitations (2 Cor. 12: 9), whereby the intellect is made receptive of divine light and wisdom. Herein, and not in any proud rationalism, lies the true path to enlightenment.’ Hence, Betz writes, Hamann’s ‘occasionally vitriolic rhetoric is never directed at reason per se, which he considers a gift of God, but only at its idolatrous misuse and transgressing of its proper limits’. He cites Hamann’s comment that ‘Faith  has need of reason just as much as reason needs faith’. Referring to the arguments of his doctoral supervisor, the prominent Lutheran theologian Oswald Bayer, Betz suggests that ‘one could even say that Hamann was more rational than his contemporaries, a kind of “radical Aufklärer,” in that, like Kant, but going beyond him, he subjected reason to metacritical  scrutiny’:

‘Specifically, Hamann calls attention to what the Aufklärer  virtually ignored, namely, the historical contingencies of tradition and the “impurities” of language and metaphor pervading all putatively “pure” thought. […] As a humbling of autonomous reason and all proud systems of thought (in the sense of 2 Cor. 10: 5), it is meant not to leave reason in a state of despair, but to prepare it for faith, thereby saving reason from theoretical suicide and providing it with its ultimate object, an object that can only be given.’       

To be continued.

Reading with Vision, part 4

& here is the fourth, final part of my 2007 commentary on Vernon Watkins' poetry.

A Pioneer’s Log

‘The Bloodhound’, which is probably Watkins’s major extended poetic statement on the subject of visionary hermeneutics, identifies a slow resolution of readerly understanding with a process of self-abnegatory pilgrimage – a walk of penitence. The sacred cognitive hunt is necessarily impeded:

Delay may reward me, even evasion

Bring me at last to truth, to the martyr’s posture,

By many paths to a tree transfixed by nails,

Or on to a field of remorse, to a fallen bough,

To footprints under the bridge, and a folded vesture. [391]

The interpreter’s disparate paths of faith are marked by an abdication of self-righteousness; their flighty, mad relentlessness matched by divine relief.

Unresting I follow the trail, a lugubrious attorney

To joy’s keeper, the sleepless giver of rest,

Great judge of the unforgiving. To find his word

An exuberant calm lends meaning to every journey. [392]

‘The Bloodhound’ hints that so long as a record is made, even the most indirect interpretative process can remain guided by a sort of investigative magnetism, or turn out ‘true to [divine] judgment’:

However devious the path through inconstant water,

I keep the log: my account of the trail I render,

Bringing to light what ferns or the scrub had hidden,

Had I gone the direct way. But, as filings quiver,

I turn, as needle to star, with insistent feet. [391]

Watkins’s poetic likening of visionary hermeneutics to the collation of a log-book of quivering filings – shifting sands that nonetheless are providentially ordered – is borne out by some statements of Dora Polk’s in the introduction to her Vernon Watkins and the Spring of Vision. Polk points out that, though published eventually in 1977, her academic study was written between 1967 and 1970, when Watkins studies was (already) no industry. This was why ‘I had to win access to Watkins’s work by the fumbling methods of the explorer who lacks maps or accounts to help him, and must rely principally on his own ingenuity and the tools he carries on his back. And, to continue the metaphor, my findings are recorded rather in the manner of a pioneer’s log – a tentative account of the personal process of discovery of Watkins’s vision’. Polk’s work on Watkins was a vocation, if one long delayed by her need to earn a living. It was a genuine personal spiritual exploration: she writes of becoming ‘the beneficiary of Watkins’s vision, which, after all, is what the study of poetry is all about’. A reader’s visionary hermeneutic is thus, Polk lets us see, part of an ongoing, developing process of spiritual re-birth; her log-book anti-method is in keeping with the shifting ‘flux of debate’ surrounding the poetry, and ‘the cumulative nature of literary criticism’. A reader’s visionary log-book also perpetuates what Norvig calls the poet’s own ‘dynamic concept of the imagination’.

Such magical transformations can emerge out of the social marginality of visionary poetry, for instance out of its resistance to the self-promotional procedures of academic career-building. Watkins studies, for instance, is no career option within today’s entirely secularized English departments. But the spiritual aptitudes, ‘the tools’, required for genuinely vocational study, can often be more fine, quiet, deep-grained and personal, than those required for developing a successful CV.

Notebook method: the method of the ‘failed’/private/underground (upper-)middle-class repressed/suppressed outsider. Benjamin (Arcades), Kierkegaard, Kafka-diaries, Weil. Compare Stephanie Strickland on the way Weil’s family constricted her - & hence the relevance of her work to the women’s, and men’s, issues of ‘hunger, violence, exclusion, betrayal of the body, inability to be heard, and self-hate’. Unpublished remains. ‘Unpublishable’: Kierkegaard, ‘backstage practice’. Exiled from life: ‘can’t find a way in’, a way of expressing one’s gifts in the real world (versus MES: working-class popstar). Cf too Newton, in Tristram Hunt’s film: research as sacred, private knowledges.

The reason why others my age aren’t wanting to write (eg diary/documentary essay form) like their adolescent literary heroes (for me, Kafka’s diaries, & D H Lawrence impulse-reproduction; for IS, massive influence of Beats on his London journalistic writing mode), is that younger literary academics simply weren’t formed by literature – they didn’t read it as teenagers (one ex-colleague only reading NME, another reading nothing even as a student). Hence why should they rebel against the subsumption of literature by (cultural theoretical) concepts? And today’s ‘novelists’/ ’poets’ never read fiction or poetry as kids either. At least I was reading DHL, Ginsberg, Blake – as well as being groomed for professional specialization in academic lit. crit. by Leavisite/ pre-Oxbridge school essay lit. crit. Never forming a personal relationship with the writing in this way – explains the widespread incomprehension of IS’s work amongst literary critics now (cf Alex M.: ‘field of contemporary literary studies has found the task of analyzing Sinclair’s writing problematic’, in City Visions). [Traherne: ‘It acts not from a centre to/ Its object as remote,/ But present is when it doth view,/ Being with the being it doth note.’] Post-Brass Prynne is popular (!), more approachable (!) and written about precisely because his sheer modernist textual games prevent attachment, there is little recognizable human presence there to feel implicated with: or the residual sense of a spectral personality behind the writing is effectively ironized out of existence by its submersion within his surrounding range of depersonalizing modernist (textual/poetic) strategies [Ian Hunt, praising JHP’s lacuna mode to Catling in Parataxis, takes this as a virtue]. This so even with the ‘uh Pandora’ comic-erotic interfusions in Triodes.

Sean Bonney on hearing of my notes on Radon Daughters: ‘You should just publish the notebook.’

My private moon voyages [Lud] into Kafka’s diaries, age c.15 – a bid for the sacred which had been pushed – by my entirely secular daily routine – into 3AM nightspace. (Alongside hearing the pirate radio broadcasts). And which then disqualified me, since exhausted, from participating effectively in the worldly educational community the next day. Alienation, and misery – estranged as John Lydon in the King’s Road [on The Filth and the Fury], provoked by the absence of a sacred element to view everyday capitalist life as just a rat-race – stumbling bleary-eyed across Blackfriars Bridge. Fighting against the commuter crowd, like Karen Armstrong c.17 on ‘release’ from her convent, & like me still (yesterday at Moorgate station). Urban Panic Attack. And, from then on in, study as a refuge from the secular world. Immersion. Which, of course, the university didn’t actually turn out to be. [Bond, Workshy journal]            

Insofar as the anti-methodical processes of visionary hermeneutics generate the form of a pioneer’s log-book, which records the pilgrim-path of insight as it passes through shifting cognitive sands – ‘and then it is footpad, footpad, nose to the ground,/ Ear and eye to the trail’ – they also recall the essay form as described (and promoted) by Theodor Adorno. Both types of writing rely on self-abdication and faith: Watkins’s log-keeping bloodhound is ‘trusting the scent to discover my destination’ [391], whilst for Adorno ‘the word Versuch, attempt or essay’ recalls ‘an intention groping its way’. But a loss of self-righteousness and subsumptive processing does not rule out intelligence or self-consciousness: ‘the slight elasticity of the essayist’s train of thought forces him to greater intensity than discursive thought, because the essay does not proceed blindly and automatically, as the latter does, but must reflect on itself at every moment.’

The trail’s elasticity is only ‘slight’, because of the unresolved tension between stasis and dynamism – for example, between fixed and unfixed cognition, or between a neat commensurability of concepts to the object and the lack of such – which characterizes the essay form. Adorno wrote of the essay’s privileging of the incommensurate, of how it is ‘concerned with what is blind in its objects. It wants to use concepts to pry open the aspect of its objects that cannot be accommodated by concepts, the aspect that reveals, through the contradictions in which concepts become entangled, that the net of their objectivity is a merely subjective arrangement. It wants to polarize the opaque element and release the latent forces in it.’ Sinclair’s ‘Before I Left the Rue Grimoire’ ironically comments on our fear of this ambition.

light darts from out there not so very far

strikes the inner sea we hope

precise equivalent soundless & scaled down

This sort of reception of light – of truth, of the meaning of an object – represents the contrary of how a visionary hermeneutic aims to receive light. In a way, visionary hermeneutics hopes to read an illuminated poem imprecisely, so as to liberate its incommensurability – its miraculous, formless and transforming, shifty aspects – and release, not some ‘soundless & scaled down’ echo, but one (to return to ‘Beckton Alp’) ‘raw and absolute and unappeased’.

Sinclair’s thinking about pedagogy, and about visionary experience – when that thinking is filtered through the diary form of his 1971 book The Kodak Mantra Diaries – again suggests an emphasis on the release of incommensurability. These diaries relay a dialogue between Paul Goodman and Sinclair in which Goodman accuses Ginsberg, his poetry, of a lack of ‘religious depth’:

He has no theological feeling at all. He doesn’t know what real faith is. He understands on the other hand that religion is the crucial thing. He knows this in some deep way and so he picks up some eclectic eastern stuff which he understands in an external pedantic way – but with no feeling of faith, miracle, communion, sacrament, all the things which make for religious life in a way that I would conceive it. He cops-out into notions of union, ecstasy etc etc – which are all sentiments. They’re very nice sentiments but they are merely aesthetic and have nothing to do with the springs, in terms of which heaven and hell are determined, or in terms of which the Messiah will come.

Goodman’s view of Christianity, vaunting ‘the springs’ – deep structures, whether practical (such as Communion), or conceptual (such as the terms in terms of which heaven and hell are determined) – over mystical emotional effects, recalls Watkins’s poetics: much of Watkins’s poetry is reducing itself to a thematic demonstration of Christian conceptual structures, for instance, such as the generation of resurrection from suffering or a pain/life dialectic. Sinclair, however, responds to the accusation of a lack of formal Christian ‘religious depth’ with the question: ‘Is that a bad thing?’. Sinclair seems to be hinting here at an interest in how miracle or sacrament can be an incommensurable, everyday, more superficial phenomenon, one not reliant on being determined by deep structures – whether practical structures of organized religion such as the liturgy, or pre-set, rigid conceptual structures. In ‘The Return of Spring’ Watkins wrote of how ‘what first I feared as a rite I love as a sacrament.’ [117] Rather as Adorno saw the essay seeking to release ‘what is blind’ in its material, in The Kodak Mantra Diaries we can see Sinclair seeking out the opaque element in our religious experience, and in pedagogy:

Can’t you throw out the old pupil / teacher relationship anyway, and approach any subject mutually, both looking for insights, get rid of the formal structure?

We could think towards a religious-exploratory experience which is more free-form – one which is fluid, provisional, shifting, as if transformed by kick-starts of cognitive shocks. Moments of incommensurability, crystallized by visionary perception, re-organize the trail itself, as we pass through them.

                   

Arrested Glory

In this wild eve’s thunder-rain, at the batement of it, the night-shades now much more come on: when’s the cool, even, after-light. [David Jones]

Perhaps writing itself is not only kick-started by perception, but is also enabled precisely by its collapse, when it is going too fast: when a translation has occurred. In ‘The Childhood of Hölderlin’, Watkins identified the intensity of Hölderlin’s poetry to be grounded in the extreme reciprocity between his visionary perception and the natural vision herself: when the poet has become her medium.

[…] The courses of rivers

Remained a compelling mystery; yet when he wrote

Of these, he no longer watched, he became the river.

So swift his thought, so close to the life he saw,

He knew the rose as the rose is known to herself,

Fell with the cataract’s fall, or became that eagle

Of piercing sight, or learnt the time of the fig-tree,

Not by time, but by breast-feather and leaf. [309]

‘The Cave-Drawing’ reveals Watkins’s view that the artist’s visionary understanding, learning, hermeneutic can be not only as speedy as its object, but also as fugitive and fortuitous. A ‘luck’ enables a singing of the light; so that precisely an arrested ‘mine/ Of mineral wonder’, a frozen crystallization, re-energizes art.

For us he made light sing in the dark of his line,

Arrested motion, all animals pierced and crystalline:

He, he alone had found it, his look trained down

By luck their lightning emergence. This was his mine

Of mineral wonder, making the skilled hand run,

A hunter, spearlike, outspeeding all ages begun,

At which we marvel. [149]

The arrest or training-down performed by visionary hermeneutics involves an act of celebration and compression, which is also an act of eternalization, as the resulting obscure crystal is rescued from time. In ‘Taliesin in Gower’:

Rhinoceros, bear and reindeer haunt the crawling glaciers of age

Beheld in the eye of the rock, where a javelin’d arm held stiff,

Withdrawn from the vision of flying colours, reveals, like script on a page,

The unpassing moment’s arrested glory, a life locked fast in the cliff. [185]

‘A life locked fast’: there is the emphasis on the crystallization of an organic unity, as in Jerusalem when Blake remarks that ‘he who wishes to see a Vision; a perfect Whole/ Must see it in its Minute Particulars; Organized’. Sinclair has spoken of the ‘brief glyph-notes’ from which the prose sections of his Lud Heat evolved; to Acker he commented: ‘for a long time you must train yourself to write in ways that are fast and accurate. You test yourself to see if you can make mental notes that mean something, represent something.’ The goal of crystallizing definition is really simplicity: ‘none so intellectual/ As the simplest truth of all.’ [401] Smith told Middles: ‘My problem’s knowing when to shut up on a song. I can’t put that bleeding pen down, so I hone it, try to get it as simple as possible. That is something I have learned over the years. I know how to edit.’ Academic practice – the administrative-bureaucratic method of cognition – can instead necessitate purposeless complexification, in line with a melancholy Puritan work ethic. Jerusalem foretold the reign of false activity:

And in their stead. intricate wheels invented. wheel without wheel:

To perplex youth in their outgoings, & to bind to labours in Albion

Of day & night the myriads of eternity that they may grind

And polish brass & iron hour after hour laborious task!

Kept ignorant of its use, that they might spend the days of wisdom

In sorrowful drudgery, to obtain a scanty pittance of bread:

In ignorance to view a small portion & think that All,

And call it Demonstration: blind to all the simple rules of life.

‘The Childhood of Hölderlin’ proposes, ‘What might the gift not bring to their holy light/ Who ask love only?’ [309]. Similarly, Kierkegaard’s distrust of his day’s professional and quasi-professional hermeneutics – ‘Christendom has got itself stuck in cleverness’ – made him see how ‘someone more than its match in cleverness’ could continue to work for wisdom: with an aim to ‘restore simplicity’. ‘The world has become just far too clever. The person who is to work effectively for the religious must get behind them – else he won’t be of much use.’

Nine years before, in 1839, Kierkegaard’s notes had drawn attention to the celebratory, even redemptive function of a backstage practice of crystallizing simplification. ‘All poetry is life’s glorification [Forklarelse] (i.e. transfiguration) through its clarification [Forklarelse] (through being clarified, illuminated, “unfolded”, etc.). It is really remarkable that language has this ambiguity.’ The perception held by Kierkegaard’s ‘poetry’ aims at the visionary register of Watkins’s ‘arrested glory’, or the radically strange, post-real ‘transfiguring after-clarity’ of The Anathemata, when life ‘looms up curiously exact and clear, more real by half than in the busy light as noses everywhere at stare-faced noon – more real…but more of Faëry by a long chalk’. This moonlit visionary perception or hermeneutic recalls the radically passive, detached attention proposed and practiced by Weil, which Finch likened to ‘”description”’, ‘when this word has lost all of its overtones of complete logical mapping. We are looking not for exactness but for description so detached, so penetrating, so obvious that it has the character of revelation.’ This ‘kind of seeing in which the ordinary becomes translucent’, is suggestive of the revelatory ‘holy light’ of ‘The Childhood of Hölderlin’.

What might the gift not bring to their holy light

Who ask love only? Sacrifice willed by the heavenly ones

Raises our god-pierced eyes. Our selves are nothing;

That which we seek is all. [309]

The lights over the ‘world-flats’ hover uncertainly, by fits & starts, ‘Wills-of-wisp’ so to say, anyway, thats the idea, - uncertainly & only now and again. Is that O.K.? [Jones to Watkins, 26 June 1960]   

Seeing

Parenthetical numbering in this exposé relates to The Collected Poems of Vernon Watkins (Ipswich: Golgonooza Press, 2000). Other, source, texts:

Acker, Kathy, ‘Writing as Magic in London in Its Summer’ (1997)

Adams, Sam and Gwilym Rees Hughes, eds, Triskel Two: Essays on Welsh and Anglo-Welsh Literature (Llandybie: Davies, 1973)

Adorno, Theodor W., Notes to Literature: Volume One, ed. by Rolf Tiedemann (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991)

Allen, Diogenes, Three Outsiders: Pascal, Kierkegaard, Simone Weil (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2006)

Blake, William, Complete Writings, ed. by Geoffrey Keynes (Oxford: OUP, 1972)

______.Jerusalem: The Emanation of the Giant Albion, ed. by Morton D. Paley (London: Tate Gallery, 1998)

Bond, Robert, ‘More than Museums: No Traveller Returns, by Vahni Capildeo’, Jacket, 26 (October 2004), here

______. Iain Sinclair (Cambridge: Salt, 2005)

Boulton, James T., ed., The Selected Letters of D. H. Lawrence (Cambridge: CUP, 1997)

Buber, Martin, Ecstatic Confessions: The Heart of Mysticism, ed. by Paul Mendes-Flohr (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1985)

Finch, Henry Leroy, Simone Weil and the Intellect of Grace, ed. by Martin Andic (New York: Continuum, 1999)

Ford, Simon, Hip Priest: The Story of Mark E. Smith and The Fall (London: Quartet, 2003)

Jones, David, The Anathemata: Fragments of an Attempted Writing (London: Faber and Faber, 1952)

______. Letters to Vernon Watkins, ed. by Ruth Pryor (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1976)

Kierkegaard, Søren, Papers and Journals: A Selection, trans. by Alastair Hannay (London: Penguin, 1996)

McLellan, David, Simone Weil: Utopian Pessimist (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1989)

Middles, Mick & Mark E. Smith, The Fall (London: Omnibus, 2003)

Norris, Leslie, ed., Vernon Watkins: 1906-1967 (London: Faber and Faber, 1970)

Norvig, Gerda S., Dark Figures in the Desired Country: Blake’s Illustrations to The Pilgrim’s Progress (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1993)

Polk, Dora, Vernon Watkins and the Spring of Vision (Swansea: Davies, 1977)

Scholem, Gershom, Walter Benjamin: The Story of a Friendship, trans. by Harry Zohn (New York: New York Review Books, 2003)

Sinclair, Iain, Lud Heat/ Suicide Bridge (London: Vintage, 1995)

______. Lights Out for the Territory: 9 Excursions in the Secret History of London (London: Granta Books, 1997)

______. Landor’s Tower: or The Imaginary Conversations (London: Granta Books, 2001)

______. and Emma Matthews, White Goods (Uppingham: Goldmark, 2002)

______. The Firewall: Selected Poems 1979-2006 (Buckfastleigh: Etruscan Books, 2006)

______. The Kodak Mantra Diaries: October 1966 to June 1971, Beat Scene special issue, December 2006 [orig. publ. London: Albion Village Press, 1971]

Thomas, Dylan, Collected Poems: 1934-1953, ed. by Walford Davies and Ralph Maud (London: Phoenix, 2000)

Traherne, Thomas, Selected Writings, ed. by Dick Davis (Manchester: Carcanet, 1988)

Weil, Simone, Gravity and Grace, trans. by Emma Craufurd (London: Routledge, 1997)

Williams, Rowan, ‘Swansea’s Other Poet: Vernon Watkins and the Threshold between Worlds’, Welsh Writing in English, 8 (2003), 107-20

Hearing

The Fall, Psykick Dance Hall (Eagle Records, 2000)

______. The Complete Peel Sessions 1978-2004 (Sanctuary Records, 2005) 

______. Reformation Post TLC (Slogan Records, 2007)

Next post: Karl Jaspers