Getting It Right

In his treatise on the necessity of liberal education, Culture and Anarchy, Matthew Arnold argues for a curriculum which establishes a clear line of (Western) tradition handed down from the Greeks and Romans as a defense against what he saw as a devolution or a descent into barbarism – anarchy in the UK. When I was 16, I listened to the Sex Pistols and tagged public property with Sharpies and canned paint and profanity and then proceeded to sniff the excesses of our vandalism. Matthew Arnold was writing to convince people to hate us and hang with him because we were trash talking the sexual fidelity of his mother in bathroom stalls. Matthew Arnold wrote his book about Plato and Aristotle and Longinus and Horace. We wrote Shit on Horace and Longinus and Aristotle and Plato, mostly because we knew that they were just men repeating the words of other men. Plato was an ancient greek dude who wrote about other greek dudes who overheard the activities of So-crates – a possible ancient greek dude, much like Jesus is a possible ancient Jewish dude – in order to teach other ancient greek dudes to not end up like us, writing shit on Horace and Longinus and Aristotle and Plato. Plato's Symposium is a morality play that looks like a fictional gossip column. A narrator is asked to tell a story told to him about how the god, I mean the man, Socrates tricked the Aristocrats into kissing the ass of the gods, when he knew full well that the gods were only a metaphor of human attempts to escape mortality. Accordingly, the story is told so that the Aristocrats (and presumably Plato's audience would find this "sensible") went on and on one-upping each other in praising the nobility and qualities of love until Socrates steps in and starts asking questions to which he already knows the answer. HA! HA! So much for believing in the abundance of love. According to Socrates, by the way of some narrator by the way of Plato (so according to Plato?), logic and deduction are the key – critical distance – to becoming aware of the trace of love in one's soul, so the body and the soul are distinctly separate. And we read Plato and we called Breton a Platonist and the Platonism scholars said we were being irrational and so we shit on the Symposium. And the Aristotelians thought us too barbaric and suggested we consult Aristotle, and so we read the Poetics and noted the importance of mimesis, of keeping our ideas as close to the archetype. And we handed out flyers saying, Andy Warhol is an Aristotelian, but the Aristotelian scholars said we were vulgar to compare mimesis to a Xerox, and so we shit on the poetics. And the followers of Longinus suggested we read On the Sublime because we needed some restraint. And so we read that great writing is about great conceptions, about lifting the reader out of the ordinary through a refined elegance and simplicity. And so we called into radio shows proclaiming Kenneth Goldsmith as the second coming of Longinus. And the scholars of Longinus freaked and expelled us for plagiarism. And so we wiped our asses with Longinus's text and mailed it with our expulsion appeals. And the faculty recommended we read Horace, and so we read the Ars Poetica. And we read how ornament needs to be cut down such that a reader need be brought in almost in medias res. And we began proclaiming Kurt Vonnegut in the tradition of Horace, but the scholars of fine verse suggested we were comparing tigers and lambs, which showed us to be vulgar plebeians incapable of understanding how the world works, and they sent us to work at the water treatment facility, where we mimeographed copies of journal we titled Arse Poetica, a compendium of butts and farts in the tradition of Horace. And we took our sharpies and we tagged everything we were told was beautiful with words like "shit" and "fuck," and we shat on Matthew Arnold and enjoyed ourselves immensely.