Two Parts of an Atom: In Dialogue

     Last night I saw a discussion between my two favorite English professors, Altieri and Blanton, on one of my favorite poems, T. S. Eliot's The Wasteland. Altieri used this wonderful analogy to describe their respective approaches to the poem. His understanding is through 'the concentrated center of reason' in the poem, something like the core of an atom. Blanton's is through the 'outer horizons of all possible meaning,' like the electron cloud. I will never understand how such poetry just falls out of his mouth.
    They reminded me why I make art. Its been a long time since I've asked myself what needs to come next in painting. I did again, and it felt good ( :

Some key moments of brilliance from the night:

"Reality is a matter of degrees." A

"The three most important English words in the last century:
Heidegger's 'is'
Hegel's 'not'
Wittgenstein's 'as'"   A (I need to read more on this 'as')

"The voices in the poem make it, undeniably, a social space." A

"The impersonality of the poem is a confession of the limits of the I (eye?). It is the fabricated organ of experience that is better than the peot. The poem is able to know more than the poet." B

"Eliot's problem was not that he wanted to say something original, but wanted to give old words new life. He was driven by the staleness of the words-- the fact that the language in our mouths has been recycled for generations. Instead of creating new words, he dug through etymologies to find and employ all possible meanings. Its re-activation over creation." - B

"The success of the impressionists was the intelligence with which they backed up their 'No's" -A