Jan Zwicky is a Renaissance woman—a philosopher who has taught at Princeton and the University of Victoria, an award-winning poet who teaches creative writing at various institutions, a violinist who has performed with chamber ensembles and orchestras throughout her native Canada, an environmentalist who published Learning to Die: Wisdom in the Age of Climate Crisis with her husband, the poet and typographer Robert Bringhurst.
That’s a lot of specializations, but from Zwicky’s viewpoint, these distinct fields of accomplishment cohere and interpenetrate. In Lyric Philosophy, she proposes that poetry, music, metaphor, and art are modes of thinking just as precise and serious as philosophy and science. In this, she bucks the trajectory of the past several centuries, which assumes that “the true order of the world is systematic” and can be exhausted by rational analysis. Clarity is the leading metaphor of analytic philosophy, and we achieve clarity by dispelling the distorting clouds of emotion, desire, beauty, and resonant language. But what, Zwicky asks, is clarity? An utterance is clear when “it renders what is on the other side of the glass easier to understand, accept, respond to, or love.” Clarity “purifies vision,” and novels, poems, and pieces of music accomplish that. The puzzle is how art “became divorced from what we recognize as thinking” in the first place. What makes philosophy philosophy isn’t method or content, but “affective commitment.” Contrary to its own self-image, philosophy is driven by a passion: “its eros is clarity.”
Such a critique of analysis might be a prelude to Heideggerian opaqueness, but Zwicky is neither an anti-realist nor an enemy of science. She wants to put science in its place. Science discovers truth, but that doesn’t tell us how science fits in the world or how much truth it’s capable of capturing. Analysis, whether philosophical or scientific, illumines only “one dimension, one axis of how it is with humans.” Often understanding doesn’t come through dissective analysis that tears a thing into its component parts to see how it works. We typically perceive an overall pattern, a Gestalt, all at once. Understanding is recognizing a face without being able to draw or describe it, or hearing a familiar melody even when it’s played badly in an unfamiliar key.
“Resonance” is one of Zwicky’s own leading metaphors. It unites universality and particularity: “Thisness is the experience of a distinct thing in such a way that the resonant structure of the world sounds through it.” While “each this focusses that resonant structure in a distinct way . . . the structure so focussed is always the same” because “there is only one world.” An utterance is resonant when it causes “other utterances to sound.” A single work can be internally resonant. Zwicky commends the “bell-like quality” of Wittgenstein’s writing, in which “each sentence seems to exist as a fully self-sufficient entity, yet each seems also to set the entire structure resonating.” Resonance also vibrates across different works and distinct disciplines. A resonant novel or symphony ignites philosophical insights, philosophy inspires a poem, and a poem gets transposed into music.
Resonance is best exemplified in Zwicky’s poetry, nowhere better than in “Practicing Bach,” a resonant poetic cycle about resonance. The first line of the first section, “Prelude,” immediately plunges into philosophy:
There is, said Pythagoras, a sound
the planet makes: a kind of music
just outside our hearing, the proportion
and the resonance of things—not
the clang of theory or the wuthering
of human speech, not even
the bright song of sex or hunger, but
the unrung ringing that
supports them all.
That’s lovely: music of the spheres, composed with the world, the silent, concordant interplay of things, in comparison with which theory “clangs” and speech is no more than a wuthering wind. A delicate encomium to the world’s harmony, but then Zwicky hits a jarring note:
The wife, no warning, dead
when you come home. Ducats
in the fishheads that you salvage
from the rubbish heap. Is the cosmos
laughing at us? No. It’s saying
improvise. Everywhere you look
there’s beauty, and it’s rimed
with death.
What could be more dissonant than a wife suddenly dead and ducats among discarded fish heads? Doesn’t the world, every moment of every day, refute Pythagoras? What we hear isn’t music but the taunting mockery of a cruel cosmos.
Zwicky rejects the inference. Death is “everywhere.” If the world resonates, its harmony must encompass death. Indeed beauty is “rimed / with death,” “rime” being both the patina of frost that clings to spiderwebs and chain-link fences on a cold and foggy morning, and “rhyme,” the aural resonance of word with word. Rimed with death as the world is, its beauty rhymes with death, death with beauty. Music above all captures that rhyme, since music exists only in and as its passing-away: Each note blinks on and goes out to make way for the next, and the music exists only so long as the players play.
The dissonance of death doesn’t falsify Pythagoras but calls us to “improvise.” In the final poem of the cycle, “Gigue,” Zwicky expands her exhortation:
Our diligence: ten fingers and
a healthy set of lungs. Practice
ceaselessly: there is
one art: wind
in the open spaces
grieving, laughing
with us, saying
improvise.
In a world where death and beauty rhyme, we’re called to riff off life’s shocking chords and melodic surprises, to hear the running of water and see the shining light “even when the dying / seems unbearable,” to wager on resonance.
