Sep 2, 2009
On Matters Of Judgment (And The Horrors Of Rejection)
By: JohnOlson Categories: Essays Feature
Not right, not right at all.
I hate it when people call me judgmental. The implication is twofold: that I have the arrogance to believe that I know all things, and that I suffer from a narrowness of mind. Consequently, any and all opinions that I express are corrupt and irresponsible. It is pointless to continue the argument. Once your authority is undermined you have no place in an argument. What is laughably ironic about this is that the person who has accused you of being judgmental is being judgmental. If everyone is blind, who can discern the one person who can see?
The opposite of being judgmental is being open-minded. This does not mean that you are unencumbered by judgment. It means that you have the capacity to suspend judgment and consider things from another point of view. It is a grand luxury if there is no other pressing business. But if you have to decide whether to get a heart operation or not, send a troop of men into battle, or step in to stop a fight you do not have the luxury of endlessly unraveling the ramifications, à la Hamlet. You have to act, and act quickly.
Years ago, on a cold December morning, I got lost in an industrial and residential district of Seattle called Georgetown. I was cruising along slowly studying the addresses when I spotted a young woman being chased by a man in his underwear around the muddy parking lot of a squalid apartment building. She was shouting “Help! Help! He’s going to kill me!” The first thing to flash in my mind was to find a telephone. But since this incident took place in the late nineties, during the advent of the cell phone, telephone booths had begun to disappear. Chances of finding a phone booth were nil. Even if I did find a phone booth and called the police the woman would already be dead. If I continued on my way and just ignored the incident I would be haunted by it the rest of my life- haunted by the image of a woman dead from strangulation; haunted by my cowardice and lack of humanity. I had to stop. As soon as I stopped, the woman ran toward my car, a small red Subaru. I had less than a second to decide whether to open the door or not, which I did. Praying at the same time that this wasn’t a car jack, I let the woman in. The man, surprisingly, also got in. He sat on the edge of the seat. At that point I ceased thinking at all- there was no time to think, I reacted by instinct. I pressed the accelerator lightly enough to move the car forward, the man’s bare foot scraping against the asphalt. There was a thud, the man disappeared from the seat, and I threw the car into second and sped away. I dimly remember checking the rear view mirror and seeing the man chasing us. I suggested that the young woman call the police. She answered she could not. She had some outstanding traffic tickets. She helped me find the address I was looking for, a combination restaurant and bar. Again, I urged her to call the police. As soon as we arrived, and as an old pick up passed by, the woman leaned over and honked my horn. The pick up stopped. She got out of the car and ran to the pick up. And that was that. I never found out what the whole thing had been about.
Each time I tell this story to people I get varied reactions. Most people think I did the right thing. But a few think what I did was foolish in the extreme. Any number of things could have gone wrong and gotten very ugly indeed, including my arrest. If the scene had had no other witnesses, there was no one to corroborate my testimony that I had stopped to help. For me, there was no right or wrong decision: I had no decision. But the story serves to show how slippery and complicated making a judgment can be, and that we don’t always have the luxury of time and distance to arrive at the best judgment. And maybe that’s a good thing. Maybe there are occasions in life when it is best to follow our animal instincts.
But even when we do have plenty of time to reflect, making a good judgment is a difficult thing to achieve. Who can say, in all honesty, that they have no regrets? That their judgments have all been sound? That foresight has in all instances equaled hindsight? That their choice of career, of car, of washer and dryer, of wife, of husband, of weather stripping and Weltanschauung were all unexcelled, the absolute best? That discrimination did not smack of bias? That the bananas they brought home were not too ripe? That their theories held water? That all their choices have had the ring and shine of sterling?
Judgment is hard. It is subject to delusion, vulnerable to collusion. Ravished by rationalization, seduced by wit. Not even judges always make good judgments.
There are judgments, and there are judgments.
Judgment based on a measure is one thing. Ten pounds of oranges is ten pounds of oranges. No argument there, no room for opinion to quibble and shift.
But what about less tangible things? Pressure, for instance.
Pressure is a scalar quantity and can be measured in units of pascals. A pascal is a measure of force per unit area. But this is physical pressure not psychological pressure. Physical pressure is quantifiable. Psychological pressure is not quantifiable. This is where judgment is required. But judgment based on what? What units? What system? What knowledge?
No units. No system. No knowledge.
Just judgment. Raw, unleavened judgment. Untested. Unspoken. Unfiltered. Grasping at straws. Plumbing unfamiliar waters.
You grill yourself. Should I keep this job? Should I complain to the supervisor that the childish outbursts and tantrums of a coworker are making it impossible for me to do my job? Will this reflect poorly on my ability to get along with others and so hurt my chances for a promotion, or getting a transfer? If the bus begins to slide, do I turn the wheel in the opposite direction, as I have been advised? Will I have the presence of mind to do that? Where was the ring for my emergency chute?
The mind is a treadmill of endless decision-making. Pressures build, offsetting our equilibrium and making rational determinations harder to achieve. Cooler minds prevail. More passionate dispositions get blown about by contrary winds.
Nor is judgment confined to matters of stress and science. Courtrooms are fraught with ethical conundrums. Say a bank teller has a child with a life-threatening medical problem that requires surgery, but that surgery is not covered by the insurance provider. There is money available in a dormant account. The teller uses that money to get the necessary surgery for their child. The teller begins paying the money back, but is caught, and charged with embezzlement. You are a member of the jury. Do you recommend acquittal, based on the circumstances, or adhere strictly according to the law, according to the judge’s instructions?
Strict adherence to law is encouraged precisely because human cognition is so vulnerable to emotion, to nuance and degree, the shifting pastels of fiery horizons, the roll and undulation of life’s uncertainties. This is where law breaks down. There are no precedents to follow in uncharted waters. Navigation in the realm of perception is less dependent on sextant and compass than a sensitivity to the fluid language of the atmosphere, tongues of lightning, halos around the moon, migrations of birds, and agitations on the surface of the sea that hint of moiling undercurrents.
Aesthetic judgments are the most unstable. Gaius Petronius, the noted “judge of elegance” in the court of the emperor Nero and presumed author of the Satyricon, once remarked that “beauty and wisdom are rarely conjoined.” Judgment is linked to logic. Beauty is not. Beauty is to logic what a cloud is to a brick. The brick has definition; heft, size, shape. The cloud is all looseness and ethereality. It is never a single shape but a multiplicity of shapes, all changing mercurially with the whims and vagaries of the air.
Immanuel Kant provides some helpful insight. He refers to a concept called subjective universality, a judgment of beauty not based on personal interests, what he calls a “disinterested satisfaction.” To call something beautiful is to presuppose the same appreciation in others. But based on what, I don’t know. Cultural affinities? Would an individual from the Democratic Republic of the Congo enjoy a painting by Antoine Watteau as much as a person from Rouen, France? Tastes vary even within the regions of southern Africa. Chéri Samba, an artist from Kinshasa, remarks how,
Critics in kinshasa have never accepted the phrases in my paintings, they think of painting in a more western
manner. Yet the truth, in my paintings,
is almost always expressed in the sentences inserted
in the paintings. Often they contradict the scene represented…
for example, for a person from Zaire, nudity is scandalous:
I paint it, I make it visible, and then,with a phrase,
I find a way of saying don’t look. I like these paradoxes.
I have noticed in the public a far greater tolerance toward experimentation in the visual arts. It may be that Chéri Samba would disagree with this. Many others have disagreed with this. But this is what I have noticed. I think the reason for this is simple: we are dealing with palpable objects, sensual products: shape, volume, texture, color. These do not necessarily require a strong educational background to appreciate.
Poetry is different. Poetry is based on language, and language is based on a mutuality of understanding. Anyone with a command of English knows precisely what I mean when I say “look at that cow,” and there happens to be a cow within view. But in poetry the word is often stripped from its referent. The strength of a poem relies on a combination of image and emotion. This can get tricky. How can anyone judge what is essentially excitation and hallucination? There are skills, techniques for building constructs and ideas with words, but the parameters are much harder to identify. Here is where judgment has become almost purely subjective. And this can drive you absolutely nuts.
For instance, let’s say I write a poem. I think the poem is great and needs to be published. All the words in the poem are marvelous and apt and beautifully aerodynamic. The poem has viscosity and meaning. The meaning is transparent but not too transparent. It is obscure enough to tease the mind into larger associations, lead the mind in curious directions, zigzags and meanders, but without tearing the fabric of coherence, so that the sphere of the poem expands, and the mind rises, happy and blithe, to view the ground below, the mundane ground, with all of its rules and traffic lights. The poem, in point of fact, is perfect. It needs to be published so that the world at large, the world of humanity, will be able to read it, penetrate its mysteries, and so grow wiser. And so the poem is submitted to a magazine, directed toward the discerning eyes of an editor, a gatekeeper, who will appreciate its beauty, the sublimity of its craftsmanship, the audacity of its autonomy, the soft warm glow of its inner meaning, the toughness of its observations, the delicacy of its assumptions, the piquancy of its pulse and temperature. But the poem is rejected. The poem is returned. “I am sorry,” confesses the editor, “but your poem is not right for our publication.”
What does this mean, “not right for our publication?” I assume it is the editor’s chosen euphemism for meaning, “your poem stinks.” Or, “your poem is dull.” Or, “your poem oozes forth the miasma of misbegotten perceptions, ill chosen words, and the penetralia of a megalomaniac.”
Here is where judgment is particularly shaky. For we are dealing with not one but two very separate judgments: my judgment, the judgment of the author, which is perfect, and the judgment of the editor, which is negligent, fiendish, and insane.
It is to be assumed that I have not undergone the task of submitting my work at random (or arbitrarily) in an eagerness to see it in print, but have fully examined the publication to which I submitted my poem, and found grounds for mutual respect. Emblazoned within its pages or resplendent among its pixels I have seen work with marks and echoes of my own. Ergo, an incongruity of style cannot be the problem. I must conclude that either my judgment has been at fault, or the judgment of the editor has demonstrated an ugly and reprehensible flaw.
But what, I am forced to admit, if it is the editor who is correct, and myself whose judgment is at fault? What agonies of doubt! What pricks of incertitude! It is here I envy the calibrations of science.
There is no way to quantify the worth of a poem. No poem yet devised can be weighed, balanced, plumbed, gauged, or calculated. There are no physical properties to which can be applied a standard system of measurement. It is all subjective, purely a matter of taste, bias, bents, propensities and predispositions.
Certain mystics have praised the ability to live in the world without judgment, to see things in their immediate condition with no preconception to obfuscate their full reality. I have often experimented with the attempt to withhold judgment and have discovered that it is nearly impossible. I did discover however, that perception is largely a creative act. When we penetrate to the essence of a thing rather than summarily accept its definition, we find ourselves in the presence of a living thing or being.
Inner qualities are volatile, like eyes. Nerve impulses pass from the optic nerve to the brain where they are interpreted as impressions, perceptions, quirks. Inductions, deductions, epiphanies. Here is where judgment comes into play. The mind ponders a phenomenon. What is it? What is this thing I’m feeling? How do I identify it? Name it? Qualify it? What are its properties, its shape, its density, its weight, its smell? The more tangled the qualifiers the more vague and elusive the object becomes. But what isn’t colored by quality? Essence does not precede existence. No judgment is possible without a consideration of tincture, structure, and texture.
I will, on occasion, stumble upon a word that refers to something I have not experienced, or experienced without knowing I had experienced it. The word zeitgeist, for example, which means, literally, time ghost, explained a great deal to me the first time I heard it defined. It refers to all the customs, habits, principles and manners of a particular time in history. Clothing and hair, jewelry, tattoos, the tones and inflections in people’s voices, careers that are sought, movies that become popular, are all indications of a collective spirit. Zeitgeist helps explain the continuing popularity of Star Trek, the appeal of Oprah Winfrey, and Facebook and Twitter. The word has validity.
What I hear and see can be put together in my mind to form a judgment about the meaning of a word. Not everything we experience can be so easily tasted and weighed. Our mental lives are volatile but crucial, forming a bridge between our inner existence and what we need to do to survive in the external world. Butterflies are equipped with very sensitive antenna. This is how they find nectar. We too are equipped with antenna. The antenna of art and language.
Words and postulates have this in common: they give voice to the mute and invisible. Concepts have consequence and weight. The intangible is judged by its virtue, its vigor and influence. Ideas do not have shape or smell, but they do have value.
How do we discriminate between values? The question answers itself with another series of questions: what object is not enveloped with a skin of idiom, a shell of idiosyncrasies, a call for deeper questions?
Everything has a story to tell. Each phenomenon and object has a meaning for us. We just need to ask the right questions. Does this flicker, crucible, persimmon, etc., possess some higher, transcendent meaning, or is it simply literal, like a glass of milk? Is it brutally utilitarian like a wedge of wood to be slipped under a door to be used as a doorstop or is it more curiously aesthetic, with no discernible purpose, something like a poem, a jumble of superfluous words, or a mysterious appendage, a fleshy redundancy like the prominent hump on the back of a zebu? I could be wrong about the zebu. That fleshy redundancy might not be so redundant. Perhaps the same could be said of a poem. It is not always so easy to tell what minerals lie in the sedimentary layers of a poem. There may be ore in its vowels, silver in its syllables, gold in its veins. Poetry is an expression of what is deepest and most sublime. Consequently these are values that require persistent effort and a discerning mind. Prospecting is a lonely and intuitive art. Judgment of what lies beneath depends on how closely we read the surface.
This is our dilemma. We can usually tell the difference between a drop cloth and a dragon, a hawk and a handsaw. But who can affirm that a guru is wise and worth our attention, or that a perception is pure and valid? That a poem is good and worthy of publication, or that a poem is dull as a chemical solvent and should be hidden from the world or restricted to use of the dry cleaner?
That a poem matters at all?
A poem matters because there the judgment is attuned to the atoms of its own making. We don’t judge the poem, the poem judges us.
