Opening Thoughts: The Anatomy of Influence

I just came across these lines in Stevens' Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction...
Soldier, there is a war between the mind
And sky, between thought and day and night. It is
For that the poet is always in the sun,
Patches the moon together in his room
To his Virgilian cadences, up down,
Up down. It is a war that never ends.
...and it got me thinking about one of Harold Bloom's opening chapters in his book titled "The Influence of a Mind on Itself." But before I get into Bloom's book, I remember back when I took a Shakespeare class a couple springs ago and Sexson had us read Bloom's shorter essay "The Anxiety of Influence," which emphasized that a writer must empty themselves out (i.e. kenosis) in order to order their ideas within the their mind as well as on paper. This difficult task is the path to take to shape your pen with the precision that you as a writer want. But then suspicion sets in, a suspension of believing in yourself as an artist, coordinated by one's inner-monologue who permeates an anxious incantation upon the self and skeptically asks the artist, "How the hell are you going to do/outdo something like that?" The anxiously unsettled writers keep telling themselves that their vision is too vast, that their ambitions overreach what's realistic, and thus cannot be captured merely with words of a single story. That's how Shakespeare built his repertoire and Bloom praises his advention of elliptical lang--

This is where it gets interesting, and I'm sorry if my language doesn't suffice but I'll give it a try. Theoretically, if one were to successfully 'empty themselves out' then they would reach the point where they could restart and, as Stevens says in his Notes..., "become an ignorant man again." That's exactly what Shakespeare did, over and over, treading new paths back to the top of this...sort of...preceding mountain...except the Platonic form kind. The really imagined one where the peasant and the king are on the same level. The one where the ass and the horse collide in the middle. Over the course of his career, he'd regress back to the base while writing a play, then ascended to the top while writing his next play, then fall into the abyss again writing his next one, then climb back up doing another, and so on and so forth. Arguably, Shakespeare's biggest success exists in his array of fool characters rather than his aristocratic figures (which in some cases become fools, such as Lear or Shylock) although, as Bloom would inquire, what would we make of Hamlet? The most affective fool characters which come to mind now are Launcelot from The Merchant of Venice, the Fool from King Lear, the Gravedigger from Hamlet, and even Falstaff from King Henry the Fourth: Part I. Shakespeare reshaped himself from top to bottom, over and over again, and is the most enigmatic person in literature, as Bloom suggests, "There are many unanswerable paradoxes presented by Shakespeare but one such is, How could the same dramatist have written As You Like It and Othello, A Midsummer Night's Dream and King Lear, Twelfth Night and Macbeth? Yet even that less enigmatic than, How could anyone have composed Hamlet?" (see page 42).

This all goes back to one question, how does practicing kenosis influence the mind on itself? One answer is that if you succeed in completely purging the youness in you then there's nothing left, no personality within except a pure stoic. You're a body, or what Lucretius would call a primal germ. You're nothing but a grain of dust with analytic thinking and problem solving skills in the void. And you're free, a free man-body-thing, and therefore you can be anybody. And becoming anybody else is creating new youness, a new part of you. I think Shakespeare woke up a different person every day, and that's how, not why, Shakespeare could develop so many different characters, conflicting layers of content, and even, simply put, genres. With his immense understanding of art and self-awareness he allowed himself to debate with, eavesdrop on, and overhear himself which is why Bloom calls his chapter "The Influence of a Mind on Itself." The influence from  your art comes from within (yeah I know we've all heard that before) but the next time you write make it a commentary, critique, criticism, or whatever written by either you about your youness or your youness about you. Become that damned gadfly intruding your intellectual space. My last thought is, I hope you're as lost as I am because Bloom's chapter concludes, "No critic, however generously motivated, can help a deep reader escape from the labyrinth of influence. I have learned that my function is to help you get lost."