"Poetry makes nothing happen"- Geertz Quote

"Poetry makes nothing happen," Auden says in his elegy of Yeats, "it survives in the valley of its saying . . . a way of happening, a mouth." The cockfight too, in this colloquial sense, makes nothing happen. Men go on allegorically humiliating one another and being allegorically humiliated by one another, day after day, glorying quietly in the experience if they have triumphed, crushed only slightly more openly by it if they have not. But no one's status really changes. You cannot ascend the status ladder by winning cockfights; you cannot, as an individual, really ascend it at all. Nor can you descend it that way. All you can do is enjoy and savor, or suffer and withstand..."


I found the above quote from Geertz's Deep Play: notes on Balinese cockfight interesting and thought provoking. I think this is an interesting part of the piece because, until this point, Geertz has been studying the cockfight and giving it so much significance that this passage is almost surprising. He comes to the conclusion that the cockfights are almost pointless because they achieve nothing, they change nothing. The cockfights are illegal but why? Is there really a reason for something that doesn't achieve anything to be illegal? Sure, we can argue bestiality and it being inhumane but as I have been learning in my philosophy class- if something is causing a greater happiness than not, why should it be wrong? The Utilitarianism approach to life sums up all of our pains and pleasures and if the pleasures of the issue at hand out weigh the pains than it is accepted by society. It can be argued that Geertz feels the same way about the cockfights in this circumstance. He describes that the men humiliate each other but losing really isn't that bad, they are "crushed only slightly" which in reality doesn't out weigh the pleasure that the cockfights give to the Balinese people. Whether participating or just simply being another person standing in the "superorganism"- as Geertz describes when gathered around a cockfight- the fights themselves really have become a part of the Balinese culture. All people come to watch the fights and it is almost a bonding experience for the Balinese to share the ups and downs of the cockfights with each other.