Stoic Detachment

A friend's having quoted a poem by Robinson Jeffers is the occasion for this blog-entry. Here is the poem:

Be Angry At the Sun

That public men publish falsehoods
Is nothing new. That America must accept
Like the historical republics corruption and empire
Has been known for years.

Be angry at the sun for setting
If these things anger you. Watch the wheel slope and turn,
They are all bound on the wheel, these people, those warriors.
This republic, Europe, Asia.

Observe them gesticulating,
Observe them going down. The gang serves lies, the passionate
Man plays his part; the cold passion for truth
Hunts in no pack.

You are not Catullus, you know,
To lampoon these crude sketches of Caesar. You are far
From Dante's feet, but even farther from his dirty
Political hatreds.

Let boys want pleasure, and men
Struggle for power, and women perhaps for fame,
And the servile to serve a Leader and the dupes to be duped.
Yours is not theirs.

The poem was published in 1941, in a book of the same title, and one of the 100 copies that were signed by Jeffers goes for about $750.00, in case you're a collector. Later, during World War II, Jeffers published another book, with Random House, and the anti-war stance in the book was so pronounced that Random House published a disclaimer in the book, noting the Jeffers' views were not necessarily those of the publishing firm. Jeffers was too old to serve, or to be asked to serve, in the military at the time, so he didn't have to make the choice that two other poets, William Stafford and William Everson, made, which was to become conscientious objectors instead of joining the armed services. I believe both men were sent to work-camps.

As in many poems, Jeffers in this one implicitly advises the listener or reader to adopt a stance of stoic detachment toward politics, and the reference to the wheel makes history seem almost mechanistic, fated. "Don't involve yourself," Jeffers seems to advise.

My colleague quoted the lines, "the cold passion for the truth/Hunts in no pack." The lines don't need paraphrasing, but one way to amplify their meaning is to suggest that, if you seek the truth in political matters, don't look to "the pack"--which might refer to political parties, received opinion, mass sentiments, and/or the Media; instead, follow the facts and the evidence as they come to you. --Not always an easy task, especially when the pack tends to hide or to spin the facts, and especially when we may see ourselves as part of a group, if not part of a pack.

In the penultimate stanza, is Jeffers talking to himself or at least to poets in general? Perhaps. He seems to suggest that to be publicly or politically involved, as a poet, is no longer possible or at least not advisable. Perhaps it never was advisable to be so involved, in Jeffers's opinion.

The last stanza reveals some biases that belong to Jeffers' era. Pleasure is the exclusive turf of boys, apparently, not of girls. Power is the exclusive turf of men, not of women. And only women are interested in fame? Hmmm.

One "not unreasonable" (as a Brit might say) response to the poem is: "Easy for you to say, Mr. Jeffers." What if events conspire to place you in the midst of politics or of the effects of politics? If you're an African American in 1941, or in the 1950s, for example, you might have a different attitude toward political involvement, and you might want relatively privileged men like Jeffers to give you a hand, and you might not regard fatalism to be as safe a haven as Jeffers makes it out to be.

At the same time, "the gang serves lies" is a nice reminder about how the political world really works, regardless of "party affiliation." And "observe them gesticulating" is excellent advice for watching such events as presidential candidates' debates, wherein almost all gestures and phrases seem scripted, so much so that when candidates go off-script and--for example--turn to each other and argue like real human beings, oxygen seems to rush back into the proceedings.

For any person investigating anything--scholar, scientist, consumer, mere citizen--"the cold passion for the truth/Hunts in no pack" is great advice; --and also often very difficult advice to follow. It's an awful thing to have one's opinion confused by the facts. It creates what's known as cognitive dissonance. Apparently, the brain itself has a chemical response in such situations--that's the premise of a new book called Mistakes Were Made--But Not By Me.

Having lept from Jeffers' poem to cognitive dissonance, thereby creating cognitive dissonance, I'll leap to the topic of cats, for when I read "Be angry at the sun for setting/If these things anger you," I think of cats. That is, being angry at the sun for setting and at cats for any of their feline behavior gets you to exactly the same place with the sun and with cats: nowhere. And in some ways (as I try to wrench myself back to the poem), Jeffers is advising us to take a cat's stance toward politics: merely observe, detached, stoic.