An Opening

Gamblers and philosophers--Pascal was both--
need a system. Poets with a system wake up
one morning or night and the system is lying
next to them like a suit of armor made entirely
of mollusks. Unsatisfactory. Poets need openings,
not systems. There is life and there is language
and there are openings between the two and poets
look for them. Here's an opening: go through.


hans ostrom 2019

Happy Birthday (Birth-Month), Writers

Here comes June, always an ambiguous month in the Pacific Northwest. It can be as wet and cold as January, or as summery as anywhere else in the U.S. You just never know.

However, you may know what authors were born in June, at least if you care about such things and poke around the Internet. Here's a list of some of our writerly friends, some still with us, most not (except in their words, etc.) who were born in June, starting with a howl:

Allen Ginsberg
John Masefield
Ambrose Bierce (do high-schoolers still read "Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge"? I hope so.)
Anne Frank
Barbara Pym
Ben Jonson
Laurie Lee
Blaise Pascal (perhaps my favorite spiritual writer--and author of a book in a genre by itself, Pensees)
Lillian Hellman (if you haven't seen the film, Pentimento, I invite you to do so)
Louise Erdrich (that's what I like--someone who's at ease with both fiction and poetry)
Luigi Pirandello
Colin Wilson
Mark Van Doren
Mary McCarthy (attended school in Tacoma)
Elizabeth Bowen
Charles Kingsley
Octavia Butler (thanks for your final book, Ms. Butler, Fledgling, not to mention the other ones)
Jean Anoulih
Pierre Corneille (we bunched the difficult French-playwright names together)
Harrie Beecher Stowe
Saul Bellow
Thomas Hardy (a.k.a. Mr. Cheerful)
John Ciardi (I have fond memories of his radio-spot on NPR, called "Good Words to You," and I very much like his translation of Dante)

Earth Day Poem

Some years ago, I returned to the site of my undergraduate education (well, part of it) and my graduate one: U.C. Davis. In the years since I'd been back, the student body had doubled, from 17,000 to over 30,000, and the physical plant had grown bewilderingly large, so much so that I got lost--at a place where I'd studied and then taught for nearly a decade: how embarrassing. You can go home again; it's just that you can't find your way around.

Finally I made it to what I considered the center of campus--the quad and the coffee house. And at that point, time had stopped. For it was Earth Day (I think we used to call it Whole Earth Day), and the booths, people, music, and atmosphere all seemed the same as they were the first time I attended the gathering. Ah, I'm back at Davis, I thought.

Dogs, frisbees, herbaceous smoke, hand-made jewelry for sale, intense but friendly arguments going on, and all sorts of music, long skirts, bare feet, scarves, wild hair, and the original Good Vibes. At the perimeter, on the bike paths, herds of bicycles went by. (The bicycle-accidents at Davis sometimes involved hundreds of people. Somehow I avoided them all.)

I think the following Earth Day poem may be irreverent, but I'm not sure. The first line certainly is.


Bet On It

Sun, you bum, if you weren't close,
you'd be just any other star, one cold
fleck on a black velvet painting. Earth,
you globular oaf, if it weren't for Sun,
you'd drop down Time's abyss like a cold
marble. Moon, you sycophant, why
don't you grow something on yourself?
Humans, you fatuous, big-brained
locusts, you're killing your home by living
in it. God, You are looking more necessary
all the time--the Back-Up Plan. Some
see you as a long shot, at best. I'm with
Pascal. I'm making the wager. It's not
a lock, but it's the smart bet, especially
as we turn the place into a sauna and strand
polar bears on ice cubes. And who would
have bet, back there in the Big Bang Bar
and Grill, that Sun, Moon, Earth, and humans
would end up just so, tensely tethered
to each other? It's all impossible, of course.
Do the math. Yet here we are. Bet on it.
*
Copyright 2009 Hans Ostrom

Pascal's Successful Failure

Blaise Pascal (1623-1662) toiled on a master work most of his life, a massive opus reconciling philosophy, mathematics, Catholicism, faith, reason, and even rhetoric. He failed. The book(s) never materialized, but a collection of notes toward the book(s) survived. It's now called Pensées.

It's one of those books one may read in, as opposed to reading, and every return-trip is as pleasurable as an earlier one. A good history of philosophy functions similarly, as does a book of aphorisms or Fowler's book on usage in English. Dag Hammarskjold's Markings is similar in form to Pensées, but Hammarskjold intended to write an interior, private, meditative diary, so he produced the book he had intended to produce (but not to publish, at least in his lifetime), whereas Pensées is an and accidental classic, its complete unevenness part of its charm. Pascal died thinking he had nothing more than a collection of notes. He was right. And wrong. His interminable warm-up to the book ended up being the book, and some of the entries are so pithy as to be poetic.

So you might find something lofty like this (quotations take from the Oxford World Classics paperback edition translated by Honor Levi):

#225 "Knowing God without knowing our wretchedness leads to pride. Knowing our wretchedness without knowing God leads to despair. Knowing Jesus Christ is the middle course, because in him we find both God and our wretchedness." (p. 65)

But then you might run into a stray line that truly is just a note to himself: "I too will have thoughts at the back of my mind." Nothing leads up to this, and nothing follows it, so you just have to think, "Thanks for that, Blaise."

A few favorites of mine:

"Power is the mistress of the world, not opinion. But it is opinion which exploits power." (p. 115)

"Languages are ciphers in which letters are not changed into letters, but words into words. So an unknown language is decipherable." (p. 115) This is no longer a profound observation, of course, but it still says much succinctly about language-acquisition, translation, and cryptology.

"When wickedness has reason on its side, it becomes proud, and shows off reason in all its lustre." (p. 113).

#213 "There is nothing so consistent with reason as the denial of reason." (p. 62).

#214 "Two excesses. Excluding reason, allowing only reason. (p. 62).

Then there's the famous "wager," a section of the book in which Pascal argues that if you are forced to wager whether whether God exists, you should bet that God does exist because if you bet that God doesn't exist and lose, then your soul might be in danger, whereas if you bet that God does exist and you lose, you haven't lost anything.

One more I like:

(p. 149): "The more intelligent we are, the more readily we recognize individual personality in others. The crowd finds no difference between people."

The book also includes a stand-alone treatise on rhetoric that holds up pretty well.

Different people will find different morsels to enjoy from this French philosophical, religious, meditative, aphoristic buffet of Pascal's. If you can locate a copy, just start flipping through it, and something will catch your eye, intrigue your reason, your personality, your obsessions, and/or your curiosity. It's a book that goes nowhere and everywhere.