To Acquiesce--Or Not?: A. E. Housman

A.E. Housman is best known now for the poem, "To An Athlete Dying Young" and other verses from A Shropshire Lad. He was born in 1859, the year of Origin of Species, and died in 1936, after the world had indeed become modern in the best and worst of ways--to echo Dickens. Housman was a classical scholar and professor first and, in his mind at least, a poet second. Posthumously, he is a poet first and shall remain so, and it's his fault because he wrote some terrific poetry. (Apparently he was also something of a gourmand and liked French food; given English cooking, especially in his day, the preference seems reasonable.) In my view, his most remarkable poem is the following one, from "Last Poems":

The laws of God, the Laws of man,
He may keep that will and can;
Not I: let God and man decree
Laws for themselves and not for me;
And if my ways are not as theirs
Let them mind their own affairs.
Their deeds I judge and much condemn,
Yet when did I make laws for them?
Please yourselves, say I, and they
Need only look the other way.
But no, they will not; they must still
Wrest their neighbour to their will,
And make me dance as they desire
With jail and gallows and hell-fire.
And how am I to face the odds
Of man's bedevilment and God's?
I, a stranger and afraid
In a world I never made.
They will be master, right or wrong;
Though both are foolish, both are strong.
And since, my soul, we cannot fly
To Saturn nor to Mercury,
Keep we must, if keep we can,
These foreign laws of God and man.

I don't think the poem could be phrased any better at any point than it is. The iambic tetrameter carries the pithy philosophical argument without straining--and what an argument it is! What is one to do if one feels, as the speaker of this poem feels, that he (in this case) is a stranger in a world he never made? Does he pretend not to feel as if he is a stranger? Does he acquiesce to the laws of man and God--to the systems of society and religion? Or does he play it honestly and, like Melville's Bartleby, respond, "I prefer not to"? To my mind, the poem to some extent also foreshadows Camus's The Stranger.

The speaker here notes that he judges and condemns certain deeds of men--and of God? Or of God's alleged spokespersons? What is the source of the criteria by which he has judged and condemned these deeds? That is not clear; nonetheless, he seems to have established for himself his own way of living life and assessing behavior, but he has no desire to impose his way on others, by whom he wants to be left alone. But of course society and religion are not in the business of leaving people alone. And the speaker is not naive. "They will master," he says, "right or wrong." They have the power, and they will use it.

The lovely question the end of the poem always induces me to ponder is this: Has the speaker convinced himself to acquiesce? After all, he concludes that since he and his soul can't fly away to other planets, they're stuck with and on Earth and therefore must remain strangers in a strange land. "Keep we must," he says to his soul, "if keep we can/These foreign laws of God and man." But the poem begins by asserting,

The laws of God, the Laws of man,
He may keep that will and can;
Not I....

So if we go by the opening assertion, the advice to the soul and himself at the end seems hollow.

Although the poem certainly expresses a stance that might belong to a hermit, an outlaw, or a sociopath, the rhetoric itself is urbane and mild. I sense I'm being spoken to by someone who just so happened to have been born, grown up, and discovered that he didn't fit into or agree with most of what was going on around him. The poem doesn't celebrate this eccentric status, nor does it argue that the world should conform to the speaker's view. This is not the speech of a revolutionary, a terrorist, a megalomaniac, a drop-out, or a protester. This is not, like the oft-quoted "Invictus," a poem of pride. This is the utterance of someone who simply believes his independent view of things is correct and who desires what he knows makers and enforcers of laws--literal and figurative--will not allow: to be left alone. This is the utterance of someone who is so reasonable that he even tries to convince himself and his soul to acquiesce, given the situation. "Let's try to go along to get along," he seems to be telling himself and his soul at the end, and the end comes before we find out whether he and his soul will take the advice. Oddly enough, the poem is something of a cliffhanger, although I'm inclined to think the speaker's inclined to stick with the assertion he brought to the dance.

Often we find ourselves perplexed and befuddled but then have things cleared up, one way or another. We learn. We are formed, and we conform. Sometimes, however, we are perplexed and befuddled and stay that way because we believe there is every good reason to be so; --believe that to disagree is simply the correct response; --believe the emperor is naked; --contine to wonder, stubbornly, about things that don't add up, such as why air-force fighter-jets weren't scrambled when the planes were hijacked on 9/11. Gore Vidal, among others, keeps wondering, stubbornly, about this question. He is dismissed as a "conspiracy theorist" (I believe this is known as an ad hominem arguument), but although he expresses skepticism about what he regards as the American Empire and the Bush/Cheney "Junta" (junta is classic Vidal), he doesn't actually offer a theory, conspiratorial or otherwise, concerning the jets. He justs asks for a thorough, clear, believable answer to the question and chooses not to accept what he calls RO: Received Opinion. This poem gives voice to those who simply, independently disagree with RO, but who also probably do not reflexively embrace a theory. The poem is stubborn but well reasoned; it is firm but not enraged; it's even a little whimsical, with the reference to interplanetary travel. I picture the speaker and his soul, a bit world-weary but by no means defeated, walking off into the foggy night, rather like Louis and Rick (Raines and Bogart) at the end of Casablanca. This independent man and is independent soul, although potentially threatened with jail, gallows, and hellfire, have a beautiful friendship. . . . Here's a link to a fine article by a political scientist who connects the film Cool Hand Luke with Housman's poem:

http://tarlton.law.utexas.edu/lpop/etext/lsf/haltom22.htm

Fathers and Sons, Faith and Faithlessness: A Sonnet by Jeffers

Robinson Jeffers tended to write in long-lined free verse in which ideas and images were mortared together like stones. The lines are well and patiently built. Although one might be tempted to compare his verse to that of Whitman or Sandburg--other American masters of the long line--Jeffers is much more rhetorically and metaphorically restrained; unlike Whitman, he's not an excitable poet. He tends to stalk his subject coldly.

It was interesting to me, then, to run across a sonnet Jeffers wrote. I found it in a lovely pulp paperback, The Penguin Book of Sonnets (1943), the kind of compact paperback published on cheap paper that I remember fondly from my childhood. The westerns by Zane Grey and Max Brand that my father read--in bed, while smoking a cigar--came in this form. I think most people who love books love them not just because of the reading but because of the physicality, and one may cherish a cheap paperback--the feel of the thing--as much as an expensive leather-bound book with exquisite paper and printing. An old soft paperback is like an old soft baseball glove, in some respects.

In any event, here's Jeffers's sonnet:

To His Father

Christ was your lord and captain all your life,
He fails the world but you he did not fail,
He led you through all forms of grief and strife
Intact, a man full-armed, he let prevail
Nor outward malice nor the worse-fanged snake
That coils in one's own brain against your calm,
That great rich jewel well guarded for his sake
With coronal age and death like quieting balm.
I Father having followed other guides
And oftener to my hurt no leader at all,
Through years nailed up like dripping panther hides
For trophies on a savage temple wall
Hardly anticipate that reverend stage
Of Life, the snow-wreathed honor of extreme age.

Jeffers does well in the sonnet-form here, in my opinion, but I feel him straining against its limits, sense his wanting to let the lines find their own length, rather like the Pacific coastline on which he lived. Jeffers here is like a fine athlete who's been asked to perform within the proscribed limits of a team-sport; you can feel him wanting to overwhelm the sonnet-form.

And Jeffers's characteristic brutal honesty is by no means discarded in the sonnet form. Faith in Christ served his father well; that's the truth, and Jeffers speaks it, and he explains precisely how that faith worked in his father's life. The faith helped the father through "all forms of grief and strife," and it kept his father noble and calm.

The surprising adjective "coronal" is terrific. Because of his father's faith, his father's age became a kind of crown, and death became a kind of balm.

This is a Shakespearian or English sonnet in form, but, like an Italian or Petrarchan sonnet, it breaks after line 8, and "turns" to another view of the topic. Now we learn that Jeffers couldn't imitate or adopt his father's Christian faith. He has followed "other guides," namely Classical models, including Stocism and Greek tragedy. But how brutally honest Jeffers is about his own lack of faith; often the guides he's chosen have not soothed his pain, have not helped him through grief and strife, and the years lived in faithlessness are compared to "nailed up" "dripping panther hides/For trophies on a savage temple wall." How wonderful of Jeffers to find a pagan image for what he admits is his own version of paganism, and to state that such trophies can't do for him what faith in Christ did for his father. Nor does Christ escape Jeffers's honest assessment. He claims Christ "fails the world," meaning what? Meaning, one supposes, that Christ has not returned yet, and that evil marches on? Perhaps. The final hard truth Jeffers leaves for himself: His worldview will not leave him in as good a shape, spiritually and philosophically, as his father when he, Jeffers, is old; "extreme age" will not be the equivalent of a "snow-wreathed honor." He's not looking forward to growing old. Old age will be harder for Jeffers, in the absence of faith in Christ, than it was for his father. I find this to be a bracing poem in which Jeffers honors his father and his father's faith without being sentimental and in which he honestly contrasts his own world-view with his father's without being argumentative or combative.

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.

One Degree of Separation

Here is a poem by Robert Browning, and the "Shelley" of the first line is Percy Bysshe Shelley, famous British Romantic poety who died young and whom Browning, of a later generation, would have seen as a poetic hero:

Memorabilia

1
Ah, did you once see Shelley plain,
And did he stop and speak to you
And did you speak to him again?
How strange it seems and new!

2
But you were living before that,
And also you are living after;
And the memory I started at--
My starting moves your laughter.

3
I crossed a moor, with a name of its own
And a certain use in the world no doubt,
Yet a hand's-breadth of it shines alone
'Mid the blank miles round about:

4
For there I picked up on the heather
And there I put inside my breast
A molted feather, an eagle feather!
Well, I forget the rest.

A note in the Norton Anthology of English Literature, Volume Two (Fifth Edition), p. 1250 says, "Browning reports that he once met a stranger in a bookstore who mentioned having talked with Shelley. 'Suddenly the stranger paused, and burst into laughter as he observed me staring at him with blanched face. . . . I vividly remember how strangely the presence of a man who had seen and spoken with Shelley affected me.' "

So to some extent, the poem is about "degrees of separation," in this case only one degree, between us and someone we think of as almost super-human, or at least special: a great artist, a great performer, someone who has achieved much, someone with a lot of power. The stranger thinks Browning's reaction is funny because, after all, the stranger is simply talking about having talked once to another human being.

The "six degrees of separation" concept is meant, I think, to show how interconnected everyone is, at least in some mathematical way, even in a global society of--what are we at now, seven billion" (And of course, the imagination can make no distinction between one billion and ten billion; at some point, the imagination shuts down.) Perhaps the concept also makes ordinary, nondescript people think that they are always only six degrees away from--what? Celebrity? "Immortality"?

An author whose work I've spent a lot of time studying is Langston Hughes. Three times I've had an experience similar to Browning's. I got to meet and to speak briefly with the jazz musician, Billy Taylor, who knew Hughes. I also heard photographer Roy DeCarava speak at a conference; he and Hughes had collaborated on a book. And at the same conference, I met a woman who had visited Hughes once, not long before he died. She described how he lit one cigarette after another and how the ashes fell on his clothes and how he casually brushed the ashes off while he talked. For some reason, I cherished that odd detail; maybe it helped make Hughes "plain," to borrow Browning's word. I'm sure at some point I got the vacant look that Browning got in front of the stranger in the bookstore, as I thought to myself, "Wow, I'm talking to someone who talked to Hughes, a poet I really admire, and one of the few writers, dead now, I would have liked to meet."

Back to Browning's poem: I love the shift in stanza three. It seems like a complete change of subject, and it may be disconcerting to some readers, but of course Browning is merely developing a comparison, and we soon find out that picking up an eagle's feather is a bit like meeting the stranger who spoke to Shelley: it's something to hang on to, a talisman. And the eagle-feather works nicely a place-holder for Shelley, who wrote Prometheus Unbound and Mont Blanc, and whose imagination soared to great idealistic heights. Of all the Romantics, William Blake included, Shelley probably took the most chances, tried most to make poetry do as much as it could, worried least about looking before he lept.

Browning is of course best known for his dramatic monologues, including "To His Last Duchess," but I also like this smaller lyric, "Memorabilia," which was published in 1855. Shelley drowned accidentally off the coast of Italy in 1822. He was only 30. Langston Hughes died in Spring of 1967, at age 65. I had not heard of him or of his poetry yet. I started high school in the fall of that year. The first African American writer whose work I remember reading was James Baldwin. I found a copy of The Fire Next Time in the back of a classroom and read it straight through. I do not have a vivid memory of when I first encountered Hughes's work.

Shifting presumptuously to a first-name, zero-degree-of-separation basis, let us say "Well done!" to three departed poets who achieved so much so differently: Percy, Robert, and Langston. Calling Browning "Bob" would, I believe, cross the line, however.

Tourist

My family and I recently traveled to San Diego--or San Diahgo, as anchorman Ron Burgundy would have it-- on official business. Before we left, someone asked me, "What do you want to do there [in addition to the official business]?" I said, "I don't want to do anything touristy."

We had gone to Berlin this summer, only for a week, but nonetheless (or perhaps because it was only a week) we did a lot of touristy things, visiting famous sites, going to museums, drinking German wine (the latter just seems like a matter of good sense, not tourism). Also, the older I get, the more quickly I seem to get tourist's fatigue, a weariness born of a desire not to be experiencing things I am supposed to experience. I must admit that the unique Pergamon Museum, with its Pergamon Altar (reconstructed) and its Gate of Ishtar (reconstructed) knocked my socks off. Still....tourist's fatigue.

My wife was okay with not doing touristy things, too, in San Diego. However, we were unable to preserve a clean slate. We ended up going to Balboa Park, to the history museum, to see the Dead Sea Scrolls exhibit, which, ironically, had been in a city near where we live, not long ago. It is, of course, a fascinating exhibit, even if it's implicitly, and at moments obviously, saturated with contemporary politics. But the few examples of scrolls (pieces thereof) and the copper scroll found in Jordan were, indeed, fascinating, as are the tales of discovery, haggling, recovery, translation, preservation, and so on. I had already read quite a lot about the scrolls, but still it was great to revisit some of the circumstances and to think about those Essenes hiding the scrolls in the little caves. Unfortunately, I couldn't ward off tourist's fatigue. So I set a pretty brisk pace as I went through the exhibit--but was nowhere near as fast as my brother was, in 1981, as he fairly sprinted through the Uffizi. He was sick unto death of Famous Art. I can't remember why he simply didn't go into the museum, but I did enjoy the spectacle of his literally jogging past masterpieces.

In fact, the technique could be expanded into a special form of tourism. We'll call it The Hasty Tourist. It would be a new way of experiencing the famous places around the globe, the equivalent of speed-reading a famous novel. "It's better when it's blurred." That might be the slogan.

According to the OED, the word "tourist" seems to have arrived in printed English toward the end of the 18th century. From the OED (online), here is the second earliest example:

PEGGE Anecd. Eng. Lang. (1814) 313 A Traveller is now-a-days called a Tour-ist.

And the OED also has references to "tourist class" accommodations"--on cruise-ships, for example--accommodations that were second-class, at best.

Anyway, here are two poems concerning tourists and tourism (and "Goodnight, San Diahgo.")

Tourist

Down a long cascade of white
steps in a seaside town, a man hurries.

By contrast people of the town
move slowly. They’re the most

recent generation who are where
they are supposed to be, something he

is not, hence the rush. No one in this
town will recall having noticed him.

* * *

On the Tour

. . . And here is a ruin of the palace
where the emperor claimed to have made
love to three virgins every night. That
was Emperor Zikka, nicknamed
Zikka the Liar. And just

off the coast here is where
a fleet carrying several tons
of important poetry sank.
The poems were heavy
and decorated with allusions,
tradition, and so forth. Salt-water
depth has preserved them.
SCUBA gear may be rented
at the wharf. Here is

a refreshment stand, not radically
different from a public hearth
in the ancient city whose ruins
we have toured today. This
stand represents perhaps
the strongest link between our
civilization and theirs.

Those people, too, were concerned
chiefly with replenishment of liquids
on hot days, getting inexpensive food,
having a few laughs, and finding shade
in which to ponder why they let someone
talk them into leaving their own beds
to join a package tour in quest
of illusory gains in foreign lands.

(First published in Writing on the Edge.)

So We'll Go No More A-Roving

Here is a short poem by George Gordon, Lord Byron:

So We'll Go No More A-Roving

1
So we'll go no more a-roving
So late into the night,
Though the heart be still as loving,
And the moon be still as bright.

2
For the sword outwears its sheath,
And the soul wears out the breast,
And the heart must pause to breathe,
And Love itself have rest.

3
Though the night was made for loving,
And the day returns too soon,
Yet we'll go nor more a-roving
By the light of the moon.

(The even-numbered lines are supposed to be indented, but for some reason the blog-machinery doesn't go along with that, try as I might. And the numbers are supposed to be centered over the stanzas.)

A footnote in The Norton Anthology of English Literature (Volume 2), Fifth Edition, p. 512, reports, "Composed in the Lenten aftermath of a spell of feverish dissipation in the Carnival season in Venice, and included in a letter to Thomas Moore, Feb. 28, 1817. Byron wrote, 'I find "the sword wearing out the scabbard," though I have but just turned the corner of twenty-nine.' The poem is based on the refrain of a Scottish song, The Jolly Beggar, 'And we'll gang nae mair a roving/Sae late into the nicht...."

To rove, as Byron is using the word, is literally to wander and figuratively to wander around "partying," of course. The noun "rove," incidentally, refers either to a scab or a piece of metal, but I've never heard or seen "rove" used in this way.

It's interesting that Byron claims to be withdrawing from the party-life and the life of amorous roving not because Lent has arrived but because he is weary. He also seems to think that age 29 is a bit too early to be weary of partying. Some people never cease to go a-roving (and that construction is fascinating: adding "a" to "roving"): Keith Richard, for example, or my distant older cousin, Erik, who was literally the town drunk of my small town. Into his 70s, he drank and "roved" almost every day of his life; of course, alcoholic roving is not a pretty sight.

The third line of the poem has always tended to throw me off, even after innumerable readings. My mind wants to read it as "Though the heart be still" as in "be still my heart"--that is, "Thought heart be quiet," but then of course the line wants to convey the following: "Though the heart is still (or "nonetheless") capable of loving." It's not a flaw; it's part of the poem's charm now, like a favorite little nick in an antique desk.

"[t]he heart must pause to breathe": I like the plain factuality of that, and I like the way the poem at this point recognizes the heart as a biological or anatomical entity, not just the symbol or locus of love. "And Love itself [must] have rest." That's good, too--Love, a force unto itself, requires periods of rest, regardless of which human is experiencing that force.

The last stanza is "counter-carpe-diem." That is, even though humans (especially those under the age of 30) were made to go a-roving, and even though time passes very quickly (hence the advice to "seize the day"), there are limits. We get tired. Even, apparently, at age 29. So carpe the diem all you want, but you're going to have to take a break.

In 1981 I traveled to Venice, from Germany, via Austria, and happened to get there just as Carnivale was starting: fortuitous. Out of that experience came, eventually, a poem, first published in The Washington English Journal, I think, in 1985 (?). My roving wasn't up to Byronic standards, by any means, but I had a good time. Here's the poem:

Venice, Carnivale

Who will you be in Venice
beneath the year’s third moon
when crowds of Carnivale
pour toward you all in greasepaint,
all in masks and capes? Who will
you be in this humanity and alleys
floating on moonlight and sewage?

Laughter from a canal-taxi
skips across painted water,
ricochets off rotting brick.
Your personality hangs like a rusted
iron shutter. Be anyone but yourself
and John Ruskin, Carnivale advises.
Be sewage, puke in the canal, beg,
sleep with cats, eat rats. Be

moonlight, fall in love, swell
like Caruso’s voice. A Danish woman
winks at you from across a restaurant.
An Italian boy lights a firecracker; therefore,
pigeons scuttling your tourist’s boredom
panic and swoop up through your heart.

Be Italian. Close your window
to riotous streets. Return to your tidy
apartment, your statuette of Mary, and
a proper life of grief, lace, and spices. Be

American: gawk and gaudy jazz architecture
of San Marco; order beer and puzzle
at this sinking city (why don’t they fix it?). Be
European, wear that history for an evening.
Work hard at language, gesture, shout, pose,
Strut. Forget your Kansas, blond in corn heat.
Forget about flat American English that naps
on your tongue, then saunters toward a barn.

Be the crowd, be the anonymous mime’s face,
talk another’s conversation, kiss another’s other,
tilt your head back and laugh a lunatic’s
hysteria to Carnivale moon.

from The Coast Starlight: Collected Poems 1976-2006

Robert Burns and the Mouse

Robert Burns (1759-1796) is the poet--and song-writer--of Scotland. He wrote, among other things, "Auld Lang Syne," which I believe translates as Old Time Past; apparently Burns borrowed from other popular songs as he crafted this one. He is also famous for lines that he did not literally write: "The best laid plans of mice and men often go awry." Steinbeck, of course, borrowed from the line to create a title for one of his most famous books. Because Burns wrote in Scottish dialect, the line(s) actually read as follows: "The best-laid schemes o' mice an' men/Gan aft a-gley,/An' lea'e us noght but grief an' pain,/For promised joy." If you hear people quote these lines at all any more, they usually simply say, "Best laid plans," and sigh, never even getting as far as mice and men. Attributed to John Lennon (at least in sources I have seen) is a similar sentiment: "Life is what happens while you're busy making plans."

The mice-and-men lines are from the poem, "To a Mouse," which recounts an episode whereby Burns (or someone he knew) was ploughing a field and disrupted, to say the least, the nest of the mouse. In the poem, the persona (we'll call him Burns) speaks directly to the mouse. Burns is sorry about running over and through the nest, and he tells the mouse not to run. The poem is really not as sentimental as one may think. Burns empathizes with the mouse, creature to creature. He understands that, instinctively at least, the mouse saw December coming and built his nest. The ploughman, apparently, saw December coming and decided--what? To plough under dead crops, presumably.

[A detour: the poem has always made me think fondly of the field mice in the Sierra Nevada, where it's so cold in winter that the mice like to appropriate human space--a shed, a garage--use human materials, and build magnificent nests. In our garage, my father had stored an elaborate old-fashioned wood-stove, with a fire-box, a full-sized oven, and two heating-ovens, among other compartments. The mice turned this into one of the biggest mice-condominiums in history, using stuffing from cushions stored in the garage, and eating hard dogfood stored there. They were like the Rockefellers of Sierra Nevad mice. The condominium was discovered only when my father decided to bring the stove into the house and use it as our main source of heat.]

Additionally, Burns empathizes with the work the mouse put into building the nest: "That wee-bit heap o' leaves an' stibble/Has cost thee mony a weary nibble." Ever seen a mouse, or a pet rat, building a nest? Tremendous work is involved, and not a little craft and improvisation. So Burns is speaking worker to worker here.

Everyone (I exaggerate) remembers the (translated) famous line(s) of this poem--lines from what is actually the penultimate stanza. The last stanza makes the poem even more interesting, however, at least in my opinion:

Still though art blest compared wi' me!
The present only toucheth thee:
But och! I backward cast my e'e
On prospects drear!
An' forward though I canna see,
I guess an' fear.

So, the deal is that, for mice and humans, the best-laid plans often go wrong and what one thought of as an avenue to joy turns out to be one of pain. But for the human, things are even worse, according to Burns, because the human can look back and regret mistakes or look back and think, "I did not get off to a good start." The human can also look ahead, and although he or she cannot see clearly, can only guess, he or she can certainly fear, whereas the mouse lives in the present, the way a Zen master would like us to do. I suppose the mouse thinks, "Some creature and thing that are quite large have just come through my world, so I think I'll run," and then the mouse, if it returns to the broken nest, thinks, "Better get to building again." No regrets, no fear of the future, though probably a glance around to see where the man and plough may have gone.

"To A Mouse" was written in 1785.

Good luck with any nest-building and or ploughing (or plowing) that may be in your present or your future. As for the past, . . .: Oh, well.

Red Shoe Ramblings: Poetry Thursday: E and E in Heaven

Red Shoe Ramblings: Poetry Thursday: E and E in Heaven

Hannah Arendt, Totalitarianism, "Infallibility, " Iraq

There is a street in Berlin named now after the scholar Hannah Arendt, who is perhaps best known for her book Eichmann in Jerusalem, subtitled A Study in the Banality of Evil. The street is very close to where remnants of Hitler's bunker lie, under a parking lot.

As an American colleague in Berlin noted, Arendt was an old-fashioned philologist, a lover of knowledge, and the breadth of her learning, depth of her studies, and refinement of her synthesis are almost not believable, especially in The Origins of Totalitarianism, which I've begun to read after being in Berlin, looking at the street sign, and considering other things. She is one of those scholars who seems to have read--and mastered--everything.

In the book, she writes, "Totalitarian movements use socialism and racism by emptying them of their utilitarian content, the interests of class or nation. The form of infallible prediction in which these concepts were presented has become more important than their content. The chief qualification of a mass leader has become unending infallibility; he can never admit an error. The assumption of infallibility, moreover, is based not so much on superior intelligence as on the correct interpretation of the essentially reliable forces in history or nature, forces which neither defeat nor ruin nor prove wrong because they are bound to assert themselves in the long run" (p. 348-349 of the HBJ new paperback edition, 1973).

The passage was meant, of course, to apply directly to Hitler, for example. But I think it also pertains to Bush and Cheney insofar as they have taken a stand of infallibility. When, in the 2004 campaign, Bush was asked about mistakes he made, he said he couldn't think of any, and he wasn't trying to be funny, even though he may have giggled nervously, as he tends to do. The invasion of Iraq and its consequences, a debacle, are still framed (by Bush, et al.) as an infallible strategy that has some tactical problems, even as soldiers on the ground in Iraq write openly about the failed strategy, not failed tactics. Bush also has positioned himself as the correct interpreter of historical forces. Thus we have, not a war on a particular nation (that's what war really is, as Gore Vidal notes), but a war on an abstract noun, "terrorism," and thus the war in Iraq is open-ended (as far as Bush is concerned) because although Iraq was conquered in conventional military terms, "terrorism" is a constant, requiring constant war, meaning the occupation of Iraq must, by definition, be indefinite. That appears to be the underlying logic, as exposed by innumerable critics of the war (conservatives included), and with some help from Arendt and Vidal. It's important to note that Bush's "authority" is based not on "superior intelligence" (Arendt's term) but on a kind of gut-level reading of historical forces. And if the evidence doesn't support the reading of historical forces, then you send Colin Powell to the U.N. with fake evidence. The gut-level reading seemed extremely appealing to Americans right after 9-11. Now, perhaps, not so much--if the polls are reliable. And of course they're not. I actually expect Jeb Bush to be the next president. As Chuck Berry once sang, "C'est la vie, say the old folk, it goes to show you never can tell."

It was interesting to watch John Stewart interview Cheney's approved biographer on The Daily Show. Stewart ran the video of Cheney saying, in 1994, that to invade Iraq would be disastrous because the nation would fall to pieces and indeed, "pieces would fly off." Stewart asked the biographer a) what changed since 1994, b) why didn't Cheney repeat this wisdom right before the invasion, and c) why don't Cheney and Bush admit they made a mistake, and d) why do Bush, Cheney, and Rove always paint critics as traitorous or soft on terror? The basic answer was, "Everything changed after 9-11." "But Iraq didn't change," Stewart countered, meaning its composition (Sunni, Shi'ite, Kurd, influence of Iran, perceptions of the U.S., how Iraq was invented by the Brits in the first place) made invasion a stupid idea before and after 9-11. "Yeah, but after 9-11, everything changed," the guy repeated, "and Cheney still thinks the invasion is a good idea" (I am paraphrasing, but not mis-representing).

Vague "historical forces" ("everything changed"); infallibility. The answer to "d" (why to they demonize critics?), of course, is that demonizing critics has worked so far for Bush, Cheney, and the recently retired Rove, so why would they change strategies? It didn't quite work in the 2006 election, but so what? Bush wasn't up for re-election, and the Democratic Congress is completely intimidated, so intimidated that they approved warrantless wire-tapping. The Democrats cower, dogs whipped by propaganda.

I think elements of the Patriot Act, the warrantless wire-tapping, and the exquisitely refined propaganda of Rove, et al., have totalitarian qualities. Watching FOX News, Bush's PR arm, is like watching something inspired by 1984, constant self-parody that is taken seriously (non-parody parody), whereas watching CNN or NBC is merely to watch fluff, lazy reporting, trivialization--with some exceptions. FOX abets the propaganda. CNN and NBC mostly nap while the propaganda goes to work. Sleepy time with Wolf Blitzer, whom Cheney makes quake.

There seem to be more totalitarian elements in Bush's presidency than in any presidency I've known in my lifetime, though certainly every presidency has had some of those elements (Roosevelt tried to pack the Supreme Court; we know what Nixon did when he couldn't resist his own worst instincts; and Reagan was a masterful mass-leader--and note that even when forced to speak on TV about Iran-Contra, he remained "infallible" in the sense that he claimed he didn't remember things the way the evidence suggested things happened; he may actually have been telling the truth, given the condition of his brain at the time, early stage of Alzheimer's).

But really the thesis of this particular blog-miscellany is simply this: I highly recommend Arendt's book on totalitarianism, regardless of whether you're inclined to see the degree to which the book might apply to the current executive branch of the United States' government. Arendt is wise.

Bear and Ipod

My family just gave me an Ipod, which is a little wafer that stores songs, etc. As technology gets smaller and smaller, I and my hands seem to get larger. Microsoft and Apple are Lilliput, and I feel like Gulliver. Actually I feel more like a bear who's been handed a little wafer with earphones attached to it. The bear knows the thing's not edible, so he (in this case) proceeds to try to make the thing work. Maybe some meditation-music, he thinks, for the hibernation. If only, he thinks, my paw weren't so large and the wafer so small. And the earphones! Were they built for a mouse?

Today a colleague mentioned Delmore Schwartz's poem about the bear, a poem I love. I "identify" with it, as we used to say. I also like the way it flips anthropomorphism around, so that a human is framed in terms of an animal, but in a very clever way. Here is the poem (again, by Delmore Schwartz, born in 1913, as was Karl Shapiro, but Schwartz died much too early, in 1966):

The Heavy Bear Who Goes With Me

"the withness of the body" --Whitehead The heavy bear who goes with me, A manifold honey to smear his face, Clumsy and lumbering here and there, The central ton of every place, The hungry beating brutish one In love with candy, anger, and sleep, Crazy factotum, dishevelling all, Climbs the building, kicks the football, Boxes his brother in the hate-ridden city. Breathing at my side, that heavy animal, That heavy bear who sleeps with me, Howls in his sleep for a world of sugar, A sweetness intimate as the water's clasp, Howls in his sleep because the tight-rope Trembles and shows the darkness beneath. --The strutting show-off is terrified, Dressed in his dress-suit, bulging his pants, Trembles to think that his quivering meat Must finally wince to nothing at all. That inescapable animal walks with me, Has followed me since the black womb held, Moves where I move, distorting my gesture, A caricature, a swollen shadow, A stupid clown of the spirit's motive, Perplexes and affronts with his own darkness, The secret life of belly and bone, Opaque, too near, my private, yet unknown, Stretches to embrace the very dear With whom I would walk without him near, Touches her grossly, although a word Would bare my heart and make me clear, Stumbles, flounders, and strives to be fed Dragging me with him in his mouthing care, Amid the hundred million of his kind, the scrimmage of appetite everywhere. Delmore Schwartz

Copyright reserved.

Berlin

Here is a highly poetic prose-excerpt from Christopher Isherwood's Goodbye to Berlin, the second part of his book, The Berlin Stories, which I read again during a visit to Berlin last week:

"From my window, the deep solemn massive street. Cellar-shops where the lamps burn all day, under the shadow of top-heavy balconied facades, dirty paster frontages embossed with scrollwork and heraldic devices. The whole district is like this: street leading into street of houses like shabby monumental safes crammed with the tarnished valuables and second-hand furniture of a bankrupt middle-class." (Copyright 1935 by Isherwood, published in 1945 by New Directions, and still in print; p. 1 of Part Two).

Berlin has become an ultra-post-Modern city, not in the way Tokyo is, but in an historical sense, for history seems to coalesce excessively and surrealistically in Berlin. It is a monumental city, a "crammed monumental safe," with massive public art, domes, cathedrals, and churches, but also with the enormous Nazi-era buildings, and now with the gleaming new 21st century towers of global capitalism, especially in the Potzdamer Platz. Chiefly rubble in 1945, Berlin has been painstakingly reconstructed--the pieces of cathedrals and other famous buildings glued back together, with relentless German determination and unyielding expertise. The building that used to house the East German parliament is at this moment being dismantled, its steel skeleton exposed. It had erased a palace. Now it will be erased, and the palace will be reconstructed. History is a contact-sport in Berlin. The horses on top of the Brandenburg Gate were recast from the old mold, discovered in a basement somewhere. A parody of capitalism, an old-fashioned Coca Cola sign sits atop a building in the former East Berlin, and of course there are several chain-hotels (Hilton, Ritz-Carlton), MacDonalds, and Starbucks.

The large statue of Marx and Lenin remains in the Alexanderplatz, as does the goofy fountain--and the radio tower, which, like the Space Needle in Seattle, is so ridiculous that it is appealing. And at Humboldt University, the unabashed university-motto is taken from Marx--the quotation about philosophers needing not just to interpret the world but to remake it. If Berlin could speak, it might say, "Enough, already, of the remaking. I need a breather."

As in Isherwood's paragraph, bankruptcy remains a problem. Berlin is 62 billion euros in debt. It is in more debt than the state of California.

But as always, Berlin stubbornly seems to belong to Berlin, to those who inhabit it at the moment. Astoundingly, Hitler and the Nazis, the American air force, Russian tanks and troops, and the Cold War couldn't obliterate it. Its perpetual decadence does not lead to decay but seems to provide resilience, life. Everyone, it seems, has had designs on Berlin, and so it is awfully designed but charmingly awkward and ugly. Isherwood captures this. Everything and nothing seems to have changed since he was writing, over 70 years ago.

The first part of The Berlin Stories, The Last of Mr. Norris, is (in my trivial opinion), one of the great short novels in English, on a par with Heart of Darkness. It is irresistibly readable.

My wife and I visited the Nollendorfplatz, near where Isherwood lived and set part of his narratives. It remains a so-called "gay and lesbian district," and it still seems somewhat small, shabby, and endearing, as it seems to have been in Isherwood's time. Chiefly we just wanted to go there, but we were also looking for a place to eat. However, it's dominated by cafes and bars that are long on coffee and booze but short on food (even good cafe food), so we chose to backtrack a few U-bahn stops to the Potzdamerplatz.

On a separate trip to the Potzdamerplatz, on Altepotsdam Strasse, we found a wine shop, drank some Rheingau wine, and had a platter of cheese. German wine is a little bit of heaven, and here's a ceremonial toast to Isherwood, and here's wishing good luck to Berlin and its 21st century inhabitants.

The Safety Buffalo

I think it was my wife who first dubbed me a "safety buffalo," although I don't know how she came up with the buffalo part. A safety buffalo is essentially the same thing, or person, as a worry wart--now an old-fashioned term, I think.

I often think, "What could go wrong, and how might one prevent it from going wrong?" Sometimes it's useful to think this way, but it's also exhausting, and I admit it does tend to take the fun out of things.

In the Catholic mass now, the priest tends to interrupt the Lord's Prayer right after "deliver us from evil," and the priest in our parish says, "deliver us, Lord, from all our useless fears," and then we finish with "for the kingdom, the power, and the glory are yours, now and forever." That "useless fears" phrase is interesting. He's right, of course; most of our fears are useless. At the same time, I assume Evolution selected "fear" for a reason, and as far as I know, the Catholic Church has no "issues" with the concept of Evolution. Sometimes caution, thinking ahead, and worry turn out to be useful--in the short run, at least, if not on the scale of kingdom, power, and glory. I sure wish Bush had been more cautious about going to war, for example.

My good friend and colleague, the late Wendy Bishop, loved the term "safety buffalo," for some reason, and she agreed with my wife that the term fit me. Wendy and I shared some Scandinavian ethnicity, and we agreed that Swedes and Norwegians may not see the glass as half-empty, but they routinely imagine situations in which the glass breaks and becomes a dangerous, jagged shard.

Here is my poem about the imaginary safety buffalo, and I hope Wendy is smiling somewhere in a place well beyond our world of fears. The poem is dedicated to all worriers out there. May you get a good night's sleep!

The Safety Buffalo

The Safety Buffalo lowers
his head and horns, considers
everything that could go wrong.
His whole head’s covered
with thick hide and hair. Beneath
these lies bone. Beneath bone
lies a bison-brain recalling well
how good things can go wrong.

The Safety Buffalo has seen
the apocalypse of prairie lightning,
heard trees explode in an ice-storm,
smelled diesel and blood
when a metal box full of humans
went spinning off that gray
line into stones. The Safety
Buffalo worries for the herd,
steps cautiously, snorts
at how carefree the antelope is,
and the goose. Death
is always loose on the prairie.
This the Safety Buffalo knows.

Heavy Light Verse

I ran across the following poem by Rudyard Kipling, in The Norton Book of Light Verse, edited by Russell Baker:

A Dead Statesman

I could not dig, I dared not rob.
Therefore I lied to please the mob.
Now all my lies are proved untrue
And I must face the men I slew.
What tale shall serve me here among
Mine angry and defrauded young?

I don't know to what statesman Kipling was referring, but the poem reminded me of George W. Bush.

Arguably, however, Bush has robbed, in the sense of funneling federal money to large corporations, a.ka. "private contractors," in many cases with no bidding process. Neither Congress nor anyone else in "power" (does Congress have power anymore?) seems to have accounted for the drained billions. It seems he has practiced this thievery both in Iraq and in New Orleans. He has certainly lied to the mob--if by "the mob," Kipling means "people" or "voters." Bush won't specify what he was doing when he was supposed to be fulfilling his National Guard duty as a pilot, and the records have been hidden. Does that qualify as a lie? I think so. He lied about weapons of mass destruction, and he sent Colin Powell to the U.N. to spread the lie. He approved the use of torture and lied about it, using a kind of two-step: a) "we don't torture" but b) "we don't discuss our interrogation techniques." He and his cohorts discuss "techniques"--quite a euphemism--to the extent that they say "we don't torture," but when they are pressed--for example, by a specific question like "Do you use 'water-boarding'?"--they say, "We don't discuss our techniques." "Water-boarding" is quite a euphemism, too--for almost-drowning someone, for making them choke on water repeatedly.

Certainly all of Bush's lies have been proved untrue (I'm not sure about that line--lies are by definition untrue), but he won't have to face the men (and women and children) he slew--U.S. citizens sent to Iraq and killed, and hundreds of thousands of ordinary Iraqi and Afghan citizens killed by bombing or killed by the civil wars that Bush's invasion unleashed. That's the thing about almost total power: it doesn't have to face its consequences. Bush will spend the rest of his life on his ranch in Texas or traveling to secure locations. Arguably, he is among the presidents most unaffected by consequences. Kennedy got his head blown off--the ultimate consequence of being president; Johnson had to decide not to seek reelection because of the debacle of Viet Nam; Nixon had to resign; Ford lost in his only presidential election; Carter lost to Reagan; Reagan was at least forced to make a speech about Iran/Contra (a minor consequences, I admit, but he was humiliated); Bush Sr. lost to Clinton; Clinton was impeached, and he was forced to admit that he lied.

I believe Bush is, obviously, a failure as a leader but a kind of mad genius as a politician., partly because he seems to have figured out that to succeed as a politician, you don't need to succeed as a leader; in fact, it may easier to succeed as a politician if you fail as a leader. He has rewritten the calculus of politics.

He measures success strictly by winning elections and draining power from opponents and quasi-opponents, but he doesn't really do anything with the power except screw up. He's not a Republican or really even a Neo-Con. He is Nihilist (please see "The Big Lebowski"). By Bush's measurement, he is a huge success, and in terms of brute-force politics, it's hard to argue with his units of measurement. He "won" two elections. Fairly or unfairly, he won them. Congress has never held him accountable. When it attempts to use legislation to block what he wants to do, he signs it and states that he doesn't have to obey the legislation. The validity of these signing statements hasn't been challenged in the courts, so Bush has not been held accountable for ignoring one branch of government. He refuses to make his attorney general resign. He made Rumsfeld resign--but so what? The war continued. He won't sign the Kyoto Accord, and he ignores rules set out by the Geneva Conventions; no consequences for him have ensued. True, some Republicans lost some elections because of the debacle in Iraq--but so what? What does Bush care about his own party, except insofar as it helped get him elected and, when it controlled Congress, rolled over like a family dog. The shift in power in Congress has been symbolic, not real. Congress hasn't checked Bush. I believe his mad genius lies in doing whatever he wants to do or what the Neo-Cons want him to do and, subsequently, in never having to face the consequences of doing what he wants. He is the wealthy kid who perpetually screws up but fails upward, upward to two terms as the most powerful "elected" official in the world. His own family seems surprised at his success--that's how bizarre the situation. Jeb was supposed to be the successful one, not the screw-up, George. He's defeated even his own family at their own game! Fascinating. His success as a mad political genius seems to be a symptom of a broken American political process. However, Bush and his supporters--and, in spite of Iraq, I believe at least 50 per cent of American adults essentially approve of what Bush represents--probably do not believe the process is broken. Reasonably, they must deduce that it is working--for them. Bush "could not dig"--could not make a living he way most people must do in the U.S. He did dare to rob, in a variety of ways. He will never really have to face "the men [he] slew"--or face any other consequences.

People were fond of calling both Reagan and Clinton "Teflon" presidents because of their gifts of slick communication, which seemed to make political friction pass by in tough situations. Reagan read texts and cue-cards expertly; Clinton spoke with great success extemporaneously, and he had a tremendously subtle sense of audience. Reagan got away with Iran/Contra. Clinton got away with sexually harrassing an employee and lying about it.

Whatever the so-called Founding Fathers had in mind when they designed the three branches of the federal government, with the hope that the three branches would share power, well, it isn't working. Bush has gotten around that system. All three branches have irreversible dry-rot.

But I think the ultimate Teflon president has been George W. Bush. He makes Reagan and Clinton look like Little Leaguers. He eschews compromise; in fact he mocks it. He's not interested in real policy successes, such as responding effectively to (take your pick) Katrina, the health-care crisis, our energy problems, the widening gap between rich and poor, global warming, the exploitation of non-citizen workers. He is not interested in diplomacy. He is not interested in data. He is not interested in history. He is interested in winning elections and, after that, doing what he wants to do, like ride a bike or appoint his pal Harriet to the Supreme Court. Mostly, he seems bored by existence, seems to have an extremely short attention-span, seems unable to put basic thoughts together or to read a simple text out loud.

Bush: our mad genius, our dictator--not, alas, our "statesman."