Category Archives: poetry

Advent IV: Something Like a Star

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Brightest and best of the sons of the morning
Dawn on our darkness and lend us thine aid.

I have yet to encounter the Southern Cross outside of Dante, who may or may not have known of it but gave allegorical preeminence to a group of four bright stars “known by the first men but since to no living eye” in Purgatorio I, 23-24. The Southern Cross is now known as an asterism, part of the constellation known as Crux among the eighty-eight constellations recognized by modern science. Crux, as Dante may or may not have known, has not been visible in northern latitudes since around 400 CE, as the precision of equinoxes has gradually altered earth’s position with respect to the so called “fixed stars.”

I say encounter rather than see as homage to a poet who taught me first to think of southern constellations and how various astronomies have tended to map the constellations to their parochial mythologies. But I also use the term encounter because I awoke this morning thinking of two things: how the history of our epoch has once again brought us to a time we might aptly describe with the title of P. F. Sloan’s 1964 protest song, “The Eve of Destruction”; that, and the final lines of Frost’s “Choose Something Like a Star.” Perhaps you remember that the poem addresses a mythopoeic star asking for a statement, “we can learn / By heart and when alone repeat.”

The speaker’s first thought upon imagining such a star is that it it says only, “I burn.” but after having played, perhaps forgettably with a few bits of science, the speaker again encounters the star by way of answering her own question:

It asks of us a certain height,
So when at times the mob is swayed
To carry praise or blame too far,
We may choose something like a star
To stay our minds on and be staid.

I will forever encounter this poem in Randall Thompson’s musical setting in Frostiana, which I had the pleasure of performing as a chorus member some years back with Hal Gibbons and the Denton Bach Society. Thompson’s setting gives the poem that “certain height” to which it aspires but then loses in ideology until those wonderful two lines at the close, “We may choose something like a star / To stay our minds on and be staid.” Still, I find I welcome the poem’s ideology as I read of recent violence that seems to be erupting almost everywhere in my country. I also welcome the poem’s emphasis upon choosing. It affirms the element of risk posed by ‘the mob.’ That mob violence is being driven on the surface by strife over our recent election results and resentment of public health measures enacted around the country to slow the spread of our current pandemic, is the preoccupation of a seemingly endless stream of media.

Some media are aware of the extent to which violent trends are being stoked by the unscrupulous leadership of the political right. But most left leaning analysts, including our incoming political leaders, seem loath to betray a core theoretical commitment of liberalism (not to be confused with liberal practice) to wit: that at all times persuasion is preferable to force when dealing with enemies. Liberal practice has never eschewed force, but it has been a constant  theme of liberal talk to proclaim righteously that force must be the last resort of liberal practice, to be employed only when all other means to solve a pressing problem have failed. The Republican rump, however, doesn’t share this aversion to force. This is how I am understanding our present politics in America (to some extent around the world as well). While the tenuous consensus among liberals and progressives within the Democratic party affirms the validity of our recent election (making constant reference to its peacefulness and the accuracy of its vote counting), and while the same consensus proclaims the legitimacy of needed public health measures, the Republican rump shows up with guns to protest.

I used the expression Republican rump during the government shutdown in 2013 because it had occurred to me that that hostage crisis somewhat resembled what happened during the long parliament that issued in the English civil war of the seventeenth century. Now that events in my country have come more to recall those that preceded our own nineteenth-century civil war, perhaps I shouldn’t use the term. But I want to link my thoughts today with those I expressed back then, and besides, the Republican rump doesn’t represent the Republican party as a whole. Witness The Lincoln Project. Witness the efforts of heroic Republican election officials around the country who ensured the integrity of our recent election in spite of the constant barrage of attacks on the process by Trump and his pack of loyalists. Perhaps I should call it the American rump; its historical roots are in the Democratic party. Most recently, though, the ideology that has come to be called Trumpism seems to belong to the remnants of The Tea Party together with its adherents among the donor class such as Charles Koch and Sheldon Adelson and its fellow travelers such as Lindsay Graham whose sycophancy would be embarrassing if it weren’t sinister.

I cannot imagine an innocent vote for Trump. To be sure the intellectual engine of movement conservatism will likely rev up to chase arguments why the [T]rump campaign against public health and the election was justified within the constitution; but my counter argument has to be that a campaign that demonstrably has caused hundreds of thousands of preventable deaths and arrayed itself against the vote, itself, in the recent election cannot have been innocent. However it is framed within whatever constitutional justification it may claim, [T]rumpism has violated the very principle of a free society. And it doesn’t matter from this perspective how loudly or how often [T]rumpist sycophants proclaim that the United States is not a democracy. By now it ought to be plain for all to see just how much contempt the Republican rump have for the republican institutions of our country. After all, it has been the settled determination of the Republican Senate to subvert our court system, and as we have recently seen, the Republican rump are not above attempting to subvert the electoral college, an attempt that may have another few acts to play out before the election is done.

But soon perhaps, we will be able to look back upon this election season and observe the justice of Marilynne Robinson’s thoughtful prediction that given our present chaos, and “allowing for regional variations, to the degree that democratic habits persist, the country will get by.” If so, it is to be hoped we shall realize as a people that we have escaped the destruction of our republic by the proverbial skin of our teeth. Perhaps we needed reminding that [T]rumpism has deep roots in American life, in my lifetime in the America First Committee, the the Dixiecrat movement, McCarthyism, and the Reagan revolution. We should recognize it as a potential manifestation of the American spirit whatever our history. And at present it appears that [T]rumpism has upwards of 74 million adherents. How to meet the challenge of their influence on the collective life of our republic will remain an open question for for those of us on the other side in the foreseeable future. The choice between [T]rumpism and affirming the pluralist society emerging around us is what William James called a genuine option: living, forced, and momentous. It is essentially a religious (or at least a mythic) option between two versions of American exceptionalism, which is likely why it tends to defy rational analysis. Apropos of such options (and stars as well–I’ve not forgotten stars) I’m remembering that Tim Redman liked to introduce the topic of Ezra Pound and fascism with this question: “How do you reconcile the poetry you love with the politics you hate?”

Both Pound and Martin Heidegger remain anomalous in the history of modern humanism. The history of our republic is one consequence of that history, stemming as it does from the enlightenment. Both Pound and Heidegger became Nazis in spite of (or perhaps because of) having received humanist educations of the highest order. Neither recanted in later life, though Heidegger was forbidden to teach in a German university and Pound lived out his days in a mental institution after his friends intervened to prevent his going to prison. We humanists are squeamish about the idea that Nazism is a possible outcome of the training we revere, but we shouldn’t be. Not only is humanist history filled with bigots and bigotry, but its core proposition that history is in the first instance an order of texts has meant that humanist history is itself a disputed territory, filled with arguments some of whose pettiness can still surprise us. Descartes and Bacon at the beginning of the seventeenth century couched their arguments against the humanists of their day. But those arguments hardly escaped humanism, just as the arguments of latter day postmodernists have proved not to escape humanism, sharing core assumptions with humanists and finding themselves equally susceptible to its pitfalls. It likely remains to be seen whether scientific and humanistic “cultures” are truly separate or whether their separation in modern universities is a product of arguments that remain merely academic. But I want to raise Tim Redman’s question again, having enlarged its context. Is the poetry of American exceptionalism that was part of my education and yours inevitably productive of hateful politics?

Part of my argument in this essay is that the exceptionalism of the Republican rump is indeed hateful. The history it promulgates is a false history whose original design was to assert that modern America had escaped its racist antecedents, had escaped accountability for its ethnic cleansing of the continent. If we hope to rescue American exceptionalism from its dependence upon that unusable past, we shall at the very least have to reckon with the Nazis among us and mount guard against the future emergence of their hateful politics. Indeed we shall need to prefer force over persuasion in some measure in dealing with their leaders, partly because their behavior borders on sedition and partly because many of those whom they lead are not capable of being persuaded. This will mean allowing the aftermath of the election to play itself out in the courts, taking whatever measures the law permits to prevent those who do not occupy protected positions within the government from holding public office in the future, and mounting an extended and enlightened campaign to free state and local governments of their influence.

But the United States of America that is the dream of liberal hope is equally a manifestation of American exceptionalism, and that is in no small part because it has always been a movable feast. Jefferson, Whitman, Lincoln all were racists; yet they each left us a set of texts that would inspire future anti-racists and will continue to do so until the crack of whatever doom awaits this planet. I shall not live to see the dawning of the republic of my dreams. We shall have to escape Trumpism first, and it remains too soon to tell whether we shall actually do so. But if that republic arrive one day, its arrival will mark the fulfillment of a significant movement in the history of my country, in the history of its humanist founding documents, and in the overall history of humanism—the thought itself is something like a star as is the thought that we Americans will have to choose that republic,

Advent IV: The Terrible Beauty

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The winter solstice came and went night before last at 11:19 EST. It was the last (or next to last) winter solstice of our current decade. From now on the nights will get shorter and the days longer for a while as our planet continues its yearly dance with the sun. Some snow remains on the ground here from last week’s snowfall, but no new snowfall is forecast for the immediate future. Guess we’ll have to make do with sunshine for a while. As we drove home through the city streets yesterday evening after a party we noticed that snow had melted on streetsides that receive afternoon sun but not on the streetsides opposite them.

With the times as out of joint as they are, perhaps one might take uneven snow melt as a sign. In Christian mythology, the solstice occurs on Christmas eve. Not so this year, the event having preceded the final sunday of Advent. So was Advent IV marooned then, and will we spend Christmas suspended between What T. S. Eliot once called ‘the motion and the act’? Or might we understand this time as a fortunate addition to our time of waiting, a time perhaps to tune our hearts more acutely to to the songs of angels. I’ve written of such a time more than once, how at the end of it “thousand seraphim stride the night sky . . . , their huge pennons shedding dark love. Time [as I thought then] to plant bulbs, get a new jacket, watch movies I missed.”

May we still hope for peace on earth? I should like to think so. I should like, for instance, to take the story of the Magi as a prefiguring of the pluralist politics we shall need if our planet is to survive. I cannot imagine a human future in which present world politics collide with the looming climate catastrophe. Perhaps history is again challenging us humans to reinvent ourselves, we who are “no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation.” The spokesman for Eliot’s Magi finds the place he and his fellows sought merely satisfactory, or perhaps he means to understate the case.

. . . . . . . . . There was a Birth, certainly
We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.

Perhaps all beauty is terrible. That’s the import of the Jeffers poem I have quoted here from time to time.

This coast crying out for tragedy like all beautiful places: and
like the passionate spirit of humanity . . .

Whatever the beauty, whatever the tragedy, we are all part of it now, as we are part of a polyglot, multi-ethnic, multi-gendered world the like of which we have never known. History has thrown us together whereas before we were separate, divided by barriers of nationality, class, religion, language, gender. How to form a more perfect union in the face of dissolving difference and the fear that generates, how to do that as the enormous reality of climate change dawns on the world, as it will do, and the fear that generates. These will be the questions we humans face around the world as we reinvent ourselves.

Or not—

The Irish Terrible Beauty was wrought out of the deaths of patriots. Yeats’s great poem, “Easter 1916,” broods on the stories of some of them. I very much fear this advent IV that we humans face an even larger conflagration around the world than the rebellion in Ireland almost a century ago. The issue may well be the same: the inherited privilege of a few versus the needs and desires of the many. We hear tales of billionaire bunkers built as a hedge against uncertain future. We also hear of a billionaire Giving Pledge, though that has largely been a failure. Still, the coming catastrophe may have potential even to wipe out differences of wealth, as the systems of politics that sustain wealth and wealth production perish.

I don’t think this argues for the dawning of a Marxist future. Marx’s critique was far too tied to the particular historical circumstances in Britain at the time of its writing to be much use as prophecy. And neither Marx nor anyone else had ever (has ever) faced a catastrophe like the envoronmental catastrophe we face in post industrial times. Indeed this Advent !V I think I have to face the dawning conviction that human history from now on is pretty much up for grabs, and the more perfect union of my dreams seems less and less likely every day.

Strangely, or perhaps not so strangely, this thought disturbs me less than it might. I’ve had a good run at life, and I’m now enjoying a more or less privileged old age. I’m not able to take my privilege for granted any longer, not just because of the circumstances I outline here, but also because my health is now precarious. Still, I find I love being alive, I continue to love the world, and I think these facts do not proceed from mere tenacity. I’ve always loved what Betty Adcock calls The Difficult Wheel. “What we do have is light,” she says, we poets who “have gone out looking for God again,/having no choice,”

. . . . . . . . . . See how they still are burning—
all those classical noses, Coyote’s laughing muzzle,
Shiva’s raised foot, Christ’s cheek, the dazzle
of leafy-armed women darkening, ashy turning.

Perhaps, as Jeffers says, there was heart-breaking beauty before there was ever a heart to break for it, whatever. I don’t need religion or history or poetry to tell me there is an illo tempore not of this world. Every solstice reminds me that my world is but a speck in the great heaven. As an Episcopalian, I’m half a Catholic I suppose. I don’t go to church much, but one of my Jesuit buddies brings me communion from time to time. I love him, and when I look into his eyes I see God.

sentries of the heart

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Before I go back to writing about my country, here’s a riff on the death of Leonard Cohen. It ultimately feeds back into my particular political angst and will, perhaps, make a nice segue.

To speak of Cohen’s death I need to do more than quote a few lines from my favorite Cohen song. indeed, I have some sympathy for the idea that Cohen would have been a better choice for the Nobel Prize than Bob Dylan. I think Dylan never escaped the historical moment to which his best songs were a response, though we can argue about what I think of as his retreat into religion. Cohen, on the other hand, spoke to the human condition at large; though a certain piety always tinged his vocabulary.

But I want to speak about Cohen from a moral perspective. I used to direct my students to a website devoted to Cohen’s “Alexandra Leaving,” one of his great songs, overlooked in the Facebook posts I have seen, as fans have flocked to songs like “Hallelujah” and “Anthem” that are easily susceptible to ideological translation. (Interestingly I have seen only one reference to “Suzanne, none to “Bird on a Wire.”) The Cohen songs of which I am most fond celebrate courage in the face of existential loss—and thereby hangs a tale.

“Alexandra Leaving” is a parody (in the musical sense of a copy or appropriation that does not necessarily imply or proceed from humorous or satirical intention) of a poem entitled “The God Abandons Antony” by Constantine Cavafy. If you look at the website I’ve referenced in the last graph you can read the texts of Cohen’s song and Cavafy’s poem in my favorite translation. My purpose in referring students to this website was that it exposes a complex case of appropriation. It also illustrates how an appropriation may not erase an appropriated text but rather comments on it in such a way that familiarity with the appropriated text can enhance and deepen one’s reading of the new. The website I reference cites Cavafy’s source in Plutarch but doesn’t mention Shakespeare’s use of it. Here’s another website that does.

It is both enough and not enough to say that “Alexandra Leaving” is about the end of a love affair, the loss of a lover and the speaker’s attempt to accept that loss without rancor or blame, even for himself, though acceptance of the loss necessitates acceptance of responsibility. For the loss is existential, like a death, a wound to the speaker’s identity and sense of his place in the world. That was Cohen’s gift in this song, to see how the loss of a lover to the death of love was akin to Antony’s loss of his adopted city, one of the greatest of Mediterranean cities, Alexandria.

There is a place in the Republic wherein Glaucon addresses Socrates as follows: “[Y]ou mean [to describe] this commonwealth we have been founding in the realm of discourse; for I think it nowhere exists on earth.” Socrates replies, “Yes, but perhaps there is a pattern set up in the heavens for one who desires to see it and, seeing it, to found one in himself.” (I’m quoting the Cornford translation.) For the Romans such a pattern was to be found in the earthly city, preeminently in Rome, itself. Even St. Paul paid homage to this conceptualization, claiming famously that he was a citizen of “no mean city,” taking some pride in his Roman citizenship. And it is this idea to which Cavafy alludes as he describes the defeated Antony:

As one long prepared, and graced with courage,
as is right for you who were given this kind of city, . . .

“[I]t is right and a good and joyful thing,” to quote the Book of Common Prayer, for the defeated Antony, having lost everything, to step to the window as an invisible procession passes, to listen with a heart filled with courage

to the exquisite music of that strange procession,
and say goodbye to her, to the Alexandria you are losing.

One may lose a lover. One may even lose a city. One may lose the center and focus of one’s life. But one is not permitted to lose heart, not one who had been given such a lover, such a city, in the first place and for a while, at least, been found worthy of the gift.

I thought of these things before I knew of Cohen’s death, as I tried to sort through my own sense of having been gobsmacked by the election of Trump. For a while I felt as though I had lost my country and a big chunk of my identity as well. But countries come and go. I have lived through many iterations of my country in my almost eighty years. Here is one of my favorites among the songs of Leonard Cohen.

May he go with God.

no continuing city

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I retired officially fourteen years ago and moved to Saint Louis, but since that time I’ve continued to work part time at Saint Louis University. I taught basic English classes for a while; then for the past eleven years I have offered a senior honors seminar called Great Books. Somewhere in there I also served as an assistant dean in SLU’s now defunct graduate college. This spring I’ve decided to retire completely, partly because my beloved is retiring and partly because it’s time.

I’ve loved Rilke’s poem, “Herbsttag,” for many years, love the opening especially in English, “It is time, Lord . . . ,” not so much about what it is time for the speaker to do as a proleptic evocation of what God might do, the near casual feeling of those first few words juxtaposed as they are to a set of cosmic expectations couched in rhetorically extravagant flourishes. Clearly this speaker’s autumn reflection means to image a metaphysical autumn, a time of last things, of passage from one life state to another. The poem is widely available. Here it is together with a number of translations.

I share the restlessness of the poem’s concluding lines. I am neither homeless nor friendless, except in the sense of being alone as we all are alone, but I am experiencing at least two contrary emotions as I think about the future. These inspire no new thoughts about death—it’s out there somewhere. Rather, what I am experiencing is a conflict between desiring to do old age as a contest between my body and the set of physical limitations that come with being almost eighty on the one hand, and on the other a contrary desire to take a nap.

Taking a nap has its advantages, I suppose, if one is willing to slide into decline and live with one’s memories. But I remain restless, walking up and down whatever streets I find to walk in, writing late at night, writing trivia, still seeking to overcome it, returning to old forms of thought I had abandoned for years, looking for my ancestors. I wrote a passable sonnet not long ago. I wrote a villanelle, not really good but a villanelle nonetheless. I’d like to write a good one. I may return to rhyme, not a bad spiritual exercise.

I’m describing a state of mind that many readers have found in Tennyson’s “Ulysses,” but that poem’s naïve evocation of the will bespeaks its late romantic origin and the youthful mind of its author. Tennyson was only 24 when he wrote “Ulysses,” a poem more likely to appeal to the youthful Bobby Kennedy (who loved it, as everyone knows, I think) than to someone at my time of life. Still, my restlessness is real, and my own. I need to learn to exploit it rather than merely living with it. I can hear the voice of some learned person reminding me of Ernest Becker, but Becker’s various immortality projects seem to me to belong to youthful thinking as well.

My beloved and I are gearing up for some travel, road trips around our own continent—though we haven’t ruled out travel abroad. I have a long list of projects to complete or cause to be completed at home, some of which must be finished before another winter. I have walks to take, some with camera in hand. I have friends to talk with and books to read, a villanelle to write and potentially a new project to explore closed forms of poetry I abandoned years ago after publishing a set of sonnets I came to dislike. There’s a certain comfort in playing with closed forms and an existential discomfort that goes with writing in open ones. So my closed form project may be a hdege against restlessness.

But I guess I’m trying to school myself to think of old age as an invitation not to design an immortality strategy (pace Becker) but still to live with as much gusto as I can muster for the remaining time I have. I’m aware of my huge good fortune in possessing good health, though I need to take off a few pounds (actually more than a few). So my prescription for myself is contingent upon continued good health and therefore is for myself alone; though you’re welcome to stop by, if you like. We can have a coffee at Mokabes or a beer at The Shaved Duck if it’s late enough in the day, and talk about whatever’s in the air.

I think I may be reconciled to living in the city I have in the here and now, not in another one to come (pace Plato and St. Paul). The academy was in some ways my city to come, to be sought or founded in the realm of discourse. But nobody can really live in such a place, and one thing I may have learned from this perception is that it is the very accidental character of real cities that makes them fit for human habitation, just as it is uncertainty that makes human life bearable and sometimes joyous; though I don’t carry the argument so far as Marilynn Robinson does, arguing from Johathan Edwards that the apparent arbitrariness of the world bespeaks a creator.

My life has also been fortunate in that I’ve never been denied culture, never lacked means or opportunity to refashion myself when I needed to do so. It’s sometimes comforting to think that given the world as it seems I’d live the same life, ask for the same jobs, over again—though I know I wouldn’t. I’ve refashioned myself sufficiently and often enough to be aware that self creation is surrounded by a thick matrix of contingency. A friend used to like to paraphrase Heraclitus ‘You can’t step in the same river even once.’ One isn’t guaranteed the world as it seems, not tomorrow, maybe not even yesterday.

So that one founds oneself in the realm of discourse as the world rushes by—and one is fortunate if the real city one lives in affords hidey holes, places to escape, and lots of unsupervised spaces for play. The real and contingent city is as febrile as a summer street dance, as brief on the wind as a smile and a shoeshine, thick with possibility and empty of information about itself as a week-old newspaper. One dwells in it upon sufferance—I’ll go that far with Robinson, since I know neither the beginning nor the end of the place that passes.

And I guess I’ll continue to write this blog and try to post more regularly than I have recently. There’s more to my restlessness than the common struggle with mortality. Though I’m not sure what the more is I seem to need to propose thought projects I know I’ll never complete.