November 22, the more it stays the same

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I last wrote about this anniversary in 2008 when I recalled a prayer I heard on the loudspeaker at Crozier Technical High School in Dallas where I taught an extension class on Monday, November 25, 1963. As I said then, the prayer concluded with the agonized question: “Why, Lord, why did it have to happen, and why did it have to happen here?”

This year the city of Dallas has asked that question again by undertaking to mount what The New York Times has called “the biggest event it has ever held to mark the assassination.” Dallas, itself, is a changed place, now one of Texas’ liberal leaning enclaves (unlike surrounding Dallas County). But this year I am remembering the Dallas political climate of the early 1960s when every day’s news brought us some offense against civility in the depredations of the National Indignation Convention where Evetts Haley called for the lynching of Chief Justice Earl Warren, and Edwin Walker attempted to out-MacArthur the infamous world war II general almost daily. The early sixties offered a feast of political extremism in Dallas, circulating a pamphlet accusing the president of treason and inciting angry mobs to abuse Lyndon Johnson and Adlai Stevenson.

We tend to forget that President Kennedy was in deep trouble when he traveled to Dallas in 1963. His legislative agenda was stalled in the congress. He was targeted by organized hate campaigns on behalf of various fanatical anti-communist groups, opponents of civil rights, and anti-Catholic Christians. He had come to symbolize all that the most fanatical movement conservatives hated most: east coast elitism, sympathy for communist regimes, opposition to Jim Crow—no matter his problematic history with respect to civil rights and the prosecution of the cold war. The assassination made JFK a martyr for causes he had come to support reluctantly and made Dallas his symbolic assassin, albeit the real killer was in all likelihood a disaffected loner.

A number of journalists have connected present-day right-wing fanaticism with the fanaticism of the 1960s and earlier times. See here and here for examples. Right-wing fanaticism runs deep in Texas and in Dallas, the home of the revived Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s. Much has been made of the shift of southern right-wing voters to Richard Nixon in 1968, but in Texas it was the Eisenhower election of 1952 that marked a massive shift of right-wing Democrats to support of Republican candidates, led by then governor Allan Shivers. Ronald Reagan was courted by these same Texans as a potential presidential candidate in the years immediately before the election of 1960. The Shivercrats, as we called them, kin to the Dixiecrats who supported Strom Thurmond when he walked out of the 1948 Democratic convention to protest his party’s civil rights agenda, remained in the Democratic party until Lyndon Johnson’s presidency, when Johnson’s defection to liberalism gave them a reason to declare themselves Republicans. Texas Governor (as well as Secretary of the Navy under John Kennedy and Secretary of the Treasury under Richard Nixon) John Connally, was one such Shivercrat.

McCarthyism and racism run deep in Texas as well. Just before I became a student at SMU in the early 1950s, the chair of the English department, John Beaty, had become widely controversial for his fanatical anti-communism, which caused him to complain that SMU was rife with communists and fellow travelers. I remember watching him walk around campus wearing a pith helmet—we joked about it and called him Clyde. Marshall Terry has remembered him as a fine teacher, Paul Boller as a vindictive red baiter. In Austin, J. Frank Dobie had been targeted by the FBI and the House Un-American Activities Committee after his shift to liberal politics in 1943. Dobie was eventually driven out of The University of Texas by right-wing governor, Coke Stevenson, in 1947. I’ve mentioned the depredations of J. Evetts Haley, one of the founders of the John Birch Society and a red baiter and Roosevelt hater from the earliest times. Haley remained a force in Texas politics throughout the 1960s. His 1964 book, A Texan Looks at Lyndon, made him a national figure for a time. Haley is also the author of a much praised biography of legendary cowman, Charles Goodnight, a book Dobie admired. Dobie and Haley were friends for many years until Dobie declared for liberalism and civil rights. Haley was also a committed racist, as were most others who supported the National Indignation Convention. Texas’ history as a haven for slavery and its long and shameful history of racist lynchings and mass murders are indices of the depth of its racist past.

But these observations don’t tell the whole story. Texas had a strong liberal contingent in my day, led during my experience by Senator Ralph Yarborough. The Texas Observer was and remains a liberal rag with a fair amount of influence. In my day in Dallas, SMU stood as a bastion of liberalism, even though it depended upon right-wing Dallas for yearly support. Unphrey Lee and Willis Tate didn’t win all the battles they fought, but they fought the good fight, something I think SMU has forgotten how to do. I need to think about my Texas. It is my place in a way that New Mexico, where I was born, is not; in a way that North Carolina and Missouri, places I Have lived for many years and will always love, are not. Texas is my place, and my love for Texas is kin to my love for my country. I need to think about these things because I have never explored them except in an essay I published over twenty years ago. I wrote about it here last year.

And I intend to write more about these things. But today I am thinking that I shouldn’t be surprised at the recent craziness of some Texas politicians. It is as though the past that many in Dallas would like to escape has now become a permanent part of American national life, as Manny Fernandez observed in The New York Times. This year, on the anniversary of John Kennedy’s death by violence, I am remembering the many who have been murdered by political violence in my state and in my country in my lifetime. And I am not unmindful of the significance of a poster that has circulated recently charging President Obama with treason.

transparent eyeballs

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This is a response to remarks after my last post by my friend, Curtis Beaird. I thought I’d put them here rather than in a comments box.

Hi, Curtis. I should start out by saying that I’m after talking about what I take to be one kind of religious experience. I make no reference to experiences that involve seizures or glossolalia, or other kinds of transport whose subjects usually cannot remember afterwards.

As you know the Rilke poem to which I refer ends with the statement: Du mußt dein Leben ändern, usually translated “You must change your life.” I wrote a poem once that attempted to respond to that statement. It’s here. Most biblical archetypes to which I can refer religious experiences (this one and others) are theophanies, not hierophanies, I think. Jacob wrestling with the angel may be an exception, but the account of that event in Genesis is not undisplaced, as Jacob gets his new name.

I’m after describing religious experiences in as undisplaced a manner as I can, which I take to require a recounting of the experience as it occurred in time with as little reference to a body of archetypes as I can get by with, not that I couldn’t make archetypal references and not that it wouldn’t be fun to do so. But I think it’s part of the nature of religious experiences that they are not repeatable or recallable. They become timeless in memory, and for each one the hierophany that is it’s objective correlative becomes the means of calling up its memory only, not the thing itself. I think this is what Wordsworth and Coleridge meant by “emotion recollected in tranquility,” but I think Wordsworth was mistaken in thinking that contemplation of the recollection of emotion would generate “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings.” Coleridge agreed, I believe, and that is what “Kubla Kahn” is about, among other things.

What I’m after is something like Romain Rolland’s oceanic feeling, for which a host of others, Freud and Jung, for instance, have supplied glosses. I agree with Rolland that experiencing this “feeling” marks one as a religious person, and that one need not tie the experience to any archetypal establishment (or that if one does it is perfectly reasonable to consider that the tie is a matter of convenience and not necessity). And I’m not talking about a feeling, either, or a sense of being bonded to the external world, or some such. It’s quite different from that. For me, Rilke’s image: . . . denn da ist keine Stelle,/die dich nicht sieht, “so that there is no place that doesn’t see you,” gets at it better than any other because it leaves the subject free.

And that’s the lightness, that freedom, a kind of Nietzschean lightness that need not be trivial or immoral as Kundera takes it to be. And there is always the feather. Emerson, when he felt himself become ‘as a transparent eyeball,’ didn’t forget that he was ‘crossing a bare common,’ and I didn’t forget to buy my book, either.

Ein tag im Jahr . . .

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Here’s a memory from my time in North Carolina. I associate it in my mind’s imaginary with All Souls’ Day, Allerseelen in German: the title of a song I used to sing. That time when the year starts to sink from late autumn into winter and we recall the names and ways and times of absent friends and loved ones. We recall the feel of them, too, and the feel of the world with them in it, as figured in my memory by the song of the French horn in the last of Richard Straus’s Last Songs. A time of last things in that sense, before Advent arrives with its heavy script.

I was on my way home from a two-day meeting at the Quail Roost Conference Center about this time of year, I think, in 1975. My way took me through Chapel Hill, which then still had a little of the village about it. On impulse I decided to stop at The Intimate Bookshop on Franklin Street. By then I had better than ten years’ experience of the place, known by those of us who loved it as “The Intimate.” I went there whenever I could, sometimes looking for something specific, sometimes to browse, sometimes just to soak up the atmosphere.

It was about five o’clock when I walked in. The day outside just gone to twilight, warming to a muted sunset that sat folded like a well-worn rug on the horizon. As I entered, the chill outside gave way to a wonderfully shabby interior of wooden floors and jerry-built bookshelves, stairs that creaked as someone walked up to the mezzanine. Like many another college-town bookshop, The Intimate did a big textbook business, supplying UNC and Duke students, but also dealt in trade books. I looked about me to see what was new since I had last been in.

On a table in front of me was a stack of newsprint catalogs form Marboro’s in New York, a scattering of remaindered art books, and a few copies of T. S. Eliot’s Collected Poems, the edition with the pink cover. I picked up the top copy because I didn’t own it and thought I’d buy it to add to my small but growing collection of non graduate school books. As I opened it my eye fell upon “A Song for Simeon,” a poem I didn’t know well then, my education to that point having focused my attention on Eliot’s earlier work, particularly “The Wasteland.” I read the opening lines:

Lord, the Roman hyacinths are blooming in bowls and
The winter sun creeps by the snow hills;
The stubborn season has made stand.
My life is light, waiting for the death wind,
Like a feather on the back of my hand.

In autumn 1975 I was barely thirty-eight. That Eliot poem in that setting gave me an intimation of mortality that was new. But the surprising thing was that no chill emanated from it. The moment was in feeling altogether welcome and welcoming. I had been given a brief but direct experience of passing divinity, of standing where there is no place that doesn’t see you, as Rilke put it, in which life and death fall away and there is only the real thing left, just now, just for now. My heart burned within me as surely as John Wesley’s had at Aldersgate.

But my experience carried with it no conviction of salvation. Such a thing was as remote from my mind as yesterday’s news. I have experienced other hierophanies. Each has left its print. As I drove home in the early darkness of that long ago November day with my newly acquired Collected Poems wrapped tight in a paper sack on the seat beside me, I carried with me a new and as yet wordless apprehension of the fragility and wonder of the world

—and it was well.