On explosions now and nel futuro

Fireworks over the City of St. Petersburg, Florida; July 4th, 2009

XXI

KEEP, the peace, Borso!" Where are we?
"Keep on with the business,
That's made me,
"And the res publica didn't.
"When I was broke, and a poor kid,
"They all knew me, all of these cittadini,
"And they all of them cut me dead, della gloria."
Intestate, 1429, leaving 178,221 florins di sugello,
As is said in Cosimo's red leather note book. Di sugello.
And "with his credit emptied Venice of money "--
That was Cosimo --
"And Naples, and made them accept his peace."
And he caught the young boy Ficino
And had him taught the Greek language;
"With two ells of red cloth per person
I will make you", Cosimo speaking, "as many
Honest citizens as you desire."
Col credito suo...
Napoli e Venezia di danari... Costretti... Napoli e Venezia... a quella pace...
Or another time... oh well, pass it.
And Piero called in the credits,
(Diotisalvi was back of that)
And firms failed as far off as Avignon,
And Piero was like to be murdered,
And young Lauro came down ahead of him, in the road,
And said: Yes, father is coming.

Intestate, '69, in December, leaving me 237,989 florins,
As you will find in my big green account book
In carta di capretto;

-- Ezra Pound
American poet

(From the Cantos)

Comments

[Krubozumo Nyankoye]

Ahh. Mr. Pound you chose to invoke. How utterly appropriate.

For myself, Pound and Eliot always constituted a kind of minuet written by Stravinsky. On their foundation one would have thought the end of the century would blossom like a field of cherry trees in spring, but it was not so.

Sadly, both are too distant from the common weal to register or resonate. For the life of me I cannot rationalize why that is so, but I know it is, as surely as I know the tides will come when they are due. The great herd of which we are all part, chooses to gnaw the sterile bark of conifers while all about them abound the flowers and succulent leaves of sea-like meadows. I cannot answer why they choose gruel over soup. But my fellows ingest garbage more readily with each passing day.

In some academic way it might be interesting to consider how selective pressures will forge the future. But it would be little more than speculation. Instead I think we should be willing to risk being in error and propose how to choose a way forward.

We should be aware, the generalities will determine whole categoies of specifics.

All of us think we have passed our childhood and obtained the exhalted status of adults, yet have we in any concrete sense come to terms with the reality of our situation? I think not. As a species, not a race or nationality or ethnic or ideological group, we all have to grow up to the next notch. That is we can either make an effort to determine our future, or we can hide from the obvious and invoke supernatural guidance. In other words trust in luck.

Fortunately, our tenure is short relative to the overall scheme of things. Even though we can see into the future in a blurry and inconstant way, we can have a certain confidence that we will not have to endure it. And we can also choose to leave no descendents who will have to endure it.

"We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, unremembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.
Quick now, here, now, always—
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flame are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one."

[litbrit]

KN, thank you for that. I adore Eliot.

I drew inspiration from him when writing one of my earliest blog posts, years ago: On Dead Geraniums and Imaginary Spiders.

Twelve o'clock.
Along the reaches of the street
Held in a lunar synthesis,
Whispering lunar incantations
Dissolve the floors of memory
And all its clear relations,
Its divisions and precisions,
Every street lamp that I pass
Beats like a fatalistic drum,
And through the spaces of the dark
Midnight shakes the memory
As a madman shakes a dead geranium.

-- T. S. Elliot, from Rhapsody on a Windy Night

I wrote about the seduction of the evening hours, and why I have always been a night person.

This weekend, the NYT had a post about the less-is-more trend in housing (my comment is #34). I've long been passionate about mid-century modernism and its clean-lined, realistic-sized architecture. But oh! What defensiveness there was in the comments section: the "big McMansions are the American way" attitude was on full display, as was an unspoken Dominionist mentality of God gave us all these resources so we could use 'em, damn it!. It saddened me to no end that so few people get it.

The fire and the rose will be one soon enough. So I dream of an eventual escape to a faraway island not yet clogged to ruins, where my descendents can live out their lives until the orchid and the (eventual, inevitable, planet-scouring) fire are also one.

[litbrit]

And this:

All of us think we have passed our childhood and obtained the exhalted status of adults, yet have we in any concrete sense come to terms with the reality of our situation? I think not. As a species, not a race or nationality or ethnic or ideological group, we all have to grow up to the next notch. That is we can either make an effort to determine our future, or we can hide from the obvious and invoke supernatural guidance. In other words trust in luck

is so exquisitely on-point, it breaks my heart. I have to reject, forcefully, this ridiculous notion on the part of so many conservatives that caring about sustainability is somehow "elitist"; that loving beauty in its non-material form--poems, ideas, the emotions that draw us to one another--is but a product of an overeducated, upper-class idealist with no real understanding of work, want, or suffering. I am far less formally educated than most of my fellow contributors--not that they are the ones leveling such accusations--having received only a four-year degree at a state university (working as a waitress or bartender most of the time), after attending a large public high school in Miami. I was brought up in a family that was neither rich nor poor (I hesitate to use the words normal or typical; absent any "as compared to" context, they are drained of meaning).

I think you captured the situation perfectly with the metaphor of gnawing on bark while turning one's back on a succulent meadow.

And I don't know if it's the fault of the school systems, the ambient fear that thickens with each passing day and chokes the collective imagination, or the persistent, corrosive residue of class resentment dragged over here by the early settlers, but I do know, all too well, that we are a nation peopled with far too many bark-gnawing fools and nowhere near enough artists and visionaries at a time when they are most desperately needed.

[Krubozumo Nyankoye]

One gnaws upon the bark only in starvation, the meadows are fenced off.

It is not the fault of the school systems per se, but the fault of their perversion to the aims of the plutocrats and theocrats. Their objective appears to be to drive all workers to a universal and inadequate wage. Enslavement to bank debt is no different than enslavement by chains.

There are ways under, over and around the fences. The sad thing is most of us never experience the brutality of the system first hand, we tend to shun those who have been tainted by missing a payment to a bank. This is an odd thing if you think about it. For there but by the grace of a credit rating agency go thou.

I have no answers, in such indeterminate conflicts what ensues is purely beyond even speculation, we cannot know what havoc may occur if we neglect the simple and obvious. We can only endure it.

Here is a different sentiment...

I sing of Olaf glad and big
by E. E. Cummings

XXX

i sing of Olaf glad and big
whose warmest heart recoiled at war:
a conscientious object-or

his wellbelovéd colonel(trig
westpointer most succinctly bred)
took erring Olaf soon in hand;
but--though an host of overjoyed
noncoms(first knocking on the head
him)do through icy waters roll
that helplessness which others stroke
with brushes recently employed
anent this muddy toiletbowl,
while kindred intellects evoke
allegiance per blunt instruments--
Olaf(being to all intents
a corpse and wanting any rag
upon what God unto him gave)
responds,without getting annoyed
"I will not kiss your fucking flag"

straightway the silver bird looked grave
(departing hurriedly to shave)

but--though all kinds of officers
(a yearning nation's blueeyed pride)
their passive prey did kick and curse
until for wear their clarion
voices and boots were much the worse,
and egged the firstclassprivates on
his rectum wickedly to tease
by means of skilfully applied
bayonets roasted hot with heat--
Olaf(upon what were once knees)
does almost ceaselessly repeat
"there is some shit I will not eat"

our president,being of which
assertions duly notified
threw the yellowsonofabitch
into a dungeon,where he died

Christ(of His mercy infinite)
i pray to see;and Olaf,too

preponderatingly because
unless statistics lie he was
more brave than me:more blond than you.

[litbrit]

yes, e.e. i will always get
that poem is itself a bayonet.
and now to furnosepressed i shall
weep quietly because (it's late)
the owner of the fur is shocked
i'm stirring at this point on clock
but grateful nonetheless
for touch
of she who knows: so little!
and yet feels so much;
(so terriblymuch)

d.n.t. (with apologies to the poet to whom her uncapitalized nickname is an unsubtle nod)

[Krubozumo Nyankoye]

Duelling poets...
The Snowman
One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

Wallace Stevens

Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half-light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet,
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

W.B. Yeats

It takes a certain courage to assume the role of poet.

Ars Poetica

A poem should be palpable and mute
As a globed fruit, Dumb
As old medallions to the thumb,
Silent as the sleeve-worn stone
Of casement ledges where the moss has grown—
A poem should be wordless
As the flight of birds.
A poem should be motionless in time
As the moon climbs,
Leaving, as the moon releases
Twig by twig the night-entangled trees,
Leaving, as the moon behind the winter leaves,
Memory by memory the mind—
A poem should be motionless in time
As the moon climbs.
A poem should be equal to:
Not true.
For all the history of grief
An empty doorway and a maple leaf.
For love The leaning grasses and two lights above the sea—
A poem should not mean But be.

------

Ultimately the question must arise, do we as individuals add anything to the discourse? If debate and argument are means of discovering truth, is it not dishonest to argue in favor of what we know to be lies?

What then? Sadly, lies are circulating freely like good counterfit money. Good enough to fool most people. Or enough people to retain some traction. I am not brave enough to offer up spontaneous poetry to the public at large.

[litbrit]

I am not brave enough to offer up spontaneous poetry to the public at large.

Yes you are.

Although, if I'm going to make statements about anyone's courage, I have to be honest about my own deficiencies. I barbecued several dozen poems in a fit of anger and grief one day when I was twenty. I didn't have the courage to save them because they were written to someone I loved who'd broken my heart (ah, that age-old story), and I believed I'd never want to re-read those words.

The mind has all manner of ironic tricks up its sleeve, however, and I would find myself reciting some of them in my dreams, or even while awake and waiting in line somewhere, or else when I'd had enough of whatever I was supposed to be reading in the dark chill of the library.

I have since developed less dramatic means of disposal for any suddenly-hated works, and transient furies and phases of deep self-loathing act as an editor of sorts, allowing the better poems to remain and incinerating the rest, though the wrapper-thin ones still glow for a second before turning black and floating away.

I love to read a poem, and then go online--or dig through the growing pile of literature textbooks to which my sons and I have all contributed--and see what someone else thinks I ought to take from it. Usually, there is a sterile dissection of its metaphors and an attempt to link them to the poet's circumstance; often, there will be careful breakdowns of meter and rhyme patterns.

But the thing is--and I say this as someone who has very few poems published, and certainly none of them were analyzed--the clinical analysis of any poem is going to be halfway doomed before it begins. I love that about the last one, the MacLeish poem, for that reason: a poem is motionless in time; and once it has climbed beyond that moment, it has also climbed beyond that meaning, away from those memories and toward something else.

Back when I was contributing to Ezra's blog, before he went big time and had his own very popular blog (from whence came this one, when he moved on), I wrote a tongue-in-cheek poem, three sonnets, about the kind of Christmas a Libertarian would experience if all his deregulation dreams came true. The third sonnet came to me first, the moral of the story one. Then the first and second ones came, and as I wrote them down, the words came out with a slightly haughty, time-gone-by affect, which seemed appropriate for the voice of the unseen wealthy host inviting his guests in. I think Ezra's readers mostly liked it, and Sir C was kind with his praise, but I was amused by one comment in particular, that of a guy who clearly liked to read and analyze poetry: Great work, he said, Although there was a sense of, Oh shit, I'm getting to the end, I'd better throw a moral in here somewhere!.

I am not brave. Just not in possession of all that much to lose by loosing them on the world, these words.

I don't really fear the freely-circulating lies you mention--they are so great in number lately as to blanket the landscape. No, what I fear are the denser truths that evaded the smoky fate that much of my writing has met. The dry stones collecting in dreams.