Libertine University has zero tolerance for its spiritual leader’s fucking and cucking going public. Now that everyone knows what Jerry Falwell’s boy’s been up to (Saint Christopher! I know that you are smiling down from heaven!), the man must be tossed out on his tushy, even though the real villain twere that jezebel wife o’ hisn whose satanic wiles done led him astray.

O Liberty! O Libertine! Established and led by Jerry Sr; burnished after his death by Jerry Jr. With Becki, he lifted his voice in sacred Handelian song: “Come, ever-smiling Liberty… For thee we pant….”

Now – who’s next?

Ain’t it obvious? Donald Trump didn’t hold that Bible up in front of that church across from the White House for nothing. He too sits at the right hand of God and will soon be pastoring this great American institution.

***********

And as for the intellectual future of this university: UD suggests a required course in not exchanging extensive texts with your secret fuck/cuck boy.

At 81, Harvard’s highest-profile emeritus has chosen to close out his life anticly and frantically suing everyone in sight. And in return getting sued.

Like his doubles in desuetude, Donald Trump and Rudy Giuliani, he has long been a naughty boy, a game-player, a rule-breaker, and he intends to go down swinging as the rule of law catches up with him. But as he is very old, his punches aren’t landing. He and his doubles are hollow men.

We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when 
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless

Observers try to capture the convoluted farce Alan Dershowitz has made of his life:

[E]very argument he makes creates even worse fallout: Don’t just deny… demand they sue you! Then get sued. Don’t just litigate the case… get [David] Boies kicked off! End up facing [brilliant litigator] Chuck Cooper. Don’t just claim [Virginia] Giuffre’s mistaken [about your sexual crimes]… accuse Boies of blackmailing you! Get sued by Boies.

He might have quietly settled various cases against him; he might have retreated to Martha’s Vineyard, as the lights dimmed, with a little dignity. Instead, this bizarre American figure, this deflated pop-up doll, keeps trying to pop. We cannot help watching him. And his doubles.

Here we go round the prickly pricks
Prickly pricks prickly pricks
Here we go round the prickly pricks
At five o’clock in the morning. 

******************

UPDATE: Portrait of a man drowning.

Long considered one of the best places to live in America, Damascus, Maryland – a short drive from UD‘s Garrett Park – has big houses and good schools and pretty landscaping. And (yawn) it has teenage anal rapers galore.

Yawn because do you know how many teenage anal raper stories I’ve covered on this blog? So many high school football teams in the country seem fiercely devoted to jamming broomsticks up the asses of new players as a kind of Welcome Wagon gesture… If I wanted, I could blog every week about pool cues, broomsticks, and pretty much anything else being jammed up the anal canals of newbies.

Why? Why? Why?

Oh, who gives a shit. It’s a thing, a major thing, part of the university fraternity hazing continuum, only I guess more intense because of the very small closed absolutely brutal world of the football team.

**************

TO THE DESPOILERS GO THE SPOILS!

If anally raping junior players is the key to success, why mess with a good thing?

With a victory Friday [this was the Friday just before the rapes were discovered], Damascus will pass Urbana (1998-2001) for Maryland’s longest winning streak of all time and add onto the country’s longest active winning streak.

Yes, with its patented broomstick-up-the-ass technique, Damascus has formed a truly unbeatable team bond!

Scathing Online Schoolmarm notes, however, that the experience of reading the Washington Post’s breathless pre-rape article about the school’s amazing achievement is a little different now, with the eye landing hard on certain words, the mind automatically altering certain words…

‘Over Damascus’s 50-game winning streak, Coach Eric Wallich has searched for new ways [LOL] to motivate his team.

… With a victory Friday, Damascus will pass Urbana (1998-2001) for Maryland’s longest broomstick [haha make that winning streak] of all time…

… Damascus (8-0) has become the premier team in Montgomery County this century — winning six state crowns since 2003 — by relying on a rape-heavy [ahem! run-heavy] system.

… Kids look on and dream of donning the green, gold and white jerseys, even as high school football participation has dropped nationally because of concussion and health concerns, among other reasons. [Like anal rape.]

… The Urbana teams that set the state winning-streak record also featured a savvy run game and deep-threat ability. [Turns out you can go to jail for deep-threat ability.]

… [One of the players] said Damascus players are also viewed highly at school and in the community. Handling that attention has helped them manage the spotlight in crucial games. [Managing the spotlight just got a lot more pesky.]’

***************

Hey but wait but oh oh oh says the school’s principal: It was the JUNIOR varsity team, not the big boys with the new state record!

A commenter on this article speaks for UD:

In all the media reports the emphasis from Principal Crouse about this not having anything to do with the powerhouse varsity team is a little disturbing and I question her priorities.

Correct. You might have noticed that football everywhere has a (cough) culture problem. You don’t get to break up the team when something like this happens. You don’t get to suddenly chuck all your language about how everyone’s part of the team, we’re all a unit, blah blah. You don’t get to claim in your official statement that the group rape is “unrelated to the varsity football team.” First of all, we don’t know that yet. Second, this is the varsity team in a very short time. And if you’re trying to convince us that the event was a bizarre one-time, Halloween-night grotesquerie etc. etc. good luck with that.

Another thing: UD knows of virtually no group teenage anal rape these days, football or non-football, that doesn’t include someone recording the thing, texting about the thing. If the Bixby Oklahoma case is anything to go by, parents are currently trying to buy the evidence (!) and everyone’s madly erasing tapes and texts. Damascus has a state-wide record to protect… IOW: get ready for the investigation.

“He’s kind of a neatnik in his yard,” said Skaggs, the co-developer who built Rivergreen 20 years ago. “You’d see all the little clippings sitting in little plastic bags waiting for pickup every week.” Indeed, on a recent afternoon, a black garbage bag filled with yard clippings still sat in Boucher’s driveway in front of his three-car garage…

Like most everyone else in the Rivergreen development, Goodwin told me, Boucher pays in the ballpark of $150 a month for professional landscaping, while Paul insists on maintaining his yard himself. Goodwin said that part of what nagged at Boucher was the difference in grass length between his lawn and that of his libertarian neighbor’s. “He had his yard sitting at a beautiful two-and-a-half, three inches thick, where Rand cuts it to the nub,” Goodwin said.

… Also at issue, according to Goodwin, is Paul’s tendency to mow outward at the edge of his property, spraying his clippings into Boucher’s yard. Boucher, he said, has asked Paul to instead mow inward when near the boundary line, and even sought help from the Rivergreen Homeowners Association but has gotten no relief.

Goodwin recalled picking up Boucher, a devout Catholic, at his home after church one Sunday afternoon several years ago. Boucher had confronted Paul about his yard-maintenance practices a few minutes before Goodwin’s arrival, to no avail, and Goodwin saw Boucher grow agitated as they both watched Paul blow grass onto his lawn. “I’ve asked him and I’ve asked him and I’ve asked him,” Goodwin recalls Boucher fuming. “How long can you sit there taking someone plucking a hair out of your nose?” Goodwin asked. “How long could you take that before losing your temper?”

… But across Bowling Green, sympathy for either man appears to be in short supply. Goodwin described them as “two little shits” who have brought embarrassment upon the town.

***************************

SING IT:

[YUM-YUM, PEEP-BO & PITTI-SING]
Two little shits are we!
One little shit who, grasses snipping
Blows ‘cross the line offensive clippings
Must undergo relentless whipping —
Two little shits are we
Two little shits are we!

How is one of this country’s major jockshops going to shake off its latest thing – the FBI bribery fraud and conspiracy thing? Decades of institutional misconduct have done nothing to blunt their teams’ championship ways; and if Auburn’s long history of corruption has destroyed any vestige of academic integrity, who gives a fuck? It’s a jockshop.

Still, when the DOJ and FBI come calling, it’s definitely a problem, and UD‘s gonna tell you Auburn’s short and long game in dealing with it.

They have a brand new president – hard-landing macho man Steven Leath, who did a bang-up job at major jockshop Iowa State – and Leath’s short game (very short – it’s kind of a placeholder until the other conspirators confess) is to deny that the bribery fraud and conspiracy is the work of anyone other than one singular bad person.

But UD sees a far more interesting long game here, involving Alabama’s next senator, Roy Moore.

UD thinks that if Auburn sits tight and doesn’t do much of anything, Moore will step in and solve its latest problem for it. As a United States senator, he will launch an all-out attack on the FBI and DOJ and their apostate assault on the twin pillars of faith down south: football and basketball. With Roy on their side, the University of Alabama and Auburn University are going to be just fine.

Manducare Stercore Subridens

**********************

[W]hile many Mississippi State fans might call for second chances, or try to say he was just defending his family to make ourselves feel better for taking Jeffery Simmons without any real repercussions, I just can’t bring myself to do it. I’ll just know we decided to take a really bad hit to the image of our school all in the name of winning football games.

Brian Hadad of Bulldog Sports Radio has often called taking Simmons similar to eating a turd sandwich. It tastes terrible going down and you just have to find a way to choke it down. He was completely right, but I’m not even sure I could anticipate how difficult this would be to swallow once we got here.

**********************

But smiling while trying to get your shit down is nothing.

Football is so popular that people (myself included) have private conversations about how many people would have to die on the field before we’d seriously consider giving it up.

If you want to know the answer to that, consider the long history of drivers dying on the race car track. People in the stands dying at race car events. I think if we’re being honest about this, public deaths in the course of violent sports events are – fanwise – a plus.

Indeed, let’s continue with Chuck Klosterman’s argument:

There’s an embedded assumption within all arguments regarding the doomed nature of football. The assumption is that the game is even more violent and damaging than it superficially appears, and that as more people realize this (and/or refuse to deny the medical evidence verifying that damage), the game’s fan support will disappear. The mistake made by those advocating this position is their certitude that this perspective is self-evident… The contemporary stance on football’s risk feels unilateral, because nobody goes around saying, “Modern life is not violent enough.” Yet this sentiment quietly exists… Football could become a dead game to the casual sports fan without losing a fraction of its cultural influence. It could become the only way for a certain kind of person to safely access the kind of controlled violence he sees as a critical part of life… [Football will not become extinct; rather it will become] a mildly perverse masculine novelty.

But the more violence faction ain’t such a novelty, is it? It’s about to elect our next president.

********************

“Look, our nature, we like competitive violence. We do. As much as we talk about the quarterbacks, and where the game of football has gone the last 25 years, we still like when you show a big hit or a big tackle. We like that. You can throw five touchdown passes and that’s great. But one big hit, that’s what you’re here for.”

Yesterday afternoon, I rested a pair of scissors on top of one of my split rail fence posts while I was mulching. When I reached for it later, my hand fell on a cicada shell.

The screaming coming off the trees for the last week, I now realized, was late-summer cicadas.

I looked for a cicada poem, and here it is.

****************************

Cicada

I want to tell him what it is to crave darkness,
to want to crawl headfirst into a dirt-warm womb
to sleep, to wait seventeen years,
to emerge again.

*******************************************
*******************************************

These are the seventeen-year ones, not this summer’s smaller emergence, and the poet uses their long underground life and the way, once they emerge, their wail can sound like a warning siren, to make a point about human life.

He begins with his memory of a younger brother who, having gestated for seventeen years, suddenly left home forever with a bang.

The “warning wail of insects” tells us that “repudiation is fast like a whirlwind.”

Meaning?

Meaning it’s pretty easy and exciting to ditch it all and with the fervor and disdain of youth do your own fine full life. When you’re that young you don’t see that “all you live is leaving.” Life is something we have to leave, and most of life – whether we dramatically repudiate or undramatically persist in it – is departure of one sort or another, the loss of this, the erosion of that.

Our experience of the passage of time deepens our tendency to be borne back ceaselessly into the past, since adult life moves toward deterioration and makes our youth seem an icon of wholeness.

The brother’s repudiation is therefore both “arrant” and “orphic” – extreme (plus, given the closeness of “errant,” in error), and mysterious, unaccountable.

Even obviously future-oriented thoughts – provoked, say, by looking at your pregnant wife – are “still so much like trying to find something / once lost.” Pregnant to bursting with his own future, the brother has broken through the door into – illusion, dissolution (things falls apart), the immutable truth of all lives. The drone of the cicada tolls this immutability: that we slow down, undone as much by the pull of mortality as by the impulse to disbelieve it.

So listen to the cicada; consider its incredibly patient rhythms, its relationship to darkness and light; hear it tell our fast fragile passage through existence. Seeing as “we are all so helpless,” adopt pity rather than disdain. Pity for everyone, including yourself.

*************************************

The poem reminds me of Philip Larkin’s Poetry of Departures.

*************************************

Sometimes you hear, fifth-hand,
As epitaph:
He chucked up everything
And just cleared off,
And always the voice will sound
Certain you approve
This audacious, purifying,
Elemental move.

Yes, swagger the nut-strewn roads,
Crouch in the fo’c’sle
Stubbly with goodness, if
It weren’t so artificial,
Such a deliberate step backwards
To create an object:
Books; china; a life
Reprehensibly perfect.

************************
************************

UD thanks John Blair for permission to reprint the poem, which appears in The Green Girls (LSU Press, 2003). His most recent book of poems is The Occasions of Paradise.

In 2007, three Grizzlies football players and a former player broke into a home to steal money and drugs. All three were suspended from the team and convicted.

In 2008, three freshman football players were charged in a beating that broke a fellow student’s jaw. Two pleaded guilty and the third pleaded no contest.

In 2009, standout cornerback Jimmy Wilson was charged in his home state of California for a fatal shooting that occurred two years earlier. He was acquitted of those charges, but later got embroiled with the law again in 2010 after his bite of a co-ed’s leg required her to go to the hospital.

… Another Griz defensive back, Trumaine Johnson, and another student were charged with beating another student unconscious in 2010. Johnson was also arrested in 2011, in conjunction with an incident with police at a party, along with teammate Gerald Kemp.

… Some … run-of-the-mill incidents involve speeding tickets, where during the course of the investigation it came out that Johnson also had unpaid speeding tickets to go with everything else.

Others involved a drunk driving incident involving Nate Montana, son of NFL legend Joe Montana – which was reduced after he pleaded guilty to reckless driving.

Former star transfer offensive lineman J.D. Quinn, too, had a second drunk driving charge mysteriously dropped – after he had already been convicted once before.

A pattern had been set: rather than handle the matters with suspensions or meaningful discipline, it appeared as if folks at Montana were trying to spin their … athletes’ way out of trouble.

… In 2011, extremely serious allegations came to light involving a party involving football players, a female victim, and the sedative Rohypnol, which is sometimes called the “date-rape” drug.

[S]oon thereafter, another woman came forward with an eerily similar story of blacking out and being raped by football players in 2010, proving that the one report was no fluke.

Paul Durcan’s poem, Glocca Morra, will mark Father’s Day at University Diaries. It’s a cheery miserable morbid sort of thing which UD discovered in this morbid volume. She doesn’t find the poem online, so she will simply quote parts of it here – enough to give you a sense of the thing. (The poem also appears in this collection.)

It’s a longish unrhymed casually expressed series of thoughts the writer has while gazing at his father dying in a hospital bed.

The whole poem, beginning Dear Daughter and ending Love, Dad is a letter to Durcan’s daughter, who “one day … will watch me die” as the poet now watches his father die. Generation after generation, the poet suggests, people closest to one another, who most love one another, remain painful mutual mysteries. (Norman Maclean’s father says to him, in A River Runs Through It, “It is those we live with and love and should know who elude us.”)

Someone a few beds over has a little radio, on which the treacly How are Things in Glocca Morra?, from the musical Finian’s Rainbow, is playing. The song evokes a “fine day” in an idealized Irish village, nostalgically yearned after by the speaker, who has left it.

The cheap Irish sentimentality of that song counterposes itself throughout the poem to the bitter reality of the poet’s unfinished business with his always-remote, soon to vanish, father. When the poet was young, he and his father played games together in Phoenix Park:

Football, hurling, cricket, golf, donkey,
Before he got into his Abraham-and-Isaac phase
And I got the boat to England
Before he had time to chop off my head.

The transistor reminds him of

The day you bought your first transistor
You took us out for a drive in the car
The Vauxhall Viva,
Down to a derelict hotel by the sea,
The Glocca Morra,
Roofless, windowless, silent,
And, you used add with a chuckle,
Scandalous.

This is stream of consciousness, thought association, random music prompting a memory of a place in time when that same song emerged — in this particular case, as the name of a seaside hotel. The poet recalls the same irony that animates his reflections in the poem — the distance between that name’s winsome evocations, and the derelict reality to which the name is affixed.

You dandled it on your knee
And you stated how marvellous a gadget it was
A portable transistor,
And that you did not have to pay
A licence fee for it,
You chuckled.
A man not much known for chuckling.
The Glocca Morra,
Roofless, windowless, silent and scandalous.

Dandled it, like a child; stated how marvellous it was, this beautiful thing you could lift and carry around with you, like a child. In the silent dereliction of the father’s emotionless world, and now in the roofless windowless silence of the dying father’s ultimate vulnerability, this will turn out to be the best his son will get by way of paternal love — this moment of oblique joy. It will do.

Realizing this now, the poet begins to cry (The tears are lumbering down my cheeks ), and the tears awaken another, equally important memory – the memory of his father’s handwriting:

You had a lovely hand,
Cursive, flourishing, exuberant, grateful, actual, generous.

The son has been able, at the father’s moment of death, to reanimate him, to recall, in an act of filial blessing and love, the most intensely vivid life within the man. He has been able to decode a little bit the mystery of the transistor, the mystery of human transmission; and he shares that mystery – for what it’s worth – with his daughter.

If she too one day watches him die, as he has just watched his father die, the poet advises her to

Consider the paintwork on the wall
And check out the music in the next bed
‘How are Things in Glocca Morra?’
Every bit as bad as you might think they are –
Or as good. Or not so bad. Love, Dad.

… who regularly link me to items of interest, I’ve got three things — a poem, and two opinion pieces — rattling around my headlet this morning. They all seem to have to do with the humanities, defense of. Let us see if we can organize them in order to make a point or two.

First, here are the items:

1.) A David Brooks column in today’s New York Times.

2.) A Stanley Fish column in the same newspaper.

3.) A poem by Delmore Schwartz called The Heavy Bear Who Goes With Me.

*******************************

Brooks wants to “stand up for the history, English and art classes,” even though few students are interested in taking them. (Students only get excited about econ and related fields that will make them rich.) The Brooks defense of the humanities rests on this:

… Over the past century or so, people have built various systems to help them understand human behavior: economics, political science, game theory and evolutionary psychology. These systems are useful in many circumstances. But none completely explain behavior because deep down people have passions and drives that don’t lend themselves to systemic modeling. They have yearnings and fears that reside in an inner beast you could call The Big Shaggy.

… Technical knowledge stops at the outer edge. If you spend your life riding the links of the Internet, you probably won’t get too far into The Big Shaggy either, because the fast, effortless prose of blogging (and journalism) lacks the heft to get you deep below.

But over the centuries, there have been rare and strange people who possessed the skill of taking the upheavals of thought that emanate from The Big Shaggy and representing them in the form of story, music, myth, painting, liturgy, architecture, sculpture, landscape and speech. These men and women developed languages that help us understand these yearnings and also educate and mold them. They left rich veins of emotional knowledge that are the subjects of the humanities.

… If you’re dumb about The Big Shaggy, you’ll probably get eaten by it.

Here we get the humanities as cautionary tale. Know thyself. If you don’t, you’ll make terrible mistakes in life.

Brooks cites a couple of recent, representative mistake-makers: “[A] governor of South Carolina [who] suddenly chucks it all for a love voyage south of the equator, or …a smart, philosophical congressman from Indiana [who] risks everything for an in-office affair.”

Who says these were mistakes? Maybe they were true love for all Brooks knows. Was the Tipper/Al marriage a mistake? It failed. Did it fail because they failed to understand the big shaggy?

UD doubts this. She proposes that the Gores understand the big shaggy pretty well.

***************************************

We all know people with very highly educated emotional knowledge who are fuckups.

We’re all fuckups of one sort or another, no?

So what if he has led a stupid life? Anyone with any brains knows that he is leading a stupid life even while he is leading it. Anyone with any brains understands that he is destined to lead a stupid life because there is no other kind.

Go ahead and disagree with this statement from Sabbath’s Theater, by Philip Roth. I’ll press on.

Here is a comment from Adam Phillips, a British psychoanalyst: “There are parts of ourselves – that don’t want to live, that hate our children, that want ourselves to fail. …[T]here is something strange about humans: they are recalcitrant to what is supposed to be their project.”

I mean, this is your emotional knowledge, no? Part of it? Not that you won’t get eaten by the big shaggy, but that you won’t be entirely assimilated into it when it starts chomping? That you might get a little leverage over it, eventually?

In his defense of the humanities, Fish cites Martha Nussbaum.

[Nussbaum writes that] “abilities crucial to the health of any democracy” are being lost, especially the ability to “think critically,” the ability, that is, “to probe, to evaluate evidence, to write papers with well-structured arguments, and to analyze the arguments presented to them in other texts.”

Here we shift to a humanities defense based not on mental health, but on civic health.

Developing intelligent world citizenship is an enormous task that can not even begin to be accomplished without the humanities and arts that “cultivate capacities for play and empathy,” encourage thinking that is “flexible, open and creative” and work against the provincialism that too often leads us to see those who are different as demonized others.

Nussbaum, like Brooks, defends the humanities as a force toward the creation of an organized and critical mind. I’m with them on this, although I think that some science and social science courses do the same thing. But as with the humanities as a pipeline to better mental health, I’m less convinced by the argument that a deep knowledge of Henry James will make you anything as grand as an intelligent world citizen. I think it’s liable to make you more tolerant and less provincial, because it will make you feel the vulnerability, variety, and complexity of human beings. But I also think that a true immersion into the humanities will make you very cautious about making big claims about outcomes. Many of the meanings we derive from deep humanistic study, after all, are quite disturbing, and even demoralizing.

Remember what William Arrowsmith wrote (I’ve already quoted him on this blog):

[The] enabling principle [of the humanities is] the principle of personal influence and personal example. [Professors should be] visible embodiments of the realized humanity of our aspirations, intelligence, skill, scholarship… [The] humanities are largely Dionysiac or Titanic; they cannot be wholly grasped by the intellect; they must be suffered, felt, seen. This inexpressible turmoil of our animal emotional life is an experience of other chaos matched by our own chaos. We see the form and order not as pure and abstract but as something emerged from chaos, something which has suffered into being. The humanities are always caught up in the actual chaos of living, and they also emerge from that chaos. If they touch us at all, they touch us totally, for they speak to what we are too.

Note that Arrowsmith’s understanding of the humanities is far more modest than that of Brooks or Nussbaum. For him, a prolonged encounter with the humanistic tradition amounts to a more and more sensate anguish at the recognition of our own chaos (this chaos is what Roth calls stupidity, and Phillips recalcitrance). The form and order of a great poem or a beautiful argument, we come to understand, suffer into being, emerge from the chaos of another consciousness. Which is to say that these accomplished objects, these solid touchstones, are not touchstones at all, but fragile occasional formal gatherings… The form and the order of literature and philosophy, in other words, can be thought of as a thin crust lying atop a deep fault line. We value many literary works precisely to the extent that they manifest the fault, the underlying chaos.

I’ll turn to the Schwartz poem in a moment. Time to post this.

… let us consider one of her poems.

She was born 8 February 1911. Died in 1979.

She lived in and wrote about Key West, so that’s another reason for UD, who will soon move there, to write about her.

But the real reason to write about her is that she’s a spectacularly good poet. Very much in the way of UD‘s adored Philip Larkin. Compare this Larkin poem with the Bishop we’re about to consider.

******************************

Friday Night in the Royal Station Hotel

Light spreads darkly downwards from the high
Clusters of lights over empty chairs
That face each other, coloured differently.
Through open doors, the dining-room declares
A larger loneliness of knives and glass
And silence laid like carpet. A porter reads
An unsold evening paper. Hours pass,
And all the salesmen have gone back to Leeds,
Leaving full ashtrays in the Conference Room.

In shoeless corridors, the lights burn. How
Isolated, like a fort, it is –
The headed paper, made for writing home
(If home existed) letters of exile: Now
Night comes on. Waves fold behind villages.

**********************************

If home existed. Bishop says almost the exact same thing in her poem Questions of Travel:

… “Continent, city, country, society:
the choice is never wide and never free.
And here, or there… No. Should we have stayed at home,
wherever that may be?”

We travel, she writes in Arrival at Santos, because of our “immodest demands for a different world, / and a better life, and complete comprehension / of both.”

Knowledge of the world before you leave it, and a perfectly clear understanding that you’ll gain very little knowledge before you leave it — it’s odd to UD that this shared pathos created in Bishop a restless traveler and in Larkin a stay-at-home. But then both of them seem to suggest that there isn’t any home anyway, that the world’s a bizarre mystery wherever you happen to plant your ass, so you don’t really need to travel. You’re always writing letters of exile. Poems are letters of exile.

In fact travel might backfire; it might rouse expectations destined to be disappointed. These expectations might involve the possibility of greater comprehension; they might also be about the possibility that you can make a new life — that having botched this one, you can make a good, new one by placing yourself in a different world. That’s the theme of this little Larkin ditty:

Poetry of Departures

Sometimes you hear, fifth-hand,
As epitaph:
He chucked up everything
And just cleared off,
And always the voice will sound
Certain you approve
This audacious, purifying,
Elemental move.

And they are right, I think.
We all hate home
And having to be there:
I detest my room,
It’s specially-chosen junk,
The good books, the good bed,
And my life, in perfect order:
So to hear it said

He walked out on the whole crowd
Leaves me flushed and stirred,
Like Then she undid her dress
Or Take that you bastard;
Surely I can, if he did?
And that helps me to stay
Sober and industrious.
But I’d go today,

Yes, swagger the nut-strewn roads,
Crouch in the fo’c’sle
Stubbly with goodness, if
It weren’t so artificial,
Such a deliberate step backwards
To create an object:
Books; china; a life
Reprehensibly perfect.

*******************************

The ongoing struggle of our lives is the same struggle anywhere; to chuck it all is to pretend otherwise, to pretend that having, say, mucked up one life, you can do the next one right.

But anyway. What strikes UD most about these two poets is their almost Kafkaesque sense of how fundamentally strange life is, and their related disengagement from the human realm. Their world is the world of the Royal Station Hotel abandoned by human beings, though recently and incompletely colonized by them… I mean, Larkin and Bishop notice again and again traces of our efforts to inhabit and understand the world. They notice the way the obdurate world responds to these efforts with a maddening inhuman self-sufficiency. The world goes on living its worldly life and gives away almost nothing. This conundrum of ours produces – if you’re a literary genius – extremely eerie sets of lines, evoking not emptiness, but an absence weighted with the failed effort to be present.

Cape Breton

Out on the high “bird islands,” Ciboux and Hertford,
the razorbill auks and the silly-looking puffins all stand
with their backs to the mainland
in solemn, uneven lines along the cliff’s brown grass-frayed edge,
while the few sheep pastured there go “Baaa, baaa.”
(Sometimes, frightened by aeroplanes, they stampede
and fall over into the sea or onto the rocks.)
The silken water is weaving and weaving,
disappearing under the mist equally in all directions,
lifted and penetrated now and then
by one shag’s dripping serpent-neck,
and somewhere the mist incorporates the pulse,
rapid but unurgent, of a motor boat.

The same mist hangs in thin layers
among the valleys and gorges of the mainland
like rotting snow-ice sucked away
almost to spirit; the ghosts of glaciers drift
among those folds and folds of fir: spruce and hackmatack–
dull, dead, deep pea-cock colors,
each riser distinguished from the next
by an irregular nervous saw-tooth edge,
alike, but certain as a stereoscopic view.

The wild road clambers along the brink of the coast.
On it stand occasional small yellow bulldozers,
but without their drivers, because today is Sunday.
The little white churches have been dropped into the matted hills
like lost quartz arrowheads.
The road appears to have been abandoned.
Whatever the landscape had of meaning appears to have been abandoned,
unless the road is holding it back, in the interior,
where we cannot see,
where deep lakes are reputed to be,
and disused trails and mountains of rock
and miles of burnt forests, standing in gray scratches
like the admirable scriptures made on stones by stones–
and these regions now have little to say for themselves
except in thousands of light song-sparrow songs floating upward
freely, dispassionately, through the mist, and meshing
in brown-wet, fine torn fish-nets.

A small bus comes along, in up-and-down rushes,
packed with people, even to its step.
(On weekdays with groceries, spare automobile parts, and pump parts,
but today only two preachers extra, one carrying his frock coat on a
hanger.)
It passes the closed roadside stand, the closed schoolhouse,
where today no flag is flying
from the rough-adzed pole topped with a white china doorknob.
It stops, and a man carrying a baby gets off,
climbs over a stile, and goes down through a small steep meadow,
which establishes its poverty in a snowfall of daisies,
to his invisible house beside the water.

The birds keep on singing, a calf bawls, the bus starts.
The thin mist follows
the white mutations of its dream;
an ancient chill is rippling the dark brooks.

****************************

This is a shag, by the way.

*****************************

So let me take a voyage around this poem. Here it is again:

Out on the high “bird islands,” Ciboux and Hertford,
the razorbill auks and the silly-looking puffins all stand
with their backs to the mainland
in solemn, uneven lines along the cliff’s brown grass-frayed edge,

[As with Larkin and the objects in the hotel, so with Bishop and the animal objects she’s considering, there’s a weird intentionality that the poet casts upon them; they’re almost human, seeming to mean and feel certain things — The birds are solemn; they’ve turned their backs to the mainland in some meaningful gesture of withdrawal or rejection… ]

while the few sheep pastured there go “Baaa, baaa.”
(Sometimes, frightened by aeroplanes, they stampede
and fall over into the sea or onto the rocks.)
The silken water is weaving and weaving,
disappearing under the mist equally in all directions,

[The water weaves silk as a weaver weaves. It doesn’t merely move; it disappears. It means to disappear in the same mysterious way the birds seem to mean their rejection of the mainland.]

lifted and penetrated now and then
by one shag’s dripping serpent-neck,
and somewhere the mist incorporates the pulse,
rapid but unurgent, of a motor boat.

[Incorporates. The great poet finds the word. Takes into its body somewhere. The world has a mind and the world has a body, and these things are powerful and have their reasons. We have little to no access to them, though we can mark some of their operations.

We can’t see the boat because of the mist — the mist that will stand throughout the poem for the haunted and undisclosed Kafka-world in which we move.]

The same mist hangs in thin layers
among the valleys and gorges of the mainland
like rotting snow-ice sucked away
almost to spirit; the ghosts of glaciers drift
among those folds and folds of fir: spruce and hackmatack–
dull, dead, deep pea-cock colors,
each riser distinguished from the next
by an irregular nervous saw-tooth edge,
alike, but certain as a stereoscopic view.

[Toto, I don’t think we’re in Romanticism anymore… Rotting, sucked away, dead, stereoscopic… Here, consciousness takes in the natural world as a rigid neurotic oddball with morbid tendencies. Which has nothing to do with us.]

The wild road clambers along the brink of the coast.

[Unlike the trees, the road is animate; but wildly, in a way that has nothing to do with us.]

On it stand occasional small yellow bulldozers,
but without their drivers, because today is Sunday.

[As with the Royal Hotel poem, it’s the world weighted with our failure to be present that compels Bishop. For her, every day is Sunday, because we never really enter into and interact with the world.

And yes – If you find yourself drifting glacially toward Wallace Stevens’ Sunday Morning – he also lived in Key West – that’s dandy.]

The little white churches have been dropped into the matted hills
like lost quartz arrowheads.

[Brilliant simile.]

The road appears to have been abandoned.
Whatever the landscape had of meaning appears to have been abandoned,
unless the road is holding it back, in the interior,
where we cannot see,
where deep lakes are reputed to be,
and disused trails and mountains of rock

[She’s getting into it now. Notice how great poems don’t assert much of anything; they calmly and expansively describe a world, and then, naturally as it were, generate implications.]

and miles of burnt forests, standing in gray scratches
like the admirable scriptures made on stones by stones–

[Hey! UD gets all excited when she reads these lines. Faithful readers know why.]

and these regions now have little to say for themselves
except in thousands of light song-sparrow songs floating upward
freely, dispassionately, through the mist, and meshing
in brown-wet, fine torn fish-nets.

A small bus comes along, in up-and-down rushes,
packed with people, even to its step.

[Notice how by now, having evoked an obscure and powerful natural/spiritual world, Bishop’s introduction of people makes them and their things — buses, bulldozers, churches — seem like toys, absurd powerless things dropped in, crawling about, barely existent.]

(On weekdays with groceries, spare automobile parts, and pump parts,
but today only two preachers extra, one carrying his frock coat on a
hanger.)
It passes the closed roadside stand, the closed schoolhouse,
where today no flag is flying

[Again, just like the Royal Hotel, the setting is that of a place usually inhabited but now not inhabited.]

from the rough-adzed pole topped with a white china doorknob.
It stops, and a man carrying a baby gets off,
climbs over a stile, and goes down through a small steep meadow,
which establishes its poverty in a snowfall of daisies,
to his invisible house beside the water.

[Notice too how the poet’s perspective moves in the poem from distant to closer and closer, from a long view of the islands to, by now, a specific view of a specific human being. Like a scientist, she is trying to understand, bringing the objects of her interest more and more to view.

And of course his house is invisible, holding back its meaning as much as any other thing on the island or the mainland holds back its meaning.]

The birds keep on singing, a calf bawls, the bus starts.
The thin mist follows
the white mutations of its dream;
an ancient chill is rippling the dark brooks.

[Frightening. We’re left, for all our mental exertions, with the same inscrutable soundings, and with a world that has a mind of its own — the thin mist propelled by its own dreams. The world is and always has been a cold place, despite our efforts to warm it. Cold and dark, with reminders of our brief battles here.]