Moo U’s president (background here), aka The Boy Who Thought He Could Fly, has grounded himself.

Give a boy a sports program. Give him his own fleet of planes. Watch him play, and watch Iowa State University pay!

ISU president Steven Leath thinks he can fly, and he thinks he’s exempt from rules about using university planes (why does an impoverished – apparently impoverished, not great university have a fleet of planes?) for personal trips.

No one at ISU seems able to keep Leach grounded.

I mean, far from being able to control the lad, university personnel struggle mightily to hide the expensive damage he does as he busts up said planes in order to fly to vacation homes.

Iowa State University President Steven Leath caused “substantial damage” to a university airplane he was piloting when it made a hard landing at an Illinois airport last year — a costly incident kept quiet for 14 months… University pilots were sent to pick up Leath and his wife with the school’s second airplane. The roundtrip flight cost more than $2,200 and was charged to the “Greater University Fund.” Leath controls that pot of unrestricted donations, which Iowa State says pays for its “most critical needs.”

What could be more critical to Iowa State University (famed for having inspired Jane Smiley’s Moo, a novel jammed with campus incidents just like this one) than supporting its president’s ongoing effort to figure out how to land a plane while the wind is blowing? The man is a treasure. He’s the guy who explains why the sports program is too poor to do anything about academics.

“We are facing a number of very large, comprehensive serious lawsuits related to athletics,” Leath said. “So before we would change our budget structure and put money into academics, we want to at least get past some of these immediate lawsuits.”

Games, games, and the president’s toys.
All jolly things for all jolly boys!

Al-Qaeda leader Ayman Al-Zawahiri issued two statements yesterday, one in praise of pro-hijab activists in India, and the other in praise of child bride legislators in Tennessee.

All praise to the noble veiling women of India who defy the law to assert their modesty!

All praise to the noble Tom Leatherwood who has freed the men of Tennessee to marry infant girls if that is their wish!

We are currently advising Brother Leatherwood on the framing, introduction, and passage of female genital removal legislation, for what man of piety would marry a baby with a clitoris?

The question of the day, as we near the election, is whether a once-dominant nation, having discovered through its sadistic president the political gratification of ass up/head down, forced squirting, and nipple clamps, can forswear its Naughty Duce fetish and cast its vote for a man who will almost certainly not leather strap it until its bottom bleeds. Are we ready for that?

“I’ve seen all that I can take,” writes Frank Bruni, echoing a growing anti-sex-slavery sentiment in America.

The strongest holdouts against change are women: Lara Trump (violent rallies are “fun”) and Kimberly Guilfoyle (“The best is yet to… you know…”) speak for those Americans who remain mouth-gagged and ready to go. Women know that Trump is the only president they can rely on to call them disgusting and retarded and ugly and fat and weak. Disgusting because they have periods and menopause and plastic surgery. Women are not going to get this treatment from any other president, ever.

The Trump side’s latest campaign song, Do That To Me One More Time, makes an indirect appeal to the pursuit of happiness through increasingly exotic forms of humiliation, such as, say, Japanese rope bondage. There are always new and different ways to be spat at by a presidential strong man – certainly enough to fill up the next four years. And look how many of us crave him! Have you ever had hot wax dripped onto your thighs?

‘On this day, presiding over [an ISIS fighter’s] trial, [Judge] Amina is wearing a white shirt and jeans with embroidered butterflies — clothing ISIS would have whipped women for wearing in public. She is seated behind a wood and faux-leather desk, which hides her platform heels. The public prosecutor is wearing a short-sleeved shirt.

In the future, Amina says, perhaps they will have judge’s gowns and proper courtrooms where journalists and the public can come all the time.

It’s a shock to some ISIS fighters to be sentenced by a woman. In the self-declared caliphate, women had very restricted roles, requiring them to stay at home unless they were accompanied by a close male relative. According to ISIS ideology, men are not allowed to look at women who are not direct relatives.

“Some of them, when they hear the voice of a woman, they look at the ground,” says Amina. “I tell them, ‘I am talking to you — raise your head and look at the committee.'”

Amina says a female colleague jokes that ISIS fighters thought that, as the Quran promises men who are faithful, they would end up in paradise with dozens of beautiful women to accompany them. “Instead, they look up and see us” in the courtroom, Amina says with a laugh.’

Kafka.

And Rooney Mara.

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.

… and broad sculpted staircases with immense stained-glass windows at the landings. I glance through a window and catch the ghosts of liberals past – Arthur Schlesinger and John Kenneth Galbraith specifically – chatting on either side of the stone wall separating their big dreary Cambridge gardens.

A few yards behind these summoned luminaries looms the campus whose iconicity-to-actuality ratio UD has always found lopsided. The world dreams about Harvard, while Harvard itself stands in an almost-permanent bad weather snit, many of its major buildings brutalist and its central quads a dispiriting brickyard.

UD has always found these sorts of grandeur-to-ground-level gulfs bracing, refreshing, happy-making, as when she discovered that Phillip Larkin was a pissy old masturbator.

Hers is a common enough reaction. The most-praised portrayals of Winston Churchill show him as a shambling ass.

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

At the darkest, coldest time of the year, I am in an old house, beside an old campus, in a very old city. The operative words are dust and dusk. Weak sunlight gives out at around two o’clock by the brooding grandfather clock in the hall, and the already-drifting house settles into true REM sleep. Across from the clock, a fine empaneled library is a museum on its way to being a mausoleum. The bound words of the prolific JKG maintain, on its shelves, a stunned silence. What happened to the world?

Such is the delicacy of this preserved interior that whenever UD spills some tea or dislodges one of the ruglets on the stairs, she smiles and thinks I am UD, destroyer of worlds. But there is a praiseworthy piety – world historical, filial – that wants to keep things as they are. The servant-summoning technology still works: Press the Library or Third Hall button on the Clark and Mill Electric Co Cambridge and Boston panel, and out comes a chirp.

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

Ghosts, and catastrophes. You think less about the grandeur and more about the ground-level grief when you’re actually here: The young son whose death threw Galbraith into a tailspin. The gruesome public assassination of Benazir Bhutto, guest of honor at one of his celebrated garden parties. Galbraith’s son Peter spends his life pacing the aftermath of global atrocity.

You could say UD currently sits (she’s in the library at five AM) at the pinnacle of elitism; you could say she ain’t climbing any higher than atop this soft leather chair resting on one of the gargantuan rugs Galbraith or Galbraith junior brought back from India or Afghanistan. But it’s only the trappings. What’s been able to be held in amber. This place is the genuine Henry James (Harvard Law, 1872): The affluent society, expansive, sedate; and the cry of pain almost out of earshot.

[Great visual on this article, by the way.]

Keeping up with Trump revelations is exhausting. By late October, he’ll be caught whacking it outside a nunnery. There are not many places left for this thing to go that don’t involve kids or cannibalism. We wait, miserably, for the dong shot.

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

All 16 of the non-Trump entrants were dunces, religious zealots, wimps or tyrants, all equally out of touch with voters. Scott Walker was a lipless sadist who in centuries past would have worn a leather jerkin and thrown dogs off the castle walls for recreation. Marco Rubio was the young rake with debts. Jeb Bush was the last offering in a fast-diminishing hereditary line. Ted Cruz was the Zodiac Killer.

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

Duped for a generation by a party that kowtowed to the wealthy while offering scraps to voters, then egged on to a doomed rebellion by a third-rate con man who wilted under pressure and was finally incinerated in a fireball of his own stupidity, people like this found themselves, in the end, represented by literally no one.

[Okay, fine, a little over the top. His images are all over the place. But worth it for “fireball of his own stupidity.”]

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

That was the highlight of the evening, unless you want to count Rudy Giuliani’s time onstage, with his eyes spinning and arms flailing like a man who’d come to a hospital lost-and-found in search of his medulla oblongata.

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

How Giuliani isn’t Trump’s running mate, no one will ever understand. Theirs is the most passionate television love story since Beavis and Butthead. Every time Trump says something nuts, Giuliani either co-signs it or outdoes him. They will probably spend the years after the election doing prostate-medicine commercials together.

[For her part, UD has predicted that, post-election, Trump (and Giuliani?) will head up America’s first Female Genital Mutilation citizens’ militia.]

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

10 a.m.: “It is so nice that the shackles have been taken off me and I can now fight for America the way I want to.”

Shackled! Only in America can a man martyr himself on a cross of pussy.

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

Trump from the start had been playing a part, but his acting got worse and worse as time went on, until finally he couldn’t keep track: Was he supposed to be a genuine traitor to his class and the savior of the common man, or just be himself, i.e., a bellicose pervert with too much time on his hands?

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

Trump can’t win. Our national experiment can’t end because one aging narcissist got bored of sex and food. Not even America deserves that. But that doesn’t mean we come out ahead. We’re more divided than ever, sicker than ever, dumber than ever. And there’s no reason to think it won’t be worse the next time.

The nihilism meme is off and running in this (to quote Leon Panetta) “very screwy” presidential election, and UD follows with great interest the progress of that old warhorse down its latest track.

“Nihilism, American-Style,” Allan Bloom titled one of the chapters in The Closing of the American Mind, but he had something very specific in mind – the infiltration of high-level Nietzschean negation (of religion, values, meaning, knowledge) into the teaching of undergraduates in our universities. What people seem to have in mind when more and more of them, every day, refer to the nihilism to which Trump appeals, or which his personality and rhetoric have evoked in Americans, is something far more down-home – a visceral disgust with the current social/political scene – a disgust so intense it makes people simply want to destroy everything, and therefore makes poopoo-spewing Trump the avatar of choice.

What drives their loyalty to Trump — if not the person, at least the idea of Trump — is a sort of nihilism. As a close friend put it to me this week, “I don’t care whether Trump wins or not, I just want him to f— things up as long as he can.” … The Trump supporters have seen plenty of politicians with important agendas, but few with the zeal to push them through; at this late date, they would apparently prefer zeal without agendas to agendas without zeal.

———–

[T]he voter nihilism that Trump both reflects and stimulates is a symptom of political decay. “He’s not perfect, but anyone would be better than this corrupt bunch,” is the sort of thing many Italians said, once upon a time, about Silvio Berlusconi, or Russians about Vladi­mir Putin, or Venezuelans about Hugo Chávez.

Let’s end the historical analogizing there; it’s enough to show how often the cry of “blow the system to hell” has gone up among peoples living in freedom and democracy, sometimes just before they lost both.

———-

[Consider] Trump’s outrageous accusations of the press, his chronic lying, his glorification of political dictators and strongmen, and his repeated racist/sexist statements, triumphantly delivered at his rallies. These are not meant as arguments in a national debate about serious issues, these are acts of political vandalism delivered with glee and impunity. This is a political performance with the implicit message: See how far I dare to go! This is political behavior that comes straight out of the manual of the Russian nihilist Dmitri Pisarev, the one time inspiration for Lenin: “What can be smashed must be smashed; whatever will stand the blow is sound, what flies into smithereens is rubbish; at any rate, hit out right and left, no harm will or can come of it.”

[Recall Trump’s comment yesterday about some of the speakers at the Democratic National Convention: “You know what, I wanted to hit a couple of those speakers so hard. I would have hit them — no, no — I was gonna hit them… I was gonna hit one guy in particular, a very little guy. I was gonna hit this guy so hard, his head would spin. He wouldn’t know what the hell happened… I was going to hit a number of those speakers so hard, their heads would spin, they’d never recover. And that’s what I did with a lot of people — that’s why I still don’t have certain people endorsing me. They still haven’t recovered, okay, you know?”]

Just smash the reigning order. It’s all a “jolly laugh” for the nihilist.

… Nihilism feels deeply resentful towards kindness, reason and open-mindedness. Its preferred currency is negativity; it has no positive vision of an even remotely attractive social and political order, and, more importantly, it does not even feel the need to have such a vision. Its preferred mode of communication is not conversation or even negotiation, but agitation, an excited mix of self-justification, accusation, denunciation, and rousing calls to action. It’s preferred political tactic is that of the scorched earth, “just smash the reigning order”. The ideal politician is the cocky hell-for-leather man, who “tells it as it is”, the crowd and the nihilist leader egging each other on in an ecstasy of liberated xenophobia.

… And here is the dilemma that political nihilism presents for the open democracies in which it currently thrives: as it is not about arguments, it cannot be countered with arguments. The register of political nihilism is emotion, symbols, charisma and performance. And performers need an audience. Nihilists like Boris Johnson, Donald Trump, the Dutchman Geert Wilders and the Austrian Heinz-Christian Strache, effectively tap into a miasma of free-floating anger and resentment…

UD thinks Brian Leiter, in the first fifteen minutes of this lecture on Nietzsche, does a very good job of explaining why American culture might devolve into the sort of enervated, self-hating, everything-hating nihilism that would grasp at the mindless charismatic ‘aesthetic’ option – in this case, the stimulating empty destroy-everything performance of Trump – as at least a way of continuing to feel alive. This emergent sensibility is a darker version of what people in earlier decades phrased the society of the spectacle or amusing ourselves to death. It’s where you go when your ‘eighties techno-passivity (tv, computer, film – one rigged-up Truman Show consumer spectacle after another) morphs into an ideology. Too much nothing eventually makes you desperately want something – any something. Zeal. Zeal without agendas. Pure agitation. Cocky hell-for-leather. But America is a very violent country, where millions and millions of people have home arsenals. Trump has a very violent imagination and he is charismatic.

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

Actually, not any something will do. The something can’t be anything having to do with traditional somethings – God, social progress, justice, love of humanity – because all of these, let’s say, have been, or are well on the way toward being, nihilized away… Why did the Democratic convention feature so many love-in, what-the-world-needs-now, lean-on-me performances? Because when all other vitalizing, motivating, foundations give way, you’re left with that one.

Did you watch long enough, last night, to catch that poor reverend at the end of the convention, trying to give the benediction? Did you hear what he said as the room continued to erupt with balloons? “I don’t know how I’m gonna pray in this chaos.” Not that the convention was chaotic; I thought it was great. But the spectacle, if you will, spoke multiple volumes to ol’ UD.

You won’t catch Trump farting around with prayer. He’s transcended it.

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

Nihilism is often hilarious, because it is so pretentious and at the same time such an empty infantile pose. Everyone loves The Nihilists in The Big Lebowski (Ve believes in nossing, Lebowski. Nossing. And tomorrow ve come back and ve cut off your chanson.); and if you were lucky enough to see Robin Williams and Bill Irwin in Waiting for Godot, you know what a laff riot that play is. Before Godot, there was the piss-yourself-giggling Ubu the King. And the nihilistic comedies of the ancient Greeks. Artists have always known that Hillarian moderation is much less stimulating than Trumpian over-the-tops and hysterias and absolutisms and extremisms.

And of course somehow at the same time nihilism has a certain plausibility as a way of thinking about or even feeling about existence. Christopher Hitchens got at this when he characterized what he considered male-tinged humor:

Nietzsche … described a witticism as an epitaph on the death of a feeling. Male humor prefers the laugh to be at someone’s expense, and understands that life is quite possibly a joke to begin with — and often a joke in extremely poor taste.

Nihilism wouldn’t be so funny if it were just pretentious and infantile; it needs the spin on it that a certain philosophical legitimacy gives it.

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

Yet our most Beckettian humorists have also always known that – in the words of Beckett himself – I can’t go on I’ll go on is the reality on the ground.

This is why, for UD, the realest moment of the Democratic National Convention came when Joe Biden, alluding to the death of his son, said

As Ernest Hemingway once wrote, “The world breaks everyone and afterwards, many are strong at the broken places.”

Iowa State University President Steven Leath said he would love to see athletics at ISU provide financial support to academics.

However, he was not optimistic about this occurring anytime soon.

“We are facing a number of very large, comprehensive serious lawsuits related to athletics,” Leath said. “So before we would change our budget structure and put money into academics, we want to at least get past some of these immediate lawsuits.”

Having jammed my black leather backpack full of stuff (jacket, dress, shoes, umbrella, laptop), and having hidden the garbage bin from the dog, UD is off, on a partially sunny day, to Baltimore. She will walk to the Grosvenor metro station unless

1. she is stopped by a neighbor in a car who insists on driving her; or
2. she gets to Strathmore Avenue just in time to catch the Ride-On bus.

Amazingly, after chatting with the town maintenance man (subject: the spring weather, and how it’s ideal for outdoor work), and exchanging greetings with Barbara, editor of the venerable Garrett Park Bugle, for which, as you know, UD writes (Barbara was working in her vegetable garden) (which reminds UD that yesterday she bought an entirely inappropriate plant to replace a bush that got eaten by deer — a Mediterranean, or European, palm, which needs more sun and heat, she figures, than she can provide, though some websites claim the thing can survive her planting zone), amazingly, as she approached Strathmore, there it was, the Ride-On.

Her fellow passengers at ten AM on a Thursday ‘thesda morning were the usual dispirited lot; as she entered, UD threw them a grin which was unreciprocated. But the driver greeted UD enthusiastically; she took his hearty wishes for a great day with her as she stood on the train platform.

How great will it be, though? She’s going to riot-torn Baltimore.

“Thank you for still coming to our wedding,” Courtney emailed a few minutes ago.

Things are a little livelier on the Red Line train to Union Station. A bald bespectacled guy with three or four newspapers smiles while making his way through today’s atrocities; the guy sitting next to me texting looks (and smells) fantastic in his expensive suit.

Dupont Circle, doors opening on the right.

This post is an addendum to my recent post about the poet Galway Kinnell.

If you’re going to write a music-of-the-sphere and music-of-the-spheres poem, here’s a better way to do it than Kinnell’s. It’s by an old UD favorite, James Schuyler. I’ve gone to the trouble to make it a seasonally appropriate choice.

As always, I’ll interrupt the poem constantly with my commentary. Go here for the poem unmussed.

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

A MAN IN BLUE

Under the French horns of a November afternoon [Just start in on the idea that sometimes, some seasons, earthly days introduce themselves so beautifully they seem positively symphonic. Say French horns to convey the high-style baroque rarity of these particular earth-tones. Don’t talk about how moved you are by the music of the globe, the way Kinnell does…. Nice assonance, too – all those ers.]
a man in blue is raking leaves [So this poem will be an extended bit of the poet’s consciousness as he gazes, in autumn, at an ordinary sight – a man in blue (overalls? jeans? in blue as in set beneath a brilliant blue sky?) raking. Like many imagistic poems, this one will follow the thoughts of a speaker as a particular image dominates and complicates his thought. Call it stream of consciousness or interior monologue if you’d like.]
with a wide wooden rake (whose teeth are pegs
or rather, dowels). Next door
boys play soccer: “You got to start
over!” sort of. [Sort of. Or rather. This is hip relaxed New York School verse – see also Frank O’Hara and John Ashbery – which will capture the vague immediacies of world-apprehension, the mind-ramble of a poet.] A round attic window
in a radiant gray house waits like a kettledrum. [The sun is obviously shining brightly – the gray of the house has been made radiant – so we can gather that the man in blue is certainly a man in a blue sky. The poet works his music of the sphere metaphor with the round window as a kettledrum awaiting its entry after the horns.] –
“You got to start . . .” [Repeating this phrase, the poet conveys his continued musing over it. It has obviously attracted his attention and thought. Is he thinking of the earthly as well as human imperative to keep going? The seasonal renewing recurrences of the globe, and our own felt commitment, despite all setback and time-passage, to persisting and thriving?] The Brahmsian day
lapses from waltz to march. [So now he is gathering up his unattributed instrumental references into a particular composer. His mind has wandered – lapsed – from stray instrumental sounds to a specific instance of instrumental music: something by Brahms. And we’re picking up steam here as we go – from the slower waltz to the snappier march, early afternoon to full midday, as the poet sits and muses.] The grass,
rough-cropped as Bruno Walter’s hair, [The sweet, silly, random, way-charming feel of the New York School poem. Start with an absurdity but a truth – hanging around a residential street on a beautiful autumn day can make you so symphonically blissful that you’ll start hearing French horns – and then just keep going, push it deeper and deeper as your free mind and spirit play with those instruments and their associations.]
is stretched, strewn and humped beneath a sycamore
wide and high as an idea of heaven [I don’t think we’re in modernism anymore. Here’s TS Eliot that same day, a few hours later:

[Oh – and Schuyler has in fact now gone directly to heaven – the immense and lovely sycamore puts him in mind of the vastness and loftiness of heaven – but he will cut off at the knees any impulse to get late Romantic about that (the music it prompts in the brain can be late Romantic, but the language the modern poet brings to the phenom will be modern).]
in which Brahms turns his face like a bearded thumb
and says, “There is something I must tell you!”
to Bruno Walter. “In the first movement
of my Second, think of it as a family
planning where to go next summer
in terms of other summers. A material ecstasy,
subdued, recollective.” [And this is how he will cut it off: He will conclude his poem with a fantasied exchanged between composer and conductor about Symphony 2, Movement 1. This is total adorable imaginative freedom on the part of the poet; the appeal and insight of this poem will not be poignantly, longingly, metaphysical – as in Kinnell – but rather it will reside in the hilariously alive play of a creative mind. Notice indeed how subversive of Romanticism Schuyler’s piece is: Brahms himself is eager to downplay the heavy-breathing significance of the movement, insisting to the conductor that he interpret it rather as expressing simple happy domesticity: a family planning a summer vacation: a material ecstasy. Bound, delightedly, to the earth.] Bruno Walter
in a funny jacket with a turned-up collar
says, “Let me sing it for you.”
He waves his hands and through the vocalese-shaped spaces
of naked elms he draws a copper beech
ignited with a few late leaves. [So, Brahms, you mean in this passage where you go lalala duhduhduh bahbahbah… Walter takes up his baton and waves his hands and sings it for us and creates a picture, the sort of picture the late romantic setting has conjured in the head of the poet… Sound, word, song, image, merge in this materially ecstatic synesthesia.] He bluely glazes
a rhododendron “a sea of leaves” against gold grass. [A magician, the conductor lifts his wand and sets the world late romantically alight, makes a poetic phrase of a rhododendron.]
There is a snapping from the brightwork
of parked and rolling cars.
There almost has to be a heaven! [The poet always brings us back to the immediate local reality: The polished metalwork of the cars on the street and at the curbs gives a gloss to the music/scene – the ordinary machinery of modern life also has its radiance to contribute to the earth-symphony.] so there could be
a place for Bruno Walter
who never needed the cry of a baton.
Immortality—
in a small, dusty, rather gritty, somewhat scratchy
Magnavox from which a forte
drops like a used Brillo Pad?
Frayed. But it’s hard to think of the sky as a thick glass floor
with thick-soled Viennese boots tromping about on it.
It’s a whole lot harder thinking of Brahms
in something soft, white, and flowing. [You can record Bruno/Brahms for the ages on your scratchy old Magnavox which by now creates a painfully rough sound. It might be authentic, but it doesn’t transport you. Material, yes, but too material, too thick-souled. On the other hand, it’s just as non-transporting to try to turn the composer and conductor into angels. We don’t do angels around here.]
“Life,” he cries (here, in the last movement),
“is something more than beer and skittles!” [Well, this is pure Schuyler. Of all modern poets, he seems to UD the one most committed to trying to express the sheer weird pulsating bliss of being alive. The crazy running around French horny finale in the Brahms is completely full of beans, after all.]
“And the something more
is a whole lot better than beer and skittles,”
says Bruno Walter,
darkly, under the sod. I don’t suppose it seems so dark
to a root. Who are these men in evening coats?
What are these thumps?
Where is Brahms?
And Bruno Walter?
Ensconced in resonant plump easy chairs
covered with scuffed brown leather
in a pungent autumn that blends leaf smoke
(sycamore, tobacco, other),
their nobility wound in a finale
like this calico cat
asleep, curled up in a breadbasket,
on a sideboard where the sun falls.

For a warm, musing, quiet time, a time when things slow down or stop, a poem by Stanley Kunitz, full of quiet musing. UD stops the poem when she feels like it, thinking aloud about its form and its meanings.

The Abduction

Some things I do not profess
to understand, perhaps
not wanting to, including
whatever it was they did
with you or you with them
that timeless summer day
when you stumbled out of the wood,
distracted, with your white blouse torn
and a bloodstain on your skirt.

[This is a wispy, thin-lined, first-person account – directed to a man’s lover – of a memory involving her that continues to baffle and unnerve him. The thinness of his poetic line, and his opening admission of his inadequacy, create a mood of lassitude, vagueness, half-thereness. The poem will be a narrative – the story of the lover’s abduction – but it will be told in the sketchy thin-lined manner of a man in fact defended against the story’s meanings.

We are in a fog, in short, of the sort one knows from Kafka stories, or from novels like The Good Soldier. It’s the condition – the pathology – of not knowing that interests writers like these.

That summer day on which the abduction took place was “timeless,” which is to say it has made on the speaker (and presumably his lover) a permanent mark; they both return to it again and again in memory and in desire. Timeless too in the sense that the events the poet is about to recount seem mythic, unreal, out of time altogether, some miraculous break in the fabric of time. Think here of that unnerving Australian film, Picnic at Hanging Rock which also features virginal women in white dresses “taken” by an alien force, taken out of time.

Here the lover returns from her abduction, spilled sexual blood on her whiteness…]

“Do you believe?” you asked.

[Do you believe the transformation that has happened to me? Do you love me enough to believe the bizarre tale I’m about to unfold? To believe my way of knowing/not knowing what has happened to transform me from white to red? To love is to enter into the deepest, most wounded, most obscure mental world of the loved one, as in this poem, by Stephen Spender. Or this one, by Richard Wilbur. Are you willing to do that?]

Between us, through the years,
we pieced enough together
to make the story real:

[This is love: That together you give life and even plausibility to… hell, you honor the particular myths, repetition compulsions, odd ways of making sense of one’s destiny, that the loved one has generated out of her experience, her imagination, her – to anticipate the end of this poem – rapture and dread.]

how you encountered on the path
a pack of sleek, grey hounds,
trailed by a dumbshow retinue
in leather shrouds; and how
you were led, through leafy ways,
into the presence of a royal stag,
flaming in his chestnut coat,
who kneeled on a swale of moss
before you; and how you were borne
aloft in triumph through the green,
stretched on his rack of budding horn,
till suddenly you found yourself alone
in a trampled clearing.

[So here’s the medieval myth itself, the way-weird account of her torn and bloodied self she offers the lover. The hunting dogs first appear, and then what sounds like flagellants, and they all lead her to a major stag who stretches her on his “budding horn.” Here is her dream of her triumphant sex, her initiation into the power (“kneeled… before you”) of her own body.]

That was a long time ago,
almost another age, but even now,
when I hold you in my arms,
I wonder where you are.

[Same thing Spender and Wilbur wonder, gazing at their lovers. If these men are going to get anywhere near where these women are, they will indeed have to “believe,” have to enter lovingly into the far country that is the soul of any other human being. The poet feels his inability/unwillingness to enter the deepest, strangest, sources of this woman’s being; yet, loving her, he wonders.]

Sometimes I wake to hear
the engines of the night thrumming
outside the east bay window
on the lawn spreading to the rose garden.

[There is a world inside the world, as Don DeLillo has Lee Harvey Oswald repeat to himself throughout Libra; there is that realm of power, of being, that thrums through our existence, a constant dark engine pulsing through us, making us and making our lives, generating our stories. You can be upbeat about this, and suggest that eventually we can have access to these deep sources of ourselves and even others:

… then he thinks he knows
The hills where his life rose,
And the Sea where it goes.

Or you can be far less upbeat:

…in time,
We half-identify the blind impress
All our behavings bear, may trace it home.
But to confess,

On that green evening when our death begins,
Just what it was, is hardly satisfying,
Since it applied only to one man once,
And that one dying.]

You lie beside me in elegant repose,
a hint of transport hovering on your lips,

[A hint of transport hovering — always an allusion, in her repose, to that transformative mythic moment of transport which has nothing to do with her lover.]

indifferent to the harsh green flares
that swivel through the room,
searchlights controlled by unseen hands.

[Always, ecstatically, she returns to her primal triumph, and this in some sense protects her from the harsh temporal material world that seeks her out, seeks to awaken her to the end of power, eros, solace.]

Out there is a childhood country,
bleached faces peering in
with coals for eyes.
Our lives are spinning out
from world to world;
the shapes of things
are shifting in the wind.
What do we know
beyond the rapture and the dread?

[Outside their bedroom rages a world of monsters out of childhood; outside their haven of life intensified lies death (bleached faces… with coals for eyes), and even as she circles endlessly into her glorious scene of transformation, she – and he – are being otherwise transformed, spun out from the world of life into the world of death.

So this is where we are; this is all we know — the rapture of our death-defying embrace of existence, and the dread of our knowing/not wanting to know how this compulsively reiterated erotic fable will end.]