Good luck with that, lady. Talk to Ocean City, Maryland. You can wave your mayoral wand and declare certain deadly events over, but, by their very nature, groups like bikers are likely to ignore you. There’s a reason they call themselves Outlaws and shit like that: They do what they want.
And they’ll probably want to keep coming back to little Red River and there’s nothing you can do about that.
You’ve whipped yourself up some real sorcerer’s apprentice type stuff, in other words. And it don’t help none that New Mexico is biker gang central. One of the top five states for biker gangs. These killers are your neighbors.
AND it don’t help that the current trend in America is for everyone to own and carry multiple crowd-pulverizers. I mean, way gun-friendly states like your beloved New Mexico don’t get to just rest on their cowboy laurels and enjoy their mass murder toys at gun ranges and all; folks are gonna wanna kill people with them, aren’t they?
****************************
Now, for reasons unknown, your little town kept inviting tens of thousands of heavily armed biker gangs to hang out with you every year. I mean, it was great for business — the bars, the motels. The bars. And I’m sure some of your bar owners are even as we speak saying basically oh okay a few dead guys in the street. Cost of doing business! Don’t shut down the rally. Few bad apples. Get more police protection. Etc. The mayor will ignore them, but, again, it won’t matter. Chances are excellent massive waves of drunken louts with big guns will be back next year.
And lady, not to be mean, but you and your fellow New Mexicans created, and sustain, the gunny gangy world in which the Barbarians thrive. That’s why they choose to live in your state.
The Taos County Undersheriff tries to explain to locals complaining about the quality of policing before and after last month’s mass shooting at Red River’s biker rally (see these posts for background), that he told them decades ago how super-dangerous the event was, but no one listened. Thus it’s a bit rich, after years of criminality and menace finally culminating in what anyone with a brain knew would happen, to listen to locals bitching about all the blood.
After all, ‘who would have thought 28,000 bikers converging in a 1-square-mile mountain town of 539 people for Memorial Day weekend could get out of control?’
[R]ecently filed court documents point toward years of turmoil in the state with two rival gangs — the Bandidos and Mongols — perceiving themselves to be at war with the other.
Ol’ UD could have chosen from a zillion recent bloody gun incidents; why so much blogging about the Red River massacre? Because a town promoted a huge, violent, cult ritual! Year after year, knowing full well they were hosting thousands of cretinous warring sects and calling the event family friendly! Drawing children to the powder keg!
‘These guys all seem likable enough: [people tend to think] that they are misunderstood, outlaws from the old days, and they ride motorcycles instead of horses,’ [one policeman] said. ‘Even cops think, “Oh they are just tattooed long haired guys who like to ride motorcycles.” And the reality of it is they are long-haired tattooed guys who ride motorcycles and sell a hell of a lot of methamphetamine and murder people and steal motorcycles and extort people and beat people up in bars for no reasons.’
When people around the world wonder what peculiar American cultural traits produce daily large-scale gun carnage, they need to look at gunny gangy states like New Mexico, and gun-mad towns like Red River within that state. Here’s a perfectly respectable town – a yearlong tourist destination! – with a chronic violence fetish. Why? If the CDC is serious about studying American gun violence, it needs to dispatch a team of epidemiologists to Red River to ask people questions like Why do you think 28,000 armed bikers are cute? What is it about open powder kegs that makes you want to smoke cigarettes on top of them?
I think part of the answer must be that states like NM, always eager to liberalize their gun laws, proudly perceive themselves to be Badlands. Wild west shootouts have always been part of their frontier history, and in these post-frontier days, biker rallies virtually guarantee the survival of that self-affirming drama. Like their neighbor, whose famous tagline is Don’t Mess with Texas, biker rally states assume as a default position paranoid belligerence – and what better organized group to exteriorize that world view than the Mongols?
If I’m right, then mass murder is baked in to states like NM and Texas. If I’m right, it’s constitutive of state identity. Hell, NM done got MORE gun deaths than TX!
Not to get all Freudian, but the evidence points here: Mass murder isn’t what NM and Texas dread; it’s what they crave.
A rational voice at the Taos News poses the question: WTF????
A violent incident like Saturday’s might not have been an inevitability at Red River’s rally, but it sure wasn’t a remote possibility — and everyone involved in putting it on has known that for years.
Even before this year’s fatal shootout, even when biker gangs haven’t rolled into town, the Red River rally has often been a drunken, perverse, dangerous event that has created major headaches for all county residents and first responders, while benefiting a minority of business owners and public officials, mostly only in Red River itself. In previous years, road accidents involving drunken motorcyclists have been commonplace, and have sometimes been fatal.
Drunken, perverse, dangerous… UD wouldn’t mind knowing exactly what the writer means by perverse (‘Perversion is a form of human behavior which deviates from what is considered to be orthodox or normal. Although the term perversion can refer to a variety of forms of deviation, it is most often used to describe sexual behaviors that are considered particularly abnormal, repulsive or obsessive.’ Do tell!), but anyway the list ain’t pretty and it definitely makes one wonder about the perversion of a municipality that would, year after year, subject its 500 residents to the roar of 28,000 bikes, fatal traffic accidents, the street fights of warring gangs, a constant atmosphere of weaponized menace, the choking smoke of weed and worse (I’m guessing on this one), the need to flee town or lock your doors for the duration. ‘The warning signs were there. Add in excessive alcohol consumption, a little cocaine on the side, and the potential for violence should have been anticipated.’ Red River needs to appoint a Truth and Reconciliation Commission whose brief would be to review this inexplicable behavior, find a way to apologize for it, and make a clear break with a long shameful chapter in town history.
UD’s effort to account for the unaccountable goes something like this.
The Red River town council has been colonized by bikers and their allies. Every year rational voices try to curtail/end the bloody mess and are shouted down by the bikers/barkeeps/drug dealers/gun dealers/fleabag hotel owners running the town. They don’t talk about money but rather the beautiful freedom of rebels who to be sure might make some people uncomfortable but this is America we get to be free free free as the wind and if you’re not on board why not remote start your Prius and move to Martha’s Vineyard.
Local Red River NM pol Craig Swagerty is being too modest. His town’s annual biker rally has long also featured drug arrests (everyone knows about biker gangs and the drug business), fights, property damage, weapons charges, and forced temporary migration/home detention of scared locals …
But, you know… Red River folk consider tens of thousands of fucked up armed bikers packed onto their streets for days as a positive, and they keep welcoming back the boys — and the boys bring their kids, too, so this year the little ones got to be part of the hysterical stampede of people trying to get out of the way of bullets. “I’ve never seen anything like this,” said another resident. “I was told not to go out [as soon as the rally began] and so I was staying at a friend’s house. It honestly sounded like a whole clip was unloaded. It was a lot of gunshots at once.” Yep, must be quite a sight for one of the 500 permanent residents of tiny Red River to see/hear 28,000 heavily armed people outside her door. Town sure don’t need to worry about adequate policing with them numbers!
*******************
So now everyone’s talking about this year’s blowout – the bloodbath is all over the national and international news and I mean Craigwhodathunkit?? Who could have foreseen that 28,000 drunk assholes carrying 40,000 weapons would shoot some of them off? What’s America coming to?
*****************
In these Great Carnage days, you’d think a few people would look at and think about the lowest hanging fruit, the locations where mass shooting is practically guaranteed. Apart from the obvious – urban drug turf – UD will now helpfully single out two places guaranteed to generate routine atrocity:
Hookah lounges
Biker rallies
There are plenty of other places you, like the Red River resident smart enough to get the hell out of the way of the rally even before it started, definitely ought to avoid if you dislike open air gun battle. The boardwalk in Myrtle Beach or Ocean City MD… Public high schools in Glocksucker states… etc etc etc yada yada yada. I mean, do you read the news at all? Ain’t it kind of obvious?
NOT that UD‘s offering even a whiff of a suggestion that guns should be restricted or you should have check points in locations guaranteed to kill people repeatedly! Perish the thought that you and your family shouldn’t be free to perish at the hands of a drunk, high POS with a Glock! NOOOOO. I’m only saying we should designate these places, with big easy to read signs, Most Likely to Murder, so people can choose to stay away, or, as some folks in places like Myrtle Beach and Red River do, leave town until event season is over. Rather than the town of Red River promoting bike rallies on its tourism website and promising fun for the whole family (current town policy), you’d have the mayor say something like this (she made the comment to the Taos newspaper — Taos: the classy town, forty miles away from trashy Red River, that along with everyplace else anywhere near Red River went into lockdown right after the shooting):
“Everybody needs to understand that this really isn’t an event that we promote. There’s not really an event sponsor; it’s not a town-sponsored event. It’s something that occurs every year. It’s an event that’s grown and happens and we do our best to manage it.”
Course they do promote it. It’s right there on their website… Oh wait! Someone done taken it down!
Not only that, but lookee here what sober rule-bound Red River’s doing now!
“For everyone, there will be zero tolerance from this point forward,” [the local police captain] said at a [post-massacre] news conference. “That is traffic violations for 1 mile an hour over, seat belts, jaywalking. We are going to stop and talk to everyone if they violate any law — traffic or criminal.”
Look sharp, lad! From now on we fuckin promise it’s gonna be Pyongyang around here! And cut your hair!
Morning, Ledge House, Harpers Ferry West Virginia.
Worked. Like a charm. The 6:03 from Union Station stopped and took me from Garrett Park to Harpers Ferry, just as it said it would.
The tricky part was finding Ledge House. UD, on foot and alone, with night approaching, and in a mountain town where most streets are steep inclines, made every mistake possible and then some. She chatted with half the town in her effort to find the place.
Everyone – including the man who took me to a steep crumbly poison ivy ridden path he swore would get me there (I didn’t take the path) – was very friendly. And of course GPS was trying to help me too. Every wrong route I tried opened up onto gobsmacking views of rushing rivers, bridges, rock cliffs, green hills, and clear evening skies with an almost full moon.
Eventually, her ancient heart pounding, UD got to Henry Clay Street, where the GPS lady assured her she had reached her destination.
The house – way the hell up some cruddy steps – looked wrong. UD had no choice but to trudge the cruddy steps.
While resting halfway, she checked her email, which included congratulations from Amy at Bonhams – at yesterday’s New York auction, our latest Fangor sold for over a hundred thousand dollars.
Naturally this news gave me a second wind and I finished the course like a Marine recruit.
Where was I? This was a private house, with a big For Sale sign in front of it. GPS had stopped me too soon and sent me up the wrong street. Now – eyeing the cemetery that was the only other game in town – I had to go all the way back down to Henry Clay.
Where, glowing with charm and a Southern garden in dusky shadows, stood Ledge House.
… over the great plains has the word “bountiful” buzzing in UD‘s brain. This obviously bountiful land, even under patches of snow.
Bountiful Chicago, where a glowing plaid-clad Burberry store appeared in UD‘s hotel window – and behind the Burberry was the lake, ice-blue, iced-in, beautifully silent behind the city noise. How can it be said that UD still knows this city, so generous to her with adventure and love many years ago? This is America, bountiful and changeable, and you can walk down Michigan Avenue and gaze at the ice chunks in the Chicago River, and, except for the Trib Tower, you can find the streetscape entirely strange.
The strangeness is fine with me – it does me good to feel the nervy vitality Saul Bellow described… And didn’t I once find myself driving next to him (I still drove then), north from Hyde Park on Lake Shore Drive? He was in a derelict little BMW – green, as I recall – and I kept glancing over at his thin white hair, his hard-set lips. A Chicago moment – chronicling my life in that city while racing next to perhaps its greatest chronicler. That was sweet.
The nutty right has royally fucked the country; I will stand with the nutty left against it. I will stand in the rain (it’s raining) and scream crazy shit with the crazy ass progressive caucus.
I don’t know what the p.c.’s platform is. I’m sure I’m opposed to most of it. But a student in my mo/pomo seminar told me about the rally, and I’ve been spouting off in class about postmodern political passivity (in my weaker moments I tell myself this blog, this daily attack on corrupt elements of the American university, constitutes…) and… I dunno. Sometimes there’s no unpacking motive. I’m on the train. I’m going.
Maybe they’ll cancel it due to inclement weather. Optimal outcome. I get points for going without having to listen to the crazy ass progressive caucus say dumb shit. Without having to worry about Our Polarized Nation.
UD‘s wearing her uniform (boots, jeans, black turtleneck, scarf). The other day she attended a meeting of GWU’s highest administrative team, and the contrast between their suits and her jeans was stark. Thready old hippie UD. Representing the humanities faculty whether they like it or not.
**********************************
Postlude. Wow, it’s wet out there. Chilled damp UD takes her place on the red line train back to Garrett Park. She carries a red sign with white letters that read
END THE SHUTDOWN!
Capitol trees, bushes, and grasses trembled beautifully around UD as she walked from Union Station to the rally. One tree in particular, planted in circular groves on the grounds of various buildings, had a complex birch-like peeling bark (maybe the tree was a river birch?) and a thick coat of reddening green leaves with black berries. Blue jays shrieked and crows called out from lamp tops. Panicled pampas grass was paired with humpy mums – not a good look.
Employees at various federal entities streamed in to a park at the foot of the Capitol. They banged pots and chanted WORK NOT HURT. One of them gave UD the sign. T-shirts were also available, but who was going to put one on over her poncho? The rain flooded down, and the air was cold.
One guy tromped through the crowd trying out various chants. “We’ve got a Norma Rae,” said one attendee to another, and they laughed.
Police and their dogs were everywhere. At one point a bunch of them converged on an oddball wearing sunglasses, but he was just an oddball.
“Are you on furlough?” a reporter asked UD.
“No.”
He walked away.
***********************************
Jesse Jackson spoke. He sounded drunk and old. He offered a halting potted American history. We won in 1862… and… uh… in 2012… Now it’s 2014 and we won’t forget… He didn’t even bother coming up with one of his famous rhyming couplets.
Remember how we picked the daffodils?
Nobody else remembers, but I remember.
Your daughter came with her armfuls, eager and happy,
Helping the harvest. She has forgotten.
She cannot even remember you. And we sold them
It sounds like sacrilege, but we sold them.
Were we so poor? Old Stoneman, the grocer,
Boss-eyed, his blood-pressure purpling to beetroot
(It was his last chance,
He would die in the same great freeze as you),
He persuaded us. Every Spring
He always bought them, sevenpence a dozen,
‘A custom of the house’.
Besides, we still weren’t sure we wanted to own
Anything. Mainly we were hungry
To convert everything to profit.
Still nomads–still strangers
To our whole possession. The daffodils
Were incidental gilding of the deeds,
Treasure trove. They simply came,
And they kept on coming.
As if not from the sod but falling from heaven.
Our lives were still a raid on our own good luck.
We knew we’d live for ever. We had not learned
What a fleeting glance of the everlasting
Daffodils are. Never identified
The nuptial flight of the rarest ephemera –
Our own days!
We thought they were a windfall.
Never guessed they were a last blessing.
So we sold them. We worked at selling them
As if employed on somebody else’s
Flower-farm. You bent at it
In the rain of that April – your last April,
We bent there together, among the soft shrieks
Of their jostled stems, the wet shocks shaken
Of their girlish dance-frocks –
Fresh-opened dragonflies, wet and flimsy,
Opened too early.
We piled their frailty lights on a carpenter’s bench,
Distributed leaves among the dozens –
Buckling blade-leaves, limber, groping for air, zinc-silvered –
Propped their raw butts in bucket water,
Their oval, meaty butts,
And sold them, sevenpence a bunch –
Wind-wounds, spasms from the dark earth,
With their odourless metals,
A flamy purification of the deep grave’s stony cold
As if ice had a breath –
We sold them, to wither.
The crop thickened faster than we could thin it.
Finally, we were overwhelmed
And we lost our wedding-present scissors.
Every March since they have lifted again
Out of the same bulbs, the same
Baby-cries from the thaw,
Ballerinas too early for music, shiverers
In the draughty wings of the year.
On that same groundswell of memory, fluttering
They return to forget you stooping there
Behind the rainy curtains of a dark April,
Snipping their stems.
But somewhere your scissors remember. Wherever they are.
Here somewhere, blades wide open,
April by April
Sinking deeper
Through the sod – an anchor, a cross of rust.
Remember how we picked the daffodils?
Nobody else remembers, but I remember.
[All of the poems in the collection, written at the end of the poet’s life, directly address Plath. Note that the repetition in these opening lines seems appropriate, unlike the repetition in the recent inaugural poem, which seems merely to be trying to import some musicality to the verses.
Why does this repetition seem appropriate?
It captures the way the mind speaks to itself. The poet muses, thinks back, circles around events. It makes sense that he’d use the same word again and again. It comes across as very human — a little proud, a little irritable… Then too, to re-member is to put something that’s fallen apart together again, and there are two ways in which the poet can be said to be trying to do that: He’s trying to put the torn-apart daffodils together again, lamenting in the poem the way he and Plath tore them carelessly and prematurely out of the earth; and he’s also trying to put his broken life together again through the exercise of memory and the imposition of some order — if only an aesthetic one, through the writing of a poem — upon what just feels like pain and chaos.]
Your daughter came with her armfuls, eager and happy,
Helping the harvest. She has forgotten.
She cannot even remember you.
[She’s forgotten both the event, that is, and her mother.]
And we sold them
It sounds like sacrilege, but we sold them.
Were we so poor?
[The poet for a moment turns away from Plath and asks himself this question, with a certain wistful incredulity.]
Old Stoneman, the grocer,
[Note the OH sound that recurs – old, stoneman, grocer. Gives the memory a certain folkloric, Mother Goosy feel.]
Boss-eyed, his blood-pressure purpling to beetroot
[Note the strong alliteration, and the use of the natural metaphor – beetroot – for a poem about nature. Flowers shoot up out of the ground; our blood pressure shoots up as another sort of natural manifestation.]
(It was his last chance,
He would die in the same great freeze as you),
He persuaded us. Every Spring
He always bought them, sevenpence a dozen,
‘A custom of the house’.
Besides, we still weren’t sure we wanted to own
Anything.
[Evokes their confident bohemian youth.]
Mainly we were hungry
To convert everything to profit.
Still nomads–still strangers
To our whole possession.
[Here the key theme of the poem appears: We didn’t know what we had. We didn’t know how lucky we were to be alive, young, fertile. We flattered ourselves that we had a higher morality in regard to possession, but we were fools: We simply didn’t know how to value what we had because we thought – arrogantly – that we owned the world forever.]
The daffodils
Were incidental gilding of the deeds,
Treasure trove. They simply came,
And they kept on coming.
[Again, we took the earth’s gifts for granted. We didn’t think about the lower depths, the difficulties, out of which they struggled, and the fragility of their existence once they emerged.]
As if not from the sod but falling from heaven.
[The sod. Plath’s grave, and all the darker truths it contains, but also hides, will appear in this poem.]
Our lives were still a raid on our own good luck.
We knew we’d live for ever. We had not learned
What a fleeting glance of the everlasting
Daffodils are. Never identified
The nuptial flight of the rarest ephemera –
[Note the use again and again of the letter L. Lends the words a lightness — what a couple of ladeedas we were…]
Our own days!
[Their hasting-away marriage. Not that they see the end coming.]
We thought they were a windfall.
[See how the greatest poets find the greatest words? Windfall. Both a piece of luck from nowhere, and also, literally, what he has already described: the act of falling from heaven. The poet drives us back to the origins of words, the ground of things, when he discovers linguistic windfalls… After all, the word windfall, for all its positive connotations, has in it the word fall, and this is a poem about the sudden fall of a life into death.
And – not that I’m keen on Dylan Thomas – but note that he got there first in a poem with the very same theme as this one: Fern Hill, which includes the line “Down the rivers of the windfall light.”]
Never guessed they were a last blessing.
[Guess. Bless. Sly rhymes.]
So we sold them. We worked at selling them
As if employed on somebody else’s
Flower-farm. You bent at it
In the rain of that April – your last April,
We bent there together, among the soft shrieks
Of their jostled stems, the wet shocks shaken
Of their girlish dance-frocks –
[Soft, jostled, shocks, frocks — the language sings. But always in the service of its themes — the girlish prematurity of these lovers, and the whispering latency by which they begin to register their oncoming doom.]
Fresh-opened dragonflies, wet and flimsy,
Opened too early.
We piled their frailty lights on a carpenter’s bench,
Distributed leaves among the dozens –
Buckling blade-leaves, limber, groping for air, zinc-silvered –
Propped their raw butts in bucket water,
Their oval, meaty butts,
And sold them, sevenpence a bunch –
[Here note simply the microscopic attentiveness to details of the physical world. You’ve never looked at a wilting daffodil as carefully as Ted Hughes has.]
Wind-wounds, spasms from the dark earth,
With their odourless metals,
A flamy purification of the deep grave’s stony cold
As if ice had a breath –
[Into seriously Wuthering Heights territory here. The daffodils aren’t merely pretty flowers we’ll sell to the merchant for a little money; they’re messengers from deep in the earth, little flames distilled from dark underlying agonies.]
We sold them, to wither.
[Whither is fled the visionary dream? may also insinuate itself here.]
The crop thickened faster than we could thin it.
Finally, we were overwhelmed
And we lost our wedding-present scissors.
Every March since they have lifted again
Out of the same bulbs, the same
Baby-cries from the thaw,
Ballerinas too early for music, shiverers
In the draughty wings of the year.
[Wings as in things lifted like birds; but also stage wings, where unready dancers shiver anxiously.]
On that same groundswell of memory, fluttering
[Groundswell — a word as madly poetic as windfall. Great poems are true to the operations of consciousness — here, memories burst out of us, a groundswell of thought and feeling, and the poet captures this operation not by describing it as a psychologist might but by working it through obliquely, metaphorically, with the objects memory attaches itself to — those daffodils.]
They return to forget you stooping there
Behind the rainy curtains of a dark April,
Snipping their stems.
[An allusion here perhaps to their children — the daughter who happily harvests with no memory of her mother. Also an angry moment: Plath has cut short the childhood of her son and daughter by killing herself. They’ve been nipped in the bud.]
But somewhere your scissors remember. Wherever they are.
Here somewhere, blades wide open,
April by April
Sinking deeper
Through the sod – an anchor, a cross of rust.
[Blades wide open. The rage and pain of his morbid reflections. The hectic undiminished terrifying eros of them even today for the poet. Wide open in the month of April, your scissors, spasm, meaty butts, those too-eager girls, soft shriek, wet…]
*******************
A sort-of companion poem.
By Philip Larkin, a sort-of
friend of Ted Hughes.
*******************
Cut Grass
Cut grass lies frail:
Brief is the breath
Mown stalks exhale.
Long, long the death
It dies in the white hours
Of young-leafed June
With chestnut flowers,
With hedges snowlike strewn,
White lilac bowed,
Lost lanes of Queen Anne’s lace,
And that high-builded cloud
Moving at summer’s pace.
The mayor says they had a heads-up of about 500 Bandidos members heading into town. However, she says there was double that and Bandidos members haven’t even been at the rally since 2019.
********************
After-Action Review*:
[One visitor said he] had felt uneasy Saturday before the shooting.
”There was so much tension. You could feel it,” he said. “We didn’t really want to walk around. There were wall-to-wall [motorcycle clubs].”
[He] said he walked on the street rather than on the sidewalk, “because if you walked on the sidewalk, every other person you passed, you bumped into. If I see people who wear the [biker gang] colors, I’d rather not bump into them and create anything. I’d rather walk in the street. I’m good with that. I don’t know why they let the colors come back. That was their first mistake, lifting the color ban.”
”It was so thick here yesterday, you couldn’t even walk around, [said another visitor]. They were just posted up everywhere, on every corner. When they’re hanging out like that you just have to be careful.”
************
*Note for next year’s family fun biker rally: Enrich everyone’s experience with multiple bullet-proof barriers/holding pens for each warring gang, surrounded by hundreds of officers holding AK-47s. Along the barrier walls, posters with identifying gang colors should be plainly visible to all visitors.
UD‘s been blogging about NM for years and ain’t surprised it came out on top on this and on other intelligence measures; but it’s always good to be able to point to evidence, and the recent decision to stage a huge public rally in a tiny town among warring biker factions will do nicely.
The mayor of Red River is shocked at the mass shooting (three dead so far, several injured) that ensued, cuz you’d NEVER expect fine folk like these to have gotten drunk at Red River’s bars and to have used their big big big guns to kill each other. Unprecedented!
How could such a thing have happened? Bikers were supposed to be at “a live music event by Warning Shot” (not making this up) but instead just blew past the whole warning thing and started killing each other. Coulda knocked the mayor and tourism director over with a feather: 28,000 armed bikers that hate each other! And now you tell me this didn’t bode well. Hidesight is 50/50 dude!!!!
… the real,” wrote Harold Brodkey, days before he died, in his memoir This Wild Darkness: The Story of My Death. In Saul Bellow’s novel, Herzog, his main character desperately wants to
live in an inspired condition, to know truth, to be free, to love another, to consummate existence, to abide with death in clarity of consciousness – without which, racing and conniving to evade death, the spirit holds its breath and hopes to be immortal because it does not live …
And in his poem, Note to Reality, Tony Hoagland, who has died, says much the same thing as Bellow and Brodkey, though in the wandering pastiche of poetry:
Without even knowing it, I have
believed in you for a long time.
When I looked at my blood under a microscope
I could see truth multiplying over and over.
—Not police sirens, nor history books, not stage-three lymphoma
persuaded me
but your honeycombs and beetles; the dry blond fascicles of grass
thrust up above the January snow.
Your postcards of Picasso and Matisse,
from the museum series on European masters.
When my friend died on the way to the hospital
it was not his death that so amazed me
but that the driver of the cab
did not insist upon the fare.
Quotation marks: what should we put inside them?
Shall I say “I” “have been hurt” “by” “you,” you neglectful monster?
I speak now because experience has shown me
that my mind will never be clear for long.
I am more thick-skinned and male, more selfish, jealous, and afraid
than ever in my life.
“For my heart is tangled in thy nets;
my soul enmeshed in cataracts of time…”
The breeze so cool today, the sky smeared with bluish grays and whites.
The parade for the slain police officer
goes past the bakery
and the smell of fresh bread
makes the mourners salivate against their will.
***************************
Nothing concentrates the mind like life-threatening illness; or so you’d think, but like most of us the poet’s “mind will never be clear for long,” so he must “speak now,” when his mind clears enough for him to write a poem. He addresses a love/hate note directly to what UD has always, in her own private lingo, called Mama Reality, that thing Bellow and Brodkey yearn toward, dream of, want to wake themselves from their dream of, so they can enter “clarity of consciousness” and leave the half-life their fear of death has settled them into.
Having overcome, for the moment, his customary half-awareness, the poet now sees that he has long “believed in you” – or he has at least believed in those manifestations of Mama Reality that involve the sheer pulsating amorally-triumphant proliferation of nature: cancerous blood cells overcoming the immune system; high grass overcoming January snow. Not abstractions, or even loud alarms, but the particularity of beetles (dung beetles, featured in Kafka’s Metamorphosis, represent another natural force that feeds on death) and honeycombs “persuade” the poet that reality exists, that life is not sheer dream, evasion, longing. Life is mad, often sweet and beautiful, but uncertainly meaningful, proliferation, as in the honeycombs, or in the piles of postcards of their work that the prolific artist-bees Picasso and Matisse generate.
************
And now we shift to a little narrative, a little memory, still in the key of morbidity and uncertain meaning:
When my friend died on the way to the hospital
it was not his death that so amazed me
but that the driver of the cab
did not insist upon the fare.
I note for the record, Reality, that to be grounded in you is to be hopelessly grounded in life – so much so, that once he died my friend was instantly less real to me than an anonymous, gratuitous, cabbie. That gratuitous gesture – not insisting on the fare – is all of us blindly driving forward to the next event, veering right away from the face of death. So here the poet is back to thinking about our customary half-sleep, our mainly unclarified consciousness:
Quotation marks: what should we put inside them?
Shall I say “I” “have been hurt” “by” “you,” you neglectful monster?
Why have you abandoned me to unreality, to the distancing abstractions of quotation marks rather than the direct expression that, as Herzog says, would allow me “to know truth”? You’re monstrously guilty of neglecting my yearning to be close to you; and at this late date I’m terribly ill – terribly hurt by your amoral proliferating processes – and I’m therefore very angry with you.
“For my heart is tangled in thy nets;
my soul enmeshed in cataracts of time…”
Here is another quotation. The poet draws upon biblical? Romantic? poetic traditions in another form of complaint: I can make this pretty if you like, but the obdurate outraging fact is my powerless implication in your unaccountable story of killing proliferation.
And now we end with brief present-time (real-time?) orientation:
The breeze so cool today, the sky smeared with bluish grays and whites.
The parade for the slain police officer
goes past the bakery
and the smell of fresh bread
makes the mourners salivate against their will.
Well, smeared. ‘Fraid we’re not making much progress out of unclarity, though, as with our response to all those Picassos, we retain aesthetic – painterly – responsiveness to the world. The earlier police siren, alarming us to danger, is now the accomplished death of the police officer; and, as in the narrative of the cab, reality seems to be that thing that hastens us on to the next fresh event, even in the immediate face of death. Rather than mourning, the paraders salivate at the smell of fresh bread.
**********
It is an interesting question, you know – the extent to which our superior human consciousness can really lift us into a realm significantly higher than that of worker bees, enmeshed in cataracts and compelled – against our will – always to freshen and sweeten and proliferate our world until those compulsions turn morbid.
You’d think the story of Stephen Dedalus working his way clear of sexual guilt, Catholic hell, a suffocating family, and of course Ireland itself, would skew antique these days; but just as we’re all susceptible to the New Year, we’re all susceptible to the New Life. Portrait is the ultimate successful makeover.
Put aside your awareness that Stephen’s flight beyond the nets of family country and religion will, in Joyce’s next book, crash-land him back into the same hot mess; recall instead your excitement on first reading this liberation song.
A veiled sunlight lit up faintly the grey sheet of water where the river was embayed. In the distance along the course of the slow-flowing Liffey slender masts flecked the sky and, more distant still, the dim fabric of the city lay prone in haze. Like a scene on some vague arras, old as man’s weariness, the image of the seventh city of christendom was visible to him across the timeless air, no older nor more weary nor less patient of subjection than in the days of the thingmote.
Here’s Dedalus just having broken free of the church; here he euphorically strides farther and farther away from a conversation he’s just had with a priest about joining the Jesuits. Although Stephen’s terror of damnation (he has consorted with prostitutes) has propelled him into a piety so intense that he has now been invited to enter an order, the unfolding conversation about his vocation suddenly makes explicit the absurdity of trying to murder his appetite with metaphysics. “His destiny was to be elusive of social or religious orders.” It’s the artist’s silence, exile, and cunning now, all the way.
How does this newly transformed self see the false world he’s about to leave? What are his thoughts as – manically overwhelmed by his release – he rushes about putting distance between himself and the prisonhouse?
Run that paragraph by me again.
A veiled sunlight lit up faintly the grey sheet of water where the river was embayed. In the distance along the course of the slow-flowing Liffey slender masts flecked the sky and, more distant still, the dim fabric of the city lay prone in haze. Like a scene on some vague arras, old as man’s weariness, the image of the seventh city of christendom was visible to him across the timeless air, no older nor more weary nor less patient of subjection than in the days of the thingmote.
You hear the gentle lilting hyperpoetic music of the thing? He’s looking at a city he’s about to leave – the dead world of “The Dead.” This writing is valedictory, a bittersweet backward view. All is old (“veiled,” “gray,” “faint,” “slow-flowing,” “dim,” “prone,” “vague,” “old,” “weary”) and trapped (“embayed,” “patient of subjection”). The final long sentence ends with the odd obsolescence of thingmote – literally, a raised mound on which Viking settlers met to enact laws; yet a figure too for the tiny ancient vanishing thing Dublin’s about to become in the artist’s rear-view mirror. We’re told this is a modernist novel; but at the moment we’ve got a rhyme-happy Romantic poet hurrying himself up into a pose of nostalgia for beautiful delicate ruins.
A veiled sunlight lit up faintly
The grey sheet of water where
The river was embayed.
The dim fabric of the city Lay prone in haze.
In the days of the thingmote.
The gentle gorgeous insistent quality of these long A‘s underscores the delicacy and immobility of this arrière “arras” scene that hangs in “timeless air.” (And not to belabor the beauty, but look how the dull closed-off short I is everywhere as counterpoint: lit/river/dim/fabric/city/in.) Dublin has become a portrait for the artist. It is no longer an overpowering reality that hurts him, but an aesthetic thing “subject” to his powerful eye.
Yvonne, a character in Malcolm Lowry’s novel Under the Volcano (1947), talks to Hugh, the brother of her alcoholic husband, about her plan to take her husband, Geoffrey, out of Mexico, and move with him to a farm in Canada. She is also hoping to escape, there, the oncoming European war.
She and her husband’s brother are riding horses together near Cuernavaca.
*********
‘Well… What’s to stop us going to Canada, for instance?’
‘… Canada?… Are you serious? Well, why not, but… ’
‘Perfectly.’
They had now reached the place where the railway took its wide leftward curve and they descended the embankment. The grove had dropped behind but there was still thick woodland to their right (above the centre of which had appeared again the almost friendly landmark of the prison watchtower) and stretching far ahead. A road showed briefly along the margin of the woods.
They approached this road slowly, following the single-minded thrumming telegraph poles and picking a difficult course through the scrub.
‘I mean why Canada more than British Honduras? Or even Tristan da Cunha? A little lonely perhaps, though an admirable place for one’s teeth, I’ve heard. Then there’s Gough Island, hard by Tristan. That’s uninhabited. Still, you might colonize it. Or Sokotra, where the frankincense and myrrh used to come from and the camels climb like chamois my favourite island in the Arabian Sea.’
But Hugh’s tone though amused was not altogether sceptical as he touched on these fantasies, half to himself, for Yvonne rode a little in front; it was as if he were after all seriously grappling with the problem of Canada while at the same time making an effort to pass off the situation as possessing any number of adventurous whimsical solutions. He caught up with her.
‘Hasn’t Geoffrey mentioned his genteel Siberia to you lately?’ she said. ‘You surely haven’t forgotten he owns an island in British Columbia?’
‘On a lake, isn’t it? Pineaus Lake. I remember. But there isn’t any house on it, is there? And you can’t graze cattle on fircones and hardpan.’
‘That’s not the point, Hugh.’
‘Or would you propose to camp on it and have your farm elsewhere?’
‘Hugh, listen – ’
‘But suppose you could only buy your farm in some place like Saskatchewan,’ Hugh objected.
An idiotic verse came into his head, keeping time with the horse’s hooves: Oh take me back to Poor Fish River, Take me back to Onion Lake, You can keep the Guadalquivir, Como you may likewise take. Take me back to dear old Horsefly, Aneroid or Gravelburg…
‘In some place with a name like Product. Or even Dumble,’ he went on. ‘There must be a Dumble. In fact I know there’s a Dumble.’
‘All right. Maybe it is ridiculous. But at least it’s better than sitting here doing nothing!’
[…] At this moment the best and easiest and most simple thing in the world seemed to be the happiness of these two people in a new country. And what counted seemed probably the swiftness with which they moved. He thought of the Ebro. Just as a long-planned offensive might be defeated in its first few days by unconsidered potentialities that have now been given time to mature, so a sudden desperate move might succeed precisely because of the number of potentialities it destroys at one fell swoop…
… He all but shook her horse with enthusiasm. ‘I can see your shack now. It’s between the forest and the sea and you’ve got a pier going down to the water over rough stones, you know, covered with barnacles and sea anemones and starfish. You’ll have to go through the woods to the store.’ Hugh saw the store in his mind’s eye. The woods will be wet. And occasionally a tree will come crashing down. And sometimes there will be a fog and that fog will freeze. Then your whole forest will become a crystal forest. The ice crystals on the twigs will grow like leaves. Then pretty soon you’ll be seeing the jack-in-the-pulpits and then it will be spring.
***************
Canada is the perennial place, the sanctuary which draws you into a crystal forest. Yet Point One wherever you go there you are. And Point Two
Life is, in fact, a battle. Evil is insolent and strong; beauty enchanting, but rare; goodness very apt to be weak; folly very apt to be defiant; wickedness to carry the day; imbeciles to be in great places, people of sense in small, and mankind generally unhappy. But the world as it stands is no narrow illusion, no phantasm, no evil dream of the night; we wake up to it, forever and ever; and we can neither forget it nor deny it nor dispense with it.
And Point Three (intimately related to Points One and Two):
There may be useful reconsiderations and redescriptions, but you really did have those parents, you really did make of it what you made of it, you really did have those siblings, really did grow up in that economic climate. These are all hard difficult facts. Redescribed, they can be modified, things can evolve. But it isn’t magic.
You’re a problem; and now your president is a problem too. Okay. But this place is where you really are. Dig your heels in and put up your dukes.
… given at the Georgetown Public Library. Another good turn-out today, with a terrific post-lecture discussion.
**********************************
Lecture Two: Stirring dull roots with spring rain: Poetry as Life Itself April 9, 2:00 to 4:00 p.m.
I
DREADING SPRING, DREADING NATIONAL POETRY MONTH
Rather than begin with a summary of last Saturday’s talk, I’ll be referring to it throughout this one, reminding you of continuities if you were here last week, and laying out those continuities I hope sufficiently clearly for those of you who weren’t.
It’s April, and the world wants us to be happy.
The sun is out in a particularly thrilling way (at least it has been) – it emerges from the dark, from the overcast of rain showers. Cherry trees are animated by the wind; the world wants us to feel and see its aliveness. The morning bird chorus is like the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. Even the weird weather – full-on spring, then snow, then a wind storm, then spring again – is part of the thrill. Gaia – the earth as living organism – wants us to feel and hear and celebrate its aliveness – and our aliveness, as part of the living organism that is the planet. And here I’ll remind you of the quotation from the psychoanalyst Adam Phillips around which my first lecture revolved: “Everybody is dealing with how much of their own aliveness they can bear, and how much they need to anesthetize themselves.” The provocation toward aliveness is arguably most acutely felt in excitingly transitional April. October is wistfully transitional; April is excitingly transitional. Things are blooming back to life, not flaming out toward death.
I mean, that’s one way – a pagan way if you like – to put it, to put the way we and generations of poets seem to feel about the spring. Poets after all are people who put our emotional and intellectual intuitions about this season on paper. Poets duly note the feelings coursing through them as the winds exhilarate them and long drifts of tulips thrill them.
A Christian poet like Gerard Manley Hopkins (by the way, we’ll look at his most famous poem next Saturday, for my final lecture in this series) will see all of this as animated not by Gaia but by God, a God to whom we can pray and even with whom, as Hopkins says in one of his poems, we can “contend.” His poem, which I’ve distributed, called “Thou art indeed just, Lord, if I contend,” is an extended complaint about the disparity between the poet’s inner lack of aliveness and happiness and generativity, and the patent aliveness and happiness and generativity of the world in spring. Why should I be dead and the world alive? Everything in the world is blessed by God with vitality and delight and creativeness – everything except me.
… banks and brakes
Now, leavèd how thick! lacèd they are again
With fretty chervil, look, and fresh wind shakes
Them; birds build – but not I build; no, but strain,
Time’s eunuch, and not breed one work that wakes.
Mine, O thou lord of life, send my roots rain.
It’s the same deal we discussed last week in regard to the famous opening lines of TSE’s The Waste Land – winter kept us – the dead – warm; spring now hurts us with sharp reminders of our spiritual deadness relative to a living world.
Here’s a DH Lawrence poem that makes the same move, first marveling at the spring and then concluding
And I, what fountain of fire am I among
This leaping combustion of spring? My spirit is tossed
About like a shadow buffeted in the throng
Of flames, a shadow that’s gone astray, and is lost.
Indeed there are plenty of poems that contend with spring, that actually hate the spring because it brings the “lie” of life, the myth of repleteness and generativity. Edna St Vincent Millay ends her poem “Spring” in the following way:
Life in itself
Is nothing,
An empty cup, a flight of uncarpeted stairs.
It is not enough that yearly, down this hill,
April
Comes like an idiot, babbling and strewing flowers.
It is not merely that we may feel internally inert; we may have a metaphysical appraisal in play about life as nothing. We may be nihilistic, or we may have strong nihilistic tendencies. “It is not enough”; Millay wants more – and it is our too-much desire – our unsatisfiable desire always for more, for a spring and for a world and indeed for a poem that will not be nothing, that will not, after its invigorating language rouses us to something, that will not remind us with a crash that life in itself may be nothing, and any particular poem is in this all-deflating context in itself no big deal. We desire a poem that does not make us turn away in disappointment from beautiful things like the spring and like poems.
Another poet, Kim Addonizio, in “Onset,” ends her poem of spring-dread (and note that title – “onset” – like a disease) by saying
it’s spring
and it’s starting again, the longing that begins, and begins, and begins.
And never gets anywhere – a painful perpetual advent of desire, prompted by spring. Desire, Freud wrote, is always in excess; and desire in the context of spring, or in the act of reading a gorgeous vivid poem, is uncontrollably prompted to be excessive.
Or let me give you a musical example, an argument about something rather brilliant that Beethoven does in some of his late works according to Dmitri Tymockzo. Recognizing our “excessive” desires and the impossibility of any musical work fully satisfying them, the composer incorporates the idea of excess, of the impossible to reach musical apotheosis inside certain works.
One might say that Beethoven’s musical “idea”–that is, the thematic material, as originally presented in [one of his] Sonata’s exposition–is in conflict with the limitations of his instrument, as represented by the high D in the soprano voice. The music “wants” to reach a high B-flat, but it gets “stuck” on the lower note. Such conflicts between musical “ideas” and the exigencies of actual performance are typical of Beethoven’s music. Especially in his late pieces, Beethoven frequently wrote music that was difficult, if not impossible, to play: for example, the very high vocal passages in the Missa Solemnis and Ninth Symphony, or certain near-impossible leaps in the Hammerklavier Sonata, op. 106. In these passages, the musical score seems to be in conflict with the human beings who are trying to perform it.
What is unusual, even unique, about the Tempest is the way the music seems to portray its own limitations. Instead of a conflict between the music and its performers, or between the desire of the composer and the abilities of the players, the Tempest is a piece of music that is in conflict with itself… the drama of the passage is the way it symbolizes both desire–in the form of the chromatically ascending chords–and limitation, as represented by the fixed upper note. It is as if Beethoven were suggesting that, while no amount of effort on his part would enable him to leap beyond the limits of his piano, his music demands that he try–as if the world of sticks and wires, the ordinary physical realm in which pianos exist, cannot be reconciled with the world of Beethoven’s aspiration. Needless to say, this coupling of an exhortation to transcendence (here heard as an inexorable chromatic chordal ascent) with a warning about the impossibility of success (the stubborn pedal point at the top of the piano) recalls Kant’s conception of sublimity. Like the Temple of Isis, the music seems to question its own adequacy, giving with one hand what it takes away with the other.
Much poetry as well, let us say, folds its knowledge of our impossible desire and the reality of its own inadequacy into its mode of expression. That’s another reason people hate it. Recall that I began my first lecture in this series with the following quotation from the film The Big Short:
“Truth is like poetry. And most people fucking hate poetry.”
The critic Ben Lerner suggests a related reason why people hate poetry:
There are varieties of interpenetrating demands subsumed under the word ‘poetry’ – to defeat time, to still it beautifully; to express irreducible individuality in a way that can be recognised socially or, like Whitman, to achieve universality by being irreducibly social, less a person than a national technology; to propound a measure of value beyond money, to defeat the language and value of existing society etc – but one thing all these demands share is that they can’t ever be fulfilled with poems. Hating on actual poems, then, is often an ironic if sometimes unwitting way of expressing the persistence of the demand of Poetry, and the jeremiads in that regard are defences, too, protecting the urgency and purity of the poetic impulse … Poets are liars not because, as Socrates said, they can fool us with the power of their imitations, but because identifying yourself as a poet implies you might overcome the bitter logic of the poetic principle, and you can’t. You can only compose poems that, when read with perfect contempt, clear a place for the genuine Poem that never appears.
Don DeLillo, in his novel Point Omega, says something similar in a more gentle way:
“The true life is not reducible to words spoken or written, not by anyone, ever.” Poetry simply cannot encompass what our excessive desire – here, for the truth – desperately wants it to encompass. And when poetry does try to convey a truth – the truth that perhaps life is nothing, or, as John Updike wrote in a poem composed on his deathbed:
For life’s a shabby subterfuge,
And death is real, and dark, and huge.
The shock of it will register
Nowhere but where it will occur.
when poetry tells us stuff like this – we hate it.
We perhaps mind a little less philosophers pulling the rug out from under us. It’s an intellectual point, rather than an emotionally felt and beautifully – persuasively – rendered truth, when the philosopher Thomas Nagel writes:
[There is an inevitable collision] between the seriousness with which we take our lives and the perpetual possibility of regarding everything about which we are serious as arbitrary, or open to doubt.
This might be the point in my talk to remind you that April is National Poetry Month. For this universal doubt may extend to a certain sort of faith we have may in poetry itself.
While not a government initiative, NPM is celebrated by federal as well as private institutions – and the orientation of NPM activity is of course celebration. Yay, poetry! Yet the poet Richard Howard calls NPM “the worst thing that’s happened to poetry since the advent of the camera and the internal combustion engine,” while his fellow poet, August Kleinzahler asserts that – contrary to the NPM ethos – “Multivitamins are good for you. Exercise, fresh air, and sex are good for you. Fruit and vegetables are good for you. Poetry is not.” The complex and often dark interiority that serious poetry expresses has no place, these poets argue, in the typically affirmative, very public, and, they believe, inevitably trivializing NPM setting. Kleinzahler worries that the difficult and even hateful truth, if you will, that significant poetry so often conveys, is at odds not just with the ethos of NPM but with the folksy upbeat popular presentation of poetry that we get from national figures like Garrison Keillor of Prairie Home Companion.
There is also a UN-sponsored World Poetry Day (March 21), by the way, which is even more celebratory. If you go to the UNESCO WPD site, you read this:
Poetry reaffirms our common humanity by revealing to us that individuals, everywhere in the world, share the same questions and feelings.
I wouldn’t call this a revelation; I’d call it a platitude.
So is that the poetic choice for us as readers? Platitudes we hate or truths we hate?
One way to answer this question is to consider whether our experience or intuition of a certain arbitrariness or even nothingness underlying our existence has to be bitter or disappointing as we meet it poetically. Do we have to go again and again to the poet and hate her because she rouses a desire that there be something and then suggests that there may be nothing? Could it be the opposite – could poetry be one important place where we go to feel, grapple with, explore, play out, the problem of the arbitrary?
The poet John Ashbery indeed argues for a different approach to all of this; in talking about his love of Rothko and Pollack paintings, he asks:
Does their work amount to anything? There’s a possibility that it doesn’t, although I believe in it and want it to exist.
Ashbery goes on to call avant-garde art in general “reckless,” and he notes that
Most reckless things are beautiful in some way, and recklessness is what makes experimental art beautiful, just as religions are beautiful because of the strong possibilities that they are founded on nothing.
In other words, the possibility that life and the various – call them convictions of substance – that we bring to it are founded on nothing – that all of this is a shabby subterfuge, or a shell game, or a big short – means that positing something — faith in God, faith in beauty, faith in humanity, faith in poetry — can be seen as a kind of beautiful and bracing recklessness, a heady, blithe, risky, radical assumption of freedom. Art is one of the major places this free play plays out. Thus Ashbery invites us to enjoy the substance – the stuff that we as human beings make come into existence – even if it has or is very likely to have no substance. He invites us to expect the artist’s positing of this sort to be done in a tentative playful vague messy not quite there way – Pollack, Rothko, or take another great 20th century painter, Cy Twombly. Or take the greatest modern writer of fiction in English – James Joyce. The critic Hugh Kenner says of Joyce that he wants to capture in his prose “the haphazardly evidential quality of life.” We’re not arriving at firm conclusions; we’re gathering and narrating and witnessing the suggestive (evidential) but pretty random flow of experience. Ashbery thus invites us to expect precisely the sort of poetry he and his friend James Schuyler write – sketchy, associative, slangy, inconclusive. So let’s look at our Schuyler poem, the absurdly long Hymn to Life.
II
HYMN TO LIFE
Maybe idiot babbling and flower-strewing of the sort Edna St Vincent Millay complains about at the end of her spring poem is the best a poet who doesn’t want to disappoint us – or to simply register her disappointment – can do. Maybe what our best poets can offer on the spring – on life as a felt bubbling up within us of desire, of longing – is a sort of organized babbling, if that makes any sense.
Hymn to Life – our central spring poem here – can feel like babbling – rather than the song of praise that the word “hymn” prepares us for – and this is for a number of reasons. It goes on and on and on. Its pace never changes – it’s all a collection of neat, complete non-metrical sentences – very few exciting dashes, no mysterious ellipses. No rhyme, no really beautiful or new language. No drama here. It offers no clear symbolism or indeed recurrently meaningful figurative language of any kind. It seems without structure – its words don’t gather up into some moment of truth, epiphany, climax, revelation, acceptance, wisdom. The poetic persona is quite flat – no ecstatic Wordsworth or neurotic Sylvia Plath here, just a pleasant ordinary guy calmly woolgathering. Its lines are long and conversational and rather meandering. Some of its language is strikingly, well, platitudinous – its register often dips into dippy. Dippy or obvious or obviously inadequate or vague.
If it has a discernible form, this poem is a kind of back and forth between objective immediate descriptions of things the poet sees around him as he writes – daily ordinary stuff like trucks delivering goods and dandelions coming up – and what I’d call weak existential questions. The poet doesn’t pretend to be a philosopher or to have anything new to bring to our basic inquiries having to do with being, with knowledge, and with the passage of time. Rather, he seems to want to record faithfully the way these unsettling and pretty much unanswerable questions emerge randomly, and again rather weakly, out of the ordinary moments of our lives. Those of you who know Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs Dalloway might think here of Peter Walsh slowly falling asleep on a park bench while Woolf’s prose follows his faltering stream of consciousness which, like Schuyler’s, turns out to be a combination of quotidian immediate observation and the sudden odd unanswerable existential inquiry.
In short, Schuyler seems to be trying to embed our accurately rendered mental experience in its present-time natural setting; he wants to show how our questions emerge – in real time – out of our experiences. We are not monks retreating to a hermitage in order to prompt meditation; nor are we like monks in already having a transcendent belief framework within which to experience existential questions. So the tension, for instance, between Gerard Manley Hopkins and God that we saw in the poem of his that we looked at earlier – that sort of poetic drama – just isn’t there. Which means that among the risks Schuyler takes in writing a poem of this sort is simply boring you. I’ll be interested, in the discussion after my talk, in finding out how many of you were able to read this poem all the way through.
So here’s its beginning – obviously we’ll only be able to jump about in this poem by way of analysis.
The wind rests its cheek upon the ground and feels the cool damp
And lifts its head with twigs and small dead blades of grass
Pressed into it as you might at the beach rise up and brush away
The sand.
An awkward first sentence, no? A bunch of simple clauses strung together with the word AND. He begins by personifying the wind, which, catching up in its energy twigs and grass, is like a person whose cheek grazes a surface and picks up things from that surface. It’s a strange, strained equivalence – the head of a person, the movement of the wind. And the likeness becomes even more strained when he compares the wind to a very precise human movement – getting up from the beach and brushing sand away from your skin. There’s a kind of defiant silliness to this comparison, made even sillier by the next line.
The day is cool and says, “I’m just staying overnight.”
The day, like a terse house-guest, assures us that the coolness of its air will soon be replaced by something warmer… These lines seem virtual satires of what traditional poets do as they hunt out appropriate metaphors and personify the world around them. (In terms of wind, for instance, think of Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind.”) Schuyler has just taken them a bit too far – his comparison is overwrought and his personification is childishly extreme. Mr Day says I’m just staying overnight. Something from a children’s book.
Yet one of the things I think Schuyler’s trying to convey throughout this poem is the hopelessly and wonderfully human world in which we live. We can’t help humanizing everything; it’s not really childish, it’s just the way we are. We constantly project our attributes onto inanimate objects (the melancholy moon), and here the poet is simply being playful with that impulse by way of making us aware of it – by way of making us see how we actually think. Back to the poem.
The world is filled with music, and in between the music, silence
And varying the silence all sorts of sounds, natural and man made:
There goes a plane, some cars, geese that honk and, not here, but
Not so far away, a scream so rending that to hear it is to be
Never again the same. “Why, this is hell.”
Note the lack of sense (between the music?), the again rather childishly awkward and simplistic formulations (geese – that – honk), and the absurdly abrupt shift of mood – from pleasantries about our musical world to the fact of hearing a hideous (human?) scream. It must be a human scream, because we suddenly get a quotation from Christopher Marlowe’s Dr Faustus: Mephistopheles saying that yes, he is in hell, stuck in hell. So in a few lines we have jumped from pleasant naive nature imagery to the darkest evil. Yet nothing is being brought to this strange jumble by way of a sensibility – and think of last week’s poem, The Waste Land — all of its strange juxtapositions and literary quotations there are made coherent, from the poem’s title onward, by the depressive, cynical, disgusted, and at times elegiac mood of the speaker.. But here is a poem that announces itself as a song of praise to life and in the first few lines we have the statement that we are in hell.
The lines that follow these make clear that the speaker is – among other things – remembering a childhood in Washington DC, and he’s in particular remembering April here, which means cherry blossoms and other iconic spring settings. Let’s continue with another section of the poem.
Tomorrow
Will begin another spring. No one gets many, one at a time, like a long
Awaited letter that one day comes. But it may not say what you hoped
Or distraction robs it of what it once would have meant. Spring comes
And the winter weather, here, may hold. It is arbitrary, like the plan
Of Washington, D.C. Avenues and circles in asphalt web and no
One gets younger: which is not, for the young, true, discovering new
Freedoms at twenty, a relief not to be a teen-ager anymore.
The feel of this – and the feel of the whole poem – is laconic, mildly contemplative, with language that gestures toward the possibility of higher and clearer perceptions of things but never quite gets there. Again, this is a mind in the present-time process of thinking about things and describing things: we can’t expect non-sketchy, fully formed thoughts and arguments. Further, given what I’ve so far suggested, we shouldn’t be surprised to encounter the word arbitrary early on. Spring may well fail to satisfy our expectations of it, either romantic or weather-related, and we should accept that failure and the larger arbitrariness of reality in which it occurs – as we ourselves right here accept today that snow of all things was in today’s forecast.
The final lines of this excerpt point again to the loose free associational movement of this poem – how can he go from our city’s circles in asphalt to no one getting any younger (a platitude), after which he says – paradoxically – that actually one can get younger in the sense that the transition from teenage years to one’s twenties tends to be one of greater freedoms (i.e., you feel younger). These are the squirrelings of a real mind in real time. And a mind dealing throughout the poem with time passing, with getting older – he is now, we gather, fifty, and he’s not happy about this.
The turning of the globe is not so real to us
As the seasons turning and the days that rise out of early gray
—The world is all cut-outs then—and slip or step steadily down
The slopes of our lives where the emotions and needs sprout. “I
Need you,” tree, that dominates this yard, thick-waisted, tall
And crook branched. Its bark scales off like that which we forget:
Pain, an introduction at a party, what precisely happened umpteen
Years or days or hours ago.
Pedestrian, yes, and sort of winsomely lame or lamely winsome; yet this is the mind, it is life as it is lived and this poem is a hymn to life. Life as it is. This is the recognizable human mind, thinking true and it seems to me occasionally rather insightful things. That we can be told all our lives about earth’s rotation and never “realize” this – never feel it as any kind of reality – seems intriguing and worth thinking about, as does the fact that what we can grasp tends to be what’s closest to us, like obvious seasonal changes and of course the movement of the sun across one full day. I mean, this is the theme of our smallness, our incapacity in the face of large terrestrial and large metaphysical challenges – but the feel of the poem, again, is not one of disappointment or longing or bitterness in the face of our limitations, our parochial lameness. This is a poem that shows us how it would look not to write like the embittered spring poems I quoted from in the first part of this lecture, but rather to write poetry out of the rather unevolved apprehension of a world of “cut-outs” – a very partial and simple form of world-apprehension, but perhaps a form of world-apprehension with empirical reality, and with much to recommend it.
As this excerpt proceeds, we once again get the almost-comically childish humanization of nature. “I need you,” tree, because you’re tall and solid and permanent and I’m small and insubstantial and transient. Gazing at you, I can begin to sense the history of my own growth – what has remained in place, what has scaled off – what is important, what is unimportant. Gazing at you I can strengthen my sense of both the sameness of my life and my impermanence, and maybe come to some sort of peace with these things.
Time brings us into bloom and we wait, busy, but wait
For the unforced flow of words and intercourse and sleep and dreams
In which the past seems to portend a future which is just more
Daily life.
The life that Hymn to Life is celebrating and praising is – let’s argue – the very unforced flow of its own language, the life of one human being’s forward poetic energy. This is why Michael Hofman calls this poem “a long, tangent-driven poem-fleuve.” It is a long babbling river of words, exhilaratingly (or maybe boringly) unforced. In this passage, Schuyler rightly notes that all our lives, even as we’re busy making a life, we wait for a moment, we idealize a moment, when everything will fit and flow together with ease and naturalness. We dream of a time when we’re not anxious about time, not weighed down by the business of desiring a certain future for ourselves, but instead freed to think of the passage of time as a calm “just more of the same” sort of thing. Schuyler’s poem I think wants to exemplify this perhaps better way to live – a long unforced freeing of consciousness in which we are able to perceive that we should – uh – go with the flow.
A
Quote from Aeschylus: I forget. All, all is forgotten gradually and
One wonders if these ideas that seem handed down are truly what they were?
An idea may mutate like a plant, and what was once held basic truth
Become an idle thought. like, “Shall we plant some periwinkles there
By that bush? They’re so to be depended on.”
Note how the movement of this excerpt is toward the more and more trivial, the more and more minute, as we “slope” down from Aeschylus to a vague invocation of “ideas” to the degradation of basic truths over time to little more than idle daily pragmatic thoughts. This is clearly a poem distrustful of ideas and great thinkers — they are to be forgotten.
III
THE RECOVERY OF APPETITE AND THE NEED NOT TO KNOW YOURSELF
To conclude: I have, in this lecture, offered you two models of spring poems, which is to say poems about the recovery of aliveness, felt seasonally and – as a personal possibility – internally. One model of poem – inaugurated for our time by Eliot’s The Waste Land, but as I hope my examples showed, succeeded – and to some extent preceded – by countless other similar poems – one model is essentially a complaint having to do with the disparity between one’s sense of one’s own meager inner sources and supplies of aliveness and the profuse aliveness of the natural world around you in spring. Lord, send my roots rain.
I don’t deny that there are other poems – some of them by Hopkins himself – which are straightforward celebrations of the advent of spring and of the sense of one’s own aliveness returning in the spring. I am arguing that the complaint mode tends to dominate in our time as we become oppressed by our sense that the sources of meaning and value that have traditionally kept human beings reasonably buoyant whatever the season are perhaps in modernity and postmodernity no longer there, whether these sources were pagan (we are part of nature and therefore as subject to its recurrences and exhilarations as nature itself; and by the way if you want a version of cutesy modern paganism, I’ve included in your handouts e e cummings’ poem, in just spring) or religious (the spring is a gift to us from God, and to be celebrated as such).
I have also suggested that a certain sort of twentieth century poem represents a rather intelligent and workable alternative to the complaint mode, and that James Schuyler’s Hymn to Life is a strong example of that kind of poem. Rather than note the spring-inspired recurrence of desire, longing, aliveness in oneself and then – recall our poetic examples – shake your fist at nature for having stirred atavistic energies within oneself that will never be allowed to run as free as the wind — or let us suggest along with Adam Phillips that you will never allow them to run free — rather than doing that, perhaps you could, like Schuyler, stop fretting that “life in itself is nothing” (quoting Millay) or contending with God for having unjustly singled you out for nothingness, and instead perhaps you could adopt the rather more fun ‘acrobatics’ of John Asbery, who, you will recall, says this:
Most reckless things are beautiful in some way, and recklessness is what makes experimental art beautiful, just as religions are beautiful because of the strong possibilities that they are founded on nothing.
Here we simply fly above the possible nothingness; yet more, we find beautiful our own recklessness – our artists’ recklessness – in doing that. A poem like Hymn to Life could be understood as endless flight above the abyss, with the poet’s endless words a way of staying aloft not by finding sources of support like religion and other forms of steadying, transcendent belief, but simply by maintaining verbal altitude. In Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce’s hero Stephen Dedalus says that as a writer he’s going to “fly by those nets” – he’s going to soar above the nets of religion, nationality, and all the other inherited foundational beliefs that have oppressed him. But that’s a different model; in our time the nets have been folded away; they can no longer save – or entrap – you. Our artists fly above an abyss.
Asked why one writes, the critic Harold Bloom responds:
One writes to keep going, to keep oneself from going mad. One writes to be able to write the next piece of criticism or to live through the next day or two. Maybe it’s an apotropaic gesture, maybe one writes to ward off death. I’m not sure. But I think in some sense that’s what poets do. They write their poems to ward off dying.
Dying here can be understood not merely as physical death but the spiritual, affective, drying out, the personal enervation, the inability to be adequate to the life of the world, about which so many of the poets of our time write. The ongoingness we noted in Schuyler’s poem – our sense that what moves it forward is not a myth, an organization of symbols, a narrative, a sensibility, or even much of a point – turns out to be life itself, the poet’s reckless pouring out of song which is his life, his particular mode of being an individual in the world at a particular time, with a certain unresolvable set of memories, confusions, regrets, and so forth and so forth and so forth, all of which being a poet, he turns into poetry. Such a poem will end anywhere and anyhow; it will begin anywhere and anyhow; one can excerpt from it anywhere and anyhow. It is the ongoingness that life is, life understood as the sort of thing that doesn’t work over time toward great moments of insight and acceptance and reconciliation and triumph and vindication and utter collapse and whatever you’re hoping and dreading it works toward.
It’s like that great poem by Philip Larkin – arguably England’s greatest mid-twentieth century poet – called I Remember, I Remember, when he thinks back on the town in which he grew up. Here’s part of it:
Our garden, first: where I did not invent
Blinding theologies of flowers and fruits,
And wasn’t spoken to by an old hat.
And here we have that splendid family
I never ran to when I got depressed,
The boys all biceps and the girls all chest,
Their comic Ford, their farm where I could be
‘Really myself’. I’ll show you, come to that,
The bracken where I never trembling sat,
Determined to go through with it; where she
Lay back, and ‘all became a burning mist’…
No, apparently the lives of most of us don’t work that way.
But they do! I hear you protest.
Well, maybe. But how about the possibility that we project narrative neatness – rising action, climax, denouement – on lives that actually look more like Schuyler’s poem? That we secure our foundations via plot points? Let me quote again from Adam Phillips.
Analysis should do two things that are linked together. It should be about the recovery of appetite, and the need not to know yourself… Symptoms are forms of self-knowledge. When you think, I’m agoraphobic, I’m a shy person, whatever it may be, these are forms of self-knowledge. What psychoanalysis, at its best, does is cure you of your self-knowledge. And of your wish to know yourself in that coherent, narrative way. You can only recover your appetite, and appetites, if you can allow yourself to be unknown to yourself. Because the point of knowing oneself is to contain one’s anxieties about appetite. It’s only worth knowing about the things that make one’s life worth living, and whether there are in fact things that make it worth living.
If Phillips is right (and maybe he’s not, but let’s go with this), then one function of a certain sort of art – poetry, painting, music – would be to accustom us to the suspension of this baleful project of self-knowing, to pleasure us into the sort of acrobatics that would do away with whatever coherent, narrative, foundational sources of knowledge – self-knowledge, world-knowledge – are tying us down and starving us.
This is not know-nothingism. As Phillips says, the project of knowing now would become one in which we try to know not who we are in some coherent plotted sense, but “about the things that make one’s life worth living, and whether there are in fact things that make it worth living.” By “things,” I don’t think Phillips means ideologies and philosophies and shared transcendent convictions. I think he means, more or less, personal projects, activities, relationships, conversations, forms of inquiry, that you for one reason or another happen to find engrossing. This model of life might imply, as it seems to do in Schuyler’s poem, a modest, reasonably selfless, present-time orientation toward questions of value. What do I see right now as I look around me? What among the things of the world I’m looking at compels in me particular? Yet this “appetitive” model of a life, as I understand it, as Phillips evokes it, doesn’t have to be particularly moral, or at least conventionally moral — what makes your life worth living might be wasting time, or being ruthlessly ambitious. The point is that whatever you’re engrossed by you’re not hastily, impatiently, even bitterly, insisting on some larger fulfillment, some larger structure, within which the thing that engrosses you, the thing that excites your appetite has a larger payoff than things in the sort of world we now inhabit tend to have.
If I can conclude with a return to the problem with things like National Poetry Months and International Poetry Days. The objection that quite a lot of poets have with a day or a month all for them (you’d think they’d be grateful) is precisely the pre-formed, socially affirmative, morally uplifting, publicly acceptable, character of poetry under the sign of on-command-inspirational large-group events. Public poetry in our time tends to be exactly what Phillips is objecting to – a statement of who I am, an affirmation of my roots, my story. Perhaps we should fly above those very unreliable nets.
Scathing Online Schoolmarm might quibble with the order of adjectives here – isn’t childish a bit weaker than ugly, kitsch, ridiculous? Those are stronger words, and I think you should build up to your stronger words to avoid a letdown at the end of a sentence. SOS might have started the list with childish and then continued by means of ascending number of syllables:
kitsch (1)
ugly (2)
ridiculous (4)
“Childish, kitsch, ugly, and rather ridiculous.” Or drop the rather. “Childish, kitsch, ugly, and ridiculous.”
ALGERNON. [Speaking very rapidly.] Cecily, ever since I first looked upon your wonderful and incomparable beauty, I have dared to love you wildly, passionately, devotedly, hopelessly.
CECILY. I don’t think that you should tell me that you love me wildly, passionately, devotedly, hopelessly. Hopelessly doesn’t seem to make much sense, does it?
Doesn’t make much sense and is, again, a bit of a letdown.
In the case of practically bankrupt Louisiana State University finding money to buy “a ‘lazy river’ on the LSU campus in the shape of the letters L-S-U,” it doesn’t really matter how the LSU Faculty Senate president organized his list – the remarkable nature of the construction certainly comes across. Students whose campus is in the tank will soon be literally in the tank, paddling while Rome burns.
