Sundays too my father got up early and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold, then with cracked hands that ached from labor in the weekday weather made banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.
I’d wake and hear the cold splintering,breaking. When the rooms were warm, he’d call, and slowly I would rise and dress, fearing the chronic angers of that house,
speaking indifferently to him, who had driven out the cold and polished my good shoes as well. What did I know, what did I know of love’s austere and lonely offices?
Let confusion be the design and all my thoughts go, swallowed by desire: recess from promises in the November of your arms. Release from the rose: broken reeds, strawpale, through which, from easy branches that mock the blood a few leaves fall. There the mind is cradled, stripped also and returned to the ground, a trivial and momentary clatter. Sleep and be brought down, and so condone the world, eased of the jagged sky and all its petty imageries, flying birds, its fogs and windy phalanxes . . .
I’m still stopping short of anarchy (interesting discussions abound with ‘they’ and Michael Malice).
Some of what you might have heard about the Kyle Rittenhouse trial might be true, but a lot of it is likely manufactured and politically motivated bullshit. When it comes to facts and law, we really need to support a reasonable discovery of facts and reasonable application of law. In my opinion, if generally better men, seeking to protect the public square from generally worse men, are actively punished by the law for mostly bad reasons….well, don’t say you weren’t warned. We’ll see which, if any, charges stick.
As mentioned, I saw the same dynamic emerge with C.H.A.Z. or C.H.O.P. here in Seattle. What might have possibly resembled legitimate protest, and any semblance of reason, appeared briefly at the beginning of this systemic failure of law and order. By the time C.H.O.P emerged, the protest model was thoroughly exhausted (long before then). Over the next few weeks, unsurprisingly, within the anarchy, crazier and more thuggish people made their will felt.
Members of the ‘John Brown Gun Club’ and various other Leftist militia types started doing what the vacated police could not. There were murders and a few rapes.
As I see things, the anti-authoritarian authorities (Seattle political leadership) pretty much failed in describing and understanding reality and human nature, as the fruits of their ideas ripened in the public square.
As always, use your judgment and keep many files open as to what’s true. My biggest concern: Violence is not prohibited, and is, in fact, actively encouraged, within radical doctrines. Religious belief, tradition and much patriotism is shared only by a plurality or only a minority of Americans these days.
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My dead horse to beat: It’d be nice if many liberal idealists, instead of mostly leaning on Boomer over-built institutions (while shrieking at conservatives and Republicans and the clusterfuck found therein), would admit that behind the rainbow flag was always a certain amount of anarchy and radical violence. Now it’s just spilled from the academic enclaves into the public square.
What’s caught my eye is a tweet by Mary Harrington regarding Wendell Berry. I don’t see many folks dipping into the Twitter Catholic enclaves (I have my doubts) nor mentioning Berry’s poems.
I’ve recognized in Berry a very good poet, as well as a poet offering potential direction to the Romantic-Modernist-Postmodern conceptualization of (N)ature. It appears Harrington is conceptualizing Berry’s appropriation below as ‘post liberal’. On the further Left, such conceptualization often occurs in the form of Romantic Primitivism, celebration of The Noble Savage, social constructionism, and ‘any-oppressed-people-is-a-friend-against-my-Oppressor’ logic.
Amongst many liberal idealists, such conceptualization often occurs as progressivism and progressive idealism, Boomer secular-one-world-humanism (the Beatles, man….the Beatles and maybe the World Bank too), global institutional collectivism and the hipster return to the nature in your backyard (a serious over-simplification).
A lot of the Civil Rights logic has resulted in a vast expansion of Federal Authority (the same used to oppress) now backing into a lot of technocratic bureaucracy and Statist authority.
‘But in the year 2000, with Fascism and Communism both discredited, why, I wondered, were so many turning back toward Rousseau? What was the attraction of romantic primitivism? How had ethnic culture become a beau ideal? Cities certainly have their problems, but why did New Yorkers see tribal societies as exemplary and tribespeople as paragons of social virtue?’
If you do manage to develop a bedrock of secular humanism in civil society (subject to that society’s particular traditions and history), won’t that society still have need of its own myths?
Even though Fascism and Communism have been discredited in theory and in practice, adherents remain (look no further than most American academies).
Sandall notes the Popperian elements discussed as from ‘The Open Society And Its Enemies‘, which as a theory, stretches deep into human nature and the West’s Greek traditions.
Is Popper’s ‘critical rationalism’ some of what we’re seeing from the intellectual dark-webbers, or at least many bright people pushing against the fascistic elements found within many far-Left movements, just those movements endorse and feed a far-right, identitarian and ideological response?:
‘…the people and institutions of the open society that Popper envisioned would be imbued with the same critical spirit that marks natural science, an attitude which Popper called critical rationalism. This openness to analysis and questioning was expected to foster social and political progress as well as to provide a political context that would allow the sciences to flourish.’
Sandall again on Popper:
‘His 1945 The Open Society and Its Enemies started out from the contrast between closed autarkic Sparta and free-trading protean Athens, and used it to illuminate the conflict between Fascism and Communism on the one hand, and Western democracy on the other.’
but…:
‘Is an ‘open society’ also supposed to be an ‘open polity’ with open borders? Médecins sans Frontières is all very well: but states cannot be run on such lines. Popper’s is a theory of society, not a theory of the state—and it seems to me that his book offers no clear account of the wider political preconditions that enable ‘open societies’ to both flourish and defend themselves.’
So, how did Sandall see the idea of ‘culture’ having its orgins?:
‘But at a higher philosophical level, and starting out in England, it owed more to the energetic publicising of Herder’s ideas by the Oxford celebrity Sir Isaiah Berlin — ideas of irresistible appeal to the post-Marxist and post-religious liberal mind.’
Open borders and open societies? A desire a ‘culture’ has to forge and solidify its own identity?
‘Now, I do not regard Berlin’s value pluralism as objectionable or even as wrong, except to the extend that it is irrelevant to the MORAL issue and so proves nothing for or against liberalism. Liberalism will indeed recommend itself if one wishes to have a regime that will respect, within limits, a value pluralism.
‘J.S. Mill, etc., continue to be better philosophers than Berlin or Gray because they understand that there must be an absolute moral claim in the end to fundamental rights and negative liberty, however it is thought, or not thought, to be justified. Surrendering the rational case does not even mean accepting the overall “value pluralism” thesis, since Hume himself did not do so. ‘
Back to Sandall:
‘Then something happened: the English word “culture” in the sense employed by Matthew Arnold inhis 1869 Culture and Anarchy got both anthropologized and Germanised — and anthropological culture was the opposite of all that. It meant little more in fact than a social system.’
Any thoughts and comments are welcome.
A rather tangled web indeed…
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Further entanglements on this site, possibly related:
‘…aesthetics is going to replace ethics, art is going to replace religion, as the means through which educated people express their spiritual worthiness…‘
‘Popper’s World 3 is in some respects reminiscent of Plato’s realm of the Forms, but differs in that Popper takes World 3 to be something man-made. As I noted in the earlier post just linked to, this makes his positon at least somewhat comparable the Aristotelian realist (as opposed to Platonic realist) view that universals are abstracted by the mind from the concrete objects that instantiate them rather than pre-existing such abstraction.’
“…and if there could be such a thing as socialism combined with individual liberty, I would be a socialist still. For nothing could be better than living a modest, simple, and free life in an egalitarian society. It took some time before I recognized this as no more than a beautiful dream; that freedom is more important that equality; that the attempt to realize equality endangers freedom; and that, if freedom is lost, there will not even be equality among the unfree.”
My Sorrow, when she’s here with me, Thinks these dark days of autumn rain Are beautiful as days can be; She loves the bare, the withered tree; She walks the sodden pasture lane.
Her pleasure will not let me stay. She talks and I am fain to list: She’s glad the birds are gone away, She’s glad her simple worsted gray Is silver now with clinging mist.
The desolate, deserted trees, The faded earth, the heavy sky, The beauties she so truly sees, She thinks I have no eye for these, And vexes me for reason why.
Not yesterday I learned to know The love of bare November days Before the coming of the snow, But it were vain to tell her so, And they are better for her praise.
Man, looking into the sea— taking the view from those who have as much right to it as you have it to yourself— it is human nature to stand in the middle of a thing but you cannot stand in the middle of this: the sea has nothing to give but a well excavated grave. The firs stand in a procession—each with an emerald turkey-foot at the top— reserved as their contours, saying nothing; repression, however, is not the most obvious characteristic of the sea; the sea is a collector, quick to return a rapacious look. There are others besides you who have worn that look— whose expression is no longer a protest; the fish no longer investigate them for their bones have not lasted; men lower nets, unconscious of the fact that they are desecrating a grave, and row quickly away—the blades of the oars moving together like the feet of water-spiders as if there were no such thing as death. The wrinkles progress upon themselves in a phalanx—beautiful under networks of foam, and fade breathlessly while the sea rustles in and out of the seaweed; the birds swim through the air at top speed, emitting cat-calls as heretofore— the tortoise-shell scourges about the feet of the cliffs, in motion beneath them and the ocean, under the pulsation of light-houses and noise of bell-buoys, advances as usual, looking as if it were not that ocean in which dropped things are bound to sink— in which if they turn and twist, it is neither with volition nor consciousness. –
They eat beans mostly, this old yellow pair. Dinner is a casual affair. Plain chipware on a plain and creaking wood, Tin flatware.
Two who are Mostly Good. Two who have lived their day, But keep on putting on their clothes And putting things away.
And remembering … Remembering, with twinklings and twinges, As they lean over the beans in their rented back room that is full of beads and receipts and dolls and cloths, tobacco crumbs, vases and fringes.
We were supposed to do a job in Italy and, full of our feeling for ourselves (our sense of being Poets from America) we went from Rome to Fano, met the mayor, mulled a couple matters over (what’s a cheap date, they asked us; what’s flat drink). Among Italian literati
we could recognize our counterparts: the academic, the apologist, the arrogant, the amorous, the brazen and the glib — and there was one
administrator (the conservative), in suit of regulation gray, who like a good tour guide with measured pace and uninflected tone narrated sights and histories the hired van hauled us past. Of all, he was most politic and least poetic, so it seemed. Our last few days in Rome (when all but three of the New World Bards had flown) I found a book of poems this unprepossessing one had written: it was there in the pensione room (a room he’d recommended) where it must have been abandoned by the German visitor (was there a bus of them?) to whom he had inscribed and dated it a month before. I couldn’t read Italian, either, so I put the book back into the wardrobe’s dark. We last Americans
were due to leave tomorrow. For our parting evening then our host chose something in a family restaurant, and there we sat and chatted, sat and chewed, till, sensible it was our last big chance to be poetic, make our mark, one of us asked “What’s poetry? Is it the fruits and vegetables and marketplace of Campo dei Fiori, or the statue there?” Because I was
the glib one, I identified the answer instantly, I didn’t have to think — “The truth is both, it’s both,” I blurted out. But that was easy. That was easiest to say. What followed taught me something about difficulty, for our underestimated host spoke out, all of a sudden, with a rising passion, and he said:
The statue represents Giordano Bruno, brought to be burned in the public square because of his offense against authority, which is to say the Church. His crime was his belief the universe does not revolve around the human being: God is no fixed point or central government, but rather is poured in waves through all things. All things move. “If God is not the soul itself, He is the soul of the soul of the world.” Such was his heresy. The day they brought him forth to die, they feared he might incite the crowd (the man was famous for his eloquence). And so his captors placed upon his face an iron mask, in which
he could not speak. That’s how they burned him. That is how he died: without a word, in front of everyone. And poetry — (we’d all put down our forks by now, to listen to the man in gray; he went on softly) — poetry is what he thought, but did not say.
In late October in the park the autumn’s faults begin to show: the houses suddenly go stark beyond a thinning poplar row; the edges of the leaves go brown on every chestnut tree in town.
The honking birds go south again where I have gone in better times; the hardy ones, perhaps, remain to nestle in the snowy pines. I think of one bold, raucous bird whose wintry song I’ve often heard.
I live among so many things that flash and fade, that come and go. One never knows what season brings relief and which will merely show how difficult it is to span a life, given the Fall of Man.
The old ones dawdle on a bench, and young ones drool into their bibs; an idle boffer, quite a mensch, moves fast among the crowd with fibs. A painted lady hangs upon his word as if his sword was drawn.
Among so many falling fast I sometimes wonder why I care; the first, as ever, shall be last; the last are always hard to bear. I never know if I should stay to see what ails the livelong day.
I never quite know how to ask why some men wear bright, silver wings while others, equal to the task, must play the role of underlings. “It’s what you know, not who,” they swore. I should have known what to ignore.
I started early, did my bit for freedom and the right to pray. I leaned a little on my wit, and learned the sort of thing to say, yet here I am, unsatisfied and certain all my elders lied.
A middle man in middle way between the darkness and the dark, the seasons have tremendous sway: I change like chestnuts in the park. Come winter, I’ll be branches, bones; come spring, a wetness over stones.
God has a brown voice, as soft and full as beer. Eleanor, who is more beautiful than my mother, is standing in her kitchen talking and I am breathing in my cigarettes like poison. She stands in her lemon-colored sun dress motioning to God with her wet hands glossy from the washing of egg plates. She tells him! She tells him like a drunk who doesn’t need to see to talk. It’s casual but friendly. God is as close as the ceiling.
Though no one can ever know, I don’t think he has a face. He had a face when I was six and a half. Now he is large, covering up the sky like a great resting jellyfish. When I was eight I thought the dead people stayed up there like blimps. Now my chair is as hard as a scarecrow and outside the summer flies sing like a choir. Eleanor, before he leaves tell him Oh Eleanor, Eleanor, tell him before death uses you up.
**The confessional and often psychiatric despair of many mid-20th century poets can grow tiresome; solipsistic and gauche much of this subject matter can be. It can also fuel some pretty good poems.
Here’s a mildly creepy photo I took, which brought the poem to mind:
I have come to a still, but not a deep center, A point outside the glittering current; My eyes stare at the bottom of a river, At the irregular stones, iridescent sandgrains, My mind moves in more than one place, In a country half-land, half-water. I am renewed by death, thought of my death, The dry scent of a dying garden in September, The wind fanning the ash of a low fire. What I love is near at hand, Always, in earth and air.
