Burn me!

I've been following the story of Florida pastor Terry Jones with interest. On the news this morning I heard he's decided not to host a Koran burning on 11 September, after receiving requests, warnings and opprobrium from various senior figures, including the Pope, President Obama, Hillary Clinton and even Sarah Palin.  What disturbs me about the response to his outrageous proposal was that so much of it was focused on possible recriminations. His gesture was criticised more because of its inflammatory propensities in an already volatile global environment than because book burning itself is a vile and alarming act. His right to burn the books was even defended by New York mayor Michael Bloomburg, who said the 'distasteful' gesture was an exercise of the pastor's first amendment right to freedom of speech. Whether or not setting fire to something constitutes 'speech', in the twentieth century at least, book burning has been rightly viewed as a signal of descent into ignorance, barbarism and violence. It is a refusal to engage the mind or the heart; ironically, it is a denial of the human freedom to think and feel.  An act of provocation, it is also fundamentally an act of illiteracy. It reveals a misapprehension of what books are and how they work. The burning of books is the rage of the fool against what he does not understand.

To mark this sorry episode, here's Bertolt Brecht's sardonic poem on "The Burning of Books."

When the Regime commanded that books with harmful knowledge
Should be publicly burned and on all sides
Oxen were forced to drag cartloads of books
To the bonfires, a banished
Writer, one of the best, scanning the list of the Burned, was shocked to find that his
Books had been passed over. He rushed to his desk
On wings of wrath, and wrote a letter to those in power ,
Burn me! he wrote with flying pen, burn me! Haven’t my books
Always reported the truth ? And here you are
Treating me like a liar! I command you!
Burn me!

All art is a revolt against man’s fate

So said Andre Malraux, French adventure and statesman, and author of the 1933 novel Man's Fate.  I read this quote in Don Watson's Obama essay in The Monthly (June), and it's stayed with me. I think it's profoundly true.

Art and revolt seem synonymous in modernism, but what about grand old art, trundling in the broad furrows of classicism, or floating in the current of conformity? Yes, even this kind of art is revolting in its way.

Whatever other fates we can think of - the fate of meaninglessness in tragic isolation, the fate of biology in the black comedy of marriage - the commonest fate is death. Art - all art - is a revolt against death.

It's a way of recording what's constantly slipping away from us. It's an attempt to fix in space and time what is fundamentally unfixable. It's an attempt to aggrandise what we know is subject at last to indignity. Art is a shot at eternity.

I wonder if our general cultural failure at memento mori accounts for our (general) lack of interest in art. Or perhaps, vice versa.  When we entrust eternity to scientists and cosmeticians, art is aimless and death becomes revolting.

We keep the wall between us

Since I had occasion to misquote this Robert Frost poem “Mending Wall” some days ago, I thought we could visit it entire today. I like Frost because he's something between the frontiersman and the farmer. You can feel the countryside in his quiet tread; hear the gentle but reclusive neighbourliness in his wry voice.

Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun;
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
The work of hunters is another thing:
I have come after them and made repair
Where they have left not one stone on stone,
But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,
To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,
No one has seen them made or heard them made,
But at spring mending-time we find them there.
I let my neighbor know beyond the hill;
And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.
We keep the wall between us as we go.
To each the boulders that have fallen to each.
And some are loaves and some so nearly balls
We have to use a spell to make them balance:
“Stay where you are until our backs are turned!”
We wear our fingers rough with handling them.
Oh, just another kind of outdoor game,
One on a side. It comes to little more:
He is all pine and I am apple-orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, “Good fences make good neighbors.”
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
“Why do they make good neighbors? Isn't it
Where there are cows? But here there are no cows.
Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That wants it down!” I could say “Elves” to him,
But it's not elves exactly, and I'd rather
He said it for himself. I see him there,
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me,
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father's saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, “Good fences make good neighbors.”

I also enjoyed his appearance with Krusty the Clown in 1963:

Robert Frost: [reading] “He will not see me stopping here, to watch his woods fill up with snow...”
Krusty: Hey, Frosty! You want some snow, man?
[He pulls a bellrope, and an avalanche of fake snow is dumped on Frost]
Robert Frost: We discussed this, and I said no.

You can feel the gentle and reclusive wryness in Krusty's voice.

Ten thousand things are growing in the radiance

Today is the first day of Spring (at least in the southern hemisphere - what's the deal with the northern hemisphere??), and it deserves some literary eclat. There are some well-loved lines about Spring, though fewer than for Autumn, as I noted here.  In Canberra, the cherry trees are blossoming in earnest and a lot of the big bare trees are covered in tiny buds. So here are Blake and Wordsworth, to represent the orthodox tradition. 

William Blake "To Spring", 1793

O thou with dewy locks, who lookest down
Through the clear windows of the morning, turn
Thine angel eyes upon our western isle,
Which in full choir hails thy approach, O Spring!

The hills tell one another, and the listening
Valleys hear; all our longing eyes are turn’d
Up to thy bright pavilions: issue forth
And let thy holy feet visit our clime!

Come o’er the eastern hills, and let our winds
Kiss thy perfumèd garments; let us taste
Thy morn and evening breath; scatter thy pearls
Upon our lovesick land that mourns for thee.

O deck her forth with thy fair fingers; pour
Thy soft kisses on her bosom; and put
Thy golden crown upon her languish’d head,
Whose modest tresses are bound up for thee.

William Wordsworth "Lines Written in early spring", 1798  

I heard a thousand blended notes,
While in a grove I sate reclined,
In that sweet mood when pleasant thoughts
Bring sad thoughts to the mind.

To her fair works did Nature link
The human soul that through me ran;
And much it grieved my heart to think
What man has made of man.

Through primrose tufts, in that green bower,
The periwinkle trailed its wreaths;
And ’tis my faith that every flower
Enjoys the air it breathes.

The birds around me hopped and played,
Their thoughts I cannot measure:--
But the least motion which they made
It seemed a thrill of pleasure.

The budding twigs spread out their fan,
To catch the breezy air;
And I must think, do all I can,
That there was pleasure there.

If this belief from heaven be sent,
If such be Nature’s holy plan,
Have I not reason to lament
What man has made of man?

I also like these lines (loosely translated) from a Han dynasty Fu - somehow more outdoorsy than Blake or Wordsworth ever sound:

Sunflowers in the field are purest green,
The morning dew awaits the sun to dry it.
The warm spring spreads round its favours,
Ten thousand things are growing in the radiance.

Something there is that doesn't love a stonewall

Here is a very good article from the NY Times about the failure of spin and stonewalling in some high-profile disasters. BP's failure to speak honestly and remorsefully, instead making things worse with attempts to trivialise the disaster, is particularly egregious, proving how vast an echo a leader's words can have. CEO Tony Hayward's "I want my life back" will probably live in memory the way Clinton's "I did not have relations with that woman" has, or Nixon's "I am not a crook."  There's much to be said for speaking the truth.