Free at last

In the month since Gabby Giffords was shot in the head, and six others were shot dead around her, much has been said about speech: the power of it, the civility of it, the freedom of it. How strong is the thread between words and deeds? Can a culture of incivility really breed a spree of killing? Can a rhetoric of arms and insurrection really take no responsibility for violent deaths?

The conversation this event provoked was as heated and noisy as the one that preceded it, yielding an even more aggressive defense of the first amendment (the right to free speech) and the second (the right to bear arms), a defense that seemed at times to confuse the two. One Republican said that “those bearing firearms at Congressional town hall meetings and Obama events were no different from anti-Bush demonstrators ‘waving placards.’” Surely the difference is the same one America prizes between its own polity and that of, say, Iran. (I might also add, placards don't kill people, guns kill people.)

That story is told in this article on the Constitution, which points out among other things a discrepancy between a surge in interest and a plunge in knowledge about this fraying parchment. ‘Originalists’ insist, as one imagines Ben Franklin or James Madison would not, on an undeviating and literal interpretation of this founding document, while at the same time surveys reveal many of Americans’ most cherished Constitutional phrases don’t occur in the document at all.

When this new zeal for the Constitution led to a reading of ‘the whole thing’ at the opening of the 112^th Congress in January, several of the Constitutional nasties – like the disenfranchisement of women, and the dehumanising of black people – were left out, silently expunged from the record, without exciting as much commentary as the replacement, in a new edition of Huckleberry Finn, of the word ‘nigger’ with the word ‘slave.’

For all kinds of reasons, these elisions and incisions in the written records are dangerous. On the surface they may seem both correct and caring. Yet changing the past to suit the present is (historically anyway) a diabolical thing to do. Is this what President Obama meant when, in his inaugural address, he urged Americans to ‘choose our better history’?

I don’t think so. I think he wanted Americans to choose the best examples to follow, to fulfill the best promises of the founders, of the fighters, of the freed. I think he wanted America, as he said in his speech at Tucson last month, to be as good as they imagined it.

Unfortunately, Obama’s words are often drowned. Torrential, irrational, mendacious rhetoric floods the thousand channels of communication in contemporary America; swelling when any moderate voice attempts to curb it. After all, “what king so strong / Can tie the gall up in the slanderous tongue?” We might say of Obama, as Measure for Measure’s Duke says in soliloquy:

…millions of false eyes
Are stuck upon thee: volumes of report
Run with these false and most contrarious quests
Upon thy doings: thousand escapes of wit
Make thee the father of their idle dreams
And rack thee in their fancies.

This is what freedom of speech, and its armed defence, have come to mean. Speech free from obligation, free from restraint, free from liability. In the land of free speech, the double-tongued man is king.

Within one heart so diverse mind

I'm about half way through Wolf Hall now, and one character who seems to crop up more and more is the young poet Thomas Wyatt: charmer of women, protege of Cromwell, and former lover of Anne Boleyn, who now so bewitches the King. This arrestingly modern poem, “The Lover Recounteth the Variable Fancy of his Fickle Mistress,” taketh on new significance when read in the context of Wyatt's court life. It's ostensibly about his mistress, but it might also be about the fickle favour of a capricious monarch - in this case a monarch with his beady eye on the poet's ex. It treats of lover's quarrels, but it might also reference the fierce and murderous debates over religion, which after all were knottily entwined with the ‘king's matter’: his licence to set his wife aside, and with her all Roman Catholic sway. It's a whinge from a jealous suitor, but it might also speak to a prevailing mood of certainties being unhinged. Man the paragon is really a fractured creature, subject to conscious as well as unconscious forces; all weakness, all weathercock variability, all wayward mutability are possible now in women and in men.  

Is it possible
That so high debate,
So sharp, so sore, and of such rate,
Should end so soon and was begun so late?
Is it possible?

Is it possible
So cruel intent,
So hasty heat and so soon spent,
From love to hate, and thence for to relent?
Is it possible?

Is it possible
That any may find
Within one heart so diverse mind,
To change or turn as weather and wind?
Is it possible?

Is it possible
To spy it in an eye
That turns as oft as chance on die,
The truth whereof can any try?
Is it possible?

Is it possible?
For to turn so oft,
To bring that lowest which was most aloft,
And to fall highest yet to light soft:
It is possible.

All is possible
Whoso list believe.
Trust therefore first, and after preve,
As men wed ladies by licence and leave.
All is possible.

Do you read me?

Being unable to post as and when I wanted was an interesting deprivation. It made me think about the nature of a blog, or this blog, and whether it’s more like a conversation, or more like a diary, or more like a magazine.  Sometimes I feel it’s more like sending a radio signal into deep space, into an inhuman silence. 

I can look at the stats to find out how many ‘page views’ I’ve had and from how many ‘unique IPs,’ but that doesn’t really give me a sense of readership. Every now and then someone surprises me by telling me they read / have read my blog, but these are singular voices in a dispersed and sporadic population. Though having at least a putative readership is a useful discipline for a reluctant writer, it’s probably better for writer and reader if the readership remains elusive, undetermined, taciturn. This sounds at odds with the tide of interactive media and the user-based thinking that swells it, but I don't see how the influence of something incalculable, unconstant, and largely unexpressed  can be beneficial for one's writing.

I like Adam Kirsch’s comments in an NY Times article on the shifting role of the professional critic:

“If you are primarily interested in writing, then you do not need a definite or immediate sense of your audience: you write for an ideal reader, for yourself, for God, or for a combination of the three. If you want criticism to be a lever to move the world, on the other hand, you need to know exactly where you’re standing — that is, how many people are reading, and whether they’re the right people. In short, you must worry about reaching a ‘general audience,’ with all the associated worries about fragmentation, the decline of print, and the rise of the Internet and its mental groupuscules.”

Obviously he doesn’t have blogging in mind here, but you can see the freedoms of a writer who writes for the sake of writing, not for the sake of being read.  In any field, good writing is its own justification, its own reward.  

“Whether I am writing verse or prose,” says Kirsch, “I try to believe that what matters is not exercising influence or force, but writing well — that is, truthfully and beautifully; and that maybe, if you seek truth and beauty, all the rest will be added unto you.”

The monstrous continent

Another Australian poem today, though the ardour for our national day has slipped back into its place beneath quotidian quarrels over tax and the price of vegetables.

This is “South Country” by Kenneth Slessor, who's more famous for “Five Bells” or “Beach Burial,” which you might, if you were lucky, have studied at school. I like the mingled sense of menace and awe, the feeling of being exposed to immensities, walking on the sky's beach.

After the whey-faced anonymity
Of river-gums and scribbly-gums and bush,
After the rubbing and the hit of brush,
You come to the South Country

As if the argument of trees were done,
The doubts and quarrelling, the plots and pains,
All ended by these clear and gliding planes
Like an abrupt solution.

And over the flat earth of empty farms
The monstrous continent of air floats back
Coloured with rotting sunlight and the black,
Bruised flesh of thunderstorms:

Air arched, enormous, pounding the bony ridge,
Ditches and hutches, with a drench of light,
So huge, from such infinities of height,
You walk on the sky's beach

While even the dwindled hills are small and bare,
As if, rebellious, buried, pitiful,
Something below pushed up a knob of skull,
Feeling its way to air.

Last sea thing

I always have mixed feelings on Australia Day.  My love for this country was learned late, after England cured my anglophilia, but it also involves a violent distate for what usually passes here as patriotic. I love the concatenations of air, water and rock that make this continent. I love the variety and strangeness of it, utterly unique on this planet, adrift in this southern sea. I love the layers and sediments of human life here: the toughness of it, the sweetness. What I hate is the back-patting chest-slapping fair dinkum Aussie blokey bushy true blue outbackery that seems to me contrived, blinkered, and ersatz; so outdoors it’s almost camp. When on Australia Day our leaders and icons trot out the tired old cliches about mateship or the fair go (and many would be angered if they didn’t), we expose not our strengths but our greatest weakness as a nation, which is a poverty of imagination, a failure of poetry. For a nation girt by sea, we seem curiously shy of depth. We have ceased from exploration. We think we know the place.  This is only the official line, however, the line declared safe for politicians, the line marketed in t-shirts and souvenirs. Beneath it, there is poetry. There is subtlety. There is, as Bernard O’Dowd’s “Australia” hints, enduring mystery.  

Last sea-thing dredged by sailor Time from Space,
Are you a drift Sargasso, where the West
In halcyon calm rebuilds her fatal nest?
Or Delos of a coming Sun-God’s race?
Are you for Light, and trimmed, with oil in place,
Or but a Will o’ Wisp on marshy quest?
A new demesne for Mammon to infest?
Or lurks millennial Eden ’neath your face?

The cenotaphs of species dead elsewhere
That in your limits leap and swim and fly,
Or trail uncanny harp-strings from your trees,
Mix omens with the auguries that dare
To plant the Cross upon your forehead sky,
A virgin helpmate Ocean at your knees.