Close close all night the lovers keep

Much has been made this month of what would have been Ronald Reagan's 100th birthday, had he lived beyond 2004.  Much less has been made of another dead centenarian, Elizabeth Bishop, who also would have turned 100 this week, had she not died in 1979. She was an orphan from New England who became America's poet laureate in 1949. A graduate of  Vassar, she inherited enough to live independently and travel widely, especially in South America, later taking up teaching posts. She was gay, and wrote of longing and loss. Her most well-known poem is probably “The Waiting Room,” but as it's rather long, I chose this one.

Close close all night
the lovers keep.
They turn together
in their sleep,

close as two pages
in a book
that read each other
in the dark.

Each knows all
the other knows,
learned by heart
from head to toes.

Beyond the pale cast of thought

Francis Wheen’s How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World: A Short History of Modern Delusions might better have been called That Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World, or even When, as he doesn’t really explain How, much less Why. The book is a pleasing rant with some delicious verbiage that sets out to give short shrift to anything that falls on the wrong side of rational. For Wheen, this line is a sharp divide, drawn in roughly 1750, that casts into an intellectual wilderness a quite bewildering array of human history: free market fundamentalism, Islamism, creationism, new ageism, managerialism,  leftism, self-helpism, Tony Blairism…the list goes on.

And it is simply a list, though an entertaining one. Wheen makes no attempt to connect these rebellions or retreats, (except that they all somehow offer an affront to the Enlightenment thinkers he admires), or to account for the persistent hungers that drive the embrace of irrationality, conspiracy, spirituality, alterity across such a dispersed range of human life.  Even within these groups, divisions or diversions don’t show up in Wheen’s view of them over the fence. He tends to expose inconsistent behaviour in groups too broad to be consistent; for example ‘the left’ does this or that, thinks this or that, apparently as one.  And he naturally has no room for difference (certainly not for differance!) within the thought or acts of one person, so his world is one of goodies and baddies. Most of the last three decades (the decline of reason beginning precisely in 1979) are peopled by baddies.

He offers no acknowledgement of whence the cultural revolutions of the last fifty years sprung and what they achieved, sourcing any good or compassionate impulses in the enlightened thinkers of two hundred and fifty years ago.  His purpose is ‘to show how the humane values of the Enlightenment have been abandoned or betrayed, and why it matters.’ With the egregious exceptions of suicide bombers and Enron, he doesn’t really show ‘why it matters’ except that it annoys him. He allows no gains to proceed from irrational foundations, and does not begin to imagine what, if his rationalist agenda were rigorously pursued, might be lost.

Thanks to Wheen’s gift for insult the book is amusing; the sheer quantity of synonyms for ‘nonsense’ is impressive.  But it is a product of journalistic ire, rather than sustained thought or analysis. And for all its rationalist bluster, the book falls readily into idealism, in particular an idealism about America that his own evidence would seem to discredit. He writes as though America began in 1776, as an idea founded on principles, instead of a culture that grew from a chaotic melange of nations, religions, ideologies, and pathologies.  He writes about the enlightenment with the reverence of a true believer, and about its prophets with a blind faith in their enduring soundness. A prophet himself, rebuking an apostate modernity, he sounds in the end like the voice of one crying in the wilderness.

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.”