Bright gleam of our bright star

I confess: I have Obama-fever. My admiration morphed into something more like fandom when Airforce 1 touched down two days ago. I'd like to think it's not because he's an American celebrity, but more because he's a piece of American history. Especially but not only when he speaks, there's an echo of Martin Luther King Jr in his presence; a sense of somehow being larger than his particular moment. It's there when he drops a line like “History is on the side of the free,” as he did in his address to Parliament yesterday. In this line, and in his many “arc of justice” references, there's a more deliberate resonance of Dr King, drawn from the speech King gave in Georgia in August 1967, about eight months before his death. Though beleaguered and embattled, three-quarters through an extremely tough term, Obama seems still to stand in the sweep of the same arc, to be part of the same dream.  

[L]et us go out with a “divine dissatisfaction.” Let us be dissatisfied until America will no longer have a high blood pressure of creeds and an anemia of deeds. Let us be dissatisfied until the tragic walls that separate the outer city of wealth and comfort and the inner city of poverty and despair shall be crushed by the battering rams of the forces of justice. Let us be dissatisfied until those that live on the outskirts of hope are brought into the metropolis of daily security. Let us be dissatisfied until slums are cast into the junk heaps of history, and every family is living in a decent sanitary home. Let us be dissatisfied until the dark yesterdays of segregated schools will be transformed into bright tomorrows of quality, integrated education. Let us be dissatisfied until integration is not seen as a problem but as an opportunity to participate in the beauty of diversity. Let us be dissatisfied until men and women, however black they may be, will be judged on the basis of the content of their character and not on the basis of the color of their skin. Let us be dissatisfied. Let us be dissatisfied until every state capitol houses a governor who will do justly, who will love mercy and who will walk humbly with his God. Let us be dissatisfied until from every city hall, justice will roll down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream. Let us be dissatisfied until that day when the lion and the lamb shall lie down together, and every man will sit under his own vine and fig tree and none shall be afraid. Let us be dissatisfied. And men will recognize that out of one blood God made all men to dwell upon the face of the earth [...] Difficult and painful as it is, we must walk on in the days ahead with an audacious faith in the future. And as we continue our charted course, we may gain consolation in the words so nobly left by that great black bard who was also a great freedom fighter of yesterday, James Weldon Johnson:


Stony the road we trod,
Bitter the chastening rod
Felt in the days
When hope unborn had died.

Yet with a steady beat,
Have not our weary feet
Come to the place
For which our fathers sighed?

We have come over the way
That with tears hath been watered.
We have come treading our paths
Through the blood of the slaughtered,

Out from the gloomy past,
Till now we stand at last
Where the bright gleam
Of our bright star is cast.

Let this affirmation be our ringing cry. It will give us the courage to face the uncertainties of the future. It will give our tired feet new strength as we continue our forward stride toward the city of freedom. When our days become dreary with low hovering clouds of despair, and when our nights become darker than a thousand midnights, let us remember that there is a creative force in this universe, working to pull down the gigantic mountains of evil, a power that is able to make a way out of no way and transform dark yesterdays into bright tomorrows. Let us realize the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice.

Willful ignorance

in

It seems strange to defend Shakespeare against hacks who sacrifice history to entertainment, since that was his stock in trade, but I'm pleased to see Anonymous getting not a few critical thrashings. Here's one from Ron Rosenbaum in Slate, and another from Stephen Marche in the New York Times.

There's lots to say about a film that so lavishly entertains such a foolish premise, and I don't think Rosenbaum will be the last to castigate it as, in Macbeth's words, “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” The Oxford theory, on which the plot depends, has been more than adequately debunked by any number of proper scholars, who wouldn't have given it attention it patently didn't deserve if its proponents hadn't been so damned irrepressible. As Rosenbaum moans, though every credible scholar has convincingly killed it, it won't stay dead. And I fear this film, in spite of the critical drubbing, will breathe life into it.

Of course the argument in defence of the film will be that it is, after all, just a film. Who cares whether it's true or not? Where's the harm in indulging a fantasy? You all liked Shakespeare in Love, riddled though it was with historical inaccuracies and aesthetic irritants - what's the difference?

First of all, no we didn't. It was awful.

Secondly, there's a great difference between a playful version of historical truth and a fantastic conspiracy masquerading as history. There's a difference of intent that this defence disingenuously elides.

Thirdly, the film, like Dan Brown's novels, gives lunatic theories cultural purchase they would not otherwise have had. It normalises nuttery and gives the flimsy fringe of speculation equal standing with the fruits of serious scholarship. The argument that “it's only a film” rests on the assumption that scholarship ultimately carries more cultural weight, though in practice films have radically overtaken scholarship as determinants of what is generally known and believed.

Fourthly, where good art makes explicit the temporary compact between teller and told, this kind of art rests on a shadowy pact where the agreement is never quite made. There's a wink and nudge with every fictive marker, a juvenile refusal on the part of the teller to acknowledge that what he is engaged in is, in fact, play. (For Shakespeare, the play was the thing.)

Fifthly, where a conspiracy interferes in history, very often the truth is much more interesting, compelling, and rich than the fantasy that displaces it, and it demands our attention. By ceding influence to untruth, we dull our receptivity to truth. If we have no capacity for truth, we render ourselves incapable of justice.

Finally, the persistence of the Oxford theory does injustice of the most ignoble kind to the greatest writer in the English language. Based not on any documentary evidence but on the assumption that a working-class boy with a grammar school education couldn't have written so beautifully and profoundly, it is an enduring insult to a miraculously good writer. Instead of spending energy on underserving conspiracies about these literary miracles, we should be striving to deserve them.

I dream of you walking

Today is our anniversary. My small act of commemoration comes from a poem by Kentucky farmer/writer Wendell Berry, “In the Country of Marriage.” These are the first three stanzas.

I dream of you walking at night along the streams
of the country of my birth, warm blooms and the nightsongs
of birds opening around you as you walk.
You are holding in your body the dark seed of my sleep.

This comes after silence. Was it something I said
that bound me to you, some mere promise
or, worse, the fear of loneliness and death?
A man lost in the woods in the dark, I stood
still and said nothing. And then there rose in me,
like the earth's empowering brew rising
in root and branch, the words of a dream of you
I did not know I had dreamed. I was a wanderer
who feels the solace of his native land
under his feet again and moving in his blood.
I went on, blind and faithful. Where I stepped
my track was there to steady me. It was no abyss
that lay before me, but only the level ground.

Sometimes our life reminds me
of a forest in which there is a graceful clearing
and in that opening a house,
an orchard and garden,
comfortable shades, and flowers
red and yellow in the sun, a pattern
made in the light for the light to return to.
The forest is mostly dark, its ways
to be made anew day after day, the dark
richer than the light and more blessed,
provided we stay brave
enough to keep on going in.

The toad work

Today was my last day in a job that has furnished our table but not my soul. I haven't been doing it long enough for too much sighing and exclaiming this afternoon, so rather than any grand eulogy, I place upon my empty desk, without bitterness, this pair of poems by Philip Larkin.

Toads

Why should I let the toad work
Squat on my life?
Can’t I use my wit as a pitchfork
And drive the brute off?

Six days of the week it soils
With its sickening poison -
Just for paying a few bills!
That’s out of proportion.

Lots of folk live on their wits:
Lecturers, lispers,
Losers, loblolly-men, louts -
They don’t end as paupers;

Lots of folk live up lanes
With fires in a bucket,
Eat windfalls and tinned sardines -
They seem to like it.

Their nippers have got bare feet,
Their unspeakable wives
Are skinny as whippets - and yet
No one actually starves.

Ah, were I courageous enough
To shout, Stuff your pension!
But I know, all too well, that’s the stuff
That dreams are made on:

For something sufficiently toad-like
Squats in me, too;
Its hunkers are heavy as hard luck,
And cold as snow,

And will never allow me to blarney
My way to getting
The fame and the girl and the money
All at one sitting.

I don’t say, one bodies the other
One’s spiritual truth;
But I do say it’s hard to lose either,
When you have both.

Toads, revisited.

Walking around in the park
Should feel better than work:
The lake, the sunshine,
The grass to lie on,

Blurred playground noises
Beyond black-stockinged nurses -
Not a bad place to be.
Yet it doesn't suit me.

Being one of the men
You meet of an afternoon:
Palsied old step-takers,
Hare-eyed clerks with the jitters,

Waxed-fleshed out-patients
Still vague from accidents,
And characters in long coats
Deep in the litter-baskets -

All dodging the toad work
By being stupid or weak.
Think of being them!
Hearing the hours chime,

Watching the bread delivered,
The sun by clouds covered,
The children going home;
Think of being them,

Turning over their failures
By some bed of lobelias,
Nowhere to go but indoors,
Nor friends but empty chairs -

No, give me my in-tray,
My loaf-haired secretary,
My shall-I-keep-the-call-in-Sir:
What else can I answer,

When the lights come on at four
At the end of another year?
Give me your arm, old toad;
Help me down Cemetery Road.