Cherished like the thought of heaven

You’d be surprised how difficult it was to find a poem celebrating the passing of the fiscal year. I guess it’s not something that captures the poetic imagination. I don’t usually run competitions on this blog, but there’s tuppence ha’penny for anyone who can write a convincing ode to the beginning of a new financial year. “O! Tis time for taxes their return to make…” it might begin.

I think it was Robert Graves who said “There’s no money in poetry; but neither is there poetry in money.” Or something like that. Wallace Stevens, on the other hand, said money is a kind of poetry. I looked in the works of both for today’s poem, and Stevens won the day with ‘What is Divinity’. It’s not about money – just a gorgeous little elegy for this heaven-haunted earth. Happy new year.

What is divinity if it can come
Only in silent shadows and in dreams?
Shall she not find in comforts of the sun,
In pungent fruit and bright, green wings, or else
In any balm or beauty of the earth,
Things to be cherished like the thought of heaven?
Divinity must live within herself:
Passions of rain, or moods in falling snow;
Grievings in loneliness, or unsubdued
Elations when the forest blooms; gusty
Emotions on wet roads on autumn nights;
All pleasures and all pains, remembering
The bough of summer and the winter branch,
These are the measures destined for her soul.

Dusk in Academia

“Most people I know in academia want to get out." So says Terry Eagleton (in this interview), confirming something I've suspected since my own exit nearly five years ago. Eagleton was one of the first big academic figures I encountered at university: it was his Literary Theory I had to plow through in first year. It was often his name at the end of introductions to Penguin classics. By the time I began to specialise in early modern writing, he was no longer so prominent in my reading, since his own work lay in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. By the time I wound up my brief teaching career (by the age of 29 I was a former academic), I was both disheartened by my failure to land anything like tenure, and glad to be leaving a field where the prospects were so bleak, in which so many were so beleaguered, depressed, and embittered. That’s what Eagleton’s comments point to, and I find it reassuring that one of the superstars of the profession is happy to spill the beans on the “hideous neomanagerialism” that has exerted its clammy grip on universities, effectively scuttling their historic role as centres of critique. I knew many academics who said they were spending up to eighty per cent of their time on administration. They were constantly called on to justify their existence, and to demonstrate their productivity by the volume of work they managed to publish in journals rated highly not by their peers but by the federal Government. Their most important skill was not in research or teaching but in writing successful grant applications, mostly in order to buy themselves out of teaching so they could get on with the research they needed to buy themselves out of oblivion. Teaching was valued only by the students and the teachers: not by the people who actually made decisions about how teaching should be valued and what students should be taught. Reductionism, economic rationalism, managerialism were rampant, and they were killing the humanities (to say nothing of the sciences and other purities), which are intrinsically expansive, liberal, and enlivening. In my post-academic career I have encountered the same three forces at work, but in the corporate world, public and private, where so much matters so little, these are merely a plaque, not, as in academia, a cancer.

Evening in America

About Ray Bradbury's death I have nothing to say. I was not a reader of his books, so I won't pontificate on his death. A death less observed but roughly coincident is that of Earl Shorris, who should not go unremarked on this blog. As the NY Times obit explains, Shorris made his mark by sharing the riches of literature with the poorest Americans. The Clemente Course in the Humanities he designed in 1995 was, as he saw it, real redistribution of wealth. It brought literature, art, moral philosophy and history to the homeless, the unemployed, the addicted, the poor. Poverty, he came to think, is not an absence of money but of reflection and beauty. Reflection, which the humanities instills, is the beginning of engagement, and of the leap out of poverty. 

I was moved reading this essay Shorris wrote for Harper's: the last thing he submitted to the magazine before his death on May 27. It's about his slide toward death in a cancer ward, and the slide into darkness he observed in America. His dystopian vision was not of book-burning, but of an unethical and unequal society in which poverty grows, and happiness belongs to a smaller and smaller elite.

His passing is the more to be lamented because he strove to increase the stock of the world's happiness, and to bring light to the darkest places. 

The good fellowship of dust

Reading George Herbert and teaching Shakespeare I became intrigued by one of the period's most insistent images: dust. It stands in for death, decay, futility, vanity - many things of which they found it necessary to remind themselves. It's both the stuff and the doom of human life. Hamlet’s ‘quintessence of dust’ is everywhere in Herbert. The dust of worldliness ‘stings his eyes’ whenever he’s tempted to want the world. His habits and frailties make him ‘guilty of dust and sinne’ when Love invites him in. Christ’s death makes his heart dust, before it can be transmuted into gold by the resurrection. One of my favourite poems is the slightly strange “Church Monuments”, where he bids his wayward body take acquaintance of a heap of dust, so it can grow accustomed to its fate. I wonder if Herbert's parishioners very often came into the church to find their pastor lying on the floor, or in earnest contemplation of a monument.

While that my soul repairs to her devotion,
Here I entomb my flesh, that it betimes
May take acquaintance of this heap of dust;
To which the blast of death's incessant motion,
Fed with the exhalation of our crimes,
Drives all at last. Therefore I gladly trust
 
My body to this school, that it may learn
To spell his elements, and find his birth
Written in dusty heraldry and lines;
Which dissolution sure doth best discern,
Comparing dust with dust, and earth with earth.
These laugh at jet and marble put for signs,
 
To sever the good fellowship of dust,
And spoil the meeting. What shall point out them,
When they shall bow, and kneel, and fall down flat
To kiss those heaps, which now they have in trust?
Dear flesh, while I do pray, learn here thy stem
And true descent; that when thou shalt grow fat,
 
And wanton in thy cravings, thou mayst know
That flesh is but the glass, which holds the dust
That measures all our time; which also shall
Be crumbled into dust. Mark here below
How tame these ashes are, how free from lust,
That thou mayst fit thyself against thy fall.

The humane imagination

One of the great pleasures of the reading life is buying the latest book of a loved living author. This is a rare pleasure for me, as there are only about four living authors I like. But it’s a keen one. Knowing a new book is coming, finding out the day of its release, calculating how soon it could be found in one’s local bookshop; then seeing it, laying hands on it, feeling the weight and texture of it, purchasing it, taking it home and cracking it open, placing it on the shelf next to its brethren, watching the loved collection grow, ever so slowly, book by book. 

I had that pleasure last week, when I bought Marilynne Robinson’s new book of essays, When I Was a Child I Read Books. Fans of Robinson’s fiction usually have a longer wait than most; there were twenty-four years between her first novel and her second. Her non-fiction, though, is getting faster. It’s only two years since her last offering: Absence of Mind: the Dispelling of Inwardness from the Modern Myth of the Self. The new collection, as its title suggests, is somewhat more personal and colloquial than its predecessors, but it lacks none of her characteristic cogency and authority. It’s based on lectures she’s given over a lifetime, but it feels very current, a wise and lucid rebuke to the various social and political and philosophical afflictions of present-day America. 

I haven’t got to the title essay yet, but I’m utterly persuaded by an early essay called “Austerity as Ideology.” This is a brilliant though mild fulmination against “the march of Austerity”: the economic dogma that has grown up in the wake of the financial crisis, and in spite of all its most obvious lessons. Blame for the disaster has somehow been shifted from the shoulders of highly paid capitalists onto governments and the wider population; venerable public institutions and services are being sacrificed to a hyper-capitalist ideology that bears little relation to the facts of recent history or the culpabilities of recent events. 

Robinson points, I suspect in all the essays more or less, to a present “dearth of humane imagination for the integrity and mystery of other lives.” The capacity to imagine and embrace the other, even when radically different from oneself, is the engine of democracy. Democracy today is threatened by the preeminence of the new economics, and by a perverse politics that claims to value America’s history and founding doctrines, but takes no account of the deeply-rooted collectivism that has in fact made America great. It is instead divisive and ignorant, unable to imagine its others, intent on tearing up the roots of America’s rich common life. 

Democracy, community, humanity. All these are under attack in America and ailing elsewhere. Robinson is their ardent and eloquent defender. Though much of civil and common life is precarious, a book like this reminds us how much potency humane and imaginative discourse still commands.