Starting from Paumonok

As always, American politics is an absorbing sideshow. After an alarming primary season, Romney and Ryan are now on the GOP ticket, but what Mitt, Newt, Rick, Ron, and Rick all had in common was that they thought a privileged white doofus should be in charge. Come on, America. You've tried that. And as if there weren't enough PWDs in the field, Missouri's Todd Akin had to pipe up, reminding everyone that Republicans often have a nebulous grasp of reality. His Palinesque ignorance earned him instant notoriety, and ignited a debate about rape and reproduction. One of the best things I've read on the subject was this in the New Yorker, by someone who (unlike Akin) actually knows what he's talking about.

One of the best lines I've read of late was in an article on Mitt's sex appeal at The Atlantic: Evolutionary psychology is the phrenology of our time. Thank you, Elspeth Reeve. I'm glad I'm not the only one rolling her eyes at fatuous explanations of how our behaviour around the office or at parties reflects traits on which our hunter/gatherer ancestors must have relied. I think the ancestors would turn in their neolithic graves if they knew what nonsense is talked in their name.  

Darwin, too, might turn, since he wrote with truth and beauty in mind, and wonder, and curiosity, and love: none of these seem present in his dim descendents, the psychopundits. I found this week these lines from Origin of Species which seem to me lovely: “As buds give rise by growth to fresh buds, and these, if vigorous, branch out and overtop on all sides many a feebler branch, so by generation I believe it has been with the great Tree of Life, which fills with its dead and broken branches the crust of the earth, and covers the surface with its ever-branching and beautiful ramifications.”

The odds of finding a poem to tie these loose thoughts into some kind of coherence were always slim, but Darwin's contemporary, Walt Whitman, casts so wide a net that he just might catch, in these lines from the poem “Starting from Paumonok,” all the creatures I've just loosed. (You can read the whole thing here.)  Have a nice weekend. 

Victory, union, faith, identity, time,
The indissoluble compacts, riches, mystery,
Eternal progress, the kosmos, and the modern reports.
This then is life,
Here is what has come to the surface after so many throes and convulsions.
 
How curious! how real!
Underfoot the divine soil, overhead the sun.
 
See revolving the globe,
The ancestor-continents away group'd together,
The present and future continents north and south, with the isthmus
between.
 
See, vast trackless spaces,
As in a dream they change, they swiftly fill,
Countless masses debouch upon them,
They are now cover'd with the foremost people, arts, institutions, known.
 
See, projected through time,
For me an audience interminable.

With firm and regular step they wend, they never stop,
Successions of men, Americanos, a hundred millions,
One generation playing its part and passing on,
Another generation playing its part and passing on in its turn,
With faces turn'd sideways or backward towards me to listen,
With eyes retrospective towards me.

[…]

Take my leaves America, take them South and take them North,
Make welcome for them everywhere, for they are your own off-spring,
Surround them East and West, for they would surround you,
And you precedents, connect lovingly with them, for they connect
lovingly with you. 

Good shepherds

Two mass shootings in as many weeks have prompted the usual American impasse about the apparently intractable problem of guns.  Meanwhile just about everyone else in the world can see the solution. And it’s not the one proposed by the gun lobby: more guns. In fact it’s the opposite: fewer guns. Or, heck, how about just fewer assault rifles? That would be a good start. But the so-called second amendment rights of the gun nuts seem to trump the first amendment rights of, for example, the Sikhs. Their freedom to carry lethal weapons must not on any account be infringed by the right of their fellow citizens to live in peace and safety. “’Tis mad idolatry to make the service greater than the god,” Shakespeare has Hector say in Troilus and Cressida. The one that got me, though, was philosopher Isaiah Berlin’s line: “Freedom for the wolves is death to the lambs.” That equation had a bloody resonance this past month. 

It has another kind of resonance this week, with the announcement of Paul Ryan as Romney’s VP pick. Ryan’s notorious Budget proposal, that, according to the independent Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, would represent “the largest redistribution of income from the bottom to the top in modern U.S. history”, argues from a purely ideological (and Randian) stance that America would genuinely be better off if the wealthy got breaks and the poor got broken. Obama’s called it “thinly veiled Social Darwinism,” but it’s worse. It’s aiding the wolves, and tying down the lambs. 

Words that don't mean what you think they do but you wish they did

I have a number of these: the words you use wrongly but confidently until the day when some smug linguist comes along and pricks your bubble. Instead of relief at knowing the truth, you're left with a sense of deflation. Instead of gratitude, there's a double loss: you have no use for a word that doesn't mean what you thought it did, and no word for what you thought you meant. Here are the ones I could think of today; doubtless there are others.

1. Nonplused. This is definitely the one I'm most upset about. I thought it meant something like unimpressed, impassive, a kind of “yeah, so what?” When I found out it means confused, bewildered or perplexed, needless to say I was nonplused. (And shouldn't it have a double s?)

2. Hopefully. This is one of Don Watson's bugbears; since he pointed it out I still use it wrongly but now with a twinge of guilt. We can say “I hope it won’t rain,” and we might even hang the washing out hopefully, but we shouldn’t say “hopefully it won’t rain,” since “hopefully,” as an adverb, describes our attitude in performing an action. We use it more as our ancestors would have used “God willing.” Maybe I should substitute that since I can't get by without hopefully.

3. Salubrious. This totally sounds like something sibilant and lugubrious and slightly risque. But it means healthful or conducive to health. Almost the opposite of what you'd expect it to mean. 

4. Lugubrious. Sounds gooey, doesn't it? It's not though. It means mournful, dismal, extravagantly, almost histrionically gloomy. Turns out there's no fancy word for gooey. 

5. Refulgent. This one sounds like an expletive, a more explosive word for repugnant or repellent. You can almost feel the saliva spraying as a contemptuous orator hurls this one at some hideously refulgent object of wrath. The joke would be on him, though, since it means something more like resplendent, radiant, brilliant. 

Perhaps my next list should be the words that - wonderfully, deliciously - mean exactly what they sound like they mean. Words like “obstreperous” and “malodorous.” And “unkempt.”

(No, not thinking of anyone in particular.) 

Sweet especial rural scene

Driving through acres of Canberra as yet unsettled - hills and slopes blanketed with verdure under a wide blue sky - I had a vision of their future: razored of trees, plotted with a brick patchwork of leggo houses, threaded through with concrete driveways. I hope somehow these acres are spared that fate, but the hope is slim. That fate seems to overtake most empty spaces in the bush capital sooner or later. It’s odd to me that the more we know about our environment’s needs or our own social needs, the less we seem able to meet them. The more we learn about environmental degradation, the more efficient we become at doing it. 

The sense of loss that came with my vision - aesthetic as much as moral - is at least as old as the industrial revolution. It was behind the protest poems of Blake and Wordsworth long before it infused the environmentalist movement of a generation ago. You can find it in just about any nature poet of the past two centuries - and probably as far back as you care to go. I’m not familiar with Virgil’s Georgics, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they contained a lament for the spoliation of land. 

On the eve of last century, Gerard Manly Hopkins wrote this poem because some of his favourite trees had been cut down. A small thing, perhaps, to cut down a dozen trees, but Hopkins saw more in it than that act. Uncannily, he saw the future. ‘If we but knew what we do.’ Indeed. The thing is we after-comers do know now, but we reck still less our strokes of havoc. This is ‘Binsey Poplars’, written in 1879.

My aspens dear, whose airy cages quelled,
Quelled or quenched in leaves the leaping sun, 
All felled, felled, are all felled;   
Of a fresh and following folded rank 
Not spared, not one                      
That dandled a sandalled        
Shadow that swam or sank
On meadow and river and wind-wandering weed-winding bank.

O if we but knew what we do
When we delve or hew—   
Hack and rack the growing green! 
Since country is so tender 
To touch, her being só slender, 
That, like this sleek and seeing ball    
But a prick will make no eye at all,      
Where we, even where we mean       
To mend her we end her,        
When we hew or delve: 
After-comers cannot guess the beauty been. 
Ten or twelve, only ten or twelve          
Strokes of havoc únselve      
The sweet especial scene,
Rural scene, a rural scene,    
Sweet especial rural scene.

Only connected

EM Forster's 1910 novel Howards End is deceptively light and hurrying in tone. Beneath the rippling, bantering surface are complexities, ironies, deep problems of human society and spirit. The 1992 Merchant Ivory film, by contrast, has a rich, heavy grandeur in its telling but has in fact stripped out much of the depth and complication of the novel. I liked the film a lot, and I think on the whole the directorial decisions were wise. I can imagine it would have been rather messy had it tried to accommodate the novel's swirling contemplation of whole tracts of modernity. The central philosophical problems, experienced mostly in Meg's inward reflections, are merely skimmed: the dilemma of seeing life either steadily or whole, not both; the struggle to bring disparate parts of life and world together in a harmonious whole, embodied in the novel's persistent refrain: “only connect.” These lie too deep to trouble the film's gorgeous surfaces.

The novel's manifest aversion to motorcars, as one of modernity's avatars, has been entirely excised from the film, and along with it a crucial scene. On the way to Oniton for Evie's wedding, Margaret jumps out of a moving car and injures her hand. It's a key scene in the book's steady antipathy to motorised travel, but obviously out of place where that theme has been expunged. However, when we see Margaret at Oniton (Emma Thompson makes a delightful Meg) she has a bandage on her hand; a scene or two later, it's gone, without ever being explained: a mystery to anyone who doesn't know the book.

In fact I finished the film feeling that much of it had been more a homage to the book, or at least a continual respectful referencing of the book, rather than an adaptation. I wondered how much sense it would have made to someone who hadn't first read the book. They would no doubt have enjoyed the lavishly beautiful sets, costumes, photography, landscapes, and the fine acting of Thompson, Anthony Hopkins, and even Helena Bonham Carter, who turns in a creditable Helen. But would the plot have been sufficiently illuminated, within the general brilliance of the film's lovely ambience? The whole film felt conscious of the ‘classic’ in whose service it was rendered. It took for granted the familiarity of its audience with Forster's world and preoccupations, and with his novel's status as self-evidently great. Such reverence is refreshing, where so many film adaptations seem to liberate themselves entirely from their source, but it was disconcerting to watch a film so clearly depedent on an external referent.

At the same time, as a devotee of the novel, I did find the film illuminating. I go back to the book a better reader having seen the film because it showed me patterns, connections, rhythms that I hadn't perceived before. The arrivals and departures on train platforms, the place of telegrams, letters and legal writs, the episodes of passionate abandon in outdoor places that mark Helen's passages in and out of polite society. The truncatory effect of the film condensed the novel's world so that I could see its connections, if not steadily, then whole.