Iron and velvet

I was going to write a post about this, but you should read the article instead. It notes, as I did, the passing of two world leaders, within a day of each other, who were worlds apart. Kim Jung-il, ruler of the bleakest state on the planet, and Vaclav Havel, leader of a bright new world.

What the article didn't include, which I would have, are these quotes from Havel's speeches. The first three are from his New Year's Address to the Nation in 1990, not long after he led Czechoslovakia to post-communist democracy:

Our country, if that is what we want, can now permanently radiate love, understanding, the power of the spirit and of ideas. It is precisely this glow that we can offer as our specific contribution to international politics.

Let us teach ourselves and others that politics should be an expression of a desire to contribute to the happiness of the community rather than of a need to cheat or rape the community.

You may ask what kind of republic I dream of. Let me reply: I dream of a republic independent, free, and democratic, of a republic economically prosperous and yet socially just; in short, of a humane republic that serves the individual and that therefore holds the hope that the individual will serve it in turn. Of a republic of well-rounded people, because without such people it is impossible to solve any of our problems — human, economic, ecological, social, or political.

And this one from his speech accepting the Open Society Prize at the Central European University in 1999.

The only thing I can recommend at this stage is a sense of humor, an ability to see things in their ridiculous and absurd dimensions, to laugh at others and at ourselves, a sense of irony regarding everything that calls out for parody in this world. In other words, I can only recommend perspective and distance. Awareness of all the most dangerous kinds of vanity, both in others and in ourselves. A good mind. A modest certainty about the meaning of things. Gratitude for the gift of life and the courage to take responsibility for it. Vigilance of spirit.

If Kim Jung-un were to take his inspiration not from his own forebears but from someone like Havel, what a wonderful world that would be.

When in Rome

I mentioned some time back that re-reading Middlemarch made me liken its heroine, Dorothea Brooke, to the lady of Henry James' Portrait, Isabel Archer. Now re-reading James, I'm struck by the parallels in their experience. Consider, for example, these two passages. Dorothea spends her honeymoon in Rome; it's in Florence that Isabel meets her future husband.

In the clear May mornings [...] she wandered with her cousin through the narrow and sombre Florentine streets, resting a while in the thicker dusk of some historic church or the vaulted chambers of some dispeopled convent. She went to the galleries and palaces; she looked at the pictures and statues that had hitherto been great names to her, and exchanged for a knowledge which was sometimes a limitation a presentiment which proved usually to have been a blank. She performed all those acts of mental prostration in which, on a first visit to Italy, youth and enthusiam so freely indulge; she felt her heart beat in the presence of immortal genius and knew the sweetness of rising tears in eyes to which faded fresco and darkened marble grew dim. [...] To live in such a place was, for Isabel, to hold to her ear all day a shell of the sea of the past. This vague eternal rumour kept her imagination awake. [Portrait of  a Lady]

The weight of unintelligible Rome might lie easily on bright nymphs to whom it formed a background for the brilliant picnic of Anglo-foreign society; but Dorothea had no such defence against deep impressions. Ruins and basilicas, palaces and colossi, set in the midst of a sordid present, where all that was living and warm-blooded seemed sunk in the deep degeneracy of a superstition divorced from reverence; the dimmer but yet eager Titanic life gazing and struggling on walls and ceilings; the long vistas of white forms whose marble eyes seemed to hold the monotonous light of an alien world: all this vast wreck of ambitious ideals, sensuous and spiritual, mixed confusedly with the signs of breathing forgetfulness and degradation, at first jarred her as with an electric shock, and then urged themselves on her with that ache belonging to a glut of confused ideas which check the flow of emotion. Forms both pale and glowing took possession of her young sense, and fixed themselves in her memory even when she was not thinking of them, preparing strange associations which remained through her after-years. Our moods are apt to bring with them images which succeed each other like the magic-lantern pictures of a doze; and in certain states of dull forlornness Dorothea all her life continued to see the vastness of St. Peter's, the huge bronze canopy, the excited intention in the attitudes and garments of the prophets and evangelists in the mosaics above, and the red drapery which was being hung for Christmas spreading itself everywhere like a disease of the retina. [Middlemarch]

For Isabel, life is possibility and promise. She has yet to make her choice so everything is imaginary, ideal, unformed. Dorothea has made her choice, and the first hints of its failure (the vast wreck of her husband's ambitions) are apparent against the backdrop of Rome's great sepulchres. Both young women are ardent idealists, eager for life. Both choose fatally and exchange ignorant presentiments for painful knowledge. At different stages in their careers, both experience Italy in transformative ways.

Stars and shells

Since next week is Christmas, this feels like the last Friday of the year. I wanted to find a poem that somehow drew together the pulse and tumult, the calamity and the promise of what has been, in many ways, a year of wonders.

The old empires, Britain and Europe, falter and tremble, while India and China, crouching tiger and hidden dragon, rise to new preeminence.

Rising waters threatened to light a nuclear fuse in Japan, even as the will to tackle warming seems to ebb.

Ten years after the attacks on Washington and Wall St in which 3000 people died, America packs up in Iraq. Of the numbered dead, 5000 are Americans, and 100,000 are Iraqis. Mission accomplished.

Meanwhile a vegetable vendor in Tunisia, roughed up by corrupt police, sets himself on fire and the Arab world catches alight.

“Rain Song,” by the Iraqi poet Badr Shakir al-Sayyab, doesn't touch everything that happened this year (how could it?) but it has a sense of the spring that's possible after ruin. Here's the end of it:

Do you know how lost a solitary person feels in the rain?
Endless, like spilt blood, like hungry people, like love,
Like children, like the dead, endless the rain.
Your two eyes take me wandering with the rain,
Lightning from across the Gulf sweeps the shores of Iraq
With stars and shells,
As if a dawn were about to break from them,
But night pulls over them a coverlet of blood.
I cry out to the Gulf: “O Gulf,
Giver of pearls, shells and death!”
And the echo replies,
As if lamenting:
“O Gulf,
Giver of shells and death.
[...]
And across the sands from among its lavish gifts
The Gulf scatters fuming froth and shells
And the skeletons of miserable drowned emigrants
Who drank death forever
From the depths of the Gulf, from the ground of its silence,
And in Iraq a thousand serpents drink the nectar
From a flower the Euphrates has nourished with dew.
I hear the echo
Ringing in the Gulf:
“Rain . . .
Drip, drop, the rain . . .
Drip, drop.”
In every drop of rain
A red or yellow colour buds from the seeds of flowers.
Every tear wept by the hungry and naked people
And every spilt drop of slaves' blood
Is a smile aimed at a new dawn,
A nipple turning rosy in an infant's lips
In the young world of tomorrow, bringer of life.
And still the rain pours down.

Of brick and bric-a-brac

One of the Scots poets honoured by Edinburgh's Mystery Paper Sculptor was Edwin Morgan, a Glaswegian.  Having been born there, taken his degree and taught there, he became Glasgow's first Poet Laureate in 1999. He died last year, aged 90. Here's the first of his “Glasgow” sonnets, whose crammed consonants create a fantastic staccato effect. It's depressing, as one might expect a poem about Glasgow to be, but it's so clever and so almost painterly (a Scottish Vermeer might have painted it) that it's hard not to find beauty in it. 

A mean wind wanders through the backcourt trash.
Hackles on puddles rise, old mattresses
puff briefly and subside. Play-fortresses
of brick and bric-a-brac spill out some ash.
Four storeys have no windows left to smash,
but the fifth a chipped sill buttresses
mother and daughter the last mistresses
of that black block condemned to stand, not crash.
Around them the cracks deepen, the rats crawl.
The kettle whimpers on a crazy hob.
Roses of mould grow from ceiling to wall.
The man lies late since he has lost his job,
smokes on one elbow, letting his coughs fall
thinly into an air too poor to rob.

Ill conceived, poorly written

This was the judgment of a reader at Knopf of a manuscript called “The Bell Jar,” submitted by one Sylvia Plath.

She's not the only writer of note to have received damning rejections from publishers early on. Sometimes early work might be bad, but more often it seems a case of painful subjectivity of judgment, or of publishers failing to recognise genius when it comes across their desk. It also draws attention to the difference between what's sellable and what's (eventually) great. The spirit and the machinery of literature are often at odds.

Here's a bunch more rejection letters at The Atlantic, including Vladimir Nabokov, Gertrude Stein, and Jack Kerouac.