Once again Frances Cornford's poem (Post 349), the
man's ear to the woman's words as to his guitar, plucking and listening before
the two "begin to play."
This time the contrast is with Donald Trump talking, there in the
trailer with Billy Bush, about the way he plays it. All grab and gobble.
No ear, no brain, all cock.
I hear adolescents displaying their cocky
credentials to each other.
"See what a man of the world I am." Women have little to do with it, except as accessories to
the display.
It's been heard differently. Those close to him hear
"locker-room talk," a temporary descent. We might hear it that way too if we could see what it's a descent
from.
A teacher of the guitar or love poetry would be
suspicious of that
"temporary." Some
descents can have permanent effects. Hear "locker room" for a while
and you don't pick up "sitting room" so well, the language of daily
affection, that tune, that prelude.
Your eardrum has been thickened, your ability to listen and tune and
really play. As adults do. Call this "locker-room talk"
and you accommodate deafness and retardation.
Shakespeare, as so often, is ahead of us in
identifying the type. Here's
Gloucester in King Lear, speaking of
his illegitimate son Edmund to the Earl of Kent, who has just said, of
Gloucester's words, "I cannot
conceive you."
Sir, this young fellow's mother could:
whereupon
she grew round-wombed, and had, indeed, sir,
a son
for her cradle ere she had a husband for her
bed.
He ends with a breezy confidence:
though this knave came something saucily
into the
world before he was sent for, yet was his
mother
fair; there was good sport at his making,
and the
whoreson must be acknowledged.
And Edmund, the son, is standing right there.
Hearing his father say (if we may translate into Trump talk),
"Yeah, he's a bastard but his mother was a dish and we had a lot of fun
conceiving him. I have to
recognize the son of a bitch."
Talk about deaf and insensitive! How did he get that
way? We don't know but a good part
of it must have been privilege, male privilege and British-gentleman privilege,
something he's used to. Part of
his insensitivity is his inability to recognize that Kent has transcended
it. Just another knight with whom
you could exchange barrack-room, or club-room, or after-dinner smoking-room,
talk.
I smell misogyny, or at least a belittling of
femininity, in there too.
Gloucester, like Trump, probably considers sensitivity feminine. Only pansies play soft guitar.
But this is Shakespeare, friends, and no disrupter
of the God-established order of feeling creatures is going to go free. Gloucester, like any parent, can't help
teaching his children. What he
teaches Edmund in that speech is that father-son feeling is dismissible. "All right, so that's the way it
is," thinks Edmund, and there goes son-father feeling. The way is clear for him to betray the
old man, and bring on the terrible scene where Albany, free from any feeling,
gouges out his eyes ("Out, vile jelly!").
And there is Shakespeare, making sure, through Edgar
speaking to Edmund, that we see the connection that even in our amoral age
feels moral, a law. "The dark
and vicious place where thee he got, cost him his eyes." That whorehouse where you kissed away marital
order, love and daily affection, feeling for wife and children, was no
playground for moral vacationers. It was a dark and vicious place,
spawning more darkness and viciousness.
Extending to you who brought it on. The disruption will be repaired and the order restored.
Restored even though the disrupters in this society —
Goneril, Regan, Edmund, Cornwall, their followers and, for a time, Gloucester
and Lear — are so many and so powerful that they have made disruption look normal.
A step further and
"disrupt" could become the buzzword for them that it now is for
us. But no, this is Shakespeare,
and the moral order, though driven underground, will reappear.
Gloucester sees it when he, blinded and
humbled, says, "I stumbled
when I saw." When he stumbled
into that whorehouse, yes, but worse when he stumbled into the locker room in
front of Edmund. Decency and
feeling, father-son feeling, reassert themselves each time Edgar, the
legitimate son, moves closer to his father.
That's probably as far as we should push the
comparison, the adolescent male elevated to significant disrupter, but the
reason we can't go further might be worth some thought. Trump is a character in real life, not
a character in a play. With Shakespeare's
characters you could readily believe that the disrupter's triumph would be
temporary. All God's universe was
against him. The order of the
heavens, the hierarchy of creatures on earth, the ranked faculties of man, the
whole Chain of Being, testified to it.
He'll have his day in the sun, but just wait.
Also, in Shakespeare the man who disrupts can
learn. Learning goes with the human
being's place in God's order, between the angels, who know everything
intuitively, and the animals, whose instinct tells them nothing important. Man can learn because he, the one
creature who can do it, and needs to, was given reason.
Also, he can suffer. Unless he's become impossibly callous he can feel his own
and others' pain. And be
taught. Bareheaded Lear in the storm, feeling for homeless wretches
("Oh I have ta'en too little care of this"), is an example of this
learning.
We, without going way past acceptable elitism, cannot
assume that Trump is incapable of suffering and learning and changing. But the evidence is not
encouraging. Listen to him for a
while and you conclude that the normal order is not likely to return through
this leader's return to it.
How then?
We have nothing like the Elizabethan's guarantee that the present
disruption will be temporary. For
us no eternal heavenly order, no fixed natural order, no Maker of It All, no
reassuring picture pasted in the backs of our heads (see E. M.W. Tillyard's Elizabethan World Picture, to fill in
what I'm talking about), nothing to back up the moral order and assure us of
its return as Shakespeare's audience was assured.
With that guarantee gone all we can hope for is that
there is something in human nature to replace it, something innate that
produces love-supporting systems like Christianity. I don't know if we'll find such a thing but I know that
we hunger for evidence of it. I
know my own hunger as the news program runs though its string of terrorists and
mischief-makers, hackers and scammers and trolls and Wall Street crooks, when
natural depravity seems to be the unavoidable, final doctrine. Oh for some evidence, a shred, some show of natural empathy, a sign that man
is not, down deep, way down deep, a selfish animal but a feeling creature.
The producer of the news program knows that the hunger is there and
gives us Looking Up, the final segment.
The food we hunger for, evidence. A child gives her toys to a refugee
child, a stricken invalid makes life easier for the more deeply stricken. We feast on it.
Well, that feasting certainly makes the case for the
hunger; the case for the evidence, the food, is a different matter. Anecdotes aren't reliable evidence. The question about our species is still
open.
And I'm not going to try to close it here. I can't see anybody closing it. But I can see, as a long-time teacher
of classics like King Lear, a more
widespread understanding of the question, and of the relation of people like
Donald Trump to it. It's (no
surprise) through those classics.
Liberal education.
And a more widespread
understanding of that education's enemies. Start with Donald Trump but go on to Pink Floyd,
"We don't need no education, we don't need no thought control." Measure that stuff against the
classics. Did Gloucester need some
education? Are people who read and
understand King Lear going to keep
flocking to Trump rallies?
That looks like an easy question, but it's not closed. For years the well-read, the civilized,
the American elite, the people now lamenting the flock to Trump, flocked to
Pink Floyd and a hundred other voices of barbarism. Gangsta rap and gangsta-colored rap. They lapped it up. They loved what Trump loves, the poorly
educated. Look up to those now in
tears over his flock-love and you're looking up to people who basked in it.
So where do you look? I have to say (no surprise) back at the classics. Start over. Liberal education.
Western civilization. Get
it straight. So you can see where you wandered.
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