338. Poem About Obama at Hiroshima

Obama at Hiroshima

Right there looking at it,

in the pool of horrors.

The fountain, Barack, is elsewhere,

is man's pride (see Dante, long ago).

Also from the fountain modern medicine, symphonic music,

     internet communication, and every secular

     accomplishment since Dante (long ago),

from the sins he rendered in earth,

as a mountain, Purgatory, terraced,

Pride at the bottom, holding them all up.

Yeats rendered it in fire,

     penicillin, miracle rice, Congo conquests, grape-shot,

     quantum mechanics, cancer-cutting lasers,

dynamite, gas, liftoff.

"Whatever flames upon the night,
man's own resinous heart has fed."

264. William Butler Yeats on Attack Ads

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Have you ever pined for more educated voters?  Have you ever tried, as the League of Women Voters has tried, to educate them?  As their teachers in school and college have?   Have you ever urged them to wrench their eyes from the TV screen and turn them to editorial and OpEd pages, hoping they would go on to journals and books? Have you tried to sneak in a subscription to a good news magazine (like The Economist) and hoped, just hoped, that it would lead to a really responsible journal (like the New York Review or Foreign Affairs), something that would keep their academic study going?  Well, you have company:

The Leaders of the Crowd

They must to keep their certainty accuse
All that are different of a base intent;
Pull down established honour; hawk for news
Whatever their loose fantasy invent
And murmur it with bated breath, as though
The abounding gutter had been Helicon
Or calumny a song. How can they know
Truth flourishes where the student's lamp has shone,
And there alone, that have no Solitude?
So the crowd come they care not what may come.
They have loud music, hope every day renewed
And heartier loves; that lamp is from the tomb.

William Butler Yeats

255. The Sex Business

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In The Economist's leader this week on the sex business only two kinds of people are mentioned as being opposed to prostitution: puritans, "who think that women selling sex are sinners," and do-gooders, "who think they are victims."  I would add a third category: teachers, who think that prostitutes are children.  In the sense that they are under-educated.

You understand that I regard anybody who doesn't know the literature his civilization has produced, as under-educated.  A student who has taken only science and engineering courses is under-educated.

What those students are missing by not taking those humanities courses, and what literature courses will best give them, is what prostitutes most need: a dramatized view of life as a whole.

Drama.  How do you get drama that gives you a sense of the whole of life?  By looking at death.  The end.  While you're right in the middle of life.

Oh, did the poets I taught ever do that!  First in the middle, the joy.  "There it is, oh golden, golden, there it is, seize it, seize it," and then "Gone, gone, gone forever, as it will all go."  Carpe diem, then ubi sunt, in the terms given us by the Roman poets.

But poets in any period do that, arousing you to the intensity of physical love and then sticking you with finality of physical death.  If you don't seize the love, the joy, when you're able to, you'll lose your chance.  At the end you'll die deprived, and in between time, if Milton is right, you'll suffer the little deaths of a deprived (he would say "depraved") mechanism, an inability to seize, seize all that's there, together.  Because you (I'm including the client now) wasted your abilities on a part, in a childish seizure, "loveless, joyless, unindeared." 

So, children, know the whole, glimpse the human future, and you'll be less likely to lie with the "cold-hearted witch,/ And after, drained dry,/ Come to the chamber where/ Lies one long sought with despair."   Yeats knows that, for most of us, there will be a period when we can't help looking back.

That looking back.  Is there a way to make it less regretful?  Yes, if you have produced children, a family, grandchildren, the "large posterity" that Spenser saw possessing the earth, all the product of the "wedded love" that Milton saw driving "adulterous lust" to range "among the bestial herds."  Physical love viewed in the fullest context.

Awareness of that context, however dim, must be what makes Christmas the saddest day of the whorehouse year.  Family, family, reminders everywhere.  Polly Adler's book, A House is Not a Home, told us about it.

There were more victims then, the forced, to whom none of this applies.  Now, with prostitutes able to charge $250 an hour (recently $350) there are fewer.

It's the people with the choice who need the drama.  Some, of course, have the imagination to provide it on their own.  But they won't get it from the True Romance magazines that, Adler says, litter the whores' private quarters.

However you get the drama, though, you can easily lose it, lose your sense that something important in human life is at stake. How, reader responsive to literature and art, do you lose that?  By becoming a scientist (you think), a clinician, a Kinsey, or an aloof Economist writer too cool to see prostitutes as anything but "workers."

101. "Hokum" and its Hazards

Wasn't it fun calling lines by W. H. Auden "hokum" (Post #100, below)? There he was in all the anthologies, the whole educated world was cheering, but we weren't fooled, no, we hung in there and nailed him. And best of all, we got his blessing for it! He knew he was off base.

Auden strayed into lofty words, a view of history from too far up. When you asked for details — the support, the goods, the beef — he, unlike the historian, could only wave. Can we say that, in principle, loftiness in poetry is a bad thing?

If we do we've got poets like Yeats to deal with. Here's Yeats in "Two Songs from a Play":

Odor of blood when Christ was slain

Made all Platonic tolerance vain

And vain all Doric discipline.

How's that for lofty? And later he says,

The Roman Empire stood appalled:

It dropped the reins of peace and war

When that fierce virgin and her Star

Out of the fabulous darkness called.

You can't get any loftier than that. And you with the Midwest accent, are you ready to make your speech to the cheering world? "Got to have some facts naow. Pretentious nonsense. Pretentious nonsense."

Who wants to say anything like that about Yeats's words? I don't. I get a tingle just typing them out. So, should we academics shun these these blunt terms? We've got so many of them — claptrap, bunk, eyewash, bullshit, hogwash, humbuggery, malarkey, moonshine, poppycock, tommyrot — and so few fit a subject this complicated. They may be all right for the street, but literary criticism? Please.

I think the test will come when we're facing a poem for which all our other words seem inadequate. Like Ossian's Fionnghall, the poem the intelligentsia of Europe (including Napoleon and Goethe) called the great primitive epic, and we call...well, let's wait. It's not an epic at all, it's just full of epicky details, exactly the ones the primitivists of the time would lap up — the battles, the speeches, the lifestyle (oh the lifestyle, the noble, savage lifestyle) of the ancient Highland chiefs. We don't have to wait to find out it's all a fake ("Ossian" was a smart contemporary Scotsman named Macpherson) to start calling it names. It's not poetry, it's a lifestyle pitch. Pure, pure...ah yes, hokum! That Macpherson, could he ever sell snake oil.

I would also, with qualifications, nominate Alan Ginsberg's "Howl," the defining poem of the Beat Generation with the famous beginning:

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,

dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix...

Who says those are the best minds of Ginsberg's generation? Ginsberg does. Trust him. Did we trust Auden when he told us the thirties were low and dishonest? If we did we shouldn't have, and in the end he was embarrassed for wanting us to. We, and apparently he, saw hokum in the loftiness.

Ginsberg is lofty (on war and capitalism and the military industrial complex) but memories of Yeats have undermined our easy use of "hokum" for loftiness so we hold back. Then we finish "Howl" and realize that the whole thing is lifestyle. Nothing but one picture after another of the way Ginsberg and his friends lived — sitting up "smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz,...investigating the FBI in beards and shorts with big pacifist eyes sexy in their dark skin passing out incomprehensible leaflets," and so on. Cool, but still only lifestyle. And with a pitch. Ginsberg is selling it. Is there any word better than "hokum" for this?