Remembering Jack

Up at dawn for some musical multi-tasking: listening to white-throated sparrows through the open window while playing a Leadbelly cassette and flipping through a sheaf of poems by Jack McManis.

Jack was my mentor in poetry, someone who taught largely through silence – he only ever commented on things he liked. He led writing workshops for 25 years at Penn State, but I never actually took a class from him. Instead, we met regularly in his office to exchange poems, starting with once-a-week visits in 1978 when I was in eighth grade, and continuing (with somewhat declining frequency) until Jack’s death in 1989.

Jack McManis was one of the first generation of post-war college poetry teachers. He placed poems often enough in magazines and anthologies, but – much to the distress of his numerous friends and supportive colleagues – never got around to finishing a book-length collection. This omission stemmed partly from the alcoholism that consumed the first half of his life and partly from the altruistic energy that consumed much of the second half. (I didn’t realize until well after his death just how active he had been in Alcoholics Anonymous, helping set up chapters all over the country.)

Jack grew up in southern California, fought in the Pacific in World War II, and was an excellent tennis player – at one time he was the tenth-ranked amateur player in the country. He helped found the poetry magazine Pivot, which still survives, though he was always content to remain Associate Editor. His former students include Diane Ackerman and the late Agha Shahid Ali.

Even after achieving sobriety and becoming a “born-again Anglican,” Jack was no saint in the conventional sense of the term. He office reeked of the snuff he dipped from a silver box, and he loved to try and get others hooked on the stuff. (I always refused it – I’ve never been big on the idea of nasal ingestion.) Although his satires and parodies grew a little less biting after his recovery, he never stopped writing them. Nor were bawdy subjects off-limits: a poem about his neighbor’s wife’s ass was one of his standards at poetry readings.

Jack’s favorite poet was Hart Crane; other favorites included William Carlos Williams, Melvin B. Tolson and Theodore Roethke (who also taught briefly at Penn State). He believed that a poet should be “drenched in words,” as he once wrote me, quoting Hart Crane. He was haunted by Crane’s death – he committed suicide in April 1932 by leaping off a boat in the Caribbean and feeding himself to the sharks. This more than anything seemed to symbolize the end of innocence for Jack, who grew up in the Roaring Twenties. In one satire, he imagined the Statue of Liberty being buried at sea: “slide her down / to the oil shark / republic.” Sharks seemed to possess a kind of limit-value for Jack, as in the following elegy.

MEMORIAL FIN

by the breakwater after the funeral,
Corona del Mar, California

My father, John, a gentle dusty man,
loved the country earth and what it grows.
He most loved lowly and neglected things
we glance at or gaze past but rarely see:
hawberries, snaky wildgrape, wormed crabapples,
swamp shade pools under willow oaks that home
nightsinging whippoorwills and clacking treetoads.
What reliquary for my father’s love
of earth? Wind-driven leaves and locust shells?
Earth crumbled over him, put out his stars
and hushed the cardinal’s clear water-fife
back in his boyhood Indiana woods
still whistling in the now, now lost to him.
My father’s Baptist testimony praised
all these as God’s. He praised the blind fin.

Love as your father loved, the preacher said.
I hear his hands wash now in slap and seethe
of wave on rock and wonder how to love
all this, my father, you its lover gone:
this sky of tearless blue, it’s dead-man’s-float
of the day moon and that lone firefly ghosting
hope, last night flown where in the too-bright noon?
O these feed the blind fin’s tidal appetite –
the sharkfin there by the quay carving its track
straight out, out into the afterbirth grey-green
Pacific and maybe on to infinity
shredding our mirages, love and time,
that fin’s synoptic arrow tugging sun
– to drown the sun? All worship the blind fin.

*
Like many of us, Jack hated to let a poem go. There are no definitive versions, just endless rewrites. The above poem seems to have been his last revision, although I admit I did substitute one line from an earlier version that I liked better – I don’t think Jack would have minded. Now, as I continue to leaf through my folders of his poems, I’m finding so much more that I can’t pass up! How about if I just put a few things down, assemble a brief, fairly random collection of McManis fragments, a la the Greek Anthology?

*
Tin can sacristan,
cling clang buoy!
. . .
I dream and look over
the rail at flaking
light churning,
pouring out
electric tears
as I lose self
in the jewelry
of water.

*
I was born
in a heat wave:
South Chicago.
Headfirst I popped out
crying for a drink . . .

*
And what about sweetsinging Bobby Jones gone paralytic,
Big Bill Tilden humbled in prison and Paavo Nurmi, Finn
ironman, loping off into Arctic twilight, last marathon
against a ghostly polar bear tireless as time?

(“Child of the Twenties in the Eighties”)

*
So the twenties, time of the great gestures! And whose
were greater than yours, St. Slapstick? You who spun truth
in crazy pantomime, though it’s half-past mayhem, time for me
to return to the missing persons bureau of the eighties, before
the onrushing manifest planet spill me in the whistlestop dark,
my keepsakes scattered in cinders, let me spin off the rods
not in mourning but laughing far down in my bones, tickled
by you, old holy pie thrower!

(Ibid.)

*
Let Satch blast out for you, Gabe,
that trumpet note
we’re just dying to hear.

(“Conceit for a Cloudy Halloween ’82”)

*
Finally
The Puerto Rican
counterman comes
and pries
the pair of clowns
out of that
glass coffin.

(“Daily Circus at the Automat / New York City”)

*
A long time ago
(but not so long)
when we pilgrimaged
down to Avenue C
in the cell-block
Lower East Side
to see Leadbelly,
America’s great folk
poet and musicman
(before the polio
things ate his spine),
sitting straight
in a chair in
his walk-up flat
he told us how when
he heard JS Bach
he couldn’t keep
still, but thumped
with his hands
and his feet and
from time to time
broke out into
half-chant and
half-recitativo.
“The beat and the
repeat and the
jubilee,” he said,
“shake the lyrics
out of me like
a hound dog
being gristed
and ground around
in a song mill!”

(“Kin: Remembering Leadbelly,” Prairie Schooner, Summer 1971)

*
I’ll prop the saint erect again come spring
but now his milky eyes feed on the grosbeaks.

(“Letter to a Friend Before the February Thaw”)

*
Inside the crinkled ghost-transparent tent
she’s stretched out gaunt, a green sarcophagus
suspended in seawater, head stuck out
of the bedsheet envelope and pillow-propped,
hawk nose thrust up a wedge to split the air,
to reach, to strain up to the source of it –
that dense life juice she mouths and gums and gulps.
Pinched nostrils labor hard ringed faint with blue-
fadeblue of robin eggshells on cement,
the cheeks caved in to make the forehead loom . . .
All birdmouth gaping she sucks air so hard
I listen for the wind-work hiss of lung,
but stillness hangs a curtain round her mouth
that quivers in and out and seems a stranger
to the frozen skull, the sheeted body mound –
the last sign visible of life the twist
of thin lips flexing their beseeching O.

If I woke where she is in a cloud of green,
what thoughts would consciousness, a broken wing,
flap fluttering against the swoongreen cage?
Or if eyes opened, tried to weave a way
through blear, what make of all the blurring ghosts
beyond the cave and gliding by like fish?
These the loved dead that slip my hands in dreams?

(“Life Mask”)

*
Finally, here’s a Jack McManis poem I couldn’t resist including in its entirety.

ART APPRECIATION CLASS

–Sir, some sacrilegious clown
has gone and dotted
that Tintoretto sunset
with tiny fly specks.
–Where?
–There, there, and there.
–Don’t touch the painting
you fool! Those
aren’t fly specks,
they’re birds.
Tempo giasco
with the Old Master.
The birds
on background of pink sky
are humorous.
–Yeah?
–Yes, the birds are fun.
–Fun?
–Yes, loads of fun.
–Oh, I see what you mean.
Just a minute, Sir.
Let me write that down.
The birds are fun.

***
Last fall my friend Jo, who is in the process of moving very gradually to Arizona, prevailed upon me to take what she calls the Jack McManis tree. This is a handsome, four-foot-tall Norfolk pine that used to belong to Jack. It doesn’t travel very well – the slight bruising and bending necessary to transport it home in the car caused extensive needle loss in the upper branches. But with plenty of light and water it’s growing vigorously now, and if anything has become more attractive as a result of this partial damage to its symmetry. Most of my house is too dark for plants; the only place I could put it was right at the opposite end of the table from where I write.

Thus it happens that when I look up from the screen I find myself staring absent-mindedly into the foliage of the Jack McManis tree. And sometimes then I am transported back to Jack’s “bartelby den of an office,” as he once described it, sitting companionably with sheaves of each other’s recent poems in our laps. I hear Old Main tolling the quarter hour. Then the rattle of a page, and an appreciative grunt gives way to a chuckle, the blowing of a nose. “What a great line,” he enthuses, and I crane my neck, staring with pretended comprehension at another pure accident, learning slowly and without realizing it how to value those moments when the words come mostly on their own.

Goodbye, and thanks for all the fish

“Things are getting a bit quiet here because I am happily occupied in the embodied world. There are many felicities, both in the realm of the obvious and in the territory of the secret.

“I have been thinking also about the fate of this blog, the good ship commonbeauty, and about how to give this enjoyable little experiment the graceful and natural death it deserves.

“Two strange thoughts have accompanied this. First, a couple of lines over at Lois’s page (heart@work), in which she talks about the inexpressibility of many of the experiences she’s been having (April 14). Somehow, that touched something very real in me. My blog, which has aided my acts of witness, has also been, in its own way, an impediment to witness. I am curious about the unprinted territory commanded by Socrates and by Gautama and by Yeshua and their many nameless ilk.

“The second is an article at Dave’s page (vianegativa) which, oddly enough, I have not yet read. It is the recent article on poetics (April 13), and I have this instinctive feeling that, when I finally do read it, the attention I will wish to pay its prescriptions will leave me precious little blogging time! So, blame Dave. . . . ”

commonbeauty 18 April 2004

*
“The strangeness happens when Joel (the Carey character) discovers that his unhappy, impulsive girl-friend, Clementine, has had her memories of him erased, so she can move on unencumbered by the past. Distraught, Joel decides to do the same thing. The complication arises when, as his memories of her are being deleted, he changes his mind. The movie surprised me with its somber ending (which, of course, I will not divulge).

“According to Hollywood, if you deliver solid entertainment and viewers enjoy themselves, they won’t care about trivial things like inconsistency, improbability or impossibility. With regard to Jim Carey’s latest movie, I found that to be true. The fact that memory erasure technology is totally inconsistent with current science or any conceivable future science didn’t dampen my enjoyment one bit. . . .

“Memories aren’t like individual data files stored on a computer hard drive. Memories are actually recreated on the fly, much as web pages are recreated new every time they are requested. So you can’t locate them anywhere in the brain for erasure. Also, different parts of the brain are involved in generating these memories. Furthermore, people program their own brains as they grow up, so every human brain is programmed a little differently. So memory generation doesn’t work exactly the same way in every brain. In short, no brain scientist on Earth could even imagine a technology that would permit the erasure of specific memories. It’s one of those things that probably will never happen . . . ”

Book of Life 21 April 2004

“Recently, a friend confessed that her memoirs had replaced her actual memories – her original impressions, images, interpretations, and emotions overwritten by the revisions stored on her laptop hard drive. Notebook scribbles, structured paragraphs, aestheticized dialogue. These are her reality now.

“‘I will be telling a story,’ she said. ‘And my husband will stop me. That is not what happened, he will say. That is what you wrote.’

“This is not to say her memoirs lie. Rather, it points to the ways in which essays are shaped – formally, aesthetically, emotionally, and otherwise. Creative nonfiction writers do not merely retrieve and record the artifacts of their lives, digging them out from the sediment and arranging them for display. They imbue them with meaning. In order to create that meaning, they reshape the emotional, psychological, or temporal contexts. Subtle as this process may be, it is also extremely powerful.

“But something even more fundamental – more powerful – is revealed by my friend’s story. When original memories are replaced by our crafted ones, what does this mean? Just like in archaeology, the site is destroyed by our own digging. Forever altered. . . . ”

evidentiary: alchemy 6 April 2004

What goes wrong

We do not go into the desert to escape people but to learn how to find them; we do not leave them to have nothing more to do with them, but to find out the way to do them the most good. . . . The only way to find solitude is by hunger and thirst and sorrow and poverty and desire, and the man who has found solitude is empty, as if he had been emptied by death.

He has advanced beyond all horizons. There are no directions left in which he can travel. This is a country whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere. You do not find it by traveling but by standing still.

That’s Thomas Merton, from New Seeds of Contemplation (New Directions, 1961), which I’m re-reading for the first time in close to ten years. (As luck would have it, Beth at Cassandra Pages has been reading Merton also.) I remember being impressed before, but this time I am blown away. Merton summarizes and synthesizes the Christian mystical tradition like no other author I’ve read. I like being challenged when I read, and this book constitutes the perfect challenge for me right now.

As delighted as I am by the profundity of his reflections, however, I still cannot (yet) bring myself to accept that there is a permanent escape route from existential sorrow and pain. I hope to convince nobody of my views – please, if you are a person of true faith (as Merton defines it), do not let me dissuade you from your idealism! Here’s a passage that exemplifies some of what I have a problem with. I fancy that many of my readers will, in fact, identify strongly with the sentiments here, and wonder why I do not.

“The only true joy on earth is to escape from the prison of our false self, and enter by love into union with the Life Who dwells and sings within the essence of every creature and in the core of our own souls. In His love we posses all things and enjoy fruition of them, finding Him in them all. And thus as we go about the world, everything we meet and everything we see and hear and touch, far from defiling, purifies us and plants in us something more of contemplation and heaven.

“Short of this perfection, created things do not bring us joy but pain. Until we love God perfectly, everything in the world will be able to hurt us. And the greatest misfortune is to be dead to the pain they inflict on us, and not to realize what it is.

“For until we love God perfectly His world is full of contradiction. The things He has created attract us to Him and yet keep us away from Him. They draw us on and they stop us dead. We find Him in them to some extent and then we don’t find Him in them at all.

“Just when we think we have discovered some joy in them, the joy turns to sorrow; and just when they are beginning to please us the pleasure turns to pain . . . ”

Yep. So?

Back in the early 70s, Doonesbury poked fun at the conservative reaction to the “Me generation” in the person of Mark Slackmeyer’s dad, who once memorably opined that “Life is not meant to be enjoyed. It is meant to be gotten on with!” That’s putting rather too strongly a sentiment I do feel a bit myself. The funny thing is, I remain a social and political idealist: there’s nothing inherently difficult about building just, peaceful and ecologically sustainable societies, in my view. This strikes me as being well within our capacities as human beings.

I don’t even have a quarrel with the truth claims in the preceding passage. As regular readers of Via Negativa have probably noticed, I’m simultaneously attracted to and repelled by religious utopianism – the comic worldview. On the other hand, a great deal of existence strikes me as inescapably tragic. On the third hand (oops, shades of Hinduism!) it is barely possible that, in rejecting the appeal of what seems most attractive about religion – joy, freedom from pain, personal salvation – I may be setting myself up for some kind of authentic religious experience. But I doubt it.

More likely I have simply entered what Molly Ivins calls “dour old fartitude” a little prematurely. Alternatively, I may actually be more cheerful than the average person, more easily sustained by whatever scraps of truth and joy happen to come my way.

I mentioned Harry Humes the day before yesterday. Here’s a poem of his that might have some bearing here, I think. This is from his book Butterfly Effect (Milkweed, 1999). My only quibble with it is that he doesn’t make the occasion quite clear enough: is he describing something he saw on TV, read in the papers, or heard from a friend? But I like the way he tries to ground the news in his own experience through synchronicity. This makes the concluding question more personal, more urgent.

GRIZZLY COUNTRY
by Harry Humes

Before she crawled into her sleeping bag,
she ate a cold supper,
had no small fire for comfort,
hoisted her pack into a tree,
did not wash her hands or face,
did not hum or whistle.

The bear found her anyway,
came quietly down some scree,
crossed the stream,
and took her out of the tent.

This evening, only a few hours past
the winter solstice, I wonder
where I was when the bear lifted
its snout into the sky.
Did I look at first snow over Hawk Mountain?
Or at my daughter?
Did I hear something beyond the blue spruce?

What is it goes wrong with our knowing?
What is it we don’t hear right away,
or ever, that comes fully grown,
silver guard hair brilliant on its shoulders,
not clumsy, but stunning
in its moves, so beautiful
one might love its approach?

Nexus: two meditations

1.
I said: No earth, no plow.
No beaten sword to sway hip-
deep in some
dark wound. Forget
the slit where the rolling
coulter rides. Surely,
she asked, you will admit
the moon’s disc?
But I was still uneasy,
thinking, only if
the values were reversed.
Shining field, breast
of smooth obsidian.

The common words
are worse than inadequate:
they’re wrong. The male parts
scatter pollen; seeds
are eggs that have been – what?
Not fertilized, but transformed.
Shining field of the body,
opaque mirror in which
both sexes preen.
If you need
a fable, I said,
try this: You are
the storm
my tree bends
against. Graceful
as a twister, moving
ladder to let the fanatic
angels down
& down. Ground
or figure, earth
or firmament?
Each yields to each,
gets stronger by giving
way: we are water, no less.
The words float at first
& then dissolve.
Voices merge,
eddy, plunge, seek
the level. All of it
a prelude to silence,
the tantalizing peaks
suspended upside-down
in – ah – this
clear lake.

2.
We are all next. — Lucille Clifton

The first word reinvents the world – and vice versa.

This never fails to astonish me, how we cannot think apart from the blossoming shadbush & the grouse exploding from cover.

The ancient analogy between word & seed still seems to hold. What happens to turn a cry into a carrier of specific import? An egg gains direction without & differentiation within. To set seed is to gain polarity, to separate up from down & one wing from the other. (You can call them cotyledons if you like.)

Thus, the very first word is next.

From the neolithic

He needs walking the way a carpenter needs a hammer and wood, but the walks are growing shorter.
“It’s terribly hard,” his wife Kitty observes.
“So frustrating. He thinks best when his legs are moving. He believes to have an idea, it’s got to come from something tangible, something he is a part of, something he sees.”

Thanks to my brother Steve for alerting me to this great portrait of the Welsh poet Leslie Norris, a long-time resident of Orem, Utah. I’m ashamed to admit I had nothing on my shelf by Norris – had never even read him, in fact. A visit to my favorite local used bookstore yesterday remedied this situation, though the book I picked up – Walking the White Fields: Poems 1967-1980 – is too brief, besides being two decades behind in its selection. Reading through it this morning, I was reminded most strongly of the Pennsylvania poet Harry Humes. There’s the same love of winter themes, the vision of the wild within the pastoral/domestic, the understated sense of dramatic occasion.

So for Earth Day, here’s a Norris poem about megaliths, which I’ll follow with one of Paul Zweig’s deathbed poems (from Selected and Last Poems, Wesleyan, 1989) on a similar theme.

THE TWELVE STONES OF PENTRE IFAN
by Leslie Norris

The wind
Over my shoulder
Blows from the cold of time.

It has
Shaped the hill,
It has honed the rock outcrops

With the
Granules of its
Rasping. When the old ones

Were born
They dropped in dark-
ness, like sheep, and hot animals

Howled for
The afterbirths.
I watched the great stones of

Faith they
Moved in the flickering
Mountains of their nameless

Lives, and
See once more the
Points of adjusted rock, taller

Than any
Man who will ever
Stand where I stand, lifting their hope

In still,
Huge stone, pointed
To the flying wind. The sea ebbs again,

And round
The endless brevity
Of the seasons the old men’s cromlech

Prepares
Its hard shadows.
The four great stones, elate and springing,

And the
Smaller stones, big
As a man, leaning in, supporting.

*

SKYWRITING
by Paul Zweig

White furrow on the sky for the seed that will not grow,
The laborious skywriting, like a child
Tracing his name in stabbing lines of letters:
Graffiti, pyramid, stone cross, footprint, haystack;
Or the farmer wielding the shoulder-bone of an ox,
Who first shoveled up the earth and planted
Barley, half-wild wheat; who let fall the seed
Of his cock, and sucked the black wound
Where the earth bled food. And the shell-heaps;
The fifty-ton stones turned on end;
The mounds to keep the dead from getting loose:
All those acts to keep life from getting out of hand,
The dead shells of deeds forming another kind of life.
The 120-foot-high earthen nipple of Silsbery
Took a hundred years to erect out of chalk blocks,
Rubble, and a fine skin of earth.
What a job for a handful of shepherds
Who also ploughed the soil in their season:
A laborious outcry, meaning here! Or a curse.
Curse the intractable earth, death, blindness, rotten teeth,
Arthritis, dead babies; curse winter, curse summer!
Can you hear me, heaven? Am I making enough noise
For you? Suck on this teat of dust and rock.
I’m dying down here, and I want you to hear
The sound of it. It is called scream in the night,
It is called earth tit and Stone Henge,
It is called language,
It is called the sleeplessness of the gods.

Ordeal, or deal with it

I said to the Yeti, wash yo’ butt! Quit leaping out like that, you’ll scare the children. Second graders by the looks of them, more-or-less absorbed in their crayoning, which I can only imagine features yellow suns in the corner and birds in the shape of the letter m. Motherly letter, how well I remember learning its name! M’s the one that looks like mountains and the birds that circle them, idiotically, in old cracked paintings from the Renaissance – which I still can’t spell without help. Every day is Earth Day, but today is special because my ISP is down and I am forced to go wandering outside, peering closely at the unfamiliar trees and wondering where I left my clothes, all of a sudden, and why I have grown so hairy. I’ve been taking howling lessons from Elvis, listen: [fire alarm]. Then there’s [a train whistle, only it’s nothing like a whistle]. I am walking lightly on the earth, I am stopping to smell the flowers, let me hear you say Hail Yeah. My feet are shaped like large, cracked gourds, my nose drips like a candle. My eyes – Lord knows – are bloodshot from too much peering in peoples’ windows to watch TV. I am registered to vote – no party affiliation. The last time I tried to affiliate, no one was willing to swear in blood. What the hell good was that? You want friendship, you want brotherhood, get out the goddamn knife. Nobody wants to commit anymore: no walking under turf, no trials by ordeal. It’s enough just to enter a couple digits somewhere, move a decimal point and poof! someone’s nonexistent wallet gets heavier, poof! a mountain turns into a valley, poof! mercury is good for us. Easy come, easy go. My friend the coyote stopped by and left his calling card, a pungent remark bristling with the hair of somebody’s dog. It was in fact shaped like the letter C. You can read into that whatever you want. And since today is Earth Day, I expect some fool will try.

The bloody sire

On Sunday night I finally got a chance to see Bowling for Columbine. I was extremely impressed. As a gun-toting freedom-lover, I was especially pleased that Moore did not simply blame the surfeit of easily available weaponry for the astonishing levels of gun violence in this country. He went to Canada to find out why its similarly well armed citizens manage to avoid shooting each other, and discovered an astonishing fact: Canadians don’t live in fear of their neighbors. He couldn’t find anyone in Ottawa or Toronto who admitted to locking their doors – “It makes us feel like we’re imprisoning ourselves,” one explained. They were also proud of the fact that their government shies away from violence as a tool of first resort in international diplomacy. Their nightly news features long, boring analyses of tedious issues such as health care and the environment, rather than hysterical reports about the latest threats to civilization and decency. About 11 percent of Canadians belong to ethnic minorities, yet white-skinned inhabitants of the suburbs seem to lack their U.S. counterparts’ obsession with looming invasions by armies of the less-fortunate. Moore interviews some African American men from Detroit who love to spend their weekends in Windsor – “I can RELAX here. People treat me like I’m just a normal person!” My father points out that Canadians won their independence as a result of an act of the British parliament – not from a revolution.

The same thing that bothered me at the time of the Columbine shootings four years ago had also stuck in Michael Moore’s craw. Here you had the president making strong statements about the need to lessen the appeal of violence among our nation’s youth, at the same time that he was sending young people in uniform to Serbia to bomb schools, bridges and power plants. What makes the U.S. different from Great Britain, Canada and Australia? Simply put: we have a unique and unshakeable belief in the redemptive power of violence. Hollywood movies are popular everywhere, but only in the U.S.A. are we so unsophisticated to think that John Wayne and Dirty Harry have the right approach. A lone ranger, armed with a six-shooter and his own moral rectitude, can make everything right again. Call it naivete or call it idealism: over 80 percent of USians tell pollsters they believe in angels and in heaven – but not in hell. Hell is for other people.

Watching Bowling for Columbine reminded me that I too had made a collage of sorts – though my results weren’t nearly as effective as Moore’s. I stitched together sentences and phrases from issues of The Christian Science Monitor from March-April 1999. (Why not The New York Times? The Monitor is the only daily newspaper I read. Plus, it features much better writing than the Times.) I discovered a curious symmetry in descriptions of and statements from the two presidents, Milosovic and Clinton. See if you can match the phrase with the administration.

BALKANIZATION: PIECING TOGETHER THE NEWS

Will this be the end of Mortal Kombat & Street Fighter? Peace in the Balkans, says Henry Kissinger, has existed only when a superior force has imposed it from above. Public opinion is very volatile. The two sides are increasingly locked in a contest to influence what plays on television. Their instructions: create & execute a marketing campaign that will get people thinking about God. Who’s in charge of watching the watchman? The images are so overwhelming.

The Serbs are unable to compete with the slick production of Western companies & TV stations. Boy Scouts have been going into the inner cities–U.S. protectorates where peace depends on F-15Es and Humvees. It worked well, but they were always being watched by the secret police. They’ve built war rooms & use sophisticated computer programs to look for crime patterns.

Police with pistols drawn jumped the car of two foreign journalists for no apparent reason. Many minority youths complain that they are routinely frisked. When it comes to going to a concert or dance, they are afraid of getting pulled over or arrested & beaten. Many of the worst atrocities are believed to have been carried out by paramilitary groups. Men & women, including the elderly, nurse wounds from batons or rifle butts. What researchers have documented is that prolonged consumption of this kind of stuff cultivates scripts in people’s heads.

I don’t think anyone knows the endgame. The situation has simply become too polarized by bullets & bombs. Even the waiter in the only hotel packs a .45. Drivers don’t stop at red lights any more. One of the state-controlled television stations showed hard-core pornography in the middle of the day. Body parts could be seen sticking out of a massive pile of bricks & twisted metal that was littered with plastic decorative flowers, old shoes & a Rubik’s Cube. Even “good” kids were potential victims of un-structured spare time–hanging out, boredom, lack of direction & cynicism. Budget restraints & a Republican Congress forced a mini-agenda of school uniforms and V-chips.

Now we’re one, like a fist. We are at war & this is propaganda. It shows the world that we are capable of doing something generous. The administration, with public opinion on its side, seems to want the bombing to continue. Airstrikes are helping the president. Touted as a test case for the “New World Order,” it was a diabolical extension of what he’s done before. The media’s depiction of violence as a means of resolving conflict & a national culture which tends to glorify violence further condoned his thinking. And in the macho warrior culture of the Balkans, to the victor goes not only the glory & spoils but also leadership & authority.

At stake now is the administration’s credibility in the eyes of its enemy. The worst thing you can have is people standing & shooting at each other in the White House. They were given a few minutes to leave their homes, which were looted & then burned, some with the infirm left inside. The president succeeded because he understood the power of fear & knew how to use it for his own purposes. The decibel level of the debate & its content, rich with mixed messages, made it especially dangerous. He will live in a bunker & take as many people with him as he can.

The jets are a kind of high-tech insurance. The squadron cancelled a war-game exercise in Las Vegas to head to the bombings. One by one, pilots balled their fists & pumped them in a “Rocky” pose, completing a familiar air warrior salute. Gambling is exhausting, so nothing less than the best will do for the tired gambler. General Electric’s chairman John Welch Jr. pocketed $52.6 million, while Viacom head Sumner Redstone got options worth $50.5 million. “Our demands are clear & he has to accept them. If not, the bridges keep coming down, the factories keep coming down, & hunger is just over the horizon.”

Such images play to a common weakness of democracies: a reluctance to sustain a long war. The Clinton administration is famous for being “on message,” with everyone singing the same policy chorus. “We love your music, your television, everything. We hope we can work with American companies when the war is over. The video games numb our youth to the issue of violence or violent acts, like trying to hit a puddle of mercury with a hammer.” And few can remember the last time any warrior took scissors in hand, signalling that something was being built & not being destroyed.

On not learning: some quotes

The Spring/Summer 2004 issue of Wild Earth has several thought-provoking pieces. Here are a few excerpts.

“Pressed flowers. Bird nests, butterflies behind glass, shells. Hand lenses and tattered field guides. A child reaching for a feather in the grass. Natural history.

“It’s going extinct, and nowhere more quickly than where we need it the most – in our colleges and universities. These days, you don’t need an understanding of – or even an interest in – natural history to get into a graduate program in ecology or any other branch of biology. Financial support for basic natural history research is all but gone. The close, scrupulous observation of nature has a long and illustrious history, but it is now sliding into oblivion . . .

“It’s as if biology has split into two kinds: for-profit and not-for-profit. The for-profit kind: that’s molecular biology, the ‘New Biology’ much in vogue these days – understandably so. Discoveries at the molecular level have revealed layer upon layer, wonder after wonder, in a world of complexity none of us could have guessed at a half century ago when the revelation of the double helix set the genomic era in motion. Yet this has led to the reductionist point of view that everything in biology is explicable by molecular processes, that explaining biological events at the molecular level is the ultimate goal of biology . . .

“And the not-for-profit biology? That’s natural history. Knowledge for its own sake. A field for the passionate amateur and the inspired schoolteacher – and until lately, the professional biologist. Biology departments are phasing out traditional courses in natural history. It’s incipient at some universities and well underway at many others.”

Thomas Eisner and Mary M. Woodsen, “The Science of Wonder: Natural History in the Balance”

*

“No one knows how many synthetic chemicals act as endocrine disrupters. A partial list includes a variety of pesticides, products associated with plastics (including plastic drinking bottles), breakdown products of household detergents, cosmetics, and a number of common industrial chemicals. Little is known about endocrine disrupters because previous tests for health effects focused on cancer. Endocrine disruption, like the earlier discovery of synthetic carcinogens, is a novel surprise.

“Can we think our way out of this problem? Endocrine disruption is impossible to predict based on a molecule’s structure, and effects may be difficult to evaluate experimentally because they include behavioral changes that are often less obvious than physical abnormalities. Moreover, endocrine disruption may occur during very brief windows of embryological exposure (as short as a few days), and may involve interactions between different chemicals. How many interactions are possible among the 58 endocrine disrupters that the Environmental Working Group found in the blood and urine of its nine study subjects? Are we smart enough to understand and manage the cascade of possible effects?”
* * * *
“A rat on a treadmill learns that if it runs when it hears a beep it can avoid an electric shock. The rat can also learn to turn to avoid a shock. But rats cannot learn to rear up on their hind legs to avoid being shocked. The explanation for a rat’s learning pattern is simple: shocks are unpleasant, and running and turning are innate avoidance responses. In contrast, rearing occurs to satisfy curiosity and is an innately exploratory behavior. The rat’s bran cannot learn to avoid danger using a naturally exploratory behavior. So even when rats frequently happen to avoid a shock by rearing, they never make the connection and learn to avoid the shock by rearing when the beep sounds. In fact, over a number of trials, a rat will rear less and less when rearing is the only way to avoid the shock. In an environment alien to its intelligence, the rat exhibits less, not more, of the behavior that could help it to avoid an unpleasant outcome.”

Matthew Orr, “Intelligence Lost: Pitfalls of a Tamed Planet”

*

“Rain drummed on the hatches and splashed off the decks, but still we could make out the sound of a wolf howling from the cliffs over the cove where we dropped anchor. There was only one wolf, although we listened carefully to make sure. The howl started low, leapt up, slid across the water, and sank away. Nothing answered the wolf’s call. Frank and I listened, as the wolf must have listened, the question probing the clouds and damping out in the forest, in the draperies of lichens and drooping hemlock boughs. . . .

“When my colleague, a concert pianist, explained the augmented fourth, she brought both hands in front of her body, palms skyward, fingers spread, and lifted the air. For her, words are not enough to explain this interval. This is a sound that floods the soul, she said, and she strained forward from the waist. The augmented fourth is a heartbreaking interval, dissonance that comes close to consonance, pulls itself so close, but never reaches the perfect fifth that is almost within its grasp.

“She leaned over the keyboard and played two notes: C, F-sharp. Then she flooded the room with music made of the unfinished intervals, harmonies that lead to resolution but never reach a place of peace. Tony, reaching for Maria. A Greek chorus pleading with the gods to have mercy on Orestes’ soul, this man who has murdered his mother. Tristan, reaching for the white sail that will bring his beloved Isolde on a following wind. And Robert Schumann, poor lovesick Schumann, yearning for Clara. Yearning: this ancient word, diving straight through history from the beginnings of language itself, a word as old as home and earth. No one in Christian medieval Europe sang the augmented fourth, my colleague said. It was the diabolus in musica, the devil’s chord – so powerful it could grab a parishioner, drag him to his knees and pull him, scraping on the paving stones, straight to hell. And there I was in that tide-dragged island wilderness, also on my knees, trying to understand the pull of these same two notes.”

Kathleen Dean Moore, “The Augmented Fourth”

Faulty intelligence

It is by now bleedingly obvious that the occupation of Iraq is unraveling for entirely preventable reasons. As Noam Chomsky pointed out the other day, it takes real talent to fail so spectacularly.

Now, I realize people don’t come here for politics. But the question of how common sense can be so consistently and flagrantly hijacked by idiocy relates directly to the main theme of this weblog. While the architects of the Iraq policy (going back through the Clinton regime to George I) may not have been exactly “the best and the brightest,” they were far from stupid – in the sense that they had (with one or two obvious exceptions) the best educations money could buy. And as we all know, formal education makes people more broad-minded and tolerant, right?

What I am working towards here is a hypothesis about the relationship of arrogance to ignorance and spectacular failure. There’s more than one kind of ignorance. The worst kind comes from people who think they do know it all, who fail to recognize the limits of their own intelligence – and who refuse to listen to the councils of any higher power, be it vox populi or vox dei.

I’ll develop these ideas more fully another time. For now, check out this report from the Guardian about the march of folly in Argentina.

A confused chorus

.
To a Lonely Hermaphrodite

Know
thyself.

John M. Burns, Biograffiti: A Natural Selection, Norton, 1975

“Most European languages have two verbs with the sense of ‘to know,’ one meaning to know a person in the sense of friendship or acquaintance (French, connaitre; German, kennen; Spanish, conocer, Russian, poznakomit’), and other meaning to know facts (French, savoir; German, wissen; Spanish, saber; Russian, znat’).”
Curtis Brautigam

And Adam knew (yada’) Eve his wife; and she conceived, and bare Cain, and said, I have gotten a man from the LORD.
Genesis 4:1

“Yada’: a primitive root; to know (properly, to ascertain by seeing); used in a great variety of senses, figuratively, literally, euphemistically and inferentially (including observation, care, recognition; and causatively, instruction, designation, punishment, etc.) (as follow):–acknowledge, acquaintance(-ted with), advise, answer, appoint, assuredly, be aware, (un-)awares, can(-not), certainly, comprehend, consider, X could they, cunning, declare, be diligent, (can, cause to) discern, discover, endued with, familiar friend, famous, feel, can have, be (ig-)norant, instruct, kinsfolk, kinsman, (cause to let, make) know, (come to give, have, take) knowledge, have (knowledge), (be, make, make to be, make self) known, + be learned, + lie by man, mark, perceive, privy to, X prognosticator, regard, have respect, skilful, shew, can (man of) skill, be sure, of a surety, teach, (can) tell, understand, have (understanding), X will be, wist, wit, wot.”
Strong’s Bible Dictionary

“The verb yada’ (‘to know’) exhibits a wide array of meanings in biblical Hebrew. In various contexts yada’ and its cognates may denote sense perception, intellectual apprehension, possession of facts and information that can be learned and transmitted, practical skill, discriminating judgment, even physical intimacy. However, when yada’ has God as its object, it implies far more than simple ‘acknowledgment.’ Nahum Sarna writes:
In the biblical conception, knowledge is not essentially or even primarily rooted in the intellect and mental activity. Rather, it is more experiential and is embedded in the emotions, so that it may encompass such qualities as contact, intimacy, concern, relatedness and mutuality (Exodus, JPS Torah Commentary, p. 5).
Commentary Press

Know thyself. (Gnothi seauton)
“ATTRIBUTION: Delphic Oracle. Inscription on the Oracle of Apollo at Delphi, Greece, 6th century B.C.
“The words are traditionally ascribed to the ‘Seven Sages’ or ‘Seven Wise Men’ of ancient Greece, and specifically to Solon of Athens (c. 640-c. 558 B.C.).”
The Columbia World of Quotations

“The Greeks were always careful to solicit approval from their gods before setting out from home, whether for commercial voyages or colonization. The god most frequently consulted about sending out a colony was Apollo in his sanctuary at Delphi, a hauntingly beautiful spot in the mountains of central Greece. The Delphic sanctuary began to be internationally renowned in the eighth century B.C. because it housed an oracular shrine in which a prophetess, the Pythia, spoke the will of Apollo in response to questions from visiting petitioners. The Delphic oracle operated for a limited number of days over nine months of the year, and demand for its services was so high that the operators of the sanctuary rewarded generous contributors with the privilege of jumping to the head of the line. The great majority of visitors to Delphi consulted the oracle about personal matters such as marriage and having children. That Greeks hoping to found a colony felt they had to secure the approval of Apollo of Delphi demonstrates the oracle was held in high esteem already as early as the 700s B.C., a reputation that continued to make the oracle a force in Greek international affairs in the centuries to come.”
Thomas R. Martin, An Overview of Classical Greek History from Mycenae to Alexander

“Reality and rhetoric are becoming confused. The means through which the United States pursued its Cold War goals – world leadership, global responsibility, strategic alliances, declaratory morality, and so on – have become ends in themselves. Geopolitical analysis is taking second place”.
Jonathan Clarke, “America, Know Thyself”

“Apollo ritually purifies Orestes after the murder of his mother Clytemnestra. The ritual cleanses Orestes of guilt for having committed matricide. The pig’s blood symbolically absolves him from his crime. Delphi became associated with ritualistically cleansing moral pollution; thus, it became a place of exile for those who committed murder or other morally questionable deeds.

“Apollo returned to Delphi in the form of a dolphin (hence, the name Delphi). The Delphic oracle, known also as ‘Pythia,’ would be seated on a tripod (Apollo’s symbol of prophesy) in a trance. Scholars believe that the tripod might have been situated above a fissure in the floor of the temple from which arose the vapors. The oracle would also chew laurel leaves.

“The laurel is an important symbol for Apollo. Eros made Apollo fall in love with the nymph, Daphne, because Apollo mocked his archery skills. Daphne rejected Apollo and fled him. When he caught her and just as he was embracing her, she turned into a laurel tree. Thus, to commemorate his love for Daphne, Apollo made the laurel his sacred tree.

“The Pythia, in a trance state, would only mumble her answer, which a high priest would translate into Apollo’s prophesy. Everyone involved in the ritual had to be ritually washed in the springs. An animal would be sacrificed and, if conditions were favorable, the petitioner could then enter the sanctuary. The question, which had been previously written, was handed to the priest, who in turn asked the Pythia for Apollo’s answer. The priest would translate into hexameter verse.

“The Omphalos, literally the navel, sits in the middle of the sanctuary at Delphi. Pausanias refers to it as the center of the Earth. According to myth, Zeus, trying to determine the middle of the Earth, sent two eagles, one flying east and another flying west. They met at Delphi. It became an important symbol of the prophetic arts.

“Cassandra, a figure in the Oresteia, also is associated with Apollo. Apollo made overtures to Cassandra. She agreed to be with him if he gave her the gift of prophesy. After he taught her prophesy, Cassandra refused Apollo. There is some disagreement as to whether she outright refused him or she did not bear him any children. Nonetheless, to exact revenge, and since he could not take back his gift of prophesy, Apollo cursed Cassandra. All her prophesies, though true, would not be believed or understood. Agamemnon returns from the Trojan War with Cassandra as his concubine. She foretells his death and the Orestes’ revenge on Clytemnestra to a confused chorus.”

Angie M. Kenna, “Apollo: Background, Mythology and Images”

“I absolutely cannot believe that the U.S. is bombarding a mosque in Iraq. The stupidity, arrogance, and total lack of comprehensive thinking – not to mention foresight about the consequences of their actions – the administration is exhibiting are so appalling that there is nothing to say; one listens, reads the headlines, and goes away slack-jawed and stupified, and –shaking that off — desiring nothing more than to climb to the top of the highest building and shout ‘WAKE UP!!!’ But what would come back? A giant, empty echo?”

the cassandra pages (April 7, 2004)