Alllusions

I assume that the allusion of the title of No Country for Old Men is to W. B. Yeats’s poem, “Sailing to Byzantium”:

THAT is no country for old men. The young
In one another's arms, birds in the trees
- Those dying generations - at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.

An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.

O sages standing in God's holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing-masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.

Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.

Though I would have liked to master Yeats during college, that ambition went the way of many things I would have liked to do but apparently didn’t want to do enough, for I never did come to understand in any comprehensive or terribly deep way his symbols.

That said, the poem seems somewhat inappropriate for the film, as it speaks of an alluring and golden world of youth, a mythological metropolis, an Eden of sensuality that is glimpsed in the Cohen film only by its absence from the landscapes or the characters’ hearts. The Tommy Lee Jones character, Sheriff Bell (the sound that begins the plot of “The Pardoner’s Tale,” (some four hundred lines after the formal beginning) come to think of it, is the ringing of bells) is surely, “An aged man … but a paltry thing, / A tattered coat upon a stick,” his body surrounded by “dying animals,” and bound to be one itself. But his soul does not clap its hands and sing, seems not to know how to begin to find what it used to be. It is no country for old men, but all he has as models are the old men, all of them now gone. Sheriff Bell hears the alarums of war, hears the knell of death, and has not the lust or life or sight of Heaven or Faery or whatever it was that Yeats saw still and desired, even as he was writing his Last Poems:

Politics

How can I, that girl standing there,
My attention fix
On Roman or on Russian
Or on Spanish politics,
Yet here's a travelled man that knows
What he talks about,
And there's a politician
That has both read and thought,
And maybe what they say is true
Of war and war's alarms,
But O that I were young again
And held her in my arms.

Thanks, by the way, to a man named Schmoo for reprinting this poem, one of my favorite by Yeats. I am in bed next to my sleeping wife and didn’t want to get up to find the book, then have to type it out. A few varied Google searches brought me to Schmoo, and thus the poem gets printed a second time online. (Hmm – Last Poems probably means a publishing date of 1939, which means it’s been 69 years, which might mean it still belongs to someone – so, if I should not have this posted, please let me know and I’ll remove it.) Sorry for the haphazard ending to the post.

An Answer

Was just rereading in my obsessive way the post I just put up (even though the point of that post is to be simply a bunch of unpolished notes), and read the final portion of the previous post: “‘What good is the truth if no one knows it?’ Good question.” I thought to myself, The truth doesn’t need to answer that question. The truth, whether we know it or not, is a good, it is good, it is the good, or at least a quality of the good. God needs us not, nor anything we can give Him, and if He exists He is the embodiment (embement? emisment? amment?) of truth, which is why Jesus gives no answer to Pilate when he asks, “What is truth?” Jesus gives no answer in the sense of taking action to provide one, but gives one in the sense that it is being given even as the question is asked: He is the Answer. Truth, at that point, stood before Pilate and Pilate asked Truth what He was and heard not nor saw not the Answer standing before him.

Notes on No Country for Old Men

This consists of notes on No Country for Old Men. A real prose post, more coherent and dedicated to full sentences I hope, is planned for later. The following is compiled with the help of my wife, whom we'll call Kay Hawking for now, in both thinking and remember things thought. It should perhaps be emphasized that we've not read the novel, and watched only the "Sheriff's Diary" among the extras. And I suppose a Spoiler Alert is demanded precisely in this spot, though it's an amorphous enough film that it's hard to say precisely what one might spoil.

Money under a tree: "The Pardoner’s Tale" – love of money is the root of all evil – is it for Anton's evil? Why is he so enraged at competition?

How does everybody find Llewellyn?

Magical realism

Texas gothic

Evil as a unexplainable force

Multiple unanswered questions: money? death of wife? motives? death of sherrif? meaning of dream? Woody Harrelson?

Eden and the fall of man: "What you’re dealing with is nothing new," says the cripple.

Air weapon is dehumanizing – modern version of reaper’s scythe – no big difference between crops and cattle – both raised for killing – Beckett’s giving birth astride a grave.

Twist of fate – flip of coin, but wife puts it on his choice, but he says I got here just the same way as the coin did.

How much choice do we have and how much is out of our control?

"Signs and wonders."

God would come to me, but he didn’t; I wouldn’t either if I knew me; you don’t know what he’s thinking

Failure? Should he have graduated to some level of expertise/some faith in or knowledge of the universe. The “gameboard” has changed and so he is not an expert but more of a rookie than ever before.

Retirement cliché turned on its head or at least emptied – nothing happens, which seems like a failure. His death seems prophesied by tale of ancestor who died on his porch and by dream, but nothing happens after first, and movie ends after second.

Goes into hotel room after Llewellyn dies, after he visits the morgue? Why is killer in room – where is he? How does sheriff not find him? He’s probably there because he’s looking for money. What ever happens to the money? Was probably not in vent because vent is round shaped behind grate. Was lock blown out originally? Probably not, because Mexicans killed him it seems, and so killer comes to look for money.

The Echo Chamber

The blogosphere seems to act like a gigantic echo-chamber at times, causing stories that don't make it big at first to get there if enough people mention them. As my modest effort to add to the echo chamber effect on this story of Hussein-Al Qaeda connections, I offer the final three paragraphs to Stephen F. Hayes's article on “Iraqi Perspectives Project: Saddam and Terrorism: Emerging Insights from Captured Iraqi Documents,” a study showing the sympathy between the objectives of Saddamite Iraq and Al Qaeda, not to mention monetary connections between the former and individuals working for the latter:

What's happening here is obvious. Military historians and terrorism analysts are engaged in a good faith effort to review the captured documents from the Iraqi regime and provide a dispassionate, fact-based examination of Saddam Hussein's long support of jihadist terrorism. Most reporters don't care. They are trapped in a world where the Bush administration lied to the country about an Iraq-al Qaeda connection, and no amount of evidence to the contrary--not even the words of the fallen Iraqi regime itself--can convince them to reexamine their mistaken assumptions.

Bush administration officials, meanwhile, tell us that the Iraq war is the central front in the war on terror and that American national security depends on winning there. And yet they are too busy or too tired or too lazy to correct these fundamental misperceptions about the case for war, the most important decision of the Bush presidency.

What good is the truth if nobody knows it?

Good Question

On "red-diaper baby socialist patchouli sponges" ... and Tolkien

Kevin D. Williamson of NRO's Media Blog has a fine vitriolic rant on reactions to David Mamet's apparent conversion to conservatism. The passage (from Williamson) that most caught my eye was the following: “Conservatism assumes that the world is necessarily imperfect, that our institutions are imperfect, and that mankind is inescapably morally compromised. These brain-dead leftists have, apparently, never heard of T.S. Eliot, Russell Kirk, Evelyn Waugh, Burke, Tom Wolfe, Disraeli, or V.S. Naipaul.” I am only passingly familiar with most of these men, as writers, though I know Waugh fairly well, and if any man or his writing was ever a study in moral ambiguity, it was he.

This reminds me of the canard that continuously comes up about Tolkien, that, as Time Magazine put it a few years ago in a review of A Feast for Crows, by George R. R. Martin (“R. R.”? – who’s he copying?), “Tolkien's work has enormous imaginative force, but you have to go elsewhere for moral complexity.” I will now proceed to cheat on my blog by supplying my commentary in the slightly edited form of the letter I wrote to a friend when he forwarded this same review to me almost one year ago this week:

This guy can't have possibly read Tolkien, and he somehow confuses the recognition that evil exists, and the ability to identify it (as you [the friend to whom I was writing] put it, “a profoundly Catholic world view of darkness vs. light”) with an utter lack of complexity. Does he know anything about the intimate portrait of a confused and tortured Smeagol? about kind Sam Gamgee's interest in killing Gollum? about the pride and skill and love of beauty of Fëanor in The Silmarillion? about the fact that a big chunk of Sauron's army is made up of men, not predestined orcs? about the love and hate and bitterness and lust for power that makes up the psyche of Denethor II, Steward of the beautiful white city who tries to burn himself and his half-dead son Faramir to death before the final battle? about the failure and repentance of that same king's other and more favored son Boromir? about the pitiable craven weakness of Wormtongue? about the crass and selfish but hardly evil cousins of Bilbo Baggins? about the brave but avaricious dwarves? Does he not know that Frodo fails in his quest? That his moral undoing is only undone by the undoing of Smeagol? I could go on and on, but this notion that Tolkien was a Manichean is ridiculous.

There. Hope that one-year-old epistle on a three-year-old review of a three-year-old novel wasn’t too warmed-over. Changes to the letter include the final two rhetorical questions (an odd detail to forget), the addition of names I couldn’t remember at the time (the letter has thus lost some of its sputtering quality, unfortunately: “Does he know anything about the pride and skill and love of beauty of (forgot his name) the gem-forging elf in the Silmarillion?”), as well as elisions of certain mild but still disparaging terms I applied to a writer whose name I had not bothered to notice in the heat of writing to a personal friend a private letter I thought would not see the light of day. I imagine that Mr. Lev Grossman would survive the application of these terms to his self, but prefer not to add insult to disagreement, especially when I know the man’s name.

Weather's Stopped

Ugh, we’re back to weather again, and its charms are now unavailing, as they get at this time of year. Starting around 7:30 AM today, I spent about thirty minutes this morning outside the DMV in a line, waiting to get in to get my license renewed. I finally bailed out when the line didn’t move in all that time. I’ll go back some evening, as some of these places are apparently open until 7:00, though they do not seem to post these times on the web (they had this fact posted outside). Last night was also bitterly cold. Far off in a northern suburb, my wife and I came gratefully out of a dull and sitcommy play that my cousin had a brief role in, into a dark parking lot collecting minute Dipping Dots from the sky. There followed the usual gasps of shock that it’s still so cold, fervent wishes for the advent of summer, or at least spring, and then what is becoming my perennial observation (if I ever have grandchildren, they’ll grow sick of hearing me say this, I think) that there’s a reason they say winter doesn’t end until March 21st.

The Color of Crimson

There is a well-written article at Harvard's The Crimson (hat tip to Roger Clegg at NRO’s Phi Beta Cons) on the most insidious weakness of affirmative action: its inculcation of doubt in all spectators as to whether the winner of a post is worthy or simply being affirmed. I have very little to add to the article, which is written in a quietly reasonable manner that can only help its cause, other than to offer a supportive analogy: the coach's son. Imagine hearing that the coach's son, a sophomore, has made the varsity basketball team, and is a starter, in front of boys two years older than he. My first impression, when I learned just this right before a playoff game at our school (just last week, in fact), was to wonder. I know our coach, though it is not deeply that I know him, and he comes across as a scrupulously honest man. I thought, “Well, the kid has to be good – coach wouldn't let him play otherwise.” Though there are certainly similar situations where parental favoritism exists, it turns out I was right – the kid knocked down five of five three pointers in our losing effort and did not turn it over once.

The argument here is of course not that we should ban coaches’ sons from playing for fear of permanently injuring their integrity. For coaches’ sons (and daughters), and corporate sons and daughters (I have been one of these), and sons and daughters generally, are only vulnerable when they are given by those parents a responsibility for which others are competing. They are not a readily identifiable group, are not identifiable as privileged outside of that particular environment, and so cannot besmirch the others of their “class.”

Ethnicities, however, are often immediately identifiable, and the particular privileges of affirmative action do not stem from private nepotism but from grievance group agitation and government decree. Thus are tarnished the reputations of whole groups, instead of the reputations of individually foolish fathers or mothers, and inept sons or daughters.

One other comment: Clegg mentions, as his final statement, that affirmative action is illegal. Is it, though? I know that it is, and can understand why it would be, in a government-owned institution such as a Social Security office or a University, but is not Harvard a private institution? Can’t they lay whatever good intentions down to pave whatever road they wish to wherever they wish? If not, it probably has something to do with the receipt of Federal monies. I could quite easily be wrong however, as this paragraph is almost wholly speculative, and I would be willing to bet significant sums that Clegg knows more of this issue than I do.

Holy Cow

I just wanted to offer thanks to Mr. Jonah Goldberg of National Review Online for linking to me from his Liberal Fascism blog. It's certainly my first and only manually-created link, not to mention my first high-traffic link, which leaves me just a bit shocked at the readership I'm getting (let's just say that the past two-three hours have outpaced the blog's lifetime readership). I've enjoyed reading Jonah, as most of his readership calls him, for many years, and I’ve enjoyed the refinement of his style, presumably having changed in my tastes over the same years as he has. I’m honored that he thought my piece was worth linking. Thanks, Jonah!

Publius J. Goldberg

I read a bit earlier tonight from Jonah Goldberg's blog, Liberal Fascism, which is named after his book, (which, like many books, I own but have not yet read). In a post titled, “Their Community Building -- And Ours (Or, Why I'm More Libertarian),” he says that modern liberalism, having essentially totalitarian elements, wishes to impose a single way of doing things on the nation as a whole. An example is FDR, who sought to reverse the Great Depression and then the depredations of the Axis. Quoting one William Schambra, Goldberg says, “‘Roosevelt sought to pull America together in the face of its divisions by an appeal to national duty, discipline, and brotherhood; he aimed to restore the sense of local community, at the national level.’” But this “cannot be done,” he claims. He does not explicitly say in his post why this is so, but perhaps his conclusion is simply the fruit of observation – seeing the obviously stronger bond between people who can connect in one place. This bond is stronger simply because it happens naturally – it does not need to be engineered. It results in “the Burkean little platoons of civil society ... local communities, churches, associations, whatever.” This kind of community, according to Goldberg, “is diverse, local, particular, quirky, organic and grown from the bottom up.” “You can have,” he says, “something like a national culture, but the idea of a national community makes me very nervous,” perhaps because of the unnaturalness of Roosevelt’s effort, and the modern liberal effort generally, and the level of coercion that would be necessary to fully implement it.

It is of course these “quirky, organic and grown from the bottom up” communities that are the source and the bane of tyranny. Every human and therefore every would-be tyrant comes out of a locality that has formed him and his ideas. Every would-be tyrant needs a base of support, and his most natural and loyal support likely comes from this locality (Saddam Hussein, with his base of support in Tikrit, north of Baghdad, is an example; Austrian Adolf Hitler’s rise in Germany may well be a counter-example to this, and I suppose the systemic dictators of the Roman Empire or the Soviet Union have advantages that may well have rendered such local bases unnecessary). But the most effective opposition to, or structural hedge against, tyranny will come from local organizations too. This insight is made at least as far back as Federalist Paper number 10, in which Madison argues not only for a Republic, but for a large Republic. He has no hope in small democracies, which he defines as “a society consisting of a small number of citizens, who assemble and administer the government in person,” because the majority, being homogenous over a great multitude of issues, will usually rule, which will put the minority at their mercy. Madison says it more exactly:

The smaller the society, the fewer probably will be the distinct parties and interests composing it; the fewer the distinct parties and interests, the more frequently will a majority be found of the same party; and the smaller the number of individuals composing a majority, and the smaller the compass within which they are placed, the more easily will they concert and execute their plans of oppression.

The result is “spectacles of turbulence and contention,” and short lifespans for the small democracies. A large republic, simply by virtue of covering great distances, will incorporate all the varied particulars that climate, geography, and distance inculcate and permit in human beings. As Madison puts it,

Extend the sphere, and you take in a greater variety of parties and interests; you make it less probable that a majority of the whole will have a common motive to invade the rights of other citizens; or if such a common motive exists, it will be more difficult for all who feel it to discover their own strength, and to act in unison with each other.

He also mentions that distrust – fear of the Other (i.e., the guy you don’t know ’cause he lives so far away) – can have a crippling effect on political organization. The result is that while coal miners in West Virginia and dockworkers in San Francisco may agree on labor issues, they may not agree on environmental issues, for instance. A large republic has not one, but many majorities, all overlapping and needing to compromise to get even part of what they want. Yes, we all feel the good that is lost when what we know is right is not implemented, but we do not miss the tyranny that also goes unimplemented, and the Founders certainly trusted themselves and their fellow citizens enough to believe that self-interest at least would tip the balance in their favor.

The point? That Goldberg is right to support the Burkean platoons of Federalism, since by frustrating the goals of leadership they create the right to lead. Too much leadership by one results in none for others, and as we have no philosopher kings handy (nor should we want one, says Goldberg’s confrere, the Derb), that’s for the best.

Weather's Changing

It’s still winter – snow is forecast for tonight – but the crispness of the thirtyish air is not like that we get as we move into winter from the fall. Autumnal crispness is of a different order, brisker, with different odors. Today’s crispness feels temporary. The sun is giving little warmth, but seems to promise warmth, to say, “that’s alright, I’m just gearing up – it’ll be warm soon.” The oppressiveness of a Midwestern winter seems lifted.

I wrote this this morning. I'm not exactly looking forward to going outside to catch my bus, but it's better than staying here, I guess.

"Private Revelationism"

Was up all night last night for no particularly good reason, and so am desperately tired. Will go to bed soon, but read a bit in Touchstone as I was brushing my teeth. Stopped partway through an article and decided to jot this down for future reference, and just to get it out there to my widespread readership. Brian McDonald, in his article “Merely Saved or Merely Damned?” (not available online, as of this posting) writes a paragraph that I felt described an aspect of my life precisely. Dad says he married his second wife, my stepmother, because he felt God was telling him to. He essentially felt called, as one might in a vocation, to marry her following his divorce (please know that the somewhat heartless tone that seems to be taking over – I almost typed, “to marry this woman” – is simply a result of my trying to use no names). Writing of C. S. Lewis’s Screwtape Letters, he says,

Screwtape emphasizes that even other-directed prayer, properly managed, can immunize the patient against reality. If Wormwood can get him to indulge in high-toned prayers for his mother’s “soul” [do I do this, I wonder?] while ignoring the needs of the real woman, then “in time, you may get the cleavage so wide that no thought or feeling for the imagined mother will ever flow into his treatment of the real one.”

Thus, while Screwtape regards prayer as a disagreeable subject, he also shows that a skilled tempter may turn it into an effective means of getting patients into the house of “our father below.” The trick is to “keep them watching their own minds and trying to produce feelings there by the actions of their own wills.” Such prayer will become an exercise in imagination insulated from fact and ultimately from God himself, “the Fountain of all Facthood,” as Lewis calls him elsewhere.

A will bent on manufacturing feelings may well veer into private revelationism and away from the hard and public revelation of God and his will in the Scriptures and the Church. (Note the phenomenon of modern Christians justifying their divorces on the basis of inner illuminations rather than the Lord’s teaching or the Church’s counsel.)

The kicker, the point of retyping the whole passage, as the discerning reader will by now no doubt have realized, is the parenthetical expression. (Let me take this moment to briefly decry what appears to be a new trend of using parentheses in lieu of brackets when inserting one’s own words into a quotation – what does one do when the quotation itself has parentheses, revert back to brackets temporarily?) I have no way of knowing just how true my father’s personal revelation was, though I have no doubt it was sincerely come by. I think, however, that McDonald’s dimetop landing on just the spot of the philosophical airfield my father occupies was more than coincidence. Lots of people are crowding that aerodrome, attempting to fly, and perhaps succeeding for all I know, though I believe they are not. There’s been something in the water, though, through the last sixty years, and either the generation’s wrong, generally speaking, or the Church is.

My apologies if I’ve not been entirely coherent; I’ve got to go to bed just now.

From Feb. 4, mostly written on the bus, so that it simply trails off...

Missed Mass yesterday. Planned to go to the 5:00, but didn’t really want to get up at 4:00 to shower (hadn’t done so yet), and decided to get up at 4:30. At 4:30, I made no new plans, as their absurdity would become immediately apparent, but just kept putting off the getting-up. At around 4:57 I conceded that I was not going and watched the Super Bowl instead. Tonight I did not dilly-dally quite as much, and so am attempting to get to the Basilica for 6:45 confession. We’ll see whether I make it. I caught the 6:00 bus, but the train I catch afterwards doesn’t disgorge in any proximity to the church. I might have to take the city bus on the same route, which is where the unlikelihood of my making it in time becomes most likely.

The night is foggy. One sorrow of life in middle America, one bolster to an hereditary nostalgia for Ireland, is the lack of fog in the former – at least in my part. A kind of glamour – and here I copy C. S. Lewis in noting that I mean the old meaning of glamour, magic, not the true modern definition, ala Audrey Hepburn, or the false modern definition, ala Paris Hilton – takes over the landscape. Especially at night, forms appear out of the nothingness and the world seems ancient yet unexplored. The world is not the old world yet, yet come out of the fog, I will be I, my things will be wet.

I wonder whether there is a half-life on my teaching career. I was told by my “cooperating teacher,” he who supervised me when I student-taught (I believe they were once called “mentor teachers,” in a slightly more hierarchical age), that one’s best years of teaching are the fifth to the fifteenth, when one has the most energy and zeal, the least exhaustion, the most creativity, the shallowest of ruts. I have no true creativity. Often I am seized by a zeal for some new way of doing things, but I rarely hold on to that zeal. An example will serve: When I was in college, I learned the meaning of the word “schanachie.” I don’t remember now whether I spell this correctly (anyone who cares to check may look up albums by the Chieftans – their Ballad of the Irish Horse is published by a outfit of this name). In Irish it means “story teller,” and I was instantly seized with the thought that it would be a great name, at a school that calls its teams “The Fighting Irish,” for a literary magazine, and that I would be the one to start that magazine. I walked around in an unobtrusive sort of a fever for a few days, but never mentioned it to anyone, or only to a few non-literary types, primarily because I was utterly unsure how to go about founding a literary magazine, partly because I had the feeling that I would be mocked for such an unabashedly Irish name (this due in part to a stay in Dublin, where the locals are anything but sentimental about their heritage), partly because I didn’t know many literary types, though I could certainly have found them in my English classes. Eventually the fever petered out, and I soon learned that there was already a literary journal, called The Juggler. Though I had two poems published in it, during my senior year, I never bid to join its editorial team.

I have no true creativity, I said above. I do, though I don’t exercise it. And when it comes to teaching, I am not particularly interested in finding ways to interest them. I am interested in literature. I want them to come in interested in one of three things: literature specifically, learning generally, or academic success. Unfortunately, even at a school as smart as this one (our lowest PLAN test predictions were 18-22, for two students, meaning that the dumbest kids in my school – or at least the worst test-takers – score as well as the average kids at my last school), I run into plenty who are uninterested in any of these things, or at least uninterested enough often enough that they don’t put the effort forth.

My favorite teachers were the ones who were clear, organized, lively, and had interesting or provocative things to say about their subject. Where the subjects in question were just not that interesting inherently, at least to my limited brain, the first three could be pretty successful. From seventh grade through high school, when I first really became a student, I count two science teachers, two math teachers, two history, one economics, one theology, and three English teachers as my most effective. I discount two more English teachers who were good but not quite on the level of their English peers; they may have been as good as the other non-English teachers, but my natural liking for the subject may have improved my opinion of them. Not one of these people used much in the way of “student-centered learning.” Not all of them were personally inspiring (Let me just note how much I hate the sanctimonious braggadocio of “I don’t teach; I inspire” sweatshirts. Let your students say it if it’s true.). All of them, however, were personable, in control of their classrooms, knowledgeable about their subject matter, and able to present it clearly. I’m not even sure they were each and every single one of them that organized in their presentation. I don’t know how tightly their assessments measured precisely what they taught (potentially one of my weaknesses). But I do know that I learned with them.

I am clear in what I say. One of my refrains is, “Is that clear?” I look them in the eye. They nod. I understand that this question is not always answered honestly, but …. But what? Perhaps I should test them more often, ask them to repeat what has been taught in their own words, some of the less able ones, at least, but the classes are sometimes so difficult to move forward at all that sometimes one just has to move on so the smarter kids don’t get bored out of their skulls. And sometimes I do that stuff, but it doesn’t stick with all of them.