A New Project? Let's See How Long it Lasts

Been a while since I posted. My apologies, faithful readers.

Rilke says somewhere in his letters to a young poet that a true writer writes because that’s what he is, and that if the young poet isn’t writing, then he isn’t a poet. I’m not sure what I am (at 35? - O my!), but I find that while I can get away with not writing, I am unable to be happy about it. Sooner or later, I have to start setting things down, even though that is sometimes more stressful than the thoughts that beg to be set down.

Often, though, the things don’t beg. I have no end of unfinished poems, ... well, scratch that, I have an end to them, but not an end I’ve approached. And I often have ideas, but I am not chomping at the bit with them, certainly not with plots. My ideas seem more meet for the lyrical essay or verse, and they don’t come too often. One idea that has persisted is that is this: I have wished to reread the novels of Charles Williams and write about them. I have no fully formed thesis; I simply have upsurgings of thought that arise when I read them. All these upsurgings are quite possibly both coherent and synthesizable. So finally, after reading all of them last Spring – I had previously read three or four of them, at widely spaced intervals over the last ten years – I am feeling ready to start. So I went to the shelf and pulled out Williams’ novel War in Heaven.

Naturally enough, I also pulled out a completely unrelated book of poems, Patrick Kavanagh’s (“kav'-an-ah,” I was admonished by a blonde in Dublin, not “kav'-a-naw'”) Collected Poems, and decided to read that instead before I started writing. This book is special to me, for I plucked it at random out of a bookshelf in a covered red brick market somewhere south of the Liffey and near St. Stephen’s Green, if I remember correctly, read a poem or two, decided it was good enough, and later found Kavanagh to be one of my favorite poets, even if I do regard him as a minor. I feel close to the guy as a part-time poet, as an underachiever, and as a dreamer. Besides that, and more importantly (there are many dilettantes I could love), he says things both beautiful and true.

So here’s another project: every few days, or more often, I will pick out a poem by Kavanagh and write about it. I’ll start with the first, my favorite, one of the few sonnets I can come close to quoting from memory: “Inniskeen Road: July Evening.”

The bicycles go by in twos and threes –
There’s a dance in Billy Brennan’s barn tonight
And there’s the half-talk code of mysteries,
The wink-and-elbow language of delight.
Half-past eight, and there is not a spot
Upon a mile of road, no shadow thrown,
That might turn out a man or woman, not
A footfall tapping secrecies of stone.

I have what every poet hates, in spite
Of all the solemn talk of contemplation.
Oh, Alexander Selkirk knew the plight
Of being king and government and nation.
A road, a mile of kingdom, I am king
Of banks and stones and every blooming thing.

When I teach sonnets, I don’t bother with the whole “Shakespearean, Spenserian, Miltonic” thing. I see it as beside the point and too terminological for high school. I teach the basic structure: most every sonnet will be a 12-2 or 8-6, that is, a trio of quatrains, followed by a couplet, or a pair of quatrains (an octet), followed by a sestet. And the reason this structure is important, I tell them, is that it gives us a clue to the true structure, the thematic structure, of the poem. A sonnet is almost invariably composed of two parts: the situation and the resolution (there are plenty of exceptions, of course). A 12-2, or three quatrains and a couplet poem, is more likely to have its situation explained over the course of twelve lines, and resolved (or even solved) in the last two. An 8-6, or an octet-sestet poem, will lay out the situation in only eight lines, and resolve it over six.

There are, however, any number of poems that do not hold to these generalizations, and “Iniskeen Road: July Evening,” is one of them. It seems obvious that there is a break after line eight, symbolized by the line break, but that the sestet is not a wholly unified statement either. The octet evokes the intimacy of a country dance in a local barn, in which the participants are so close they converse non-verbally, through a “half-talk code of mysteries,” and through the universal “wink-and-elbow language of delight” (3-4). At “half-past eight” (5), however, the speaker is alone on the road, no “man or woman” with him (7). The last line of the octet tells us that there is not “a footfall tapping secrecies of stone,” an evocative line from a poet who throughout his poetry seeks searchingly – but perhaps more futilely than even the Romantics did – for the sources of the magic of Creation.

The sestet represents a clean break, and contains what may be Kavanagh’s most perfect two lines, in their hopeless truth:

I have what every poet hates in spite
Of all the solemn talk of contemplation.

Those are lines I remember, in spite of my faulty synapses. Those are lines that the Goblin Bee of truth states quite loudly in its sting for a lonely, unproductive expatriate. When I read it, I was plumb sick of being king of my little rented room off North Strand Road, just past the tenements with the mismatched doors. I was king indeed of my little world, had the run of a miniature Georgian house, and simply wanted to go back home. I wrote more than I’ve ever written since, and it wasn’t much. I had what every poet hates, I didn’t do much with it, and I don’t much wish for it back, though in my weaker moments I blame my empty blog and journal on its lack.

Kavanagh’s poem is ultimately an 8-6, but his final two lines are a couplet – they are not integrated into the sestet – because they solidify and cry out his frustration over this loneliness and his resulting petty power: “A road, a mile of kingdom, I am king / Of banks and stones and every blooming thing.” Lonely is the head that wears the crown.

Not-so-N.I.C.E.

The lazy blogger's last resort is publishing (slightly emended - especially if there were any egregious spelling errors) letters to the editor. So, here I go:

Dear Mr. Taranto,

Don't know what you think of C. S. Lewis, but today you mentioned Britain's "National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence," or, "N.I.C.E." There is already a precedent for a sinister organization called N. I. C. E., dating from around the same time Orwell was writing, and that is C. S. Lewis's "National Institute for Coordinated Experiments," a sort of genetic engineering center cum Frankenstein's lab cum Faustian summoning chamber that houses the bad guys of That Hideous Strength, the final installation of Lewis's space trilogy. The three novels have much more religious than governmental overtones. Out of the Silent Planet portrays a trip to Mars, a sort of mature Eden, where the inhabitants have gone on to procreate but still live in harmony with God, each other, and nature; Perelandra tells of a trip to Venus, where the inhabitants are only two - a Venusian Adam and a Venusian Eve, both subject to temptation from a visiting demon; That Hideous Strength is one I've not read as recently as the other two, but I know it is set on earth - the "silent planet," due to its sinful state - and has, if I remember, its conflict as the efforts of the hero from the first two books, Professor Ransom, to prevent the members of N.I.C.E. from bringing to life a corpse that most of them think they are reanimating through scientific means, but which they are actually making ready for demonic possession.

If, again, I remember correctly, Lewis's essential criticism is similar to what he writes of in The Abolition of Man, which is that there is a certain breed of utopian in this world that thinks he could solve all our problems if only he could extirpate just this or just that imperfection, whether by means of eugenics, biological engineering, different governance, or different education. Being a Christian who took seriously the existence of the devil, Lewis believed this tendency a mistake and associated it with a demonic desire to remake mankind, thus perverting (though in his - the devil's - mind, perfecting) God's creation. By opening mankind to reanimation through ungodly means, one was not rescuing from death the soul of the man so affected, but opening his body up to be enslaved by evil. Hence Lewis's "men without chests" in The Abolition of Man, and hence his Professor Weston in Perelandra, essentially a automaton acting not out of his own free will, but because he (it) is enslaved, or possessed. Anyway, this is becoming a bit of a digression, but Lewis distrusted big, unaccountable, elite-staffed bureaucracies trying to remake the world by removing what they see as the sources of human evil. It's kind of shocking - or perhaps it's not - that the British bureaucrats and scientists are so ignorant of the writings of one of their most famous 20th century authors that they would use an ironic and previously used name for their big, unaccountable, etc.

Sincerely,

Jay Hawking

P. S. Hope you don't mind, but I'll probably post the text of this letter in my infrequently-updated and less-frequently-read blog. When I actually get around to writing something, I might as well publish it.

Another point to make, that I won't get into now: Lewis uses Perelandra to posit a solution to the free will vs. predestination debate, suggesting that they are somehow one in the same. In Perelandra, Professor Ransom goes to bed one night conflicted about how to act, and wakes in the morning knowing precisely what he will decide to do. Lewis's narrator (can't remember if it's Ransom himself) suggests that perhaps there is no true difference between these. Lewis was of course trained in the Chestertonian and Christian school of believable paradox, so perhaps he's being more credulous than he should be, but I'm also not phrasing my point quite as eloquently and subtly as he did (sorry that I don't have the time or text handy to quote him on this). Also, not meaning to demean "the Chestertonian and Christian school of believable paradox," as I myself am one of its pupils, but phrasing something as a paradox doesn't, of course, make it true.

This Is All Very Disturbing

Before the election I wrote that Obama was prepared to re-make America in a socialist, collectivist bent. Larry Kudlow has similar fears:

An old friend e-mailed me this week about how to characterize Obama’s economic interventions into the banking and auto sectors (with health care next on the list). He says it’s not really socialism. Nor is it fascism. He suggests it’s state capitalism. But I think of it more as corporate capitalism. Or even crony capitalism, as Cato’s Dan Mitchell puts it.

It’s not socialism because the government won’t actually own the means of production. It’s not fascism because America is a democracy, not a dictatorship, and Obama’s program doesn’t reach way down through all the sectors, but merely seeks to control certain troubled areas. And in the Obama model, it would appear there’s virtually no room for business failure. So the state props up distressed segments of the economy in some sort of 21st-century copy-cat version of Western Europe’s old social-market economy.

So call it corporate capitalism or state capitalism or government-directed capitalism. But it still represents a huge change from the American economic tradition. It’s a far cry from the free-market principles that governed the three-decade-long Reagan expansion, which now seems in jeopardy. And with cap-and-trade looming, this corporate capitalism will only grow more intense.

This is all very disturbing.

Indeed.

The End of Breeding

I am not an Ezra Pound expert by any means – he is too allusive and classical for my learning, and my ears have never attuned themselves to his music. Despite that, I am teaching a few of his poems, rather poorly, as part of a unit on Modernism, which I am also teaching rather poorly.

The poem we covered today is “The Garden,” which goes as follows:

En robe de parade.
– Albert Samain

Like a skein of loose silk blown against a wall
She walks by the railing of a path in Kensington Gardens,
And she is dying piece-meal
of a sort of emotional anemia.

And round about there is a rabble
Of the filthy, sturdy, unkillable infants of the very poor.
They shall inherit the earth.

In her is the end of breeding.
Her boredom is exquisite and excessive.
She would like someone to speak to her,
And is almost afraid that I
will commit that indiscretion.

It is not a bad poem, and has some resonance for the modern world. The most important line in the poem, I think, is: “In her is the end of breeding.” It seems clear to me that “end” has both a teleological and a prosaic meaning here: First, like a work of art, she is the perfection of breeding. The simile of a “skein of silk” implies her quality of rare and fine beauty; she is an object of wealth and labor. Her contrast with the surrounding “rabble / Of the filthy, sturdy, unkillable infants of the very poor” who do not speak to her is obvious. Whether Pound was a eugenicist, I do not know, but I believe he was an anti-Semite and I know that he broadcast on Italian radio during the Second World War. These lines bespeak a kind of tragic eugenic sensibility, the belief that there is a perfected race, but that it is going to be surpassed, that it will not “inherit the earth.”

This of course brings us to the prosaic meaning of “end”: she is the end because she is the last. We know that does not have any children because she is bored and because she “would like someone to speak to her” – in other words, she has nothing to do (no children to care for), and no one who loves her. That “rabble / Of the filthy, sturdy, unkillable infants of the very poor” emphasizes her infertility. The mention of an “indiscretion” implies the scandal of the presumably male speaker approaching her; she seems to have been without man.

Her boredom is “exquisite.” Perhaps the emptiness of wealth has something to do with the resentment of quality that Spengler mentions in the article I linked to below. Perhaps we have so long been wealthy in the West, have so long avoided great suffering, that we have nothing to fight for anymore. We have been denuded of our religion, and with it the spiritual battles that give concern and color to our lives, and our bodies have been secured by the comfort granted us by prosperity and guaranteed us by the state, and the safety guarded by our technologically powerful military. The success of capitalism and the long slow decay of socialism have together done us in, and we Westerners, who see ourselves as perfected in the cultural sense (even those who believe the West irredeemably flawed believe themselves to have come out of it with true wisdom), have become bored, have failed to see the point in it all, have wandered through the gardens of these wealthy states surrounded by the children of the poor. We blame ourselves for their state, we shake our heads sadly at their savagery, we distrust our ourselves, and unstiffened by any iron in our blood, we allow ourselves to die. We are not so unlike that lady in Kensington Gardens.

The Fall of the West

I passed this deconstruction of the fame of Susan Boyle on to my students. Thought I’d scare a bit of ambition into ’em. Hat tip to John Derbyshire.

A Letter to our Adoption Lawyer

After last summer’s ordeal, we have not progressed in fertility efforts, so we have decided to begin the adoption process. What follows is a letter to a lawyer with whom we met in January:

Dear Ms. ...:

This letter is a much-belated follow-up to our meeting in January. Kay and I meant to write you shortly thereafter, but the school year took over and we got busied in those concerns. Now that we have some time off around Easter, we wanted to sum up the things we discussed with you and ask you a few questions for clarification. I would appreciate if you are able to answer the questions and correct any misapprehensions I might have.

As a first step, you suggested we get licensed with DCFS, not necessarily as a way of taking in foster children, but because many of the agencies require that prospective parents be vetted with them. I have looked over their website, and from what I can see, it seems I have to call them to begin this process. There doesn't seem to be a way to do it online. I plan to call them on Monday.

Second, you said the next step is to figure out our path. As I remember you suggested four choices, with the following commentary:

DCFS: this would be true foster-parenting, with the problem that the children we take in would not necessarily be up for adoption, and even those who were could at some point be removed from our care. I believe you said also that there is a wide range of ages and conditions of the children that one cares for as a foster parent.

Charitable Sectarian Organizations: You mentioned that Catholic Charities, Lutheran Family Services, and the Jewish Children’s Bureau all offer adoption services on a non-sectarian basis. I do believe you mentioned that the children available from these groups are more likely to have health problems, though I don’t remember for certain.

Adoption Agencies: The Cradle, and others, offer adoption services. Some of these specialize in the U.S., others in foreign adoptions, and others offer both. The quality of these is varying. You suggested that we interview a number of them to figure out which fits our needs the most.

Private Ads: You suggested we could also place advertisements in newspapers looking for a private adoption. You said that you would be willing to serve as a go-between, setting up meetings between us and the prospective parents, using your experience to vet them.

I assume that pursuing more than one of these avenues is fine, with cost being the limit, correct?

Third, you have said that we need to figure out our own requirements. As I remember, there are at least three questions:

Age: we said we would like to adopt an infant.

Sex: we are open to either; I would guess, especially with foreign adoptions, that girls are more likely.

Open or Closed: probably the biggest question. Your opinion on which we should choose was that it simply depended on our own preferences. We expressed an bias towards closed adoptions, but are definitely willing to consider open adoptions, especially because, as you noted, being open to either kind obviously increases our options.

Fourth, you said we would want to put together an album showcasing ourselves as adoptive parents.

A few questions that we have are these:

•Do you have a list of agencies that you would recommend we start with? Part of what we are looking for is advice in this area. Rather than searching and interviewing at random, we hope your experience can give us a few starting points, so that our interviews can then be a more subjective exercise of deciding whether we are personally comfortable with the agency in question.

•Are there any books, websites, or support groups you suggest we read or join as a way of understanding this process better?

•Where might we get some guidance for putting together an adoption album or an newspaper advertisement? Would you also be able to recommend publications or websites on which to post these ads?

Thank you so much for any advice you can give. The meeting we had with you was very helpful in orienting us. We will be pursuing this process more consistently from now on, especially as the school year comes to a close, and I will make sure to keep you up to date as we make progress.

Sincerely, ...