Probably Hyperbole

I was at Mal-Wart on a Sunday morning, after church, and the lines were long. For some reason, we dumb customers simply REFUSE to go to the teller-less checkouts. Long lines'll teach us to fight Mal-Wart's obvious wisdom in going to a labor-free retail environment. (It's true: the management is decreasing cashiers and making cashiers stand by the "check yourself out" lines to "guide" people. Unfortunately, people would prefer to wait than check themselves out.)

Ned Ludd was right, by the way.

Ludd's loss isn't why I'm writing. Cosmopolitan is why I'm writing. Its cover this month is:

If I were good, I wouldn't hotlink this, but I don't think my traffic will inconvenience anyone.

Cosmopolitan is supposed to make people who view its cover think about sex. In this case, I will admit that I thought about nudity, simply because the dress-thing on Katie Perry was so offensive to the eye that I could only think about how much I'd prefer it if she took it off. I think a Burqa would be preferable. The copy on the cover explains that "Katie Perry is on fire," and this may be true, but not when she was photographed. When she was photographed, she appeared to be decomposing, as the gangrenous hair dye and the dress with cut-outs looking like a bug's eyes reminded me more of the grave than flames. (A thingamabob that's shorts, but with a long, exposed zipper, and long sleeves? Is there any element of the garment that works with any other?)

No, what made me pause is the magazine's offer to provide "20 OMFG Moves" and "Epic Summer Sex." I suspect the magazine's copy editor was drunk.

Many moves will result in a partner making the sound, "Omfg!" I believe an unexpected elbow to the solar plexus or the chin is quite effective. A sudden belly flop of one partner onto the other can routinely elicit that noise from both participants and "turn up the heat."

It's the "epic summer sex" that had me scratching my head. My fifth edition of the Holman Handbook of Literature tells me that the epic is,
1. Marked with elevated diction,
2. Invokes the gods and involves supernatural aid,
3. Deals with matters of national foundations,
4. Covers a large scope of action.

I appreciate the writers at Cosmopolitan Magazine making a contribution to the American epic. After all, the English epic has proven elusive enough. Oh, sure, everyone says that Beowulf is the English epic -- About.com says so! -- but it's about the founding of a nation called the Geats. . . in Europe. John Milton was gonna write an English epic, but he decided that writing an epic-epic -- the story of Man -- was better, so he wrote Paradise Lost/Paradise Regained. Everyone knew that King Arthur was the potential epic subject, and William D'Avenant's Gondibert had tried an epic in the a,b,c,b ballad rhyme in the 17th century. Finally, Alfred, Lord Tennyson did Idyls of the King and ended anyone trying to write an epic in English anymore, because it frankly kind of stank. American efforts have been even worse.

"Hark! we hear of hookups past in Forum and fanzines,
How Fifty Shades of Grey taught his lady much to endure,
She crouching and swooning and swatted and pierced to ecstasy,
That was good erotica. Then came she, he, and all
To America, the gods to bless, greedy for good sex, alluring. . . ."

I can't do any more, I'm afraid, because I didn't buy the issue. I am, however, looking forward to the summer sex that founds new nations and spans vast territories.

What I am learning

"The greatest pleasure of a dog is that you may make a fool of yourself with him, and not only will he not scold you, but he will make a fool of himself, too." -- Samuel Butler (of Erewhon).

I missed church again today, and I was going to write about my new literary revelation, which is that no age deserves to say that it has poetry of any sort until it can approach what has already been written in Job 14:18-22:

"But the mountain falls and crumbles away,
and the rock is removed from its place;
the waters wear away the stones;
the torrents wash away the soil of the earth;
so you destroy the hope of mortals;
You prevail forever against them, and they pass away;
you change their countenance, and send them away.
Their children come to honor, and they do not know it;
they are brought low, and it goes unnoticed.
They feel only the pain of their own bodies;
and mourn only for themselves." (RSV)

When anyone gets blinkin' near that, then there is poetry. Until then, everyone needs to shut up the shop and wait patiently, reading.

I'm not going to say that, though. I'm also not going to go into renewed raptures about "books that changed my life" and tell you all to buy a copy of At Swim-Two-Birds, especially since Dalkey Archive Press seems to be run by a bunch of jackanapes, and getting an old copy is dodgy and a foreign copy is expensive.

No. Instead, I'm going to take back something really depressing I wrote before. In "Where Do Babies Come From," I wrote about how youth signs to age, how the old "hear the mermaids singing" with despair. It's one of my less read posts, but it's one of the more maudlin ones. I was non-plussed by the commercials made by the director of "The Immortals." They weren't homoerotic as much as. . . queerly erotic. . . in that they weren't aimed at getting young people hot and bothered about being young people. I wrote:

"The youth of beauty, and the beauty of youth, demand those who lost years to watch and demand them to seek out the joy of their own vital pulse, the concerns of the overhang and undertow that remove their exceptions, and who can blame either party? The one who missed and misses longed and longs and surfaces briefly in the filling of senses, and the one in potential is compelled and curtailed, devoted and dovetailed by and in time. Nature could allow no exception, and will complies."

"We, like the commercial, long for what is lost, and we will buy some jeans. We will need some help, perhaps, need a supply, but we will avoid that longing and shovel dirt into the hole."

Ptui!

I take nothing back, but I should point out that a hidden caveat is necessary: these statements are true for the fragmented. J. Alfred Prufrock, Hugh Selwyn Mauberly, L'Etranger, the Misfit -- these folks, when they get to the old age home, slaver pointlessly and go back to their rooms for the knotted rope. (You guys noticed that I'm not linking my allusions anymore? I have. I wonder why that is? Probably lazy rather than stuck up.)

Oh, I shouldn't be exclusionary: we would find Mrs. Haversham, Catherine, and Cordelia at the home, too, although with less grim resolutions or loud complaints, probably. We men whine worst.

Every dog I have had has taught me something. I am convinced that each is an angelos, even if none are particularly angelic. Well, Macheath was. Macheath was the best behaved, most worried and conscientious creature I have ever met on any number of legs. She showed me what duty means and set before me a bar that I shall never meet. As I was missing church, I went to go walk the dog and pray aimlessly (both of the actions).

Let me tell you what Rambolina is teaching me.

Other than that you can have a trepanning scar in the top of your head and show no ill effects, except an inability to house train, she's showing me that a ball really, truly, cannot move if no one is there to throw it.

While we were out, she began scanning the tree tops for squirrels. Now, we all know how dogs feel about squirrels, and rabbits, and mice, and shiny bugs, and turtles, but Stella actually watches them up in the trees. She then began to try to climb a tree to get at a noisy squirrel. After she had wrapped herself around the trunk a couple of times, she looked over at me and as much as said, "Now, please undo this."

That longing, that "call of surfeit to loss," is only a sharp pain, a knife in the joints, for we who are broken away. In a family, even with a puppy, the youth's surfeit shares and supplies the old. It is a sweet drug that tempers the melancholy and lifts the gravity soaked mind. It is what is meant to be, as the old remain the cushion against which the young can always punch and declaim, and the young offer strength against the eroding wind and water.

That's my Sunday school lesson for the day.

Fly Larvae!

"He showed concernment for his soul. Some things
In his experience were hopeful. He
Would sit and watch the wind knocking a tree
And praise this countryside our Lord has made.
. . . though a thirst
For loving shook him like a snake, he durst
Not entertain much hope of his estate
In heaven. Once we saw him sitting late
Behind his attic window by a light
That guttered on his Bible; through that night
He meditated terror, and he seemed
Beyond advice or reason. . .
. . . In the latter part of May
He cut his throat. And though the coroner
Judged him delirious, soon a noisome stir
Palsied our village. At Jehovah's nod
Satan seemed more let loose amongst us." -- Robert Lowell, "After the Surprising Conversions" 1946

Robert Lowell is one of those poets with very few friends and very many enemies, and that's at least partly due to the fact that there are several editions of Robert Lowell. There is Robert Lowell the agrarian (above) of New England, Robert Lowell the diffident yankee, Robert Lowell the insane person, Robert Lowell the confessional, and Robert Lowell the noisome political actor. That's a lot for one poor madman to bear. It's even more for one bundle of poetic skill to have to voice. Me? I pick and choose. I kind of like his snarky poems about other poets, despite the poet, and I somewhat like the pretending stridency of the early stuff.

What I really like, though, is the madness that has an unchanging essence. It is a very American form that did not quite mature with our century.

I quoted a long stretch above because of it is a subtle butterfly net. It purports to be a poem written by one of Jonathan Edwards's deacons reporting after a visit from the great man. This deacon reports the score board: the saved soul of the dissipate or indifferent. However, it then goes on, like a physician discussing a disease of the soul, and notes how the patient was lost to hereditary and environmental conditions. It ends by noting that the entire village begins to have a rash of suicides, and the bass gorges itself on the spawn of the stream.

First, this is A-OK with me, because the evangelical movement continues along the path described here. A successful meeting results in X souls saved. I have seen a weekly service at a school populated by Christian students have an alter call as a regular feature. Further, the ministers exclaim at each meeting that the top priority for the students is to save their classmates by introducing them to the Gospel. Later, the speakers are ranked on how many were saved.

(I used to be upset that these folks assumed that anyone in the U.S. had not heard the Gospel. However, my students, who attend church every week, do not recognize Gospel quotations -- even ones I consider most famous, like "the last shall be first, and the first shall be last," or "Judge not, lest ye be judged," or "Let he who is without sin cast the first stone." Now, my complaint is that the ones who are supposed to "introduce" the others to the Gospel are unlikely to have read one of them still.)

However, the poem is only consciously about the underlying problems of evangelical preaching. By speaking of this figure powerless to stop his village from killing itself, completely unequipped to deal with his crisis, Lowell gets at despair itself and the call to repentance. When we convince people that they are sinners in the hands of an angry God, it gets pretty hard to convince them that forgiveness is available. Some people will never believe in their own guilt, but more will never believe in their forgiveness.

Each pleasure or admiration will call to mind some way of falling short. It took the exceptionally radical (and I think toxic) view of perseverance of the saints to get evangelical preaching past this point. Today's evangelicals preach a once-saved-evermore-saved to get people past even being bothered by their sinning, but this introduces its own poisons.

So it is, also, that the modern -- triumphant over disease, glorified by radio, triumphant over the atom and the atmosphere -- had a horror betraying each marvel. Every chemist could be a murderer, and every physicist a world killer. The Janus mask of the 20th century never came off, and being responsible was too much for anyone but the most glib, oblivious, or maniacal.

Finally, though, Lowell's own guilt is captured. The depressive will fall back to William Cowper's malady of feeling damned and need distraction or encouragement, but all of the latter will fail, as it does not penetrate the internal certainty -- the "Satan let loose." Lowell, who had his insanity possibly as an incubus, had his guilt, too.

The flies that fall to the water's edge are food to the trout.

A Vile Antithesis: Amphibious Things

  Let Sporus tremble — "What? that thing of silk, [305]
Sporus , that mere white curd of ass's milk?
Satire or sense, alas! can Sporus feel?
Who breaks a Butterfly upon a Wheel?"
Yet let me flap this Bug with gilded wings,
This painted Child of Dirt that stinks and stings; [310]
Whose Buzz the Witty and the Fair annoys,
Yet Wit ne'er tastes, and Beauty ne'er enjoys,
So well-bred Spaniels civilly delight
In mumbling of the Game they dare not bite.
Eternal Smiles his Emptiness betray, [315]
As shallow streams run dimpling all the way.
Whether in florid Impotence he speaks,
And, as the Prompter breathes, the Puppet squeaks;
Or at the Ear of Eve, familiar Toad,
Half Froth, half Venom, spits himself abroad, [320]
In Puns, or Politicks, or Tales, or Lyes,
Or Spite, or Smut, or Rymes, or Blasphemies.
His Wit all see-saw between that and this,
Now high, now low, now Master up, now Miss,
And he himself one vile Antithesis. [325]
Amphibious Thing! that acting either Part,
The trifling Head, or the corrupted Heart!
Fop at the Toilet, Flatt'rer at the Board,
Now trips a Lady, and now struts a Lord.
Eve 's Tempter thus the Rabbins have exprest, [330]
A Cherub's face, a Reptile all the rest;
Beauty that shocks you, Parts that none will trust,
Wit that can creep, and Pride that licks the dust.  --Alexander Pope, Epistle to Arbuthont found best by every-hero-since-the-crack-of-time Jack Lynch here.

You think that's long? It isn't: it's great. Lord Hervey was effeminate, and perhaps more. Pope refers to him as Sporus, who was the pretty boy whom the Emperor Nero had 1) castrated, 2) freed, and then whom he 3) married. It looks at first glance to be the usual attack on homosexuality (assumed), except that it isn't. Pope implied that Hervey is homosexual, but also that he is an impotent homosexual. He never enjoys women nor men. Nor does Pope give Sporus a Nero -- there is no masculine to Hervey's feminine, no 'top' for him to play 'bottom' to. No, what Pope points at with disgust is that Hervey is a mix. He is a discordia discors. 

In the portrait of Sporus, Pope lambasts Hervey's wit as being "between that and this,/ Now high, now low, now Master up, now Miss." By the theory of mind most operative in Pope's day, wit would come from the ability to show unexpected similarities in disparate things and unexpected distinctions in presumed like things. However, each bit of wit, to be true wit, had to be tempered by a knowledge of place (the infamous "decorum") and, most of all, serve a purpose. Pope did not merely believe in Horace's maxim of "utile et dulce," he saw it as a guide star. Hervey's wit had to be in the service of Nature.

When Pope ridiculed Ambrose Phillips, it was along the lines of truth and nature, and when he criticized other moderns, it was because they derived their practice from their rules or observations rather than from nature or what must be true. This Catonian streak can make Pope difficult at times, at least partly because he is not consistent. Three Hours After Marriage is for simple entertainment and a la mode, after all.

Hervey's crime, in Arbuthnot, is being an amphibian -- one who slips from male to female and back again. He is very much like Pope's view of woman when he says that "Most women have no character at all." Women can change their whole selves, and so the Theophrastan idea of character does not fit them. Similarly, a woman's freedom and art with clothing and cosmetics mean that she can blend into any environment she desires. This is the disability of women, in Pope's mind (in Epistle to a Lady):

 Nothing so true as what you once let fall,/ 'Most Women have no Characters at all.'/ Matter too soft a lasting mark to bear,/ And best distinguish'd by black, brown, or fair."

It amazes me that people can think there is misogyny present. The "character" intended is obviously not the sweat-stained inner soul and integrity of the locker room motto. It is the germ within that cannot be crushed and which grow into a predestined form.

The amphiotic, including amphimixis, is disturbing. Medievals, who lived and thought the Great Chain of Being, saw mixed things as blasphemous or miscreant. The best one could hope for, if one looked mixed, is to be ruled a lussus naturae (freak of nature) and thus not personally in league with Satan. The reason for the revulsion is simple enough. If each creature fits into a niche of intellect and soul, and the niches run from God at an infinite height to nothingness at an infinite small, then something that is two places/positions is defying the order God set upon the cosmos. A person who willingly mixes is willingly creating discord.

Once more, though, idiots will be idiots. Folks given a metaphysical concept will almost instantly apply it to the flesh. Their deductive reasoning will run from, "God put each thing in its place, and you seem to be manly and female" and conclude with a beating. It may only take red hair, or a stubby thumb, or a club foot. Pope, you will notice, is not doing this.

Pope studiously avoids physical descriptions. When he provides them (Edmund Curll in Dunciad), it's notable, but his usual tactic is to talk about a person's character through a behavior. Lord Hervey is offering up the continuous wit without a purpose that devalues language, and he is girlish and a man; he is both empty and poisonous.

The disgust with the mixed would continue. Gay men today write about the "straight-acting" code and how gay men who are "straight acting" do not get the ill treatment that presumably gay acting men do. This discussion is at least slightly off the beam, as the vicious and illegal behavior gay men fall victim to is usually men reacting to an effeminate man, and effeminate men are routinely harassed even if heterosexual. (Gender codes are policed by the same sex, and so men force men to be 'manly' as women force women to be 'feminine.') Women who are masculine (as opposed to assertive) also get hostile reactions, whether they are lesbian or not.

You going to eat that pencil?

In the 1890's, Gerard Manley Hopkins addressed the issue of the God of Placements:

"Pied Beauty"

GLORY be to God for dappled things—
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough;	5
And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.
All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:	10
Praise him.

Be sure, he tells his readers, that God does not need our version of consistency. Further, the very concept that God has to be homogenous is unnecessary. Plato may have needed a god that was internally consistent, like a giant ball of Silly Putty surrounded by an egg of Demiurge, but Plato's god is not alive. The Platonic god is affectless. 

All of the Middle Eastern religions have a God who is involved by emotion or impulse. A living God who loves can create out of love without having any lack. What's more, differences and mixes are all actualities and eventualities confined to time and space; for the eternal, there is only the glory, the exultation, the amazement, and the praise and love.

Lord Hervey was despicable, probably. However, what Pope lashes him for is being an artificial creature -- a man who is self-made without reference to nature (which does not mean hetersexuality, but productivity). Pope could not see that he, too, was amphibious, also antithetical. A man 4' tall who had to wear a corset simply to stand erect is an embodied paradox. A poet with a sensitive mind lived in physical pain for all of his adult life and wrote with placid ease. I wonder what the Confessional poets would have done if they could have claimed a quarter of Mr. Pope's pains. A man who never got consideration from women because of his condition, and yet he wrote lovingly of women. He was a Roman Catholic and despised for his religion, discriminated against, and yet he supported the conservative party.

What's more, and worse, is the amphibian life. Death does not hurt, I assume, but dying does. We spend a good portion of our lives neither born nor adult -- struggling between two characters, fighting between child and self. Even as our beauty forms and fades, we are in the crisis of sloughing off our births. Then we spend more time neither adult nor dead, but merely dying very slowly. We have our powers, and the supports and succors we long for have passed, but we have not death -- just an unresolving blur.

I can feel it these days, the tug of war. The white flag in the middle of the rope may jerk back to my side a foot or two, but more people keep joining the other side, and there was never any doubt about the outcome.

I Wanna Be Normal People

Meet the new writing companion.

Photo taken Sept. 7, 2012

She had a name at the animal shelter. She was called "Erin." Since my first dog was "Bounce" (same name as Alexander Pope's dogs), and my second was "Uncle Toby," and my third was "Macheath," it's pretty clear that "Erin" could not stand. However, the name that my heart had decided upon for my next American Eskimo Dog was Garm, and the dog in the photo above is not Garm. For one thing, this one might howl well before Ragnarok or Judgment Day. Also, Garm is supposed to be male, Hel female, so I was going to give the name to a female, just for symmetry's sake.

The dog above (and at my right ankle now) is female. She is spayed, although she went through her first estrus at the time of the spaying. (Oops, as they say.) (That must have been a relief to her, albeit a confusing one.) So, I thought of other names. "Glumdalklitch" was top spot (just called "Glum"), but I finally settled on "Stella."

So, meet Stella:

"Stella" is a stealthy dog, and the name is deceptive as well. I'm sure that you are thinking "Astrophel to Stella," and that's a fine thing, but "Stella" is also the generic 'beloved' name in every bad poem of 1680-1780, so there's that. However, for the really geeky 18th century theme park consistency, there is Esther Johnson. Jonathan Swift's teasing, flirting, but never abused female friend, whom he called Stella in his writings, has left her mark on the public through him, but she obviously left a deep furrow in his life. (If you want more information on Stella, there isn't much. Do NOT go to the Wikipedia page, which uses a fiction as its source.)

Stella was rescued from the needle, for she had been at the animal shelter since May with "zero public interest." The shelter in question tries to ensure that no dog gets euthanized, so she was not in imminent peril, but the choices were stark. As for what she is. . . I don't know.

I know she's at least half a Pointer. The other half could be anything from Border Collie to Labrador. She likes water and sociks. She is a sock collector of the first order. She does not chew them, eat them, or do anything else except own them. Similarly, she wishes to have one shoe of every pair, simply for ownership. (You can't leave without your shoes, I think.)

This is the first dog I have had that is part or whole Working Dog. In short, it is the first "normal" dog I've had. For once, I'm normal. I'm like the average person, and my dog has a normal name. I will do all that I can, of course, to be as subversive as possible so that, like the name, the dog is only a strange critter abiding in a normal wrapper, and she certainly seems inclined that way.

For a decade of my life, my greatest desire was to be one of them -- the normal people. What on earth possessed me, I don't know.

It's a Trap!

I watched "The Hunger Games" movie. I thought it was astonishing that they went to all that trouble to make an actress who isn't Shelley Duvall look exactly like Shelley Duvall, and the star was an amazing simulacrum of Ellen Paige, although more likeable. The film constructors had to create both effects, too, so these shouldn't have been accidents. Woody Harrelson's scalp wig, on the other hand, freaked me out.

I haven't been able to stop thinking back on the movie, and I think my subconscious is worrying over it. There was something down there that bothered me -- something I'm not ready to articulate. On a superficial level, there is the political recall.

In 1948, George Orwell wrote 1984 about how a nation can use war as an excuse for constant privation and a cover for the misdirection of funds. That same year, London was the host of the Olympics, and they referred to the events as the Austerity Games. This year, the E.U. is facing "the New Austerity." It's not a repeat for any but the British -- for the other nations it is a reminder of desolation and conquest, not victory -- and they held Austerity New Games, where professional athletes and sponsorships changed the appearance of everything and the context of nothing.

Because today's Olympian is professional, she can have a logo on her fanny at the beach volleyball. There can be wealth on the tributes. However, the wretchedness of the austerity games was that a nation that had to ration cheese was asked to celebrate the perfected form of man and the amity of nations.

That's superficial, though. I don't think The Hunger Games is aware of the connection, although it has benefited from it. No, what had me going this time was another parallel. The books and movie concern an evil central power and hard scrabble provinces upholding their independence. In fact, the political structure could as easily come from George Lucas as reality, because "district twelve" could be Dantoine. For that matter, it's not far from Josh Whedon's "Firefly." Nor is it much off from some of Heinlein's corrupt central powers.

Let's face it, rebels are sexy.

If I drew political parallels with today, then what parallels would others feel? "Corrupt state that takes all our work and lives in high fashion and makes fun of us, while we do all the work" is a summary not only of The Hunger Games attitude toward the capital but the TEA Party's attitude toward the I-95 megalopolis. That got me down. Yet another way for the ill informed to feel ill treated and go on ill advised, I thought.

So, is it possible to write a story with a central power as a hero? Is it possible to write a pro-Union story? One can write an anti-rebel story (there are such), but one that proposes the use and joys of unity and stability? It's not very likely, is it?

 This is the problem that Milton ran into, isn't it? From a narrative point of view, the center of establishment or power is a lousy her. The only way to tell the story is by making the speaker for power a rebel him or herself. Bedford Forrest the slave trading rich Memphis man was hardly a figure of romance, but Nathan Bedford Forrest the Ku Klux Klan founder who would never give up against the repression of the state warmed hearts.

Are we going to be doomed to sagas about how great it is to resent the government? Is the best we can hope for a William Gibson novel, where corporations take the place of the Empire? Is that as near to reality we can hope for?

1. What does the novel do?
Ian Watt famously argued that novels are separate from other genres in their development of "psychological realism." By this he meant that the novel features interior experience, growth of character and mind, and an individual. There are other definitions, and Watt's is not the gospel account it once was, but this is at least a critical observation of a thing novels do and have done as they have grown.

I would point to the fact that the genres that fathered the novel are a) biography, b) stage drama, c) satire, d) hagiography, e) history, f) travelogues. Think of the earlier novels and their lines, and you'll quickly recognize that most of the early ones offered a frame tale of biography -- the life of David Copperfield, or David Simple. When the Licensing Act of 1737 made the English stage an entirely Ministry affair, the playwrights turned to writing up their plays as stories. This gives us Henry Fielding, but theater strikes had earlier given us Aphra Behn's Oroonoko. The structures inside the drama-derived novels therefore had long established histories. What did Defoe do but bring the criminal biography to great glory? All that remained was for the satirists to get into the game and for Walter Scott to create the historical novel.

Novels, in short, worked around following an individual. Whether they were bildungsromans or not, they had an interest in showing revelations and realizations and interactions that would grow.

2. No one with the answers can ask a question.
A person with power has a hard time with a dramatic agon. When your hero is Superman, it gets ridiculous the amount of Kryptonite you have to invent so that there's an interesting fight. When "Star Trek: The Next Generation" has hyper-warp phasers and teleporters that don't malfunction, they have to go play 19th century on the holodeck to have any conflict.

A novel needs a weak or bewildered or imperiled protagonist. It doesn't have to be an underdog, but we're bored if the Invulnerable Man faces the Average Robber.

3. You break the world, you bought it.

Rebellions give any author an opportunity to present a monster that is omnipresent and monolithic. Furthermore, it allows a motivation for the monster to do almost any wickedness against the heroine. The hero of such a saga serves to embody the political principle that the author wishes to promote, and yet the author is never forced to answer all the nagging details that would show up if he had to have that heroine win and become queen.

Frank Herbert's Dune series has the same "corrupt central world sucking dry the lives of the provinces" that is familiar to "Star Wars" and "Hunger Games" and TEA Party, but he was working from sociology and history, and so his fantasy world was literally feudal. The others are much more vaguely gestural. The impossibility of governance with virtue was Herbert's theme, in the end, and so he had his hero rebel (who was also an aristocrat) win. For four books, the message gets clear: one may be good or powerful, and one may serve one's people or be good, but goodness itself changes with a time frame.

The audience reads into the rebel, but most authors cheat and make their heroes, like Paul Atreides, blue bloods who convert or royalty in disguise ("Luke, I am your father" is not much different from "That... that birthmark! My own child, the heir to the throne had just such a mark!"), so readers get to feel clever, refined, cultured, and able to lead the rebellion.

4. Leading a rebellion is like winning a peace.
The "rebel leader?" Actual rebellions tend to be disorganized because they're rebellions and filled with rebels. I invite any and all to review the glorious Civil War career of Joe Brown, even if you look at a Bowdlerized version of it.

In romance and saga, being the leader of a rebellion allows one to be a reformer, warrior, and guide and to not merely overcome overwhelming odds, but to establish the glorious reign.

--

We are doomed, I think, to these narratives. For us, our fictional governments will always be the enemy, and all our fictional rebels will be wide eyed innocents driven to extremity.

A Message for the Goon Squad

[I know when one of my posts is less than great -- mainly because I hit "post." I know when one is far less, too. Also, just from the years, I know when I stumble across my nuts, blind squirrel that I am, and so I share this letter, occasioned by anger at hearing a rather indulgent interview on BBC World Service's "Strand" program.]

An open letter to the novelist of the recent Pulitzer prize win.

Dear Madam, I understand many things about your story, but one thing is missing.

It is true that love is like the thing that cures one of its diseases, mercury (who the Greeks called Hermes), in that it moves with speed, splits, rejoins, and cannot be touched directly. Also like mercury, love is poisonous if taken too deeply, and, like the element, love compounds readily.

We have no power over who loves us, cannot fling love like a brick or fire it like a dart or spitball at the objects we would desire, and our desires and loves are themselves frequently jarring with one another. Married couples of deep mind find that they cannot imagine a world without one another and cannot bear to think of a romantic touch from the other, while the febrile teen's desires overwhelm reason and wisdom alike, and would make him or her suffer any consequence for the chance to join sex. Love itself, though, flickers, jolts, smites, ebbs, flares, and generally frustrates, if it shows up at all.

I understand, quite well, why the fundamental injustice of humanity, a pain as great as our first sin – in fact a mirror of our sin so that we may feel what we have done to God's divine providence by that unrequiting sin – would make a person flee. Closing down the receptors to love is sensible. Cauterizing the wound is a normal reaction for the disaffected, although it rarely works. Diversion is another normal reaction, where we decide that, if we cannot command love that has full meaning, we will take the half love that is under command, whether it is from collecting dolls or imagination or payment.

What I do not understand, though, is why, with all of the possible reactions to being unable to make the desired love, you chose to fall in love with yourself!

Admiring the work of one's hands is a secret joy that any author should be allowed. There is a shame in gazing with dew in one's eyes at the marvel of one's own invention, but it is a shame possessed as a shared secret and each forgives the next without a word. The thing of art may be a joy, yes. Galatea is lovely indeed; Pygmalion is not.

In the fullness of time, I have seen pornography. The voyage of adolescence compelled it, and the liberty of adulthood made it possible. I noted that each item, every year, sought to be more shocking than the one before. Pornographers thereby chug into absurdity long before they peter out of imagination, and that is why pornography, as opposed to sex, is an assault and battery that only a very young man can endure. As time matured, I put away all such clownish efforts of the pornographers to make me feel dirty and sneaky and criminally triumphant.

However, when you go on interviews and explain that your novel was a mere onion skin's chuff of your genius, that it was your craft, that you worked without inspiration from any but approved, monumentalist, classic culture, that contemporary history meant nothing to you, that, most importantly, your novel was a way for you to uncover, to discover, to mine, to produce your own psyche, I have a real pornographic feeling.

Worse yet, I finally feel quite, quite dirty.

Of Me I Sing

Once upon a young sap rise, upon a stripling, I sat at the Smith-Corona with Red Man chewing tobacco in a cheek, beside a Peavey 400 Watt bass amplifier stack, and wrote, all night long, at poetry. The poetry that emerged, when I was fifteen through seventeen, was exceptionally anxious, as if a compensation in workmanship for the slapdashery of my surroundings and habits and habitus, and then I had a psychotic break known as college. Actually, the first year of college did not teach me much, in this respect, but it let the little maniac driving the poetry get a concussion, a skinned knee, and then, finally, a complete break. When I did not learn my lesson or win my freedom, the poetry that I wrote from ages nineteen to twenty-four was calculatedly anarchic, indebted, frustrated (sexually, physically, emotionally, and financially), and a long form code for the puzzlement of how a world that works so well in other respects could be so utterly lunatic for humans.

If you looked through the whole of this blog, you would find evidence of why "poetry" is "wrote" and why this is to the greater glory of the world. You would discover that having written it is the best thing for me and for you, alike.

(A creek in Baltimore that is much safer now that I will not pollute it with metaphors.)

However, all of those years meant I approached the curse the way that a pre-menopausal person does: as a sufferer, and therefore as a person trying to make the best of it. I always wanted other people to recognize just how bad it was (and by that, I mean how wonderful the poetry was, for poets are driven by the depths of their pain or the severity of their visions or the power of their philosophy or the height of their molehills), and I could never find anyone else who would really get it.

Well, there's nothing for it, if you're a poet, but writing a manifesto. If your poetry won't get your readers (those afflicted looking people otherwise known as friends or students), then a manifesto might do it. Of course, what you, the poet, never realize is that you're waving a white flag, that you've failed to enunciate things in your own medium (poetry, painting, appearing shaved and naked in a public fountain -- whatever your art is) and have resorted to prose and political programs, but nevertheless it's really, really attractive.

Mine was: narrative voice, war upon, hatred of, destruction to be wrought.

The social drinker trying a drunken, stoned verse form was one disguise. Another was the schizophrenic eliminating connectives. Another was the pre-verbal infant with atemporal descriptors of action. Henry Green's dangling modifiers as a method of suspension really appealed to me, even though that was theft. Finally, I thought description without action might do it. Aside from all of these things having been done by other poets, all of these things had failed in the hands of every writer of every form (except Green, and one wouldn't want his bank account). Additionally, each of these was not merely tried, but done successfully every single day by actual schizophrenics, autistics, drunks, infants, and Alzheimer's patients. My self-hatred and hatred of the lie of writers and the false "history" inherent in narrative was hardly an excuse for emulating Dustin Hoffman in "Rain Man."

Fortunately, though, I got better. Poetry might not be a disease, but being a poet as a young person is certainly co-morbid, and I was cured of poetry by a great, vast, yawning horror, on the one hand, and getting my personal oil pan filled to the requisite number of quarts, on the other.

(The shelf fungus is in the tree from seedling but only grows when the tree is down)

Now the days are no more when I worry with contributing my voice to the world or my wisdom to the lifeless sea measureless to man where the drains go. (The Dear knows no one keeps, hears, or profits by wisdom, even the wisdom of "In all thy getting, get thee wisdom," (Prov. 4:7; all the fundamentalists in the blogosphere seem to get the citation wrong or not know it at all) so it flows out from life, from experience, from meditation, and goes down to the sunless sea.) However, I again have to mess with poetry, but this time from the outside, as an hygienist with a dental pick.

Recently, I was explaining "Kubla Khan" to a class of students, and I did the advanced thing. I explained that the foreword should be there, that it's part of the poem, that the poem isn't a fragment, that the poem isn't about the son of Genghis Khan at all, that the poem is about poetry and creativity, etc. Afterward, I realized two things. First, the students were going to wonder about Coleridge's Christianity, because that's the kind of place and region I am, and that, more broadly and generally, they were going to doubt that Coleridge "meant" for the audience to understand all that. If I could convince them that the poet did expect some audience to "get" it all, then they were going to have every right to ask why someone writes a poem with that much philosophy and theory in it, and that started me thinking, and the fruits of that thinking are here in this blog.

Well, not so far, but in the next bit.

"Selfishness is the greatest curse of the human race" -- Gladstone, 1890

The Romantics set out their manifesto, and they called the tune for a lot of what has happened since then. In many respects, poets today are still Romantics. The 1798 "Preface" to Lyrical Ballads does in prose what the poets had apparently failed to do in poetry: start a movement. Let's remember that that's the preface to the second edition. In other words, the book had been out, but it wasn't Romanticism until they explained it.

I won't go on about that, but I will point out that the one formal feature that the Romantics announced was a re-invigoration of the lyric. Now, a lot of this is horse flop, because the whole Warton, Percy, Gray, Thomson stuff had been doing lyric, but this was a manifesto. The lyric is in. The lyric is it. The poem of personal emotions recalled in tranquility is The Poem. In fact, most people, when they think of "poetry" can only think of verse about the author's emotions. They can't even conceive of any other thing being poetry. That's how completely we are Romantics.

Once the subject of poetry must be the poet's reaction or psyche, then there is no choice but to start looking for interesting psychological states, reactions, and persons. Let's find the emotions of uneducated people! Let's find the emotions of victims of abuse! Let's find and then express the emotions of Seers, and let's demand that poets have super-duper special emotions to express. After all, even lovers of such poetry recognize quickly that the general run of emotions that are commonly felt are commonly expressed, commonly adequately; therefore, poets either needed to be scientists about perception or philosophers of feeling or radicals of sensation.

Stupid people, and never underestimate their number, read "Kubla Khan" and started taking dope. Stupid people, and never underestimate their persistence, began putting themselves in dangerous and meddlesome positions to collect "experience." As graveyards and psych wards fill, and as poetry becomes handmaid and gateway to psychiatry, both the arbitrarily intellectual and the gluttonously sensational run out of things to fuel them. (I never had the courage for the latter or the originality for the former.) The quality of the poetry itself is irrelevant, if not impossible to determine behind so many assumptions of reception and production.

So, young poets, do you want a manifesto? I have one for you, in all seriousness. I have great love for poetry, recite it to myself nearly every day and read it without being asked, and I read contemporary poetry as often as I can, and so I make an offer -- an amicus brief.

If you want to revolutionize poetry, write social verse.
If you want to change poetry, return to satire. Try odes. Try any form of occasional or public verse. Evacuate the ego from the attempt and replace it with the common good, and see what happens. Replace the personal desire and Desire as the subjects with Classical or Abrahamic virtues and see how those work as motives for poetry.

If you are trapped by social and political language, and you absolutely are, then poetry is a political and social act, and not by any means, ever, a personal one, unless you have the good sense, as I did, to quit it. The only personal element is saying "no."