Upsoaring wings: damned, damned, damned

I first ran into Jonathan Swift in high school, when I did a paper on the Anglo-Irish hostility. You know—the “hostility” that started in the 12^th Century, when Henry II used the excuse of the Irish Church’s refusal to follow the Gregorian reforms (the ones that stick in my mind being monks’ tonsures and celebration of Easter) invaded Ireland. And it’s continuing today as Henry’s heir Theresa May prepares to abrogate the Good Friday Agreement and reinstate a hard border between the six counties of Ulster and the 26 counties of the Republic.

Well.

The fusion of Mother England and Celtic Ireland has produced nearly 800 years of literary giants: Oscar Wilde, Seán O’Casey, Oliver Goldsmith, George Bernard Shaw, C.S. Lewis, J.M. Synge, Bram Stoker, William Butler Yeats, Samuel Beckett and Swift among them. Swift, born in 1667, straddled Ireland and England literally, born in Dublin, spending much of his early adulthood in England and then return to Dublin where he was Dean of Saint Patrick’s Cathedral from 1715 until his death in 1745. You may know him as the author of Gulliver’s Travels, where we get a taste of his ability to use humor to skewer the many ills he saw in the world.

The one that imprinted on me was A Modest Proposal (full title being A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of Poor People from being a Burthen to Their Parents or Country, and for Making them Beneficial to the Publick), in which Swift solves the problem of poverty in Ireland by permitting parents to sell their children as food to what we’d today call members of the 1% (English 1%, to be precise). In quintessentially Swiftian fashion, he mocks the heartlessness that the 1% still show to the poor. It’s deadly.

Swift was politically active, first for the Whigs and then for the Tories, and (as evidenced by Proposal and other writings) he was vehemently opposed to Britain’s Irish policies. He managed to get up Queen Anne’s nose, and lost ecclesiastical appointment in England. Saint Patrick’s, Dublin, was outside Anne’s gift, so that’s where he ended up. Toward the end of his life he became obsessed with death, and suffered from mental illness, quarreling with friends and growing increasingly isolated.

Today’s entry isn’t titled; it’s a concise disquisition on the nature of hell. It strikes me as being timely, nearly 300 years later. Same players, same outcomes. So much for progress.

All folks who pretend to religion and grace,

Allow there's a HELL, but dispute of the place:

But, if HELL may by logical rules be defined

The place of the damned -I'll tell you my mind.

Wherever the damned do chiefly abound,

Most certainly there is HELL to be found:

Damned poets, damned critics, damned blockheads, damned knaves,

Damned senators bribed, damned prostitute slaves;

Damned lawyers and judges, damned lords and damned squires;

Damned spies and informers, damned friends and damned liars;

Damned villains, corrupted in every station;

Damned time-serving priests all over the nation;

And into the bargain I'll readily give you

Damned ignorant prelates, and counsellors privy.

Then let us no longer by parsons be flammed,

For we know by these marks the place of the damned:

And HELL to be sure is at Paris or Rome.

How happy for us that it is not at home!

Upsoaring wings: Through violence and grace

Jean Cocteau was one of those polymaths who are all over the creative place—poet, writer, designer, playwright, artist and filmmaker. And he was good at all of it. He delighted in cocking a snook at bourgeois sensibilities, and he was very good at that, too.

The crowd he ran with—including Picasso, Dialhigev, Apollinaire, Modigliani and Diaghilev—was equally wild and crazy. He collaborated with all sorts of artists to create cutting edge works that outraged the Establishment: novels, poems, ballets, plays, pictures. Nothing was beyond him.

Cocteau greatly admired Orson Welles, who in many ways resembled him as Enfant Terrible and creative genius. They met at the 1936 staging of Welles’ “Voodoo Macbeth”, which moved the story from Scotland to the Caribbean, featured an all African-American cast and substituted Haitian voodoo for the Scottish witchcraft. Just exactly the sort of thing Cocteau loved.

“

At the 1948 Venice Film Festival, the two were in top form, according to Simon Callow. “[Welles] and the perennially provocative Jean Cocteau formed a sort of anti-festival clique…Together in Venice, the two men behaved like two very naughty boys.”

Here’s a photo of the two of them conspiring:

Today’s poem for National Poetry Month is from 1962, not particularly titled (Cocteau was not the sort to get fussed about titles), on Welles, to which I’m adding a drawing Cocteau did of Welles as the frontispiece of a biography by André Bazin:

Orson Welles is a poet

through his violence

and through his grace.

Never does he tumble

from the tightrope

on which he crosses cities

and their dramas.

He is a poet too in the

Loyal friendship he bears

our dreams and our struggles.

Others will know better than I

how to praise his work.

I content myself with sending him

my fraternal greeting.

His handshake is as firm as he is

and I think of it each time my work

obliges me to leap over an obstacle.

Upsoaring wings: The world is a white laundry

In honor of my friend, Viking Maiden, for today’s National Poetry Month entry, we’ll go to Denmark. I did not know Inger Christensen (1935-2009) before now, but I really like her stuff. She didn’t view poetry as “truth” but as “a game, maybe a tragic game—the game we play with a world that plays its own game with us.”

Word.

One of her major works, Alfabet, combines the alphabet and the Fibonacci sequence, which deserves major props, and it’s very much in the “game” arena.

I’m giving you “From April: IV”, which has very striking—grotesque, even—imagery.

Already on the street

with our money clutched

in our hands,

and the world is a white laundry,

where we are boiled and wrung

and dried and ironed,

and smoothed down

and forsaken

we sweep

back

in children’s dreams

of chains and jail

and the heartfelt sigh

of liberation

and in the spark trails

of feelings

the fire eater

the cigarette swallower

come

to light

and we pay

and distance ourselves

with laughter.

Upsoaring wings: Get very drunk

George Gordon, Lord Byron, was one of the big guns of English Romantic poetry. I personally outgrew Romanticism probably some time in my 20s, when it started to seem turgid and overblown. But still, never hurts to pay a visit now and again. I like Romantic music just fine, but the literature—especially poetry—not so much.

As a human, Byron was someone I would not have suffered gladly—he was the model for every self-indulgent legend-in-his-own-mind male from actors to programmers. Again—this lost its charm for me in my 20s. Interestingly, his one legitimate child was Ada Lovelace, the extraordinary bluestocking, mathematician and first computer programmer. Like a lot of self-indulgent LIHOMs, Byron lived large on other folks’ money; he ran up huge debts swanning around Europe and having multiple affairs with men and women without much consideration for anyone but himself. In 1823 he became involved in the Greek war for independence against the Ottoman Turks. An illness turned to sepsis, and he died in Missolonghi in February of the following year.

Byron wrote a lot of epic, melodramatic poetry, but it turns out he had a puckish side. His “Don Juan” is a very long satire on the whole notion of the womanizing libertine. In most of the versions we know in poetry and opera, Don Juan (AKA Don Giovanni) seduces every woman he can, ruining them unrepentantly (because he’s young, good looking and a long way from death), until fate catches up with him after he kills the father of one of his victims.

In short—like Byron—Don Juan is mad, bad and dangerous to know.

Okay, but Byron’s take on Don Juan turns everything on its head. Across 17 cantos, his hero starts out as a seducer, but he is shipwrecked, captured by pirates, sold as a slave by the pirate daughter, disguised as a woman so one of the Sultan’s concubines can get him into the harem; he escapes, joins the Russian army, is invited by Catherine the Great to join her, ah, court, becomes ill, goes to England (supposedly better weather than Russia), has some adventures with British aristos, and The End.

I mean—it pretty much is every damsel in distress of Romantic literature, only with, you know, tackle.

No, I won’t make you read the whole thing, although if you want to, it’s on Project Gutenberg. No, I’ll just share this bit, from Canto II, because it seems pertinent to our experience in 2019:

Let us have wine and women, mirth and laughter,

Sermons and soda water the day after.

Man, being reasonable, must get drunk;

The best of life is but intoxication:

Glory, the grape, love, gold, in these are sunk

The hopes of all men, and of every nation;

Without their sap, how branchless were the trunk

Of life’s strange tree, so fruitful on occasion:

But to return—Get very drunk; and when

You wake with head-ache, you shall see what then.

Upsoaring wings: A slumbering silence lies

The Austrian-Czech poet Rainer Maria Rilke is quite fascinating, because he was basically in love with all the arts—sculpture, painting, music, writing; they all shaped his sensibilities. He was born in Prague in 1875, which was then the capital of Bohemia within the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

Having washed out of military academy and been expelled from a trade school, he eventually studied the liberal arts in Prague and Munich. He traveled and lived all over Europe, soaking up what each community had to offer and adding the flavors to his writing. During his long residence in Paris, he hung with Cézanne and acted as secretary to Auguste Rodin, so he would have known the house that’s now Musée Rodin, which I visited last November.

Perhaps he walked along this allée in the garden:

And enjoyed some of these works that I viewed, like the Three Shades:

Or Aphrodite:

Maybe some of these:

Well, anyhow, Rilke had relationships with a number of women of all ages, and managed to stay on good terms with most of them after the passion faded. He famously, in Letters to a Young Poet, admonished a young man trying to decide between a military or a literary career, “Nobody can advise you and help you, nobody. There is only one way. Go into yourself.”

(Of course, he went on to tell the kid how a poet should feel, love and seek truth, but…)

Rilke absorbed influences from all the arts and all the artists he knew. Today’s poem, “Aus einem April” reflects the kind of Art Nouveau period I love and associate with Prague, Vienna, Rodin and the whole megillah. I’m making it my theme for National Poetry Month this year.

“Aus einem April”

Wieder duftet der Wald.

Es heben die schwebenden Lerchen

mit sich den Himmel empor, der unseren Schultern schwer war;

zwar sah man noch durch die Äste den Tag, wie er leer war,-

aber nach langen, regnenden Nachmittagen

kommen die goldübersonnten

neueren Stunden,

vor denen flüchtend an fernen Häuserfronten

alle die wunden

Fenster furchtsam mit Flügeln schlagen.

Dann wird es still. Sogar der Regen geht leiser

über der Steine ruhig dunkelnden Glanz.

Alle Geräusche ducken sich ganz

in die glänzenden Knospen der Reiser.

  

“From April”

Again the woods are odorous, the lark

Lifts on upsoaring wings the heaven gray

That hung above the tree-tops, veiled and dark,

Where branches bare disclosed the empty day.

After long rainy afternoons an hour

Comes with its shafts of golden light and flings

Them at the windows in a radiant shower,

And rain drops beat the panes like timorous wings.

Then all is still. The stones are crooned to sleep

By the soft sound of rain that slowly dies;

And cradled in the branches, hidden deep

In each bright bud, a slumbering silence lies.

Upsoaring wings: Ants and purple weasels

Woops—here we are in April again. So you know what that means. Thirty days of poems because it’s National Poetry Month.

It’s also April Fools’ Day, when tricks are played and jokes are made, typically at someone else’s expense. That someone else is supposed to forgive all at the shout of “April Fool!” Look for silly hoaxy headlines and something silly from Google.

Then back to work with you.

My theme this month—upsoaring wings—comes from Rainer Maria Rilke’s “Aus einem April”, which I’ll get to tomorrow. I think in 2019 we can really use a bit of lifting; I know I do. In honor of my use-it-or-lose-it trip last year, I’ll through in more than the usual number of French and German poets, plus some Czech efforts.

Although he was an all-around creative dynamo (cartoonist, playwright, screenwriter, song writer), we probably know Shel Silverstein best for his children’s books. He came to that genre via his friend Tomi Ungerer, and one of his big hits was the poetry collection Where the Sidewalk Ends, which includes “Oh Have You Heard”, about April Fools, er, well, jokes and stuff.

I equivocate because on rereading it, what was hilarious because unthinkable in 1974 is not nearly as funny in 2019. We got anti-vaxxers waving the Bible; outbreaks of entirely preventable diseases like measles; an occupant of the white house whose brain is pocked and blistered with hate, fear and cruelty; the “principal” of the federal schools agency is in the midst of torching our entire education system; the Labor Department is cutting back on all kinds of worker protections, so you can kiss goodbye the thought of any sort of vacations; and Florida is in fact sinking into the ocean, thanks to climate change deniers and Chamber of Commerce boosters.

At this point, I wouldn’t even be surprised by scalp infestations of ants and purple weasels. Although I’d be mildly amused.

 “Oh Have You Heard”

Oh have you heard it’s time for vaccinations?

I think someone put salt in your tea.

They’re giving us eleven-month vacations.

And Florida has sunk into the sea.

Oh have you heard the President has measles?

The principal has just burned down the school.

Your hair is full of ants and purple weasels—

APRIL FOOL!

Welcome to April, folks. Buckle up.

Gratitude Monday: make 'em laugh

Someone who can make you laugh is a blessing, in any circumstances. When you live in the dark end of the halftone spectrum, that person is sun breaking through the clouds after six months in Seattle.

One of my colleagues does that—it’s a combination of his wit, his choice of words and his puckish expression. He makes me laugh so much my eyes leak. He was gone for a few weeks and I hadn’t realized how much I hadn’t laughed until he returned. And I’m tremendously grateful that he did.

I hope you’ve got someone like him in your life. And that you’re someone like him for others.