Upsoaring wings: He stands his ground

English poet Wendy Cope published “He Tells Her” as one of her “Differences of Opinion” in 2006. But it’s one of the best examples of mansplaining around, and apparently went viral a couple of years ago because of that.

What do you think?

“He Tells Her”

He tells her that the earth is flat —

He knows the facts, and that is that.

In altercations fierce and long

She tries her best to prove him wrong.

But he has learned to argue well.

He calls her arguments unsound

And often asks her not to yell.

She cannot win. He stands his ground.

The planet goes on being round.

Upsoaring wings: I want my sins back

We’ve got two holy days going today: for Western Christians, it’s Good Friday, the day Jesus of Nazareth was crucified. And at sundown tonight, Pesach begins for Jews, honoring the Exodus from Egypt. Because it’s generally accepted that the Last Supper was a Seder, it seems appropriate that I offer a poem to commemorate each, and I’ve chosen entries from two contemporary poets.

Maria Melendez Kolson teaches literature and writing at Pueblo Community College, in Pueblo, Colorado. She herself writes of the Latinx experience in America. Her “Good Friday” is intimate as she confesses her shortcomings (reminding me a little of Saint Augustine’s “Lord, grant me chastity and continence. But not yet.”). I like it a lot.

“Good Friday”

Jesus, I want my sins back.

My prattle, pride, and private prices — 

climbing, clinching, clocking — 

I might loan you a few for the evening,

so you don’t show up at your own crucifixion

naked of all purpose.

But for God’s sake, don’t spill any

redemption on them! They’re my

signature looks. Body by Envy.

Make up & wardrobe provided by Avarice. Lord,

if you take away my inordinate cravings,

what the hell’s left? Do you know

how much I paid for my best rages?

I want them all back if they’re

so To Die For. Else shred my palms,

wash my face with spit, let the whip

unlace my flesh and free the naked blood,

let me be tumbled to immortality

with the stew of flood debris

that is my life.

Likewise, the focus of South African-born poet Bracha Meschaninov’s “Pesach” is personal and honest. She lives in New York, with her husband and six children, so this feels authentic.

“Pesach”

House cleaned

more or less

kitchen surfaces covered

more or less

food ready

more or less

an experience of redemption

more or less

Upsoaring wings: On the place of tombs

We’ve got another all-round player for today’s National Poetry Month entry. Gilbert Keith Chesterton trained at the Slade School to be an illustrator, but found his real gift in words—as a journalist, novelist, playwright, essayist and poet. He converted to Roman Catholicism in 1923, age 48, and was renowned for his theological writings. (C.S. Lewis attributed his own conversion to Christianity to Chesterton’s The Everlasting Man.)

Most people know him best for his Father Brown series of detective stories (published between 1910 and 1935)—which bear no resemblance whatsoever to the appallingly bad BBC television series currently blotting the PBS landscape. (Seriously—plots, dialogue, acting—every aspect of this thing is utterly cringeworthy. It’s a testament to the sad fact that people will do anything for a regular paycheck.)

I first ran into Chesterton, though, in high school, when I was doing a paper on the Anglo-Irish hostility. Unusually, for an Englishman, he had great sympathy for the Irish, and he deplored British policy towards them. Somewhere I found this excerpt from his “The White Horse”:

The great Gaels of Ireland are the men that God made mad,

For all their wars are merry, and all their songs are sad.

He lived long enough—to 1936—to see and deplore the rise of fascism, as well.

In 1922 he published a collection of poetry that included “For a War Memorial”. The 20s was perhaps the a acme of post-WWI activities with respect to honoring the war dead. (It was also the time when the British government did its best to cram the survivors back into the poverty and servitude they’d emerged from in 1914 to defend imperial policies. But that’s another discussion.) Memorials listing the names of the fallen were built in just about every school and every town and village in Britain, which are still there today. Of course, they didn’t realize they’d have to add more names from the 1939-1945 war to the plaques.

Chesterton suggests here a more truthful, if less palatable, inscription for such constructions.

“For a War Memorial”

(SUGGESTED INSCRIPTION PROBABLY NOT SUGGESTED BY THE COMMITTEE)

The hucksters haggle in the mart

The cars and carts go by;

Senates and schools go droning on;

For dead things cannot die.

A storm stooped on the place of tombs

With bolts to blast and rive;

But these be names of many men

The lightning found alive.

If usurers rule and rights decay

And visions view once more

Great Carthage like a golden shell

Gape hollow on the shore,

Still to the last of crumbling time

Upon this stone be read

How many men of England died

To prove they were not dead.

Upsoaring wings: Indefinable and one

The philosopher Laozi (Lao Tzu) may or may not be an actual historical figure, but the followers of Taoism, and place him somewhere in the Sixth Century BCE. He may have written the Tao Te Ching, or he may have compiled the writings; or he may not have existed at all. Nonetheless, there are poems ascribed to him, and we’ll have a couple today.

Perhaps because my own experiences have been so unbalanced, I find it hard to embrace the serene detachment of Taoism; I find Zen challenging, as is trying to meditate. I mean—grasping the intangible, and all. Viz:

“Look, It Cannot Be Seen”

Look, it cannot be seen - it is beyond form.

Listen, it cannot be heard - it is beyond sound.

Grasp, it cannot be held - it is intangible.

These three are indefinable, they are one.

From above it is not bright;

From below it is not dark:

Unbroken thread beyond description.

It returns to nothingness.

Form of the formless,

Image of the imageless,

It is called indefinable and beyond imagination.

Stand before it - there is no beginning.

Follow it and there is no end.

Stay with the Tao, Move with the present.

Knowing the ancient beginning is the essence of Tao.

Laozi was a proponent of small government, so anti-authoritarians and libertarians down the ages have espoused his principles, on left and right. I can’t say I agree with it, but it’s telling that his explanation for human poverty is still cogent more than two millennia on.

“Why Are People Starving?

Why are people starving?

Because the rulers eat up the money in taxes.

Therefore the people are starving.

Why are the people rebellious?

Because the rulers interfere too much

. Therefore they are rebellious.

Why do people think so little of death?

Because the rulers demand too much of life.

Therefore the people take life lightly.

Having to live on, one knows better than to value life too much.

Upsoaring wings: Motionless and speechless

Haitian-American poet Hébert Logerie wrote “Violence on the Steps of Notre Dame of Paris” in response to an incident in June 2017, when police shot an attacker armed with knives and a hammer at the cathedral.

I’m sharing it today after being transfixed by appalling images of Nôtre Dame engulfed in flames. As of Monday afternoon, EDT, the roof and spire had collapsed and the wooden interior was gutted, although apparently the structure and artwork have been saved.

This is all I can say, because this is violence of another kind, and my heart is broken.

“Violence on the Steps of Notre Dame of Paris”

These days, even in the Holy Cathedral,

We are not safe. What a sad world!

At the shrine of the immaculate virgin of our soul,

We are not at peace. What a scandal!

The fools are everywhere, the criminals are everywhere.

Sometimes, we're motionless and speechless out there.

We can haphazardly measure our actions, our moves, and our steps.

Sadly, we're living where the villains know the ropes and the assets.

Violence is savageous, brutal, inhuman, and even bestial.

We are waiting for the Mighty God to perform many miracles.

The undesirables respect neither the altar nor the tabernacle.

Nevertheless, the pitiful morons will lose the final battle.

Upsoaring wings: Drop by drop upon the heart

We know Aeschylus as a tragedian and a poet, but he was also a soldier—veteran of the battles of Marathon (against Darius I) and Salamis (against Xerxes). So even when he wrote of mythical wars and warriors, he drew on his own experiences and knew what he was talking about.

The characters in Aeschylus’ plays are not, on the whole, happy. This is particularly true of the Oresteia trilogy, focusing on the family of King Agamemnon of Mycenae, one of the leaders in the Greek war against Troy. Not to put too fine a point upon it, everything we know about Agamemnon (starting with Homer’s Iliad) tells us that he’s a complete shit: arrogant, boastful, bullying, petty, inflexible and greedy. Yes, he came from an unhappy family (the House of Atreus), and there was that curse, but still—he really got up my nose when I was reading the classics.

Agamemnon is not the sort of guy who engages in introspection, and his ego prevents him from ever learning. This is a serious flaw, particularly in a head of state. And it leads to his violent murder, followed by the destruction of his family.

The observation about wisdom emerging from pain that Aeschylus makes in Agamemnon, the first play in the Oresteia, was not absorbed by the title character. Big cheeses typically don’t take instruction from poets. But these lines were chosen by Robert F. Kennedy in April, 1968, when he announced to the citizens of Indianapolis that Martin Luther King, Jr. had been assassinated. I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately.

God, whose law it is

that he who learns must suffer.

And even in our sleep, pain that cannot forget

falls drop by drop upon the heart,

and in our own despite, against our will,

comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God.

Here’s video of Kennedy's speech that day.

He barely outlived King by two months. We don’t learn.

Gratitude Monday: taxes paid

I’m feeling a tad tetchy on this Gratitude Monday, having had to fork over a couple large to the Feds in addition to taxes withheld regularly from my pay checks. I’m not one of those people who view big refunds as a windfall; my preference is to be within a couple hundred on either side of the total owed. But this year, with only a moderate increase in my annual salary, all of a sudden my liability shot up. Primarily because I all of a sudden lost most of the deduction for mortgage interest and property taxes.

I am not happy about that. And I am not grateful that I’m subsidizing the Billionaire Boys’ Club with my contribution.

However, I have a job, making enough to owe taxes; I can make my mortgage payments and put petrol in my 18-year-old car; and my taxes are paid. And with my taxes, I've contributed to the wellbeing of the polis.  So that’s what I’m grateful for today.

Upsoaring wings: People did not like it here

I was introduced to Kurt Vonnegut by Chuck Mitchell, Joni’s ex-husband, at a performance by him at The Ice House in Pasadena. Mitchell spoke this passage from Slaughterhouse-Five as an introduction to one of his songs. I don’t recall the song, but this image has never left me:

“It was a movie about American bombers in World War II and the gallant men who flew them. Seen backwards by Billy, the story went like this: American planes, full of holes and wounded men and corpses took off backwards from an airfield in England. Over France, a few German fighter planes flew at them backwards, sucked bullets and shell fragments from some of the planes and crewmen. They did the same for wrecked American bombers on the ground, and those planes flew up backwards to join the formation.

“The formation flew backwards over a German city that was in flames. The bombers opened their bomb bay doors, exerted a miraculous magnetism which shrunk the fires, gathered them into cylindrical steel containers , and lifted the containers into the bellies of the planes. The containers were stored neatly in racks. The Germans below had miraculous devices of their own, which were long steel tubes. They used them to suck more fragments from the crewmen and planes. But there were still a few wounded Americans though and some of the bombers were in bad repair. Over France though, German fighters came up again, made everything and everybody as good as new.

“When the bombers got back to their base, the steel cylinders were taken from the racks and shipped back to the United States of America, where factories were operating night and day, dismantling the cylinders, separating the dangerous contents into minerals. Touchingly, it was mainly women who did this work. The minerals were then shipped to specialists in remote areas. It was their business to put them into the ground, to hide them cleverly, so they would never hurt anybody ever again.”

Vonnegut drew on his own experiences in World War II—as a soldier and a prisoner of war—to describe the firebombing of Dresden in February 1945 by British and American air forces. He lived through the bombing because the POWs had been herded into the eponymous slaughterhouse. The book is a bit of a challenge to read, because it’s non-linear; you have to focus on both nonsensical and heartbreaking topics.

You know—like life.

I was reminded of this when I read a piece by Alex Horton, a reporter for The Washington Post, this weekend. Horton used Vonnegut’s non-linear construct to frame his own experiences as a soldier in Iraq 12 years ago (nearly six years into America’s longest war). He weaves some research into his account to give context, and readers are left with the sense of fragmentation that combat veterans carry back into the world.

Like Slaughterhouse-Five, it’s a hard read. Here’s another (now more than ever), Vonnegut’s “Requiem”, published in 2005, two years before his death.

“Requiem”

When the last living thing

has died on account of us,

how poetical it would be

if Earth could say,

in a voice floating up

perhaps from the floor

of the Grand Canyon,

“It is done.”

People did not like it here.