Dec
31
Happy New Year
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The snow outside my window is falling steadily but gently; watching it is compelling. I’m thinking of all the weather forecasters on TV saying that this would ruin the New Year for everyone. I hate slick roads and paths, but I have to say that the powdery covering of white upon brick chimneys, evergreen trees, and fallen leafless branches is probably the most natural observance of the New Year.
I’m not big on resolutions – for me, at least, “clean slates” can’t be forced. They have to be tied to something other than mere willpower; the problem with a willed clean slate is that one has to dismiss the good one has done. It sounds strange to think of snow as a foundation, but maybe that’s what it is. It hasn’t completely covered the landscape, after all – at this point, only graced it.
Happy New Year.
Dec
30
2009 in Review
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I’m not fond of making these posts which link to lots of stuff I’ve written. It’s not that I’m against self-promotion. It’s just that all the categories, tags, even titles of posts exist to make this blog searchable; while I haven’t updated the index, it still points to a wide variety of posts; finally, I’d rather be producing new content than looking over old stuff and wincing at what has been written.
So yeah. Happy New Year to you too. If you’re a reader of this blog and you remember reading something over the past year not listed here that you want to see listed, let me know in the comments. I realize I haven’t linked to everything I’ve written.
Poems covered since January, in order of appearance on this blog:
Emily Dickinson, “I fear a Man of frugal Speech” (January – considered by a few to be the best commentary on this blog)
Amy King, “I’ve Opted for a Heart This Mid-November Morn” (January)
William Butler Yeats, “The Second Coming” (January)
Emily Dickinson, “A Moth the hue of this” (February)
Gerard Manley Hopkins, “Heaven-Haven” (February)
Derek Walcott, “Europa” (March – Walcott is an actual epic poet. I know, it sounds insane; he’s as good as advertised, though.)
Emily Dickinson, “So the Eyes accost – and sunder” (March)
Emily Dickinson, “We like a Hairbreadth ’scape” (March)
Gerard Manley Hopkins, “The Caged Skylark” (April, for Easter Sunday)
William Butler Yeats, “Gratitude to the Unknown Instructors” (April)
Emily Dickinson, “Me, change! Me, alter!” (May)
Li Po, “The Jewel Stairs’ Grievance” (May)
Charles Wright, “Words and the Diminution of All Things” (June – maybe the most heartbreaking thing written on this blog)
Ario Farin, “Up, up and away!” (June)
Jane Kenyon, “Otherwise” (June)
Amy King, “Calling all Agents” (June)
Emily Dickinson, “I stepped from Plank to Plank” (June)
Robert Frost, “The Gift Outright” (July – for July 4th)
Alice Shapiro, “The Twittering Machine” (July)
Stanley Kunitz, “The Abduction” (July)
Kay Ryan, “Turtle” (July)
Emily Dickinson, “Fame of Myself, to justify” (August)
Jane Kenyon, “Mosaic of the Nativity: Serbia, Winter 1993″ (August)
Emily Dickinson, “A South Wind – has a pathos” (August)
William Stafford, “At the Un-National Monument Along the Canadian Border” (September)
Emily Dickinson, “They say that “Time assuages”…” (September)
Ario Farin, “As sad as the scent of smoked fish” (September)
Alice Shapiro, “I” (September)
Robert Bly, “Driving to Town Late to Mail a Letter” (October)
Nomi Stone, “Why I Came” (October)
Emily Dickinson, “Expectation – is Contentment” (October)
Amy King, “Ivywall of Sparrows” (October)
Tom Wayman, “Did I Miss Anything?” (November)
Emily Dickinson, “Away from Home are some and I” (November)
Yehuda Amichai, “Near the Wall of a House” (November)
Emily Dickinson, “How well I knew Her not” (December)
Emily Dickinson, “Good to hide, and hear ‘em hunt!” (December)
Emily Dickinson, “I made slow Riches but my Gain” (December)
Cecilia Woloch, “Slow Children at Play” (December)
Song lyrics:
The Weakerthans, “None of the Above”
The Roots, “False Media”
The Weakerthans, “Utilities”
On Philosophy:
Kierkegaard, “Every Good and Every Perfect Gift is from Above”
An Introduction to Machiavelli’s “Prince”
On Socrates, Dancing and Philosophy: Xenophon, Symposium II 15-20
Why you should read Heidegger and ignore trash partisan critiques advanced by people whose notion of “philosophy” is “having big names tell them they’re right”
Plato, Menexenus
On the intersection of poetry, politics and philosophy
Politics and the age:
Plutarch, “Pericles”
Alexander Hamilton, Federalist No. 1
Thomas Jefferson, Letter to William Ludlow 9/6/1824
Jefferson’s Epitaph, Education and the Enlightenment Republic
Abraham Lincoln, “Proclamation of Thanksgiving”
Here and there:
In Omaha
Homeward Bound: In Houston
In Dallas
A Tale of Two Art Galleries
Dec
28
This Post-Family World: Cecilia Woloch, “Slow Children at Play”
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Reading Cecilia Woloch’s “Slow Children at Play,” I can’t help but think about three people. The poem:
All the quick children have gone inside, called
by their mothers to hurry-up-wash-your-hands
honey-dinner’s-getting-cold, just-wait-till-your-father-gets-home-
and only the slow children out on the lawns, marking off
paths between fireflies, making soft little sounds with their mouths, ohs, that glow and go out and glow. And their slow mothers flickering,
pale in the dusk, watching them turn in the gentle air, watching them
twirling, their arms spread wide, thinking, These are my children, thinking, Where is their dinner? Where has their father gone?
I don’t know what the details mean yet; I haven’t combed through the poem carefully at all. There’s only thought of:
- A girl whose father was so emotionally abusive and controlling that I often wondered if she would have been better off without him in her life at all
- Someone I knew whose father walked out, and that resulted in a number of problems I wouldn’t wish on anyone
- Of two single moms I know, one in particular whose child is absolutely crazy about his dad but whose dad could care less for him
The quick children above are being taken care of for an authority higher than their mothers. The authority is higher than their fathers, too. Even though “household management” is the original meaning of economics, it still shocks to think about how materialistic the family as an institution can be. The thing that strikes me is that a materialistic world will break up the materialistic family, not because it explicitly tampers with the family, but precisely because the world and the family mirror each other too well. There’s no proper distinction between the two, no way to keep each thing in its place. One thing that should frighten you is there are tight-knit families where the children are in some kind of world out of Ozzie and Harriet. They won’t make a peep in church, they’re usually homeschooled, Mom knows her place as does Dad and the conspiracy theories about the rest of the world and gossip about the neighbors abound. I can safely tell you that fundamentalism does not make a proper family. It makes a petty, closed world where people reject others not merely for being different, but for just seeming different. We do worship the almighty dollar because of what we think the dollar gives us, and people should be angry with themselves: thag sent me a wonderful rant on education that makes me wonder if we ever had anything resembling imagination (Mark Slouka, “Dehumanized: When math and science rule the school”). Now that I think about the more basic issue of how we relate to each other, the education issue doesn’t seem to matter as much.
The slow children are the children of a spiritual world: their only true father is their Heavenly Father. The mothers flickering like fireflies is a shadow of an image from Yeats’ “Byzantium,” a poem I have memorized that I will probably never blog and that you should all read and know like as if it was the only thing you’ve ever read or knew. In “Byzantium,” the Emperor’s city is filled with flickering flames – “flames begotten of flame” – and I don’t think I really need to expound on the image of a flickering mother being between heaven and earth in the most tragic way. The spiritual world here is that of wonder – “oh’s” are gaping mouths, nothing articulate except what resembles a zero. Not even a blank, for “blank” in Dickinson can be tied to potential. We’re all like fireflies, a tribe of individuals, united by sometime light and sometime dancing. There is no unity, no order: fireflies know what they have to eat and get to it. Not us, who can starve to death, who can leave our children to starve if we will. Again, the materialistic world doesn’t come with any morality except in the sense of control. Control, however, implies what one lacks control over as well as the willing abdication of responsibility. The “spiritual” world can be nothing but the questions given us by the material world; what seems to define the spiritual world is mere awareness of sin.
What makes religion so, so important is that it is about love. A few of you have asked me about where conservatism can feasibly go, and I’ve been reluctant to answer that because all the financial issues, all the concerns about freedom, all the bureaucratic incompetence and Leftist idiocy and hatred are a sideshow. We live in a world that in many ways we wouldn’t wish on our worst enemy. Our political sense generally is numb to these issues, and when it does engage them, it can only moralize or retreat into fear, instead of looking and mouthing “oh.” What conservatives and liberals need is not merely a culture of life, but a sensitivity to life that does not sugarcoat the amount of pain in America. Even the most ambitious would rather be with their Dad than be President; we can only wish the family were a social construct so easily dissolved.
Dec
27
I made slow Riches but my Gain… (843)
Emily Dickinson
I made slow Riches but my Gain
Was steady as the Sun
And every Night, it numbered more
Than the preceding One
All Days, I did not earn the same
But my perceiveless Gain
Inferred the less by Growing than
The Sum that it had grown.
Comment:
“All Days, I did not earn the same / But my perceiveless Gain” – two parables of Christ are referenced here: first, “earn the same,” the parable of the workers who were hired early in the day for one wage and then workers who came later who were paid the exact same wage. The first workers saw that the workers who came later were paid the same as them and expected a bonus, and were angry that they didn’t get any bonus. Like the story concerning the reaction of the Prodigal Son’s brother, this is about the nature of justice that defines heaven. The afterlife is not a place where one floats on clouds and gets everything one wants. It is conceivable that one gets nothing in the heavenly order, except the joy – if one cares for others at all – that others are there with them. Who exactly is least in the kingdom of heaven is a tough question; there are many indications that the poor in this life will get far more than the rich, but it looks from this parable that no one will get anything. The spirit of the divine law is its own reward.
Second, the parable of the talents: “perceiveless Gain.” Three servants charged with guarding their master’s wealth do different things; two gain on investments, one buries the wealth and returns the exact same thing given to the master. That last person is rebuked by the master. The “talents” that comprise the master’s wealth can be perceived, and an increase in talents (“Gain”) is likewise physically accountable.
One more thing to consider before a more orderly explication: Xenophon’s Oeconomicus, II.3 – Socrates refers to his “substance,” his wealth, in such a way as to imply that his only true wealth is the knowledge of the beings he may have. He can only sell what he has for five minas, but he insists that wealth is only wealth if it is useful to one. In other words: the aspect of his wealth that was five minas was never properly speaking his true wealth. Xenophon commentators tend not to say “the beings” = “wealth” for Socrates; I think that’s a scholarly aversion that borders on an insult to wisdom. It doesn’t matter if the supposition is wrong: the point is it should be played with, thought about and refuted as it may be in certain instances. In this case, it brings up the very large question of whether an incomprehensible notion of justice is any justice at all. More generally, it forces us to ask how much we value knowledge itself, and what presuppositions we are bringing to the text that we may not bring to other activities. It’s easy when reading to value knowledge. Do we always act like knowledge matters?
The first stanza: the “Gain” is likened to the Sun. Light is in the background; the Gain resembles the Sun in terms of steadiness, it is always there. At Night – in darkness – it is accounted. It is true that one type of not-knowing, knowledge of ignorance, is 1) pain 2) quantifiable (you can, even as you know, sort the things you don’t know into rough classes) 3) dependent on knowledge in the way the Night is dependent on the moon and stars. If the Night is purely dark, it is beyond the scope of the human. We get an indication of labor – “slow Riches” – and a close look reveals an indication of the greatest pain. What numbers more every day is that our days our numbered.
Hence, the second stanza: what kind of stupid world is this that the only “gain” is ticking off the days before you die? We need another notion of justice, perhaps a divine one. But the speaker only knows her own experience (“All Days”). We do not earn the same thing every day, much less the same as others every day. And no one perceives our “Gain:” people take it for granted that others will be around forever, that they can take what has been shared with them and not give any interest to those who share. Inequality and ingratitude make it hard but not impossible to see the kingdom of heaven.
Dickinson at her best is not interested in bashing religion. She wants the best question possible, and in this case the Bible has done a very good job of outlining where the best question lies. She moves away from the Biblical promise (“Sum” instead of “Sun”) so as to address her own experience. After all, her own experience is actually addressing her: her “Gain” is not just days on a calendar being marked off. The “Gain” itself inferred – the Latin root means “to bear.” What the “Gain” realized was that there seemed to be less value in accounting for every single day and far more in looking at the Sum total of life. In this, Dickinson and Biblical finality (the day of judgment) are agreed, but you can see how an atheist could break from the Bible on the same ground – one may not want to take the Levitical law in its totality as the final guide to daily life, since the Sum matters most for purposes of sanity. The “Gain” made a realization, but is “perceiveless” itself: our speaker saw what it bore, and a lack of inference may imply having actual knowledge.
The question, then, is that of parts and the whole. Following Benardete – if you take a whole apart, the parts stand distinct in themselves; they are not merely parts of the whole. Similarly, merely recognizing the part in a whole may complicate the part/whole relation in ways that require no less than a philosopher to figure out. The parts may never be put back together to form the same whole again. The whole itself might be recognized as not a true whole. If you want to refine the question, the issue immediately at hand seems to be this: how did considerations of justice/equality/gratitude – considerations of politics/law/piety – stem from a simple question about whether we’re getting anything from life? How did the whole emerge from what seemed to be most partial? How did “I” become “All?”
Dec
26
Links, 12/26/09
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Christmas was nice and quiet, the way I like it. I’m not one for holidays where things feel forced in the least; I’m not against social obligations, but I think far too many people take on too many of them over the holidays. Don’t you just want some quiet time?
My only regret Christmas Day was that I would have liked to get some reading and writing done, and not because I wanted to “be productive.” It’s more like – thinking well shouldn’t take a holiday, neither should putting good things in one’s head. I did enjoy myself thoroughly, and there might be a blogpost about the two video games I’m addicted to now, if I get a bit more real work done to my satisfaction.
Anyway, a few notable things from around the web:
- I hope these will be the last links ever on health care reform. I was sick of the issue back in August, and it had been in the wings for months then. The main reason why I harp on it is that there’s a lot of complaints and advocacy Left and Right about proposed reforms (i.e. “death panels,” and to a lesser degree, the “this will save us money” garbage) that are getting significant attention. I know far more reasonable arguments can be advanced. Anyway – Megan McArdle, “Senate Passes Health Care Bill” (lots that’s quotable here, summarizing months of dealing with this issue very succinctly) & Jay Cost, “More on the Parker Griffith Switch” (yes, this is a sign of things to come, and a good sign)
- A few people shared this with me, I think it’s pretty dramatic to look at – the weather over here recently.
- David Glenn, “Matching Teaching Style to Learning Style May Not Help Students” (h/t aldaily.com) – self-explanatory, but a really good read because it discusses lots of scholarly work briefly and presents both sides of an issue. I wish a lot more articles read like this one.