First Things First (from The Poetic Quotidian)
W.H. Auden

Woken, I lay in the arms of my own warmth and listened
To a storm enjoying its storminess in the winter dark
Till my ear, as it can when half-asleep or half-sober,
Set to work to unscramble that interjectory uproar,
Construing its airy vowels and watery consonants
Into a love-speech indicative of a Proper Name.

Scarcely the tongue I should have chosen, yet, as well
As harshness and clumsiness would allow, it spoke in your praise,
Kenning you a god-child of the Moon and the West Wind
With power to tame both real and imaginary monsters,
Likening your poise of being to an upland county,
Here green on purpose, there pure blue for luck.

Loud though it was, alone as it certainly found me,
It reconstructed a day of peculiar silence
When a sneeze could be heard a mile off, and had me walking
On a headland of lava beside you, the occasion as ageless
As the stare of any rose, your presence exactly
So once, so valuable, so very now.

This, moreover, at an hour when only to often
A smirking devil annoys me in beautiful English,
Predicting a world where every sacred location
Is a sand-buried site all cultured Texans do,
Misinformed and thoroughly fleeced by their guides,
And gentle hearts are extinct like Hegelian Bishops.

Grateful, I slept till a morning that would not say
How much it believed of what I said the storm had said
But quietly drew my attention to what had been done
—So many cubic metres the more in my cistern
Against a leonine summer—, putting first things first:
Thousands have lived without love, not one without water.

Comment:

Is the Christian God being praised? That was my initial thought. “First Things” in the title keeps that a guiding assumption. The “storm enjoying its storminess” would be a pagan god. But the Proper Name of the first stanza is mere air and water, two elements quite conspicuous in the Creation and Flood stories.

That Proper Name in the second stanza helps articulate the formerly pagan powers. The audience being addressed (“you”) is named “a god-child of the Moon and the West Wind.” The powers of mystery and passion are ascribed to him. Moreover, he is indicated as having a “poise of being” that is the landscape itself. The name hints at hope (“green”) and a fortune that is Providence (“blue” reminds of the “sky”).

The third stanza gives us fire and earth (“lava”) in addition to air and water. Indirectly, one could say the revelation of the first three stanzas has happened through air alone. Invisibility and revelation of an intensely personal value are joined in that “day of peculiar silence when a sneeze could be heard a mile off.” The pagan gods had real powers, but the point of worshipping God isn’t power. All the elements which compose this world and the most beautiful growth may hearken to higher purpose, but what we need might be something quieter, closer, present.

What is the devil’s taunt? That all religions, including Christianity, will sink into the ground. Clergy of any sort may be “Hegelian.” It isn’t that they lie. They have to assume they have the truth, that belief is knowledge, in order to have the position they hold in this world. That may not hold for more run-of-the-mill believers, especially in a time of liberal democracy. Providence for “Hegelian bishops” may not just be hope, but the unfolding of absolute Idea, the trust in a rationality that certainly can’t be confirmed.

The result of the storm and the existential meditation on faith isn’t an immediate love. Our speaker is alone with the morning. But he is left with perhaps the most Providential sign. If the first three stanzas concerned air, the last is the promise of water. This God doesn’t judge like the devil or overpower like the pagan deities. The best things can wait.

The piers are pummelled by the waves;
In a lonely field the rain
Lashes an abandoned train;
Outlaws fill the mountain caves.

Fantastic grow the evening gowns;
Agents of the Fisc pursue
Absconding tax-defaulters through
The sewers of provincial towns.

Private rites of magic send
The temple prostitutes to sleep;
All the literati keep
An imaginary friend.

Cerebrotonic Cato may
Extol the Ancient Disciplines,
But the muscle-bound Marines
Mutiny for food and pay.

Caesar’s double-bed is warm
As an unimportant clerk
Writes I DO NOT LIKE MY WORK
On a pink official form.

Unendowed with wealth or pity,
Little birds with scarlet legs,
Sitting on their speckled eggs,
Eye each flu-infected city.

Altogether elsewhere, vast
Herds of reindeer move across
Miles and miles of golden moss,
Silently and very fast.

Comment:

The central of seven stanzas concerns intellectual Cato, engaged with the past, and the “Marines” who “mutiny for food and pay.” Yes, the Romans had something like our marines, but “Marines” is a more modern concept. This brief Wikipedia discussion is helpful.

Still, “Ancient Disciplines” could well refer to the devotion of both Cato and the Marines, and therein lies the ambiguity this poem develops. Each stanza except the the third and the last two contain some specifically modern element: “train,” “evening gowns,” “Marines,” “pink official form.” There is also a movement from “piers” to “provincial towns” to what we suspect is the heart of the city atop Palatine Hill. Then suddenly there are birds well outside the city, and hordes not stopping to stare at a golden ground.

I suspect Auden is indicating something Leo Paul de Alvarez hinted at repeatedly in his lectures on Machiavelli. We can try to say the solution to modern problems is to return to something older: “the oldest is the best.” But that brings problems of its own, for the “oldest” isn’t what we think it is. The “Ancient Disciplines” give both Cato and brutal Roman legions standing. The “oldest,” properly speaking, is the “natural,” and you can see for yourself nowadays just how sane most people advocating a return to nature are. They’ll be the ones with a voice, though, the more things unravel. Note that “outlaws” and “tax-defaulters” are literally in nature as they are exiling themselves from order.

Does that mean all hope for moral rhetoric is finished in a declining Empire? Despite the conflation between our world and the Romans, Auden’s speaker keeps Roman elements distinct to a degree: “Fisc,” “temple prostitutes,” “Cato,” “Caesar.” And it is pretty clearly Rome who is throwing out or abusing the people who can’t pay, marginalizing the literati and the politicians who have respect for the institutions they inhabit. That doesn’t mean we’re exempt from the critique, but it does mean that the critique is very specific.

It develops into something more with the union of the nature imagery and the plight of the literati. There’s a curious lack of birth in all the parties and sex. That lack of birth signals the onset of epidemic in this way: with no real growth, the only condition left for change is a move into decline. Another implication from this thinking: other forces one can’t even count are swirling into a mass (“reindeer”).

It isn’t hard to see the direct link between lack of birth and injustice. The Empire is spending so much time robbing people that it is completely caught up in its own artifice. Again, this is not as simple as Julian Assange’s type of ranting; the artifice alone does not indict the institution or the people. What indicts things here is that even the people within the Empire don’t see a reason to grow, other than to take. Birds understand birth, but they – and perhaps we – don’t.

That actually might be the most damning criticism of our society, along the same lines as “Children of Men.” I’m not saying everyone should have kids. But we’ve made this process very complicated, and by saddling generations with huge amounts of debt and bad jobs, we’ve probably pushed a number of people to go “why bother? How am I going to provide for those I can only imagine having?” In our case, this isn’t so much theft, as much as an overemphasis on our individual (and, ironically enough, familial) security. Either way you cut it, “health care reform” and “tax cuts,” taken singly and in their crudest form (“Big Pharma is evil”/”gov’t wastes our money all the time”), may only represent an interest of “grab as much as you can” (obviously, they can each be parts of a larger vision for the country). That they’re the only way most people can conceive of politics is the real crisis we face.

Through the lack of a “modern” element, Auden silently links the “literati” with the natural, an “imaginary friend” that may literally be outside the Empire’s bounds. The forces of change are in motion, but rarely as direct as people want them to be.

Jumbled in the common box
Of their dark stupidity,
Orchid, swan, and Caesar lie;
Time that tires of everyone
Has corroded all the locks,
Thrown away the key for fun.

In its cleft the torrent mocks
Prophets who in days gone by
Made a profit on each cry,
Persona grata now with none;
And a jackass language shocks
Poets who can only pun.

Silence settles on the clocks;
Nursing mothers point a sly
Index finger at a sky,
Crimson with the setting sun;
In the valley of the fox
Gleams the barrel of a gun.

Once we could have made the docks,
Now it is too late to fly;
Once too often you and I
Did what we should not have done;
Round the rampant rugged rocks
Rude and ragged rascals run.

Comment:

The end of all things has come up many times before in this blog, but with Yeats’ “The Second Coming” as the impetus. Here we examine another source. We wonder about the erotic not merely as degenerative, but as leading to violence.

If we put aside the notion that eros is part of the Fallen world, the link between eros and violence is hard to conceive. It would be thumos – spiritedness, eros alienated from itself as it is not cognizant of its own incompleteness – which drives towards empire and incites violence. That certainly seems to be the Platonic teaching: Socrates’ eroticism is a softening of education. The Hesidoic myth of gods eating each other, of being trying to annihilate becoming, finds itself put in the background by the Odyssean wiles of the philosophic. Lovers who get angry and hateful and kill each other fall away from the truly erotic in many cases (not in all: I commend you to Nietzsche’s “Why must we destroy that which we truly love?” – a paraphrase). “Anger” must be the sign of spiritedness.

But here Auden gives us a “box of… dark stupidity.” Desiring is not knowing, certainly not self-knowledge. The nutritive, animal and rational souls are all represented by erotic beings – “Orchid, swan, and Caesar.” The last element seems out of place: Shakespeare’s/Plutarch’s Caesar is very much thumotic, knowing no bounds militarily. Perhaps the want to rule all, to be wed to Gaia, means a thumotic/erotic conflation. If we proceed with this, then Auden – despite his eloquence – is prephilosophic.

Yet – maybe something more subtle is going on. If everything is eros truly, then eros is not just constitutive of beings but also what drives moments. Maybe Time, which makes the Truth manifest at its own leisure, gives us another way of conceiving the problem.

Out of the current’s division, out of the current’s power, comes mockery of prophets. What “profit” they made, we can conjecture, is the few hearts they changed. Changing hearts and minds now is the same as making money. Similarly, poets are reduced only to punning, because the language itself has turned on them. Time unleashes Chaos that swallows up the sacred and the refined.

More interesting is when Time starts to cannibalize itself. The light of day giving into a blood red sky indicates there is no future for the future. The hunter is the hunted and human contrivance, which has meant no escape for so many other creatures, offers us no escape.

So what does Time teach about eros? What it does is force us to separate our personal lives from history. Time splits as prophet, poet, mother and hunter split: our roles are the indication that the end of all things is the end of each individual’s world. The separation can never be perfect, of course – if our couple makes the docks, they are still upon the Chaos, still subject in some way to the torrent’s cleft. Our individual mistakes mirror the larger tragedy, where we may be forced permanently into our beginning state. But our feeling that we’re separate somehow – that’s not useless. Despite the rejection of the Platonic teaching, despite the use of eros here as solely tragic, our spirit still exists somehow, aware it has something to say about love too. Notice that separation can be characterized as violence, however.

Certainty, fidelity
On the stroke of midnight pass
Like vibrations of a bell,
And fashionable madmen raise
Their pedantic boring cry:
Every farthing of the cost,
All the dreaded cards foretell,
Shall be paid, but from this night
Not a whisper, not a thought,
Not a kiss nor look be lost.

- from Auden’s “Lullaby”

1. Perhaps forging a more thoughtful politics is a fashionable madness.

After all, once more rigor is applied to language and argument, such standards, if accepted by many, become mores. Thoughts become rules, then become sentiments, then finally law and the spirit of the law.

Certainty and fidelity might be best left moments in our existence. The problem for a free society is how to encourage fidelity without overemphasizing certainty. But a more thoughtful politics only encourages fidelity when it acts as if it is certain. A continual questioning uproots the law and makes the possibility of moral action difficult to conceive.

There does not seem to be a solution to this problem except to drop “thought” from the foundations and practice of politics altogether. For in any case, all my screaming just becomes a “pedantic boring cry,” sounding vaguely prophetic and most certainly apocalyptic. And some vibrations of a bell echo throughout a mortal coil an entire life, and such a person may not be the most thoughtful, but is more than willing to sacrifice.

2. Perhaps the problem is that I am not clear about the ends of a more thoughtful politics. Do I want people to be more thoughtful because everything is going to work better?

Of course not – it is entirely conceivable we will be a worse world for attempting to think through things. The trains may not run on time; people prone to questioning their country may ask even harder, jarring questions; all possibility for faith could be lost.

The reason why one should want a more thoughtful politics is when one considers that there is a season for all things under the heavens. If we lead our private lives well, even in darkness we do not lose a moment: every whisper, thought, kiss and look matters. It is possible we can experience great pain. But an even greater good is being enjoyed, inasmuch we are loving.

I haven’t been very subtle in arguing that thought is perhaps the greatest form of love. Thought may be a perpetual sacrifice, an alienation of nearly every other desire to merely see how things actually are. Most of the ancients therefore saw mathematics as the highest form of thought, but in doing so, they made a mistake: they thought objectivity – the inherently inhuman – ideal and the greatest good. Mathema are far more important when we consider the perfect forms of the soul, the return to virtue, the fulfillment of human being in the everyday.

3. A thoughtful politics is necessary because it is the product of a thoughtful, concerned people, conducting themselves well in their private capacities. How can our government display, though, our very personal sense of being?

Perhaps, as a thought experiment, we can conceive of Congress as an institution that mirrors how we talk amongst ourselves and deliberate. It can be seen as filled with petty little games and people trying to gang up on each other and then hanging out later drinking like all the cursing and shouting and power trips were meaningless. It can be filled with people enjoying life and their jobs and all the mistakes and goods that accompany such enjoyment.

When things get serious, their real virtues should show – they should be patient and supportive and sparing of words. They should be willing to put their own reputations and constituencies aside, just for a moment, to really think through things and speak wisely and ask when they don’t know.

Every word said in Congress should count at the key moments, when enjoyment isn’t an option. They should be able to switch from their everyday more private capacity of having a career (which just happens to be that of Congressmen), to their true public capacity: representing us at our best.

I know, bringing in Congress to a discussion of love and politics seems corny, and that this entry is a risk: it might show me to be far too immature a thinker to have anything serious to say about politics. But I was thinking that despite the cynicism that is the reasoning behind the Constitution, the idea of representative government is an old one, and one dependent on an ancient question: Can ordinary men govern themselves? If that is the central question, then Congress should mirror us in our perceived weaknesses, and should more than compensate in its strengths.

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Are You There?
W.H. Auden

Each lover has some theory of his own
About the difference between the ache
Of being with his love, and being alone:

Why what, when dreaming, is dear flesh and bone
That really stirs the senses, when awake,
Appears a simulacrum of his own.

Narcissus disbelieves in the unknown;
He cannot join his image in the lake
So long as he assumes he is alone.

The child, the waterfall, the fire, the stone,
Are always up to mischief, though, and take
The universe for granted as their own.

The elderly, like Proust, are always prone
To think of love as a subjective fake;
The more they love, the more they feel alone.

Whatever view we hold, it must be shown
Why every lover has a wish to make
Some kind of otherness his own:
Perhaps, in fact, we never are alone.

Commentary:

Imagination, born from pain, gives us true love in our dreams. “Dear flesh and bone” is there; the price is two different aches, though – one pain from the absence of the lovers’ body, the other from the absence of his soul. Those pains correspond to “the ache of being with his love, and being alone.”

The literal reason why they correspond is that we are not given an instance in the poem of anyone actually having a lover. The only thing that comes close is the dream of the second stanza. The three stanzas before the last give us the pain of youth, childhood, and the aged, in that order. Narcissus, a youth, can be said to be self-absorbed because he believes love is real: the problem of youth is the arrogance which stems from actually having something to believe in, one’s dreams. The child’s “pain” comes from a different problem: it is unclear the child has pains. The list of water, fire and stone implies a fourth element: wind. A child is mischievous like the wind, taking everything for granted. Can taking everything for granted be said to be a hallmark of love? Of course not – if the child has a “pain” as regards love, it is the lack of love coming from the child’s inability to conceive an Other. Finally, Proust very much thinks love a “subjective fake:” “Swann’s Way,” the first volume of Remembrance of Things Past, was very good btw, and all you really need to read of Proust’s in order to see this. In that work, Proust turns to nature over and over again to search for meaning in life, and when we realize that, we realize that jumping into a lake or acting like the wind are also manifestations of humanity mimicking nature.

The distance which creates love is written into the world. The lack of a lover’s body is nowhere more apparent than in loving your own reflection; the lack of a lover’s mind is nowhere more apparent than in jumping from tree to tree in joyful, thoughtless bliss. Yet the lack of body, for Narcisssus, comes about because he thinks he understands that which he sees: the reflection and him share the same mind, he hopes. Similarly, the child, in not thinking, is the sensuality of the world: being young, he does not just recall the newness that creation speaks, he also demonstrates, in his activity, the truest love of body in play. Who cares how nature thinks? What matters is that it is there, and wonderful.

Now that we have exhausted this poem quite a bit, the cryptic final stanza should make more sense. The want for otherness is less a “want” but more a realization of self. If you look at what you want, you see who you are. And so it cannot be said that we are alone, inasmuch we are creatures of desire.

Looking up at the stars, I know quite well
That, for all they care, I can go to hell,
But on earth indifference is the least
We have to dread from man or beast.

How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.

Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
I cannot, now I see them, say
I missed one terribly all day.

Were all stars to disappear or die,
I should learn to look at an empty sky
And feel its total dark sublime,
Though this might take me a little time.

Commentary:

But on earth indifference is the least
We have to dread from man or beast.

Auden proclaims this to us in the first stanza, and I wonder: Is it true? (I certainly don’t think so. Indifference is very cold.)

Later on, we hear this from the speaker:

If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.

“More love,” of course, can very easily translate into hate. Any of us who love know this. We know how disappointed we can be because of love, and we know that hate takes a variety of forms. One of the more prominent forms it takes is a type of indifference, an attempt to be dead to the world so one cannot be hurt again. If indifference truly is the least we have to fear, then the wish to be more loving is inconsistent with that “fact.” So Auden has some explaining to do:

Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
I cannot, now I see them, say
I missed one terribly all day.

The attitude of the speaker here – an attitude we are tempted not to reflect on because he has chosen to personify “stars,” and we would rather make sense of that – is that of “indifference.”

Were all stars to disappear or die,
I should learn to look at an empty sky
And feel its total dark sublime,
Though this might take me a little time.

And this indifference, of course, pushes our speaker to embrace the infinite void, total darkness, a darkness so “sublime” it cannot be truly embraced until death (“a little time”). Indifference, obviously, is the problem for Auden’s speaker. We can’t be indifferent. Hence we should be “more loving,” divorced from a temptation to indifference.

A very cleverly constructed poem, where the 3 stanzas seem to complement the first, but in fact refute it.

Epitaph On A Tyrant
W.H. Auden

Perfection, of a kind, was what he was after,
And the poetry he invented was easy to understand;
He knew human folly like the back of his hand,
And was greatly interested in armies and fleets;
When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter,
And when he cried the little children died in the streets.

Commentary:

Ask anyone what tyranny is and they’ll be sure to tell you and give you detailed examples of when they purportedly lived under a tyrant. They know full well when they weren’t allowed to do something, and they understand perfectly, so they think, that arbitrary control was exercised over them for the sake of arbitrary control only…

I think, in order to approach this poem properly, we need to admit something: We know nothing about tyranny. We know that we are limited, we know we have been limited. But tyranny is far removed from our experience, for most of us.

So let’s take the first sentence seriously. The tyrant is interested in “perfection” of a sort. Let us not dismiss this and say it is “perfection” that is used to tell all the rest of us what to do. That may be true, and the perfection being “of a sort” inclines us to cast doubt on the purity of the tyrant’s motives. Yet let us concede that a tyrant may actually be someone who is interested in perfection.

If we grant Auden’s speaker this, that the tyrant is interested in perfection, then we understand the next two lines. The tyrant is someone who, in his pursuit of perfection, wants to create the Ultimate Art. He wants something beautiful that is also simple. There is no way to avoid the fact that a tyrant emerges from populist urges. His art stems from what the many want, what he feels the many will understand. His art will be the art to end all art, for everyone can understand it, and thus have no need to go to anything “higher” or anything more complicated. All will be spelled out because one man has given to us perfection.

Further, why should we be sarcastic about this enterprise? He knows “human folly like the back of his hand.” His knowledge of our faults – an ability that allows him a frightening amount of control over his enemies, an ability that makes him far more fearful than he really is – is also genuine knowledge of our nature. He can correct us as human beings, he can bring us to something greater. Just because some tyrants go bad doesn’t mean that perfecting the people they tyrannize over is totally out of reach. Knowledge of folly implies that he knows what is greater.

What seems mainly to corrupt the tyrant is his actual holding of power. That he is “greatly interested in armies and fleets” means whatever knowledge he has is devoted to the martial – the crude, physical manipulation of reality – as opposed to enlightenment.

The tyrant wants to write the perfect poem that everyone will understand. Unfortunately, that means his means are not those of gentleness or thoughtfulness. What people understand is fear and bribery moreso than love. And so senators laugh, both out of fear and out of shared criminality.

And so children die, and the quest for perfection, merely because it entails having actual power, ends up destroying the future for all, quite literally. For the true tyranny is to try to make the present perfect, which is what making something beautiful that all can now understand is.

Real perfection would be what the artist does: creating something wonderful – something ideal – now, and hoping that others will understand it, to make the future better. Reality is not a template for one’s designs, and because it is not, others are free to grow and develop, and use one’s wisdom if they so choose. And if they don’t, well, they will end up responding to or complementing that wisdom, for true wisdom is not merely the product of one mind.

He looked in all His wisdom from the throne
Down on that humble boy who kept the sheep,
And sent a dove; the dove returned alone:
Youth liked the music, but soon fell asleep.

But He had planned such future for the youth:
Surely, His duty now was to compel.
For later he would come to love the truth,
And own his gratitude. His eagle fell.

It did not work. His conversation bored
The boy who yawned and whistled and made faces,
And wriggled free from fatherly embraces;

But with the eagle he was always willing
To go where it suggested, and adored
And learnt from it so many ways of killing.

Commentary:

This is a Cupid/Psyche story, but with a twist, and that twist is not in the homosexual affair between Zeus and Ganymede, I don’t think.

We can ascribe “wisdom” of some sort to Zeus from line 1. Such “wisdom” might turn out to be ironic (“all His wisdom” suggests a limit on Zeus’ wisdom), or it might not turn out so (Zeus is the most powerful Olympian, as he established the Olympian order in the first place). For Ganymede, we can see “humility,” which again could be ironic, given his ultimate pairing with the eagle.

Another thing of which to take note is the dominion of each. Zeus rules everything, but nothing in particular. His dominion has more to do with his having power, even if he doesn’t use it. Ganymede is watching over sheep, and “humble” suggests not only poverty, but also that he might be a servant to those sheep.

I should say that any religion worth a damn exhorts its followers to love, no matter where any given follower ranks in terms of having wisdom or intelligence. Religion stems from the fact of willing, the soul’s “spiritedness,” a redunancy which explains why the soul is. I suppose one might be able to read into this poem how the pagan and Christian orders merged, but I really do not want to go there right now.

Now wisdom always wants something better for all of us. It is only in our age that we say wisdom leaves well-enough alone. We say this because we do not value wisdom. We value what we think is freedom. In earlier, more primitive times, where men like Fred Flintstone had to run a little bit to get their cars moving, it was easier to say that perhaps the one who knows best is freest. In our time, we do as the Federalist, and say that if a bunch of Socrates were in a room, they would all argue, which is why they need to be divided into a bicameral legislature, etc.

Anyway, the point is that wisdom does seek some sort of unity with the will, and it literally through artifice and purposeful denial that our age tries to hide this. So how does wisdom try to achieve this unity?

The first appeal is made by the dove, but the dove’s song is boring for a youth. It only acts as a lullaby. I think the problem is Ganymede’s naivete; he doesn’t know what peace is good for yet. Maybe after he has had several broken relationships or witnessed a war, he would regard peace and its blessings differently.

But then again, maybe not. There is something about the will, the want for action, that does not accept a quiet rest as a blessing at all. And I think we will see something about love, which really is the will for most people, that is rather dark because of this at the end of this poem.

The second appeal is through the Truth, which works through speech and awe. Now if one is curious, Zeus’ speech should win them. It is the king of the gods speaking to one, why would he be an awful bore? He’s not, and something about the will, and something about love further, must be deduced from the rejection of Zeus’ speech (and Zeus’ paternal authority, which is also rejected).

I think again, we need to see something at fault in Ganymede. While Ganymede wants to be in motion – hence the rejection of the dove – whether he has ambitions for what is better generally can be cast in doubt. To reject the dove is probably to reject the best; Zeus is aiming, in Homer, for peace among the gods, no less. To reject Zeus’ plans for him, to not care about a truth that transcends the present, or any truth at all, really, shows a lack of curiosity and a lack of wonder (the eagle falling has to do with augury, and seeing the future).

Why does willing and loving reject wonder? Again, I keep saying the ultimate love is thought. But that’s for those us who are ugly people. If you’re beautiful, like Ganymede was, you don’t need to “think.” You just want to be, and you don’t even think about other people and how freedom could be manifest in them, and you don’t even think about your own future. To be concerned with one’s own beauty is to assume the world is yours, and that you are doing your best with it merely by being yourself. To embrace thought is to embrace that there are eternal things, but they are far above us, and that it is seeing change properly that allows us a peek into that which is divine. Ganymede doesn’t see the possibility of change at all, in any meaningful sense.

So Ganymede fits best with the eagle, the power “wisdom” can make manifest, but wisdom in a limited sense. It is having the “knowledge” that others don’t have, and using it to smear one’s mark on the world. An emphasis on beauty will always lead to this conclusion, where peace is not aesthetically pleasing enough, for it does not embrace motion, whereas love and willing are motions for most people, and their “goal” is beauty.

There is a deep irony here in who exactly is emphasizing beauty: we could say this was all Zeus’ fault, for He fell in love with the boy because of his beauty, and Zeus ought to have known better. In modern education, blame always hits the teachers and parents. But I have painted this as Ganymede’s fault, for the least he can do is stay awake and listen. I think we have to take the hint that while he is of humble circumstance, there is no humility in him, and that Zeus’ wisdom is both actual wisdom and fallacious, both at once, in trying to embrace Ganymede.

Musee des Beaux Arts
W.H. Auden

About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer’s horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Brueghel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

Commentary:

Auden’s poem seems to divide people into two categories, based on what the speaker’s viewing in the paintings he’s seeing.

One category is composed of those who, for whatever reason, are indifferent to the sufferings of others, or just don’t realize at all that anything’s going on.

The other category seems to be composed of the “aged,” “martyrs,” and Icarus.

Now if we take the “aged” to be people like Simeon, and “martyrs” to be, well, “martyrs,” then the connection between those two groups is obvious, but it leaves out Icarus.

Ovid thought Icarus was just being a boy when he flew too close to the sun and fell to his death. Other authorities, I’m sure, are more concerned with Icarus’ potential or actual hubris. Brueghel’s own painting features a ploughman plowing as its most prominent feature.

The ploughman plows, the ship sails, only the shepherd stares at the sky, away from where Icarus fell, and the painting seems to scream “Look at Icarus; his ambition and hubris earned him death and smallness. Whereas these other people, who know their roles in life, and who work hard at their given station, well, they persist, at the least.” (Brueghel’s capacity to be ironic shouldn’t be ignored just because he illustrated Dutch proverbs much of the time.)

And Icarus and the martyrs and the aged do have something in common: they stand for something, and have some sort of ambition, some sort of hope, and that’s what creates the suffering they go through. If they didn’t want anything, or didn’t care for anything in particular, they’d suffer less, certainly.

But who wants to suffer at all? We can always be the speaker, and just move on to the next painting, quite casually, as if we’ve learned nothing at all: For we, like the ship, have “somewhere to get to” and we can therefore “sail calmly on,” too.

(At least that’s what I hope.)