God Is Good

Today I just want to share an excerpt from a poem I happened to come across that speaks to me in the midst of this foolish, frantic, fractured, frightful modern world, so cruel and so cynical.

Excerpt from "God Is Good" from Bees in Amber by John Oxenham, 1913.

God has been good to me and M.P. here in our little bungalow, and I am deeply grateful.  Gratitude is one of the secrets of happiness.

-----

R. I. P. Ted Turner, 1938-2026

There's just something about a man with a cigar . . .
Ted Turner, 1977 

Ted Turner, the colorful billionaire and philanthropist, 6 feet tall with a rakish mustache and a cocky, Rhett Butler swagger, has died at the age of 87 at his plantation home in northern Florida.  A shrewd, talkative businessman full of boyish exubarance, with big dreams and big wins, he was called "The Mouth of the South" for his sometimes outrageous public comments. Among many other accomplishments, he was the father of CNN and Turner Classic Movies, and for some years was the owner of the champion Atlanta Braves baseball team.  He wasn't born in the South, but we'll claim him anyway.

I recollect when he started his first TV station in Atlanta, where I was living at the time.  Channel 17 was a low-budget start-up that I chiefly remember because it would play Top 40 songs all morning? / afternoon? on Saturday - producing the first music videos, all done in-house by using special effects with the TV cameras - like mirror images, upside-down dancers, a rain of polka dots, and so forth.  Primitive, but fascinating at the time.  I watched them on my nifty little Sony TV with a 5-inch screen, which was the last word in cool back then.

He was married three times and had five children.  His third wife, from 1991 to 2001, was Jane Fonda, who has written this lovely tribute:

He swept into my life, a gloriously handsome, deeply romantic, swashbuckling pirate and I’ve never been the same. He needed me. No one had ever let me know they needed me, and this wasn’t your average human being that needed me, this was the creator of CNN, and Turner Classic Movies, who had won the America’s Cup as the world’s greatest sailor . . . 

He was a good-looking rascal, but straight as a board, and therefore typically boring:  not someone I kept track of; I hadn't thought about him in years.  But as far as I know, he wasn't hateful or malicious, nor was he a thief or a rapist, as we hear so much about today.  And looking over his obituaries, I am struck by all the many good things he did or tried to do for the country and the world.  He actually cared about other people - what a concept - and had a big heart.

If you can spare the time to look at some of these retrospectives, you will see that, unlike some other big-mouthed billionaires, he actively promoted world peace, nuclear disarmament, environmental regulation, wildlife protection, responsible journalism, and other noble causes.  He put his money where his big mouth was, too - lots of it.

So I have to say, Good on you, Ted.  You used your time on earth wisely and well, and your treasure too.  Rest in peace.

TCM: 

PBS: 

WSB (Atlanta, 1988): 

 

And a 52-minute interview with Charlie Rose from 2004 - it's most interesting to hear Turner's condemnation of Bush's invasion of Iraq, and contrast that with the insane, homicidal ravings of the current occupant of the White House:

P. S. -- Turner was no dummy, either.  He wanted to major in classics (Latin/Greek literature and history) in college, until his daddy threw a fit and made him choose something else.  In one of the videos above, Turner quotes from memory a famous passage from "Horatio at the Bridge" by Macaulay:

To every man upon this earth, death cometh soon or late;

And how can man die better than facing fearful odds,

For the ashes of his fathers, and the temples of his Gods . . . .

-----

Easter Sunday 2012

Alleluia! Christ is risen.

The Lord is risen indeed. Alleluia!

The Incredulity of St. Thomas
by Caravaggio

Alleluia.
Christ our Passover has been sacrificed for us;
therefore let us keep the feast,
Not with the old leaven, the leaven of malice and evil,
but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth. Alleluia.

Christ being raised from the dead will never die again;
death no longer has dominion over him.
The death that he died, he died to sin, once for all;
but the life he lives, he lives to God.
So also consider yourselves dead to sin,
and alive to God in Jesus Christ our Lord. Alleluia.

Christ has been raised from the dead,
the first fruits of those who have fallen asleep.
For since by a man came death,
by a man has come also the resurrection of the dead.
For as in Adam all die,
so also in Christ shall all be made alive. Alleluia.

Collect of the Day:

O God, who for our redemption gave your only-begotten Son to the death of the cross, and by his glorious resurrection delivered us from the power of our enemy: Grant us so to die daily to sin, that we may evermore live with him in the joy of his resurrection; through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.

Seven Stanzas At Easter
By John Updike

Make no mistake: if He rose at all
it was as His body;
if the cells' dissolution did not reverse, the molecules
reknit, the amino acids rekindle,
the Church will fall.

It was not as the flowers,
each soft Spring recurrent;
it was not as His Spirit in the mouths and fuddled
eyes of the eleven apostles;
it was as His flesh: ours.

The same hinged thumbs and toes,
the same valved heart
that--pierced--died, withered, paused, and then
regathered out of enduring Might
new strength to enclose.

Let us not mock God with metaphor,
analogy, sidestepping, transcendence;
making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the
faded credulity of earlier ages:
let us walk through the door.

The stone is rolled back, not papier-mache,
not a stone in a story,
but the vast rock of materiality that in the slow
grinding of time will eclipse for each of us
the wide light of day.

And if we will have an angel at the tomb,
make it a real angel,
weighty with Max Planck's quanta, vivid with hair,
opaque in the dawn light, robed in real linen
spun on a definite loom.

Let us not seek to make it less monstrous,
for our own convenience, our own sense of beauty,
lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are
embarrassed by the miracle,
and crushed by remonstrance.

Holy Saturday

The Entombment of Christ
by Caravaggio

Redemption

by George Herbert

Having been tenant long to a rich Lord,
   Not thriving, I resolved to be bold,
And make a suit unto him, to afford
   A new small-rented lease, and cancel th’ old.

In heaven at his manor I him sought:
   They told me there, that he was lately gone
About some land, which he had dearly bought
   Long since on earth, to take possession.

I straight return’d, and knowing his great birth,
   Sought him accordingly in great resorts;
In cities, theaters, gardens, parks, and courts:
   At length I heard a ragged noise and mirth

Of thieves and murderers: there I him espied,
   Who straight, Your suit is granted, said, and died.

Collect of the Day:

O God, Creator of heaven and earth: Grant that, as the crucified body of your dear Son was laid in the tomb and rested on this holy Sabbath, so may we await with him the coming of the third day, and rise with him to newness of life; who now lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

Happy New Year: Enivrez-Vous

Tonight, as we step by forced march into the future, and the present inexorably glides away into the past, I am reminded of this poem by Charles Baudelaire, here recited so well in English by the young Dean Stockwell:




French original and English translation here, if you want to read it.

I think also of Keats's Ode to a Nightingale, which you can listen to here, read by the wonderful Robert Donat.

Have a good one, fellas.

Tempus Fugit by Henry Stacy Marks

Note, Returned

My goal is to always come from a place of love . . . but sometimes you just have to break it down for a motherfucker.

--RuPaul

I was going to use that as the epigraph of a little essay on the faults and flaws of the modern world, and of LGBT people in particular. Being oppressed does not make you virtuous, ipso facto. There's a difference.

Oh but . . . skip it. Human beings have been repeatedly told, ad nauseam - and better yet, shown - how to live, from Socrates down to Mother Teresa.

But who really cares? Before you answer: circumspice.

ENVOI

For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
In the valley of its making where executives
Would never want to tamper, flows on south
From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,
A way of happening, a mouth.

--Auden

Lacrimae Rerum

I've been meaning to post this for some time now, but not until this minute have I gotten around to making the necessary scan.  The oldest thing I own is a scrap of paper:  a single leaf from a notebook kept by my great-grandfather nearly 140 years ago. 



He was 24 when he recorded these verses.
Click to enlarge.

I'll tell you how I came to possess this.  My grandparents were the sort of hard-working country-bred people who, though literate, were not the type to keep much reading material lying around, save for the daily newspaper and the family Bible which sat for years, largely unread, on the telephone table in the living room.  But behind the front door was an old homemade cabinet with doors that fastened by a chunk of wood that pivoted on a nail - a thing of utility, not beauty - repainted every few years in the same tan color as the living room walls, but mostly ignored. 

Until one day in my early adolescence, when I decided to explore the contents.  The cabinet held three shelves, full of old herb catalogs and physical culture magazines dating back to the 1920's - my grandfather was a great one for believing in home remedies, and was acknowledged by all to be the family expert on such things - as well as some dusty religious books and tracts, old letters, and the odd catalog of tools and useful implements.   And the stray outdated textbook or novel, doubtless acquired when my father and his sisters were young, and long since forgotten by them. 

Some of these things were interesting to read by themselves.  But the most exciting find I made was three books:  one seemed truly ancient, with what seemed a home-made black leather cover, cracked with age, the pages of which were nubbly, not smooth like more modern paper.  It seemed a book of songs or poems:  I remember one verse was in celebration of "Washington, and Adams too," so it must have been from somewhere around the year 1800.

The second find was a much-worn but still tightly bound copy of Noah Webster's famous blue-backed speller, from the mid-19th century.  It seemed that every lesson began with an illustration of a short morality poem; the one I remember drew a contrast between two schoolboys, Punctual and Dilatory I think.  Naturally, Punctual was the one who succeeded while Dilatory fell by the wayside.

And the third of these antique treasures was the little notebook of my great-grandfather's that I mentioned above:  made of ruled paper, no more than about 3 by 5 inches, missing a cover but painstakingly filled on nearly every page with neatly written quotations from poets and playwrights, along with the occasional note of the price of corn, a home remedy for some ailment, a remark on some unusual weather, or even the exact tally of the nationwide popular vote for a presidential election, culled from a New York paper he must have subscribed to:  the collected musings of a young man who, though he never got further than the 8th grade, if even that far, was nevertheless of keen mind and had an ear for a well-turned phrase, a pleasing poem.

As I do, though I lived in more fortunate times and was able to get a good education.  Which for me, looking at his jotted fragments of thought, reveals a link across the centuries, a testimony of the continuity of something human, some essence of spirit.  I never knew the old man - he died half a century before I was born - and I don't feel particularly sentimental about him.  There are others I might have ended this year's postings with, more near and dear to my heart, starting with my own dear parents and others.  But somehow it seems fitting to end the year with this small bridge across the river of Time. 

Alas, having made these rather exciting discoveries - for even then, I was more interested in the past than the future - I made the great mistake of telling everyone in the family what I had found.  It was not long before some more senior relation confiscated all three treasures - "for safekeeping," of course - and I never saw them again.  Doubtlessly, they have long since been bequeathed to some other descendant, who may very well care little for them and be unaware of their significance.  Since I am the last of my grandfather's line to bear his name, I would have felt it only right that they descend to me - oh but some things are not worth the fight and feud that would result, you know what I mean, fellas?

How this single page came to rest among my keepsakes, I have no idea now.  I certainly would not have torn it out of the notebook.  Perhaps it just came loose on its own, and I stuck it inside another book to preserve it.  Whatever the facts were, I'm glad I have this charming little memento of a bygone day.  The famous Lewis Carroll poem about the crocodile is just the sort of thing I delighted in as a child - and still do.  How gratifying to find that it appealed to my great-grandfather as well.

Tonight, I am struck by the last quotation on the back of the page, which is from Gray's Elegy, written in 1750 and immensely popular for the next two hundred years, until the advent of our jet-fueled, damn-fool era.  Since it is partly obscured, I reprint the stanza here; and if any of my truckbuddies is familiar with this classic work, or will take the trouble to read it, I think you will agree that it also is fitting to end the year, and these reflections, with.

Full many a gem of purest ray serene,
The dark unfathom'd caves of ocean bear:
Full many a flow'r is born to blush unseen,
And waste its sweetness on the desert air.

Four Poems

By Philip Larkin (1922-1985).

Days

What are days for?
Days are where we live.
They come, they wake us
Time and time over.
They are to be happy in:
Where can we live but days?

Ah, solving that question
Brings the priest and the doctor
In their long coats
Running over the fields.


Maturity

A stationary sense . . . as, I suppose,
I shall have, till my single body grows
          Inaccurate, tired;
Then I shall start to feel the backward pull
Take over, sickening and masterful—
          Some say, desired.

And this must be the prime of life . . . I blink,
As if at pain; for it is pain, to think
          This pantomime
Of compensating act and counter-act,
Defeat and counterfeit, makes up, in fact,
          My ablest time.


To Failure

You do not come dramatically, with dragons
That rear up with my life between their paws
And dash me butchered down beside the wagons,
The horses panicking; nor as a clause
Clearly set out to warn what can be lost,
What out-of-pocket charges must be borne,
Expenses met; nor as a draughty ghost
That’s seen, some mornings, running down a lawn.

It is these sunless afternoons, I find,
Install you at my elbow like a bore.
The chestnut trees are caked with silence. I’m
Aware the days pass quicker than before,
Smell staler too. And once they fall behind
They look like ruin. You have been here some time.


Faith Healing

Slowly the women file to where he stands
Upright in rimless glasses, silver hair,
Dark suit, white collar. Stewards tirelessly
Persuade them onwards to his voice and hands,
Within whose warm spring rain of loving care
Each dwells some twenty seconds. Now, dear child,
What’s wrong, the deep American voice demands,
And, scarcely pausing, goes into a prayer
Directing God about this eye, that knee.
Their heads are clasped abruptly; then, exiled

Like losing thoughts, they go in silence; some
Sheepishly stray, not back into their lives
Just yet; but some stay stiff, twitching and loud
With deep hoarse tears, as if a kind of dumb
And idiot child within them still survives
To re-awake at kindness, thinking a voice
At last calls them alone, that hands have come
To lift and lighten; and such joy arrives
Their thick tongues blort, their eyes squeeze grief, a crowd
Of huge unheard answers jam and rejoice —

What’s wrong! Moustached in flowered frocks they shake:
By now, all’s wrong. In everyone there sleeps
A sense of life lived according to love.
To some it means the difference they could make
By loving others, but across most it sweeps
As all they might have done had they been loved.
That nothing cures. An immense slackening ache,
As when, thawing, the rigid landscape weeps,
Spreads slowly through them—that, and the voice above
Saying Dear child, and all time has disproved.

The Outlaw of Amherst

Yes, your Head Trucker likes poetry - you got a problem with that, bud?

Holland Cotter's excellent reflections in the NYT on what Emily Dickinson meant to him as a gay teen resonate deeply with me.

Patterson attributed Dickinson’s seclusion and poetry to a thwarted romance. But she proposed that the love object was a woman.

The revelation, true or not, was explosive for a teenager who knew he was gay and was still isolated in that knowledge. As always, I went immediately back to Dickinson’s poetry and discovered there a dynamic I had sensed but hadn’t been able to name: fluidity of gender.

She spoke as a woman, a man, a little girl, a little boy, a lover active and passive. Suddenly she was throwing out a power-of-example lifeline. Not only was she an outsider, she was also, so it seemed, an outlaw, on the margins, where I felt I was too. . . .

The one power Dickinson trusted was the power of language, which she loved. And that love is, I think, the main thing I’ve gained from her, even if I’ve put it to lesser uses. By her own account she experienced an acute physical reaction to words, a euphoric shock.

I know exactly what she meant, because her poetry has that effect. Ambush is its strategy. It knocks the breath out of you and leaves you giddy, like a nanosecond-long roller coaster ride. If you visit the Dickinson show at the New York Botanical Garden, which I recommend, and watch people’s faces as they read the poems posted around the grounds, you may see that power in action.

It’s a power she acquired in part by being, in some essential way, an outsider, but also from seeing that identity, not as a disability, but as a saving grace, and one that carries responsibilities:

               The Province of the Saved
               Should be the Art — to save

Emily has been one of my very favorites since way back in junior high.  Something about the intensity, the flashes of insight, the particular view she took of things, drew me in, fascinated.  When I was in college, I dug around in the library and found her entire collected poems, the scholarly edition:  there are 1,775 of them, if I recollect right.  And I sat right down and read through most of them; delicious, like a fruited table in a walled garden.

And was she gay?  I don't know, I doubt that anyone can ever know for certain.  But it was a wonderful life, whatever the case may be, to produce such sparkling gems of words and thought that still speak to the heart of those who don't fit in with the crowd, who see the world from another perspective than the ordinary:  who march to a different drum.

A favorite that I know by heart:

          Much madness is divinest sense
          To a discerning eye;
          Much sense the starkest madness.
          ’Tis the majority
          In this, as all, prevails.
          Assent, and you are sane;
          Demur,—you’re straightway dangerous,
          And handled with a chain.

Browse more of Emily's poems here.  It's okay:  I won't tell anyone at the Eagle if you won't.

Forgetfulness

Forgetfulness - Billy Collins Animated Poetry from smjwt on Vimeo.

Outwitted

He drew a circle that shut me out—

Heretic, rebel, a thing to flout.

But love and I had the wit to win:

We drew a circle that took him in!

An old favorite poem of mine, and until this very minute I would have sworn it was by Emily Dickinson.  But I checked to make sure - and come to find out, it's by a Californian named Edwin Markham (1852-1940), who also wrote this:

Poetry writing is as practical as bread-making; and, from a high ground, it is just as necessary to the life of man. Poetry is bread for the spirit: it is the bread that is made of earthly wheat and yet is mixed with some mystic tincture of the skies. It nourishes all the higher hopes and aspirations of man.

In our day, of course, poetry has been replaced by pop songs, some of which do approach poetic heights - and some not.

Startling thought:  Imagine if some of them old boys - like Whitman, say - had been able to make music videos. . . .English class might not a-been so boring, huh?

The Inaugural Poem

Your Head Trucker will admit to liking a good poem - or pome, as we say here in Texas. So I thought I'd reproduce for y'all here the one that Elizabeth Alexander delivered at the Inauguration. She seems like a nice person, and there's nothing wrong with the poem when you read it on the page:

Each day we go about our business, walking past each other, catching each other’s eyes or not, about to speak or speaking.

All about us is noise. All about us is noise and bramble, thorn and din, each one of our ancestors on our tongues.

Someone is stitching up a hem, darning a hole in a uniform, patching a tire, repairing the things in need of repair.

Someone is trying to make music somewhere, with a pair of wooden spoons on an oil drum, with cello, boom box, harmonica, voice.

A woman and her son wait for the bus. A farmer considers the changing sky. A teacher says, Take out your pencils. Begin.

We encounter each other in words, words spiny or smooth, whispered or declaimed, words to consider, reconsider.

We cross dirt roads and highways that mark the will of some one and then others, who said I need to see what’s on the other side.

I know there’s something better down the road. We need to find a place where we are safe. We walk into that which we cannot yet see.

Say it plain: that many have died for this day. Sing the names of the dead who brought us here, who laid the train tracks, raised the bridges, picked the cotton and the lettuce, built brick by brick the glittering edifices they would then keep clean and work inside of.

Praise song for struggle, praise song for the day. Praise song for every hand-lettered sign, the figuring-it-out at kitchen tables.

Some live by love thy neighbor as thyself, others by first do no harm or take no more than you need. What if the mightiest word is love?

Love beyond marital, filial, national, love that casts a widening pool of light, love with no need to pre-empt grievance.

In today’s sharp sparkle, this winter air, any thing can be made, any sentence begun. On the brink, on the brim, on the cusp, praise song for walking forward in that light.

Nice thoughts, nice poem. Problem is, it simply doesn't sound so great when read aloud; not the kind of thing that works well when declaimed upon a great national occasion.

I agree with the title of the Guardian's review of it: "Elizabeth Alexander's praise poem was way too prosy."

I hear tell that prose poems are all the rage these days; but as with modern art and modern music, so too with modern poetry: it's all well and good to innovate, but when you get too far from the oh-so-last-century traditional forms that people expect, too far into the ordinary (or the bizarre, in some cases), then you can't blame people for not being terribly impressed.

Still, I believe I understand what Ms. Alexander was trying to say here, and I applaud her sentiments. I don't know that I could have done any better if the onus were put on me. I've put it on my to-do list to go read some of her other poems when I get a chance.

Mama always said, when slipping some suspicious vegetable onto my plate, At least try three bites; then if you don't like it, you don't have to eat any more of it.

London, 1802

Milton! thou should’st be living at this hour:
England hath need of thee: she is a fen
Of stagnant waters: altar, sword and pen,
Fireside, the heroic wealth of hall and bower,
Have forfeited their ancient English dower
Of inward happiness. We are selfish men;
Oh! raise us up, return to us again;
And give us manners, virtue, freedom, power.
Thy soul was like a Star, and dwelt apart:
Thou hadst a voice whose sound was like the sea:
Pure as the naked heavens, majestic, free,
So didst thou travel on life’s common way,
In cheerful godliness; and yet thy heart
The lowliest duties on itself did lay.

Wordsworth had his reasons for admiring Milton, who, I’m sorry to say, is not at the top of my list.

But when I substitute Lincoln for Milton here, and America for England, the poem makes brilliant sense in 2008.