I admit it, I am utterly convinced that those who wield the pen ultimately control the world; they control its design and its fate, for better or for worse. I'm not always true to this conviction, which you might think would keep me scurrying around looking for the Next Great Poet, something I, in fact, don't do.
Or perhaps you might expect that I would at least realize that the Bushes and the Rumsfelds and the Blairs and the Saddams and the Saudis and all the rest of that tiresome ilk are not worth following in their weavings and schemings. Sorry, I have to also confess that I do follow their doings rather closely, on the assumption that the lot of them may shortly blow us all up; and it would be nice to have a few hours' warning to grab the bug-out kit and head for the hideout.
I like to repeat to myself a few choice lines that reinforce my notion of the radical superiority of the humane arts to the martial and political ones.
Sextus Propertius (50 B.C. to about 16 B.C.), reflecting on his likely ultimate status as versus the mighty of Rome (Pound's translation):
"Flame burns, rain sinks into the cracks, And they [the tombs of the powerful] all go to rack ruin beneath the thud of the years. Stands genius a deathless adornment, a name not to be worn out with the years."
Alfred North Whitehead commenting, as a last thought in his great book, Science and the Modern Mind, on the relative worth of the men given over to philosophy and science versus those given over to power and dominion:
"The great conquerors, from Alexander to Caesar, and from Caesar to Napoleon, influenced profoundly the lives of subsequent generations. But the total effect of this influence shrinks to insignificance, if compared to the entire transformation of human habits and human mentality produced by the long line of men from Thales to the present day, men individually powerless, but ultimately the rulers of the world."
I recently reread Whitman's "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom." It remains a powerful and authentic threnody even now (and I think it will outlive entirely the positive reputation of Lincoln, who inspired it). It seems possible to say now that Whitman was blinded by the sheer nearness of (what to call it?) the War of Secession. He was unable to sort out the goods and bads in the titanic character of the war's lanky victor. In his poet's invincible naivete, he was entirely taken in (as have been how many generations of Americans since?) by the indubitable virtues of the man, which we now see hardly balance his evil effects. But as Lincoln fades in reality, Whitman's dirge for a "mighty hero dead" loses nothing.
I think of the shattering power in The Gulag Archipelago of Solzhenitsyn's incontrovertible proof of the wild, ghastly folly of socialism, which has forced the whole lot of irredeemable and malicious muddleheads who still favor socialism to crawl about like cockroaches, mostly in our universities, hoping nobody grown-up will notice them.
And I think of the mournful power of Whittaker Chambers in his Witness, an enormous, trophy book. It recorded a whole, tragic life, profiled the follies of a half century, and raised high in the sky for all to see, anytime they care to look, evidence that an honest man can counterbalance – and outlive – a raft full of dishonest and bloody fools.
Somebody else might come up with a thousand better instances than mine to make my point; these are just ones that have stuck with me. I read Robinson Jeffers' poem "Greater Grandeur" when it first came out in his controversial volume, The Double Axe (1948).
Jeffers makes plain in The Double Axe that he thought the 1939-1945 war a great swindle by politicians worldwide, with Churchill and FDR leading our crowd. In a "Publisher's Note" in the front of the book, Jeffers' long-term publisher, Liveright, felt compelled to publicly wash its hands of complicity with the poet's radically insufficient reverence for the war lately won.
Jeffers' lines have lodged in my memory all these years:
"Half a year after the war's end. Roosevelt and Hitler dead, Stalin tired, Churchill rejected – here is the Triumph of the little men. Democracy – shall we say? – has triumphed. They are hastily preparing again More flaming horrors. . . The tall world turns toward death, like a flower to the sun. . . . "
This was, perhaps, a premature announcement, as the nation readied for the "fabulous fifties," of a culture of death embedded in the future?
And Ezra Pound once more: in a U.S. Army prison cage in Pisa, under charge of treason, after a contentious lifetime, thinking of where things stood with him at just that moment:
"As a lone ant from a broken ant hill from the wreckage of Europe, ego scriptor."
Perhaps this seems to you utterly vainglorious. Perhaps it is. But not half so much as the politicians' habit of putting their faces on the coinage and commissioning mendacious works of praise of their doings, almost uniformly anti-humane and universally destructive.
I find thinking of these repeated defiances of power in the name of truth and beauty and knowledge necessary for my own will to live.
February 18, 2002
