God is a comedian? Of course. it explains everything.

I plan on continuing to use this account to archive poems and thoughts that I like. The first poem of the year is a fragment from W. B. Yeats’ The Circus Animal’s Desertion.

Those masterful images become complete
Grew in pure mind, but out of what began?
A mound of refuse or the sweepings of a street,
Old kettle, old bottles, and a broken can,
Old iron, old bones, that raving slut
Who keeps the till. Now that my ladder’s gone
I must lie down where all the ladders start
In the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart.

Not a beautiful piece certainly, but I find it oddly moving.  It is the frontpiece to a book of verse I got for a dollar at Half Price Books.  The book is edited by Robert Bly (and some others), and is called The Rag and Bone Shop of the Heart: A Poetry Anthology.  According to its preface the work is intended to present "poetry for men."  Interesting.

In 1895, William James gave a lecture entitled "Is Life Worth Living?" James suffered periodically from depression and, according to one writer "cast about for reasons to engage in a daily existence that often seemed devoid of zest and challenge...." James concluded his lecture thusly:

If this life be not a real fight, in which something is eternally gained for the universe by success, it is no better than a game of private theatricals from which one may withdraw at will. But it feels like a real fight — as if there were something really wild in the universe which we, with all our idealities and faithfulnesses, are needed to redeem.

Interesting. Like Camus, James seems to have felt that the most important philosophical question was suicide.

This dictionary is dedicated to the beautiful Fridestuide (c. 755), that young lady, wise beyond her years, who anticipating marriage to a savage bore, similar to many littering these 16 pages, refused queenship, preferring a life of contemplative virginity in a pigsty at Binsey Abbey.

...from the age of 15 to 50 said to be the most desirable woman in English, in rotation, was mistress to King Olaf the Saint, wife to King Edmund, King Edwy the Fair, King Ethelred the Unready and King Canute’s paramour. The voluptuous creature was almost equal to the acknowledged sexual insatiability of King Edwy, but at times was forced to recruit her mother. The Archbishop of Canterbury had to drag this satyr from bed where he lay between two to his own coronation. After her husband’s death, the Church punished her for her sins by excommunication, branding, hamstringing and, finally, sending her to Northern Ireland.

Beauty is but a flower
Which wrinkles will devour;
Brightness falls from the air,
Queens have died young and fair,
Dust has closed Helen’s eye,
I am sick, I must die
Lord have Mercy on us.

A recent issue of the New York Review of Books had an obituary (written by Tony Judt) for Polish philosopher Leszek Kolakowski.  Kolakowski was raised in Poland and was a noted Marxist philosopher there until 1968 when he was expelled from both the party and the country for having said in a lecture that the Communist Party had betrayed the people. He went to Oxford, where he became a notable critic of socialist thought, saying, in part, that major flaws of Marxism were its naivete (its belief that all human shortcomings are produced by social institutions) and its failure to understand that "some sources of conflict and aggression are deeply rooted in essential human nature."

Kolakowski was not entirely dismissive of socialism, however. At another point he wrote:

What ever had been done in Western Europe to bring about more justice, more security, more educational opportunities, more welfare and more state responsibility for the poor and helpless, could never have been achieved without the pressure of socialist ideologies and socialist movements, for all their naiveties and delusions.... Past experience speaks in part for the socialist idea and in part against it.

Anyway, toward the end of the obituary, Judt includes a footnote about a reception for Kolakowski given after one of his lectures at Harvard.

At a party in his honor following the Cambridge lecture, I recall watching with bemused admiration and no little envy as virtually every young woman in the room migrated to the corner where a sixty-year old philosophy, already wizened and supported by a cane, held court before their adoring eyes. One should never underestimate the magnetic attraction of sheer intelligence.

Oh, if it were only so.

While up on the North Shore last week I finished a "police procedural" novel, Before the Frost, by Swedish writer Henning Mankell. Toward the conclusion of the book, the protagonist, a detective inspector named Kurt Wallander receives a call that a good friend with terminal cancer has at last died. On learning this, he says the following to his daughter, a rookie police officer:

We used to talk about it when we were younger, Sten and I. That death was something like an opponent in a duel. Even if the outcome was a given, a skillful player could hold off and tire death so that it only had the power to deliver a single blow. That is how we wanted our deaths to be, something we could take care of so they would ‘go well.’

A little earlier in the book, Wallander’s daughter and another detective interview a man who earns half of his living teaching philosophy and the other half working as a blacksmith. As they are driving away from the interview, the detective says,

So often you meet fearful, angry, shaken people.... But sometimes there are moments of light. Like this man. I’m filing him away in my archive of interesting people I’ll remember when I’m old.

In another book (I forget the context), Mankell says, "Everyone has small, extremely personal sacred moments." I believe this is true and have begun to ponder what my own "sacred moments" might be.

I just had an online exchange with a guy who believes all that of this country’s problems are the fault of politicians — specifically liberal politicians. This guy has no conception at all that this country is something like a democracy and that, since the people elect politicians, the people also bear some of the blame for our political and economic difficulties. He shows not a glimmer either of understanding that in a democracy featuring people with fundamentally differing views most political actions are going to be compromises of some sort, usually leaving many people dissatisfied. Anyway, it reminded me of the following fragment of the philosophy of Confucius:

Wanting good government in their states, they first established good order in their families; wanting good order in the home, they first disciplined themselves; desiring self discipline, they rectified themselves; wanting to rectify their hearts, they sought precise verbal definitions of their inarticulate thoughts (the tones given off by the heart.)

I am also reminded of a similar comment by Wendell Berry: "I think that the best government is the one which governs least. But there is a much neglected corollary: the best citizen is the one who needs the least government. The answer to big government is not private freedom but private responsibility."

Faint hope.

I am rearranging, culling and cataloging my personal library. It is amazing how many books I have accumulated over the years, many of which I have not and will not read. I am averaging a box a week to Half Price Books and am also donating a fair number to the Washburn Library Book Shop. In the process of this I rediscovered a "quote book" that I began when I was just out of the army. I think I will start archiving some of these quotes here.  This one is from Ernest Becker's Outer Most House (I think).

We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals. Remote from universal nature, and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion. We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate of having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein we err. And greatly err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours they move finished and complete, gifted with extension of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren. They are not underlings. They are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time; fellow prisoners in the splendor and travail of the earth.

Every now and then I come across a phrase that just grabs me and shakes me. "[F]ellow prisoners in the splendor and travail of the earth," is one of these.

Nicolo Sacco and Bartolo Vanzetti were two Italian immigrants who rose to prominence in the American Trade Union Movement in the twenties. Eventually they were charged with murder and robbery (according to recent scholarship almost certainly framed), kept them on 'Death Row' for seven years, and despite world wide protests, executed. Sacco wrote a letter to his son Dante on the eve of his execution, and Pete Seeger transposed it into this song. According to Seegar "By omitting a word here and there, or adding one, I found I could make it scan, if not rhyme. I recorded it..., and it was added to a record of Woody [Gutherie’s] about the Sacco-Vanzetti case."

Sacco’s Last Letter to His Son

If nothing happens
They will electrocute us right after midnight
Therefore here I am, right with you
With love and with open heart
As I was yesterday

Don't cry Dante
For many many tears have been wasted
As your mother's tears have been already wasted
For seven years
And never did any good

So son, instead of crying
Be strong, be brave
So as to be able to comfort your mother

And when you want
To distract her from the discouraging soleness
You take her for a long walk
In the quiet countryside
Gathering flowers here and there

And resting under the shade of trees
Beside the music of the waters
The peacefulness of nature
She will enjoy it very much
And you will surely too

But son you must remember
Don't use all yourself
But down yourself just one step
To help the weak ones at your side

The weaker ones that cry for help
The persecuted and the victims
They are your friends - friends of yours and mineThey are the comrades that fight
Yes and sometimes fall

Just as your father
Your father and Bartolo have fallen
Have fought and fell
Yesterday, for the conquest of joy
Of freedom for all

In the struggle of life you'll find
You'll find more love
And in the struggle you will be loved also

A wonderful version of this song has been recorded by the folk duo "Magpie." Postscript: for many years public school teachers were forbidden to read or present this poem because, well, as union activists it Sacco and Vanzetti were thought to be communists.

Here is a poem by Wendell Berry that was published recently in the New Yorker.

                          (With thanks to Wes Jackson and in memory 
                                 of Sir Albert Howard and Stan Rowe.)

Thank you. I’m glad to know we’re friends, of course;
There are so many outcomes that are worse.
But I must add I’m sorry for getting here
By a sustained explosion through the air,
Burning the world in fact to rise much higher
Than we should go. The world may end in fire
as [prophesied --- our world.. We speak of it
As "fuel" while we burn it in our fit
Of temporary progress, digging up
An antique dark-held luster to corrupt
The present light with smokes and smudges and poison
To outlast time and shatter comprehension.
Burning the world to live in it is wrong,
As wrong as ti make war to get along
And be at peace, to falsify the land
By sciences of greed, or by demand
For food that’s fast and cheap to falsify
The body’s health and pleasure — don’t ask why.
But why not play it cool? Why not survive
By Nature’s laws that still keep us alive?
Let us enlighten then, our earthly burdens
By going back to school, this time in gardens
]That burn no hatter than the summer day.
By birth and growth, ripeness, death and decay,
By goods that bind us to all living things,
The Wheel of Life, delight, the fact of wonder,
Contemporary light, work, sweat and hunger
Bring food to the table, food to cellar shelves.
A creature of the surface, like ourselves
A garden lives by the immortal Wheel
That turns in place, year after year, to heal
It whole. Unlike our economic pyre
That draws from ancient rock a fossil fire,
An anti-life or radiance and flame
That burns as power and remains as doom,
The garden delves no deeper than roots
And lifts no higher than its leaves and fruits.
— Wendell Berry

A recent issue of the New Yorker Magazine had a fine article on the originator of the modern essay — Michel de Montaigne. There is much that is notable and useful in the article but I liked best Montaigne’s comments on what the author of the piece called "the vagaries or penises." Here it is:

"We are right to note the licence and disobedience of this member which thrusts itself forward so inopportunely when we do not want it to, and which so inopportunely lets us down when we most need it; it imperiously contests for authority with out will; it stubbornly and proudly refuses all our incitements, both of the mind and the hand."

Overall, the author (Jane Kramer) concludes about Montaigne: "[H]e seems to be saying, like Sextus, that there may be no truths, only moments of clarity, passing for answers."

There was an interesting article in the Star-Tribune recently, concerning the raid on Northfield in September, 1876 by the Jesse James gang. Two of the robbers were killed during the actual attempt, one of these by a medical student who was home on summer break from the University of Michigan. During the robbery he looked out of his bedroom window, saw what was happening, grabbed his hunting rifle and shot one of the robbers.. Afterwards a local photographer took a picture of the two dead robbers with their eyes propped open with toothpicks (the picture was in the Styar-Tribune article). Later the two men were buried in an unmarked grave, but the medical student needed a cadaver for dissection (you had to provide your own in those days). He asked if he could have the man he killed, and it was decided that he could. So he took the body back to Michigan, dissected the robber and kept the bones in an urn for the rest of his (long) career.

Something similar happened after the Dakota Conflict in 1862. After the early phase of the conflict, 38 Dakota men were hung in Mankato (the largest mass execution in U.S. history) and then buried in a common grave on the banks of the Minnesota River. Some Minnesota doctors petitioned to dig up these bodies for dissection, and permission was granted. A Dakota warrior named Marpiya Okinajin ("He Who Stands in the Clouds" or "Cut Nose") was given to Dr. William Mayo (who with his brother founded the Mayo Clinic) and dissected by Mayo in LeSeuer. Afterwards Mayo had the bones dried, cleaned and varnished and kept them in an iron kettle in his office. Eventually the bones were returned to the Dakota by the Mayo Clinic under the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act of 1990.

PS --- A legend is that an unknown person nicknamed "Dr. Sheardown" removed some of the prisoners' skin (presumably after the execution) and boxes containing these pieces of skin were sold afterwards in Mankato as souvenirs.  I am told that these souvenirs are still being sold occasionally on ebay.

I came across this poem in the New York Review of Books. I just like it.

The Toad

It’ll be a while before my friends
See me in the city.
A while before we roam the streets
Late at night
Shouting each other’s names
To point out a sight too wonderful
Or too terrifying
To give it a name in a hurry.

I’m staying in the country,
Rising early,
Listening to the birds
Greet the light.
And when they fall silent
To the wind in the leaves
Which are as numerous here
As the crowds in your city.

God never made a day as beautiful as today,
A neighbor was saying.
I sat in the shade after she left
Mulling that one over,
When a toad hopped out of the grass
And finding me harmless,
Hopped over my foot on his way to the pond.

--- Charles Simic

I don’t know much about Charles Simic, but I find that I rather like his work. He uses simple language to create enduring images. In the poem above I particularly like the contrast between the ineffectual Simic ("finding me harmless") and the purposeful toad ("on his way to the pond.")

Last night Liz and I and our friend John went to Kieran’s Pub in downtown Minneapolis to hear Scott (and Andy’s) new band. It is called "Four Pints Shy." The new guitar player is Rick, who has played with them before and seems quite skilled. Also added is a female vocalist (Rene) and a violinist (Trevor). As a whole, some of the rough edge of Drunk and Disorderly has been smoothed away. Trevor is a fine young violinist. Rene is a strong singer, provides a lot of energy and is very good to look at. Her presence also makes it possible to have some Kate Rusby songs — a definite plus.

I miss Greg and Seth and Dylan and John, though. Most of all I suppose I miss Tuesday nights at the Dubliner --- beer, a surly bartender, stale popcorn and Drunk and Disorderly. I am old enough to know better, but as I look back I find those hot summer nights almost form my idea of heaven. I suppose I thought they would last forever. But they didn’t and couldn’t.

I found this in a recent issue of the New Yorker.

Fool's Errands

A thing
cannot be
delivered
enough times:
this is the
rule of dogs
for whom there
are no fool's
errands.  To
loop out and
come back is
good all alone.
It's gravy to
carry a ball
or a bone.

--- Kay Ryan

It made me think of Gara.

I see where John McCain voted against Sonia Sotomayor's Supreme Court confirmation, calling her "unqualified."  This from the man who thought Sarah Palin was fit to be Vice President.  To think that I once considered voting for that fool.