Monthly Archives: February 2013

The Future’s Misfortune

15 Friday Feb 2013

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Ranch Twigs

Once, as my thought was being drawn through daylight into the bronze corridors of dusk and thence into the promise of dark, I heard out there the strained voice of the hourglass calling for someone to turn it over and show that the future is just an illusion, that what lay ahead was only the past again and again. I was too young for such an idea, so it came back years later as if to prove its own point.

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The Nietzschean Hourglass, or The Future’s Misfortune by Mark Strand, which you’ll find in his Collected Poems.

The photo was taken at my ranch this January.

There Is No Way to Clear the Haze in Which We Live

14 Thursday Feb 2013

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Ranch Twigs

Because we have crossed the river and the wind offers only a numb uncoiling of cold and we have meekly adapted, no longer expecting more than we have been given, nor wondering how it happened that we came to this place, we don’t mind that nothing turned out as we thought it might. There is no way to clear the haze in which we live, no way to know that we have undergone another day. The silent snow of thought melts before it has a chance to stick. Where we are is unresolved. The gates to nowhere multiply and the present is so far away, so deeply far away.

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Bury Your Face in Your Hands by Mark Strand, which you’ll find in his Collected Poems.

I love you M.

The picture was taken at my ranch this January.

“Mirror” by Mark Strand

10 Sunday Feb 2013

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Mark Strand

A white room and a party going on
and I was standing with some friends
under a large gilt-framed mirror
that tilted slightly forward
over the fireplace.
We were drinking whiskey
and some of us, feeling no pain,
were trying to decide
what precise shade of yellow
the setting sun turned our drinks.
I closed my eyes briefly,
then looked up into the mirror:
a woman in a green dress leaned
against the far wall.
She seemed distracted,
the fingers of one hand
fidgeted with her necklace,
and she was staring into the mirror,
not at me, but past me, into a space
that might be filled by someone
yet to arrive, who at that moment
could be starting the journey
which would lead eventually to her.
Then, suddenly, my friends
said it was time to move on.
This was years ago,
and though I have forgotten
where we went and who we all were,
I still recall that moment of looking up
and seeing the woman stare past me
into a place I could only imagine,
and each time it is with a pang,
as if just then I were stepping
from the depths of the mirror
into that white room, breathless and eager,
only to discover too late
that she is not there.

__________

“Mirror” by Mark Strand. (Find it in Strand’s Collected Poems.)

The Only Conversation Worth Having

10 Sunday Feb 2013

Posted by in Religion

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Christopher Hitchens

“I’ll close on the implied question that Bill asked me earlier.

Why don’t you accept this wonderful offer? Why wouldn’t you like to meet Shakespeare, for example?

I don’t know if you really think that when you die you can be corporeally reassembled, and have conversations with authors from previous epochs. It’s not necessary that you believe that in Christian theology, and I have to say that it sounds like a complete fairy tale to me. The only reason I’d want to meet Shakespeare, or might even want to, is because I can meet him, any time, because he is immortal in the works he’s left behind. If you’ve read those, meeting the author would almost certainly be a disappointment.

But when Socrates was sentenced to death for his philosophical investigations, and for blasphemy for challenging the gods of the city — and he accepted his death — he did say, well, if we are lucky, perhaps I’ll be able to hold conversation with other great thinkers and philosophers and doubters too. In other words, the discussion about what is good, what is beautiful, what is noble, what is pure, and what is true could always go on.

Why is that important, why would I like to do that? Because that’s the only conversation worth having. And whether it goes on or not after I die, I don’t know. But I do know that that’s the conversation I want to have while I’m still alive. Which means that to me, the offer of certainty, the offer of complete security, the offer of an impermeable faith that can’t give way, is an offer of something not worth having. I want to live my life taking the risk all the time that I don’t know anything like enough yet; that I haven’t understood enough; that I can’t know enough; that I’m always hungrily operating on the margins of a potentially great harvest of future knowledge and wisdom. I wouldn’t have it any other way.

And I’d urge you to look at those people who tell you, at your age, that you’re dead ’til you believe as they do — what a terrible thing to be telling to children. And that you can only live by accepting an absolute authority. Don’t think of that as a gift. Think of it as a poisoned chalice. Push it aside however tempting it is. Take the risk of thinking for yourself. Much more happiness, truth, beauty, and wisdom will come to you that way. Thank you.”

__________

Christopher Hitchens’s improvised closing remarks at one of his final debates on faith and reason. This debate was against the very erudite and convincing William Dembski of Baylor University, and the entire contest is worth watching (and is on Youtube), but this particular segment is below.

I Sometimes Think There Are Two Israels

08 Friday Feb 2013

Posted by in History, Politics, Religion

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Saul Bellow

“When I was a graduate student in anthropology, it was my immature ambition to investigate bands of Eskimos who were reported to have chosen to starve rather than eat foods that were abundant but under taboo. How much, I asked myself did people yield to culture or to their lifelong preoccupations, and at what point would the animal need to survive break through the restraints of custom and belief? I suspected then that among primitive peoples the objective facts counted for less. But I’m not at all certain now that civilized minds are more flexible and capable of grasping reality, or that they have livelier, more intelligent reactions to the threat of extinction. I grant that as an American I am more subject to illusion than my cousins. But will the Israeli veterans of hardships, massacres, and wars know how to save themselves? Has the experience of crisis taught them what to do? I have read writers on the Holocaust who made the most grave criticisms of European Jewry, arguing that they doomed themselves by their unwillingness to surrender their comfortable ways, their property, their passive habits, their acceptance of bureaucracy, and were led to slaughter unresisting. I do not see the point of scolding the dead. But if history is indeed a nightmare, as Karl Marx and James Joyce said, it is time for the Jews, a historical people, to rouse themselves, to burst from historical sleep. And Israel’s political leaders do not seem to me to be awake. I sometimes think there are two Israels. The real one is territorially insignificant. The other, the mental Israel, is immense, a country inestimably important, playing a major role in the world, as broad as all history – and perhaps as deep as sleep.”

__________

From To Jerusalem and Back by Saul Bellow.

Ephemeral Creatures

08 Friday Feb 2013

Posted by in Philosophy

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Edmond de Goncourt

“Out walking this morning, [Alphose] Daudet asked me whether my brother had been tormented by the thought of an after-life. I replied that he had not and that not once during the whole of his illness had he mentioned an after-life in his conversations with me.

Then Daudet asked me what my own opinions on the subject were, and I answered that in spite of my longing to see my brother again I believed that the individual was totally annihilated at death, that we were utterly insignificant beings, ephemeral creatures lasting a few days longer than those which lived for a single day, and that if God existed it was expecting too much of Him in the way of accounting to imagine that each one of us would have a second life in another world. Daudet told me that he shared my opinions; somewhere in his notes, he said, he had a record of a dream in which he was crossing a field of broom to the sound of the crackling of the bursting pods, and he compared our lives to those little explosions.”

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Edmond de Goncourt’s journal entry on Friday, July 17th, 1891.

“Black Maps” by Mark Strand

07 Thursday Feb 2013

Posted by in Poetry

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Wheat

Not the attendance of stones,
nor the applauding wind,
shall let you know
you have arrived,

not the sea that celebrates
only departures,
nor the mountains,
nor the dying cities.

Nothing will tell you
where you are.
Each moment is a place
you’ve never been.

You can walk
believing you cast
a light around you.
But how will you know?

The present is always dark.
Its maps are black,
rising from nothing,
describing,

in their slow ascent
into themselves,
their own voyage,
its emptiness,

the bleak, temperate
necessity of its completion.
As they rise into being
they are like breath.

And if they are studied at all
it is only to find,
too late, what you thought
were concerns of yours

do not exist.
Your house is not marked
on any of them,
nor are your friends,

waiting for you to appear,
nor are your enemies,
listing your faults.
Only you are there,

saying hello
to what you will be,
and the black grass
is holding up the black stars.

__________

“Black Maps” by Mark Strand, which you’ll see in Collected Poems.

I took the photo this January, wandering around the fields near my family’s ranch.

The New Frontier

07 Thursday Feb 2013

Posted by in Politics, Speeches

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JFK with Caroline

“We are not here to curse the darkness, but to light the candle that can guide us through that darkness to a safe and sane future. As Winston Churchill said on taking office some twenty years ago: if we open a quarrel between the present and the past, we shall be in danger of losing the future.

But I tell you the new frontier is here, whether we seek it or not. Beyond that frontier are the uncharted areas of science and space, unsolved problems of peace and war, unconquered pockets of ignorance and prejudice, unanswered questions of poverty and surplus. It would be easier to shrink back from that frontier, to look to the safe mediocrity of the past, to be lulled by good intentions and high rhetoric–and those who prefer that course should not cast their votes for me, regardless of party. But I believe the times demand new invention, innovation, imagination, decision. I am asking each of you to be pioneers on that new frontier. My call is to the young in heart, regardless of age–to all who respond to the Scriptural call: ‘Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed.’ For courage, not complacency, is our need today–leadership, not salesmanship. And the only valid test of leadership is the ability to lead, and lead vigorously.

The new frontier of which I speak is not a set of promises– it is a set of challenges. It sums up not what I intend to offer the American people, but what I intend to ask of them.

And today, as always, begins another long journey, taking me into your cities and homes all over America. Give me your help, your hand, your voice, your vote. Recall with me the words of Isaiah: ‘They that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run and not be weary.’ As we face the coming challenge, we too, shall wait upon the Lord, and ask that he renew our strength. Then shall we be equal to the test. Then we shall not be weary. And then we shall prevail.”

Caroline and John F Kennedy

__________

Jack Kennedy’s Presidential nomination acceptance speech, which would later become known as “The New Frontier,” delivered July 15th, 1960.

For some reason, despite that on the day Kennedy gave this speech, America’s predicament in the world was as precarious — if not more so — than our own, such optimism seems almost ridiculous when mapped onto today’s United States.

Either the country is just beset by more desperation, or there were cynics in the audience in 1960 who, like so many now, didn’t believe the United States would make it another half century.

I bet it’s a little of both.

The pictures are of John with his daughter Caroline. She was five days away from her sixth birthday when her father was shot.

John F. Kennedy and Caroline Kennedy

Caroline

John and Caroline

“Jerusalem” by James Fenton

06 Wednesday Feb 2013

Posted by in Poetry

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Jerusalem

Stone cries to stone,
Heart to heart, heart to stone,
And the interrogation will not die
For there is no eternal city
And there is no pity
And there is nothing underneath the sky
No rainbow and no guarantee –
There is no covenant between your God and me.

It is superb in the air.
Suffering is everywhere
And each man wears his suffering like a skin.
My history is proud.
Mine is not allowed.
This is the cistern where all wars begin,
The laughter from the armoured car.
This is the man who won’t believe you’re what you are.

Israel 2006 1228

This is your fault.
This is a crusader vault.
The Brook of Kidron flows from Mea She’arim.
I will pray for you.
I will tell you what to do.
I’ll stone you. I shall break your every limb.
Oh, I am not afraid of you,
But maybe I should fear the things you make me do.

This is not Golgotha.
This is the Holy Sepulchre,
The Emperor Hadrian’s temple to a love
Which he did not much share.
Golgotha could be anywhere.
Jerusalem itself is on the move.
It leaps and leaps from hill to hill
And as it makes its way it also makes its will.

Israel 2006 1296

The city was sacked.
Jordan was driven back.
The pious Christians burned the Jews alive.
This is a minaret.
I’m not finished yet.
We’re waiting for reinforcements to arrive.
What was your mother’s real name?
Would it be safe today to go to Bethlehem?

This is the Garden Tomb.
No, this is the Garden Tomb.
I’m an Armenian. I am a Copt.
This is Utopia.
I came here from Ethiopia.
This hole is where the flying carpet dropped
The Prophet off to pray one night
And from here one hour later he resumed his flight.

Israel 2006 3987

Who packed your bag?
I packed my bag.
Where was your uncle’s mother’s sister born?
Have you ever met an Arab?
Yes, I am a scarab.
I am a worm. I am a thing of scorn.
I cry Impure from street to street
And see my degradation in the eyes I meet.

I am your enemy.
This is Gethsemane.
The broken graves look to the Temple Mount.
Tell me now, tell me when
When shall we all rise again?
Shall I be first in that great body count?
When shall the tribes be gathered in?
When, tell me, when shall the Last Things begin?

Israel 2006 4034

You are in error.
This is terror.
This is your banishment. This land is mine.
This is what you earn.
This is the Law of No Return.
This is the sour dough, this the sweet wine.
This is my history, this my race
And this unhappy man threw acid in my face.

Stone cries to stone,
Heart to heart, heart to stone.
These are the warrior archaeologists.
This is us and that is them.
This is Jerusalem.
These are dying men with tattooed wrists.
Do this and I’ll destroy your home.
I have destroyed your home.  You have destroyed my home.

Israel 2006 3729

__________

“Jerusalem” by James Fenton, as printed in his Selected Poems.

The photographs were taken in and around Jerusalem in the winter of 2005.

The picture below is of yours truly at the Western Wall of Solomon’s Temple. It’s out of focus because of the day and time in which it was taken: evening on the Sabbath, so the sun was getting low and the photo had to be snapped in a hurry, before the Rabbinate would see us and have a chance to tell us to put our cameras away.

Jerusalem

True Stories

04 Monday Feb 2013

Posted by in Literature

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PA

“We used to see him occasionally at the Carlyle Hotel. It would be an exaggeration to call him a friend, but F. was a good acquaintance, and my wife and I always looked forward to his arrival when he called to say that he was coming to town. A daring and prolific French poet, F. was also one of the world’s leading authorities on Henri Matisse. So great was his reputation, in fact, that an important French museum asked him to organize a large exhibition of Matisse’s work. F. wasn’t a professional curator, but he threw himself into the job with enormous energy and skill. The idea was to gather together all of Matisse’s paintings from a particular five-year period in the middle of his career. Dozens of canvases were involved, and since they were scattered around in private collections and museums all over the world, it took F. several years to prepare the show. In the end, there was only one work that could not be found – but it was a crucial one, the centerpiece of the entire collection. F. had not been able to track down the owner, had no idea where it was, and without that canvas years of travel and meticulous labor would go for naught. For the next six months, he devoted himself exclusively to the search for that one painting, and when he found it, he realized that it had been no more than a few feet away from him the whole time. The owner was a woman who lived in an apartment at the Carlyle Hotel. The Carlyle was F.’s hotel of choice, and he stayed there whenever he was in New York. More than that, the woman’s apartment was located directly above the room that F. always reserved for himself – just one floor up. Which meant that every time F. had gone to sleep at the Carlyle Hotel, wondering where the missing painting could have been, it had been hanging on a wall directly above his head. Like an image from a dream.”

__________

From the section “True Stories” in Paul Auster’s Collected Prose.