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Tag Archives: For the Time Being

For the Time Being

28 Monday Dec 2015

Posted by jrbenjamin in Poetry

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Catholicism, Christianity, Faith, For the Time Being, Poem, poetry, Redemption, W.H. Auden

W.H. AudenAlone, alone, about a dreadful wood
Of conscious evil runs a lost mankind,
Dreading to find its Father lest it find
The Goodness it has dreaded is not good:
Alone, alone, about our dreadful wood.

Where is that Law for which we broke our own,
Where now that Justice for which Flesh resigned
Her hereditary right to passion, Mind
His will to absolute power? Gone. Gone.
Where is that Law for which we broke our own?

The Pilgrim Way has led to the Abyss.
Was it to meet such grinning evidence
We left our richly odoured ignorance?
Was the triumphant answer to be this?
The Pilgrim Way has led to the Abyss,

We who must die demand a miracle.
How could the Eternal do a temporal act,
The Infinite become a finite fact?
Nothing can save us that is possible:
We who must die demand a miracle.

__________

Pulled from W.H. Auden’s 1942 poem “For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio”. You’ll find it in his Collected Poems.

I hope all of you have had wonderful Christmases and holidays.

Three others I read this time of year:

  • Eliot’s haunting poem “The Journey of the Magi”
  • The closing bit of John Updike’s near-perfect memoir
  • “Redeem the time being from insignificance”

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W. H. Auden: When Pity Replaces Justice

23 Wednesday Sep 2015

Posted by jrbenjamin in Literature

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A Christmas Oratorio, C.K. Williams, Christianity, Ethan Canin, For the Time Being, Greed, Jesus, King Herod, reason, religion, Superstition, The Palace Thief, W.H. Auden

W.H. Auden

“Reason will be replaced by Revelation. Instead of Rational Law, objective truths perceptible to any who will undergo the necessary intellectual discipline, Knowledge will degenerate into a riot of subjective visions… Whole cosmogonies will be created out of some forgotten personal resentment, complete epics written in private languages, the daubs of schoolchildren ranked above the greatest masterpieces. Idealism will be replaced by Materialism. Life after death will be an eternal dinner party where all the guests are 20 years old… Justice will be replaced by Pity as the cardinal human virtue, and all fear of retribution will vanish… The New Aristocracy will consist exclusively of hermits, bums and permanent invalids. The Rough Diamond, the Consumptive Whore, the bandit who is good to his mother, the epileptic girl who has a way with animals will be the heroes and heroines of the New Age, when the general, the statesman, and the philosopher have become the butt of every farce and satire.”

__________

A highly prophetic section pulled from W.H. Auden’s “For the Time Being”. You’ll find it in his Collected Poems.

If you’re reading this and not seeing some parallels to today — some Consumptive Whores and generous bandits elevated in our society; some daubs supplanting masterpieces and an ethos of pity and therapy thickening around us — I think you’re reading it wrong. It doesn’t matter that it’s actually King Herod who delivers this judgement in the poem.

“For The Time Being” is a poem about the incarnation (“A Christmas Oratorio”, as the subtitle says), but this bit concerns what happened after Jesus’s birth, when Herod massacred the Innocents. Herod’s fear, it turns out, is not just that a new king will replace him, but that this successor will bring on an age of unreason.

Herod is conflicted about the action he is taking, because he’s a liberal at heart. Yet he can justify the means with the ends, and can contemplate doing evil so long as the word “lesser” is in front of it.

I think this section of the poem is wonderful because it piles on details like the excesses of the described scenario. The excerpt’s diction is absolutely superb and its loose, run-on punctuation adds to its frantic energy. (I’m reminded of C.K. Williams, who passed away last week, and his ability to string together one-sentence poems that pulse with kinetic, frenetic force.)

Returning to the present, I’m also reminded of an apropos line. It comes from the film adaptation of Ethan Canin’s imperishable short story “The Palace Thief”. In it, the protagonist, a classics teacher at an elite New England prep school, lives to witness one of his star students grow into a hungry and corrupt politician. Towards the end of the story, he reflects on the student: “I was wrong about him. But as a student of history, I could be shocked neither by his audacity nor by his success.” Without growing complacent, I often think of this nowadays when I look out the window or into the TV at what seems like cultural or moral entropy.

Read on:

  • Steven Pinker: the problem with political correctness (Martin Amis also comments)
  • The Christian worldview vs. the Greek worldview
  • Another section from the poem, which is written on a card posted above my desk

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Redeem the Time Being from Insignificance

22 Sunday Dec 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in Poetry

≈ 14 Comments

Tags

Artist, Christianity, Christmas, family, For the Time Being, holidays, Mary McCleary, meaning, Poem, poetry, religion, Thanksgiving, Time, W.H. Auden

W. H. Auden by Richard Avedon, bromide print, 1960

The Christmas Feast is already a fading memory,
And already the mind begins to be vaguely aware
Of an unpleasant whiff of apprehension at the thought
Of Lent and Good Friday which cannot, after all, now
Be very far off. But, for the time being, here we all are,
Back in the moderate Aristotelian city
Of darning and the Eight-Fifteen, where Euclid’s geometry
And Newton’s mechanics would account for our experience,
And the kitchen table exists because I scrub it.
It seems to have shrunk during the holidays. The streets
Are much narrower than we remembered; we had forgotten
The office was as depressing as this…

The Time Being is, in a sense, the most trying time of all.
For the innocent children who whispered so excitedly
Outside the locked door where they knew the presents to be
Grew up when it opened. Now, recollecting that moment
We can repress the joy, but the guilt remains conscious;
Remembering the stable where for once in our lives
Everything became a You and nothing was an It.
And craving the sensation but ignoring the cause,
We look round for something, no matter what, to inhibit
Our self-reflection, and the obvious thing for that purpose
Would be some great suffering. So, once we have met the Son,
We are tempted ever after to pray to the Father;
“Lead us into temptation and evil for our sake.”
They will come, all right, don’t worry; probably in a form
That we do not expect, and certainly with a force
More dreadful than we can imagine. In the meantime
There are bills to be paid, machines to keep in repair,
Irregular verbs to learn, the Time Being to redeem
From insignificance. The happy morning is over,
The night of agony still to come; the time is noon:
When the Spirit must practice his scales of rejoicing
Without even a hostile audience, and the Soul endure
A silence that is neither for nor against her faith
That God’s Will will be done, That, in spite of her prayers,
God will cheat no one, not even the world of its triumph.

IV
Chorus

He is the Way.
Follow Him through the Land of Unlikeness;
You will see rare beasts, and have unique adventures.

He is the Truth.
Seek Him in the Kingdom of Anxiety;
You will come to a great city that has expected your return for years.

He is the Life.
Love Him in the World of the Flesh;
And at your marriage all its occasions shall dance for joy.

__________

From W.H. Auden’s For the Time Being.

My aunt, the artist Mary McCleary, inscribed the above chorus on the letter she gave me the day I graduated from college. That card is now the centerpiece of the bulletin board above my desk. (Given how little time there is now for poetry, I can’t be too surprised that guests are yet to identify much less ask about the card. But then again, I wasn’t aware of the reference ’til I received the card from MM.)

The entirety of “For the Time Being” stretches over 1,400 lines. (For perspective: a few of Shakespeare’s plays are less than 2,000 lines.) I can’t find the full text online, but if anyone knows where I can, please send a link to my email or drop it in the comments area.*

From a technical standpoint, the above section is a sterling example of what postmodernism can do so long as it has a substantive core and also wears itself lightly. That may sound simple in principle; in practice, it’s not. Like much of Auden’s work, the subversion of classical form here does not signal a disregard for traditional ideas. The free verse is flecked with obvious nods to scripture (“lead us into temptation”) — nods which, like a photographer’s macrographic study, expose otherwise unseen parts of a whole we had gotten used to identifying by rote. Moreover, with the chorus — especially that fantastic phrase “Kingdom of Anxiety” — there is a redressing of old ideas which cloaks them in modern clothes. After all, who had anxiety in the first century?

As the verses clearly indicate, “For the Time Being” is a poem about the holidays. These words, and in particular the line I misremembered as “the time being redeemed of insignificance,” were rattling around my head throughout quieter moments at my family’s Thanksgiving. And although they work especially well as a panacea for post-holiday melancholy, they may get more mental mileage if you are reminded of them before the official Christmas week kicks off.

The pictures are of Auden, a man who once said that his face looked like a wedding cake left out in the rain.

*Again the brilliant Ted Rey has come through and found an archived full text of “For the Time Being”. As always, thank you, Ted.

NPG x25900; W.H. Auden by Bill Potter

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