Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 02/02/10

A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Tuesday, February 2, 2010

American Taliban

Markos Moulitsas is writing a book called American Taliban, for which he commissioned a poll of people who identify themselves as Republicans. Here are some of its findings:

Should Barack Obama be impeached, or not?
Yes 39
No 32
Not Sure 29

The poll doesn't even specify what he should be impeached for. Being a Democrat?

Do you think Barack Obama is a socialist?
Yes 63
No 21
Not Sure 16

Do you believe Barack Obama was born in the United States, or not?
Yes 42
No 36
Not Sure 22

This one makes my head hurt:

Do you believe Sarah Palin is more qualified to be President than Barack Obama?
Yes 53
No 14
Not Sure 33

These are really nauseating, too:

Should openly gay men and women be allowed to serve in the military?
Yes 26
No 55
Not Sure 19

Should same sex couples be allowed to marry?
Yes 7
No 77
Not Sure 16

Should gay couples receive any state or federal benefits?
Yes 11
No 68
Not Sure 21

Should openly gay men and women be allowed to teach in public schools?
Yes 8
No 73
Not Sure 19

And as for religion:

Should public school students be taught that the book of Genesis in the Bible explains how God created the world?
Yes 77
No 15
Not Sure 8

Do you believe that the only way for an individual to go to heaven is though Jesus Christ, or can one make it to heaven through another faith?
Christ 67
Other 15
Not Sure 18

We're doomed.

Poem of the Day: Gerard Manley Hopkins

That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and of the comfort of the Resurrection
Cloud-puffball, torn tufts, tossed pillows | flaunt forth, then chevy on an air-
built thoroughfare: heaven-roysterers, in gay-gangs | they throng; they glitter in marches.
Down roughcast, down dazzling whitewash, | wherever an elm arches,
Shivelights and shadowtackle in long | lashes lace, lance, and pair.
Delightfully the bright wind boisterous | ropes, wrestles, beats earth bare
Of yestertempest's creases; | in pool and rut peel parches
Squandering ooze to squeezed | dough, crust, dust; stanches, starches
Squadroned masks and manmarks | treadmire toil there
Footfretted in it. Million-fuelèd | nature's bonfire burns on.
But quench her bonniest, dearest | to her, her clearest-selvèd spark
Man, how fast his firedint, | his mark on mind, is gone!
Both are in an unfathomable, all is in an enormous dark
Drowned. O pity and indig | nation! Manshape, that shone
Sheer off, disseveral, a star, | death blots black out; nor mark
                               Is any of him at all so stark
But vastness blurs and time | beats level. Enough! the Resurrection,
A heart's-clarion! Away grief's gasping, | joyless days, dejection.
   Across my foundering deck shone
A beacon, an eternal beam. | Flesh fade, and mortal trash
Fall to the residuary worm; | world's wildfire, leave but ash:
                                In a flash, at a trumpet crash,
I am all at once what Christ is, | since he was what I am, and
This Jack, joke, poor potsherd, | patch, matchwood, immortal diamond,
   Is immortal diamond.

-- Gerard Manley Hopkins

Like Dylan Thomas or E.E. Cummings (though he's greater than either of them), Hopkins was sui generis, a poet better left unimitated. All that stuff about "inscape" and "instress" and "sprung rhythm" remains his and his alone, and no matter how hard I try, I can't make them work for me. That caesura ( | ) he marked in this poem, for example. It's Hopkins imitating Anglo-Saxon poetry, but I don't really sense it when I read the poem. But it doesn't really matter.

Your first reading of one of his poems is a paraphrase: Nature is in flux, mutable, like clouds and wind and fire. Human beings are in flux, too, and no matter how brilliant our lives, we die. But at the Resurrection we become immortal. On your second reading you pick through all the unfamiliar and sometimes cobbled-together words (chevy, shivelight, shadowtackle, footfretted, firedint), knowing that Hopkins loved Anglo-Saxon roots, to try to wrest some sense out of them. (Even if you don't succeed, don't worry about it. Make up your own meaning if you have to: Hopkins did.)

But the third reading is the best, because you can start to relax and listen to the sounds and go with the flow and begin, however faintly, to sense the ecstatic experience that Hopkins went through writing it. Even if you don't believe what he's saying (I don't), you believe that he believed it. And for a poet that's enough.