FOR BETH...

...who has recently discovered Yeats. She sent me the following poem, with the editorial comment: "Oh. My. F***ing. God."

I had a huge crush on a co-worker a couple years back, a really wonderful guy. I suppose he had a crush on me as well. We sat two cubicles away from each other, and used to have long hilarious IM conversations, as though we were in separate states, and couldn't say to one another, "Hey there, what's up" in PERSON. I would send him something amusing and hear him, four feet away from me, burst into laughter.

He was first-generation Irish-American, and was intimately familiar with the Irish canon. That was one of the things we loved to discuss. He IMd me the following Yeats poem, saying, "This one is my favorite, I think. I know it by heart."

What? I fell madly in love with him at that moment. Unfortunately, it all crashed and burned a couple of weeks later. Unfortunately, he did not "love the pilgrim soul" in me. Bastard!

But here is the poem, I post this for Beth.

When You Are Old
When you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;

How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face'

And bending down beside the glowin bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.



  contact Sheila Link: 4/18/2003 10:09:00 AM

 
THE QUESTION OF JUDAS

Donald Sensing, at One Hand Clapping, has a very interesting post up about Judas. The question he asks, which many people have asked is: "Was Judas Iscariot really a traitor to Christ? Or was he actually a secret accomplice?"

I remember seeing a documentary on the Independent Film Channel about the making of The Last Temptation of Christ, a movie which I actually really enjoyed. Harvey Keitel, who played Judas (I didn't realize that Judas came from Brooklyn) talks about Martin Scorsese's take on Judas. Actually, it wasn't Scorsese's take, it was Nikos Kazantzakis' take. That Judas was Jesus' accomplice, his closest confidante. Harvey Keitel spoke very feelingly about this. I remember him saying, "It is a very healing interpretation of the event."

This, clearly, is very controversial. I actually enjoy the controversy. It doesn't disturb me that people want to take up the story of Judas, examine it, see what else might be there. The whole point, to me, is that the story is a living story, not a dead flat story. It is something which we, to this day, can participate in.

Sensing goes into this controversy, this interpretation, with some detail. It's fascinating. Talk about making these stories live! He asks questions, he delves deeper ...

Check it out. Very interesting stuff.

  contact Sheila Link: 4/18/2003 09:48:00 AM

 
GOOD FRIDAY

Lent, leading up to Good Friday, and Easter, is my favorite time of the church calendar. I have to admit that the reason is: that it appeals to the actress in me. I mean, that's not the ONLY reason, of course ... but the part of me that is the storyteller, and also loves to listen to stories, gets swept away in it all. The church, too, became like a theatre to me. It's like what i know about the medieval churches, and the glorious spectacles of the masses then: It was about the music, and the people as spectators, the illiterate masses being told the story of the crucifixion of Jesus. It fed the populace's need for drama. I remember the Good Friday masses from when I was a kid, at Christ the King. Everything a deep purple, the priest's robes, the cloth over the altar ... the melancholy tone of the Good Friday mass. Everything still in darkness. A sense of waiting. We went to evening masses on the Friday before, and then Easter, of course, was a morning mass.

Here's the reading for today, Good Friday. I always loved the story of Peter. Peter basically saying, when push came to shove, "You know what? I have never seen that man before in my life." "You're sure you don't know him, Peter?" "Nope. Never laid eyes on the guy."

It was such a betrayal ... but Peter always seemed so human to me. Because of those three moments of denial, I related to him the most. I couldn't relate to Judas. His betrayal was too calculated, too sneaky. Peter just choked, in the moment of crisis.

Jesus says, "One of you will betray me tomorrow."
They all protest: "NEVER!"
Jesus says again, "One of you will betray me tomorrow."
Again: "No! Never!"
And then the next day, boom boom boom, Peter is asked 3 times, "Do you know this man? Are you his disciple?" And Peter chokes: "Nope. Never seen the guy before in my life. Don't know him. Nope. It's not me. You totally got the wrong guy."

Who of us could NOT relate to Peter's betrayal? I really related to it.

Today's reading is from the gospel according to John:

Jesus went out with his disciples across the Kidron valley
to where there was a garden,
into which he and his disciples entered.
Judas his betrayer also knew the place,
because Jesus had often met there with his disciples.
So Judas got a band of soldiers and guards
from the chief priests and the Pharisees
and went there with lanterns, torches, and weapons.
Jesus, knowing everything that was going to happen to him,
went out and said to them, "Whom are you looking for?"
They answered him, "Jesus the Nazorean."
He said to them, "I AM."
Judas his betrayer was also with them.
When he said to them, "I AM,"
they turned away and fell to the ground.
So he again asked them,
"Whom are you looking for?"
They said, "Jesus the Nazorean."
Jesus answered,
"I told you that I AM.
So if you are looking for me, let these men go."
This was to fulfill what he had said,
"I have not lost any of those you gave me."
Then Simon Peter, who had a sword, drew it,
struck the high priest's slave, and cut off his right ear.
The slave's name was Malchus.
Jesus said to Peter,
"Put your sword into its scabbard.
Shall I not drink the cup that the Father gave me?"

So the band of soldiers, the tribune, and the Jewish guards seized Jesus,
bound him, and brought him to Annas first.
He was the father-in-law of Caiaphas,
who was high priest that year.
It was Caiaphas who had counseled the Jews
that it was better that one man should die rather than the people.

Simon Peter and another disciple followed Jesus.
Now the other disciple was known to the high priest,
and he entered the courtyard of the high priest with Jesus.
But Peter stood at the gate outside.
So the other disciple, the acquaintance of the high priest,
went out and spoke to the gatekeeper and brought Peter in.
Then the maid who was the gatekeeper said to Peter,
"You are not one of this man's disciples, are you?"
He said, "I am not."
Now the slaves and the guards were standing around a charcoal fire
that they had made, because it was cold,
and were warming themselves.
Peter was also standing there keeping warm.

The high priest questioned Jesus
about his disciples and about his doctrine.
Jesus answered him,
"I have spoken publicly to the world.
I have always taught in a synagogue
or in the temple area where all the Jews gather,
and in secret I have said nothing. Why ask me?
Ask those who heard me what I said to them.
They know what I said."
When he had said this,
one of the temple guards standing there struck Jesus and said,
"Is this the way you answer the high priest?"
Jesus answered him,
"If I have spoken wrongly, testify to the wrong;
but if I have spoken rightly, why do you strike me?"
Then Annas sent him bound to Caiaphas the high priest.

Now Simon Peter was standing there keeping warm.
And they said to him,
"You are not one of his disciples, are you?"
He denied it and said,
"I am not."
One of the slaves of the high priest,
a relative of the one whose ear Peter had cut off, said,
"Didn't I see you in the garden with him?"
Again Peter denied it.
And immediately the cock crowed.

Then they brought Jesus from Caiaphas to the praetorium.
It was morning.
And they themselves did not enter the praetorium,
in order not to be defiled so that they could eat the Passover.
So Pilate came out to them and said,
"What charge do you bring against this man?"
They answered and said to him,
"If he were not a criminal,
we would not have handed him over to you."
At this, Pilate said to them,
"Take him yourselves, and judge him according to your law."

The Jews answered him,
"We do not have the right to execute anyone,"
in order that the word of Jesus might be fulfilled
that he said indicating the kind of death he would die.
So Pilate went back into the praetorium
and summoned Jesus and said to him,
"Are you the King of the Jews?"
Jesus answered,
"Do you say this on your own
or have others told you about me?"
Pilate answered,
"I am not a Jew, am I?
Your own nation and the chief priests handed you over to me.
What have you done?"
Jesus answered,
"My kingdom does not belong to this world.
If my kingdom did belong to this world,
my attendants would be fighting
to keep me from being handed over to the Jews.
But as it is, my kingdom is not here."
So Pilate said to him,
"Then you are a king?"
Jesus answered,
"You say I am a king.
For this I was born and for this I came into the world,
to testify to the truth.
Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice."
Pilate said to him, "What is truth?"

When he had said this,
he again went out to the Jews and said to them,
"I find no guilt in him.
But you have a custom that I release one prisoner to you at Passover.
Do you want me to release to you the King of the Jews?"
They cried out again,
"Not this one but Barabbas!"
Now Barabbas was a revolutionary.

Then Pilate took Jesus and had him scourged.
And the soldiers wove a crown out of thorns and placed it on his head,
and clothed him in a purple cloak,
and they came to him and said,
"Hail, King of the Jews!"
And they struck him repeatedly.
Once more Pilate went out and said to them,
"Look, I am bringing him out to you,
so that you may know that I find no guilt in him."
So Jesus came out,
wearing the crown of thorns and the purple cloak.
And he said to them, "Behold, the man!"
When the chief priests and the guards saw him they cried out,
"Crucify him, crucify him!"
Pilate said to them,
"Take him yourselves and crucify him.
I find no guilt in him."
The Jews answered,
"We have a law, and according to that law he ought to die,
because he made himself the Son of God."
Now when Pilate heard this statement,
he became even more afraid,
and went back into the praetorium and said to Jesus,
"Where are you from?"
Jesus did not answer him.
So Pilate said to him,
"Do you not speak to me?
Do you not know that I have power to release you
and I have power to crucify you?"
Jesus answered him,
"You would have no power over me
if it had not been given to you from above.
For this reason the one who handed me over to you
has the greater sin."
Consequently, Pilate tried to release him; but the Jews cried out,
"If you release him, you are not a Friend of Caesar.
Everyone who makes himself a king opposes Caesar."

When Pilate heard these words he brought Jesus out
and seated him on the judge's bench
in the place called Stone Pavement, in Hebrew, Gabbatha.
It was preparation day for Passover, and it was about noon.
And he said to the Jews,
"Behold, your king!"
They cried out,
"Take him away, take him away! Crucify him!"
Pilate said to them,
"Shall I crucify your king?"
The chief priests answered,
"We have no king but Caesar."
Then he handed him over to them to be crucified.

So they took Jesus, and, carrying the cross himself,
he went out to what is called the Place of the Skull,
in Hebrew, Golgotha.
There they crucified him, and with him two others,
one on either side, with Jesus in the middle.
Pilate also had an inscription written and put on the cross.
It read,
"Jesus the Nazorean, the King of the Jews."
Now many of the Jews read this inscription,
because the place where Jesus was crucified was near the city;
and it was written in Hebrew, Latin, and Greek.
So the chief priests of the Jews said to Pilate,
"Do not write 'The King of the Jews,'
but that he said, 'I am the King of the Jews'."
Pilate answered,
"What I have written, I have written."

When the soldiers had crucified Jesus,
they took his clothes and divided them into four shares,
a share for each soldier.
They also took his tunic, but the tunic was seamless,
woven in one piece from the top down.
So they said to one another,
"Let's not tear it, but cast lots for it to see whose it will be,"
in order that the passage of Scripture might be fulfilled that says:
They divided my garments among them,
and for my vesture they cast lots.
This is what the soldiers did.
Standing by the cross of Jesus were his mother
and his mother's sister, Mary the wife of Clopas,
and Mary of Magdala.
When Jesus saw his mother and the disciple there whom he loved
he said to his mother, "Woman, behold, your son."
Then he said to the disciple,
"Behold, your mother."
And from that hour the disciple took her into his home.

After this, aware that everything was now finished,
in order that the Scripture might be fulfilled,
Jesus said, "I thirst."
There was a vessel filled with common wine.
So they put a sponge soaked in wine on a sprig of hyssop
and put it up to his mouth.
When Jesus had taken the wine, he said,
"It is finished."
And bowing his head, he handed over the spirit.

Here all kneel and pause for a short time.

Now since it was preparation day,
in order that the bodies might not remain on the cross on the sabbath,
for the sabbath day of that week was a solemn one,
the Jews asked Pilate that their legs be broken
and that they be taken down.
So the soldiers came and broke the legs of the first
and then of the other one who was crucified with Jesus.
But when they came to Jesus and saw that he was already dead,
they did not break his legs,
but one soldier thrust his lance into his side,
and immediately blood and water flowed out.
An eyewitness has testified, and his testimony is true;
he knows that he is speaking the truth,
so that you also may come to believe.
For this happened so that the Scripture passage might be fulfilled:
Not a bone of it will be broken.
And again another passage says:
They will look upon him whom they have pierced.

After this, Joseph of Arimathea,
secretly a disciple of Jesus for fear of the Jews,
asked Pilate if he could remove the body of Jesus.
And Pilate permitted it.
So he came and took his body.
Nicodemus, the one who had first come to him at night,
also came bringing a mixture of myrrh and aloes
weighing about one hundred pounds.
They took the body of Jesus
and bound it with burial cloths along with the spices,
according to the Jewish burial custom.
Now in the place where he had been crucified there was a garden,
and in the garden a new tomb, in which no one had yet been buried.
So they laid Jesus there because of the Jewish preparation day;
for the tomb was close by.



  contact Sheila Link: 4/18/2003 09:26:00 AM

DIARY FRIDAY

 
NATIONAL POETRY MONTH

I'll post more poems throughout the month. There's so many I love. Seamus Heaney, Shakespeare, Rumi, and many many more.

  contact Sheila Link: 4/18/2003 08:36:00 AM

 
POETS: W.B. YEATS

In honor of National Poetry Month:

The Second Coming
by W.B. Yeats

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?



  contact Sheila Link: 4/17/2003 04:41:00 PM

 
POETS: WALT WHITMAN

In honor of National Poetry Month:

Walt Whitman makes me cry. So many poems to choose from. Here are a couple:

I Hear America Singing
by Walt Whitman

I hear America singing, the varied carols I hear,
Those of mechanics, each one singing his as it should be blithe and strong,
The carpenter singing his as he measures his plank or beam,
The mason singing his as he makes ready for work, or leaves off work,
The boatman singing what belongs to him in his boat, the deckhand
singing on the steamboat deck,
The shoemaker singing as he sits on his bench, the hatter singing as he stands,
The wood-cutter's song, the ploughboy's on his way in the morning, or
at noon intermission or at sundown,
The delicious singing of the mother, or of the young wife at work, or of
the girl sewing or washing,
Each singing what belongs to him or her and to none else,
The day what belongs to the day--at night the party of young fellows,
robust, friendly,
Singing with open mouths their strong melodious songs.

Sometimes with One I Love
by Walt Whitman

Sometimes with one I love I fill myself with rage for fear I
effuse unreturn'd love,
But now I think there is no unreturn'd love, the pay is
certain one way or another,
(I loved a certain person ardently and my love was not
return'd,
Yet out of that I have written these songs.)

When I heard the learn'd astronomer
by Walt Whitman

When I heard the learn'd astronomer,
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,
When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide,
and measure them,
When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with
much applause in the lecture-room,
How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,
Till rising and gliding out I wander'd off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look'd up in perfect silence at the stars.


  contact Sheila Link: 4/17/2003 04:38:00 PM

 
POETS: CHRISTOPHER SMART

In honor of National Poetry Month:

Christopher Smart (1722-1771) was put into a madhouse. It seems that he had some sort of fit of religious freak-out, and felt that he had to pray all the time. He prayed in the streets, he fell to his knees in public places.

The following poem is just delicious: I love love love it. It is an excerpt from his long extended poem: Jubilate Agno, which he wrote while he was locked up in the madhouse. Smart writes an ode to his cat. Sounds to me like Christopher Smart must have been a very interesting person to know. To see the joy in such small things. He saw God everywhere. I love this poem.

On his cat Jeoffry
by Christopher Smart

I will consider my cat Jeoffry.
For he is the servant of the living God, duly and daily serving Him.
For at the first glance of the glory of God in the East he worships in his way.
For this is done by wreathing his body seven times round with elegant quickness.
For when he leaps up to catch the musk, which is the blessing of God upon his prayer.
For he rolls upon prank to work it in.
For having done duty and received blessing he begins to consider himself.
For this he performs in ten degrees.
For first he looks upon his fore-paws to see if they are clean.
For secondly he kicks up behind to clear away there.
For thirdly he works it upon stretch with the fore-paws extended.
For fourthly he sharpens his paws by wood.
For fifthly he washes himself.
For sixthly he rolls upon wash.
For seventhly he fleas himself, that he may not be interrupted upon the beat.
For eighthly he rubs himself against a post.
For ninthly he looks up for his instructions.
For tenthly he goes in quest of food.
For having consider'd God and himself he will consider his neighbor.
For if he meets another cat he will kiss her in kindness.
For when he takes his prey he plays with it to give it (a) chance.
For one mouse in seven escapes by his dallying.
For when his day's work is done his business more properly begins.
For he keeps The Lord's watch in the night against the adversary.
For he counteracts the powers of darkness by his electrical skin and glaring eyes.
For he counteracts the devil, who is death, by brisking about the life.
For in his morning orisons he loves the sun and the sun loves him.
For he is of the tribe of Tiger.
For the Cherub Cat is a term of the Angel Tiger.
For he has the subtlety and hissing of a serpent, which in goodness he suppresses.
For he will not do destruction, if he is well-fed, neither will he spit without provocation.
For he purrs in thankfulness, when God tells him he's a good Cat.
For he is an instrument for the children to learn benevolence upon.
For every house is incompleat without him & a blessing is lacking in the spirit....
For the English cats are the best in Europe.
For he is the cleanest in the use of his fore-paws of any quadrupeds.
For the dexterity of his defence is an instance of the love of God to him exceedingly.
For he is the quickest to his mark of any creature.
For he is tenacious of his point.
For he is a mixture of gravity and waggery.
For he knows that God is his Saviour.
For there is nothing sweeter than his peace when at rest.
For there is nothing brisker than his life when in motion....
For he is docile and can learn certain things....
For he can jump from an eminence into his master's bosom.
For he can catch the cork and toss it again....
For he is good to think on, if a man would express himself neatly....
For by stroaking of him I have found out electricity.
For I perceived God's light about him both wax and fire.
For the Electrical fire is the spiritual substance, which God sends from heaven to sustain the bodies both of man and beast.
For God has blessed him in the variety of his movements.
For tho he cannot fly, he is an excellent clamberer.
For his motions upon the face of the earth are more than other quadrupeds.
For he can tread to all the measures upon the musick.
For he can swim for life.
For he can creep.

  contact Sheila Link: 4/17/2003 04:21:00 PM

 
POETS: MARK STRAND

In honor of National Poetry Month:

My sister Jean loves Mark Strand with all her heart. Here's one of his poems:

My Mother on an Evening in Late Summer
by Mark Strand

1.
When the moon appears
and a few wind-stricken barns stand out
in the low-domed hills
and shine with a light
that is veiled and dust-filled
and that floats upon the fields,
my mother, with her hair in a bun,
her face in shadow, and the smoke
from their cigarette coiling close
to the faint yellow sheen of her dress,
stands near the house
and watches the seepage of late light
down through the sedges,
the last gray islands of cloud
taken from view, and the wind
ruffling the moon's ash-colored coat
on the black bay.

2.
Soon the house, with its shades drawn closed, will send
small carpets of lampglow
into the haze and the bay
will begin its loud heaving
and the pines, frayed finials
climbing the hill, will seem to graze
the dim cinders of heaven.
And my mother will stare into the starlanes,
the endless tunnels of nothing,
and as she gazes,
under the hour's spell,
she will think how we yield each night
to the soundless storms of decay
that tear at the folding flesh,
and she will not know
why she is here
or what she is prisoner of
if not the conditions of love that brought her to this.

3.
My mother will go indoors
and the fields, the bare stones
will drift in peace, small creatures --
the mouse and the swift -- will sleep
at opposite ends of the house.
Only the cricket will be up,
repeating its one shrill note
to the rotten boards of the porch,
to the rusted screens, to the air, to the rimless dark,
to the sea that keeps to itself.
Why should my mother awake?
The earth is not yet a garden
about to be turned. The stars
are not yet bells that ring
at night for the lost.
It is much too late.


  contact Sheila Link: 4/17/2003 04:15:00 PM

 
POETS: FRANK O'HARA

In honor of National Poetry Month:

My friend Mitchell turned me on to Frank O'Hara. He also used to read the following poem to me, as a semi-dramatic monologue. It was hilarious. The poem never fails to make me laugh out loud.

Poem
by Frank O'Hara

Lana Turner has collapsed!
I was trotting along and suddenly
it started raining and snowing
and you said it was hailing
but hailing hits you on the head
hard so it was really snowing and
raining and I was in such a hurry
to meet you but the traffic
was acting exactly like the sky
and suddenly I see a headline
LANA TURNER HAS COLLAPSED!
there is no snow in Hollywood
there is no rain in California
I have been to lots of parties
and acted perfectly disgraceful
but I never actually collapsed
oh Lana Turner we love you get up

  contact Sheila Link: 4/17/2003 04:09:00 PM

 
POETS: JOHN MILTON

In honor of National Poetry Month:

I do not know how to preface this poem. Nothing I can say will describe or explain its impact. Any attempt on my part would just diminish it. This is one of the most powerful poems I have ever read. I can barely deal with it. It makes me want to scream. John Milton was going blind. He wrote this poem to his blindness.

On His Blindness
by John Milton

When I consider how my light is spent,
Ere half my days, in this dark world and wide,
And that one Talent which is death to hide,
Lodg'd with me useless, though my Soul more bent
To serve therewith my Maker, and present
My true account, least he returning chide,
Doth God exact day-labour, light deny'd,
I fondly ask; But patience to prevent
That murmur, soon replies, God doth not need
Either man's work or his own gifts, who best
Bar his milde yoak, they serve him best, his State
Is Kingly. Thousands at his bidding speed
And post o're Land and Ocean without rest:
They also serve who only stand and waite.



  contact Sheila Link: 4/17/2003 04:01:00 PM

 
POETS: JOHN DONNE

In honor of National Poetry Month:

At the round earth's imagin'd corners
by John Donne

At the round earths imagin'd corners, blow
Your trumpets, Angells, and arise, arise
From death, you numberlesse infinities
Of soules, and to your scattered bodies goe,
All whom the flood did, and fire shall o'erthrow,
All whom warre, dearth, age, agues, tyrannies,
Despaire, law, chance, hath slaine, and you whose eyes,
Shall behold God, and never tast deaths woe.
But let them sleepe, Lord, and mee mourne a space,
For, if above all these, my sinnes abound,
'Tis late to aske abundance of thy grace,
When wee are there; here on this lowly ground,
Teach mee how to repent; for that's as good
As if thou’hadst seal'd my pardon, with thy blood.

  contact Sheila Link: 4/17/2003 04:00:00 PM

 
POETS: JOHN KEATS

In honor of National Poetry Month:

Ode on a Grecian Urn
by John Keats

Thou still unravish'd bride of quietness,
Thou foster-child of Silence and slow Time,
Sylvan historian, who canst thus express
A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme:
What leaf-fringed legend haunts about thy shape
Of deities or mortals, or of both,
In Tempe or the dales of Arcady?
What men or gods are these? what maidens loth?
What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?
What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard
Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on;
Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear'd,
Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone:
Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave
Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare;
Bold lover, never, never canst thou kiss,
Though winning near the goal--yet, do not grieve;
She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,
For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!

Ah, happy, happy boughs! that cannot shed
Your leaves, nor ever bid the Spring adieu;
And, happy melodist, unwearied,
For ever piping songs for ever new;
More happy love! more happy, happy love!
For ever warm and still to be enjoy'd,
For ever panting, and for ever young;
All breathing human passion far above,
That leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloy'd,
A burning forehead, and a parching tongue.

Who are these coming to the sacrifice?
To what green altar, O mysterious priest,
Lead'st thou that heifer lowing at the skies,
And all her silken flanks with garlands drest?
What little town by river or sea shore,
Or mountain-built with peaceful citadel,
Is emptied of this folk, this pious morn?
And, little town, thy streets for evermore
Will silent be; and not a soul to tell
Why thou art desolate, can e'er return.

O Attic shape! Fair attitude! with brede
Of marble men and maidens overwrought,
With forest branches and the trodden weed;
Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought
As doth eternity: Cold pastoral!
When old age shall this generation waste,
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say'st,
'Beauty is truth, truth beauty'--that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

  contact Sheila Link: 4/17/2003 03:58:00 PM

 
POETS: GALWAY KINNELL

In honor of National Poetry Month:

Here's another poem which meanders along, descriptive, before suddenly clutching at your throat.

The Perch
by Galway Kinnell

There is a fork in a branch
of an ancient, enormous maple,
one of a grove of such trees,
where I climb sometimes and sit and look out
over miles of valleys and low hills.
Today on skis I took a friend
to show her the trees. We set out
down the road, turned in at
the lane which a few weeks ago,
when the trees were almost empty
and the November snows had not yet come,
lay thickly covered in bright red
and yellow leaves, crossed the swamp,
passed the cellar hole holding
the remains of the 1850s farmhouse
that had slid down into it by stages
in the thirties and forties, followed
the overgrown logging road
and came to the trees. I climbed up
to the perch, and this time looked
not into the distance but at
the tree itself, its trunk
contorted by the terrible struggle
of that time when it had its hard time.
After the trauma it grows less solid.
It may be some such time now comes upon me.
It would have to do with the unaccomplished,
and with the attempted marriage
of solitude and happiness. Then a rifle
sounded, several times, quite loud,
from across the valley, percussions
of the custom of male mastery
over the earth — the most graceful,
most alert of the animals
being chosen to die. I looked
to see if my friend had heard,
but she was stepping about on her skis,
studying the trees, smiling to herself,
her lips still filled, for all
we had drained them, with hundreds
and thousands of kisses. Just then
she looked up — the way, from low
to high, the god blesses — and the blue
of her eyes shone out of the black
and white of bark and snow, as lovers
who are walking on a freezing day
touch icy cheek to icy cheek,
kiss, then shudder to discover
the heat waiting inside their mouths.

  contact Sheila Link: 4/17/2003 03:54:00 PM

 
POETS: ROBERT FROST

In honor of National Poetry Month:

Stopping by the woods on a snowy evening
by Robert Frost

Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.
My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.
He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound's the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.
The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.


Sheila's note: Ahhhh. The poem never disappoints, no matter how many times I read it.


The Road Not Taken
by Robert Frost

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I--
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.


Out, Out
by Robert Frost

The buzz-saw snarled and rattled in the yard
And made dust and dropped stove-length sticks of wood,
Sweet-scented stuff when the breeze drew across it.
And from there those that lifted eyes could count
Five mountain ranges one behind the other
Under the sunset far into Vermont.
And the saw snarled and rattled, snarled and rattled,
As it ran light, or had to bear a load.
And nothing happened: day was all but done.
Call it a day, I wish they might have said
To please the boy by giving him the half hour
That a boy counts so much when saved from work.
His sister stood beside them in her apron
To tell them 'Supper'. At the word, the saw,
As if to prove saws knew what supper meant,
Leaped out at the boy's hand, or seemed to leap--
He must have given the hand. However it was,
Neither refused the meeting. But the hand!
The boy's first outcry was a rueful laugh.
As he swung toward them holding up the hand
Half in appeal, but half as if to keep
The life from spilling. Then the boy saw all--
Since he was old enough to know, big boy
Doing a man's work, though a child at heart--
He saw all spoiled. 'Don't let him cut my hand off
The doctor, when he comes. Don't let him, sister!'
So. But the hand was gone already.
The doctor put him in the dark of ether.
He lay and puffed his lips out with his breath.
And then -- the watcher at his pulse took fright.
No one believed. They listened at his heart.
Little -- less -- nothing! -- and that ended it.
No more to build on there. And they, since they
Were not the one dead, turned to their affairs.

  contact Sheila Link: 4/17/2003 03:49:00 PM

 
POETS: EMILY DICKINSON

In honor of National Poetry Month:

There's a certain Slant of light (258)
by Emily Dickinson

There's a certain Slant of light,
Winter Afternoons--
That oppresses, like the Heft
Of Cathedral Tunes--

Heavenly Hurt, it gives us--
We can find no scar,
But internal difference,
Where the Meanings, are--

None may teach it--Any--
'Tis the Seal Despair--
An imperial affliction
Sent us of the air--

When it comes, the Landscape listens--
Shadows--hold their breath--
When it goes, 'tis like the Distance
On the look of Death--


Sheila's note: The following poem "After great pain a formal feeling comes" was one of my favorites in high school. I knew it by heart. I felt that I understood her despair. Of course the "great pain" in my life was when David Worthen turned me down for the toga dance, but afterwards I certainly felt an enormously "formal feeling". Don't mean to trivialize this great poem. I'm just trying to illustrate that poems speak on all levels. Or at least the great ones do.

After great pain
by Emily Dickinson

After great pain a formal feeling comes--
The nerves sit ceremonious like tombs;
The stiff Heart questions--was it He that bore?
And yesterday--or centuries before?
The feet, mechanical, go round
A wooden way
Of ground, or air, or ought,
Regardless grown,
A quartz contentment, like a stone.

This is the hour of lead
Remembered if outlived,
As freezing persons recollect the snow--
First chill, then stupor, then the letting go.



  contact Sheila Link: 4/17/2003 03:40:00 PM

 
A LOAD OF SHITE - RE-POSTED

For some reason, the following Slate piece, written by Adam Kirsch, entitled "Why We Love Irish Poets" ANNOYED me. I am trying to figure out why. First of all, I think it is very badly written. 6th grade book report sentences:

Why do we love the Irish so much? In large part it's because these poets have portrayed an Ireland that seems glamorously different from our own modern, urban, technological society.

O'Driscoll, a 48-year-old Dubliner and the author of six collections of poems, is well-known in Ireland and Britain as a poet and critic, but he is little read in the United States. This is a shame, since he is one of the most interesting poets now writing in English.

I really like poetry. I especially really like Irish poets. Some Irish poets write about faeries and digging in the mud and stuff like that. I like those poems. They're really good. But some Irish poets write about things that are modern and everyday. Like Irish people at happy hours, or Irish people listening to rap music. Irish people are modern people. That is why I like to read these poems, too. I like to learn about other countries and other lands. But Ireland sounds a lot like America. And this is kind of confusing. But still. I like to read those poems. They're really good.

As these lines show, O'Driscoll's Dublin is a version of London or New York.

A few references to "VAT" (a European tax) and "EC directives" let us know that we are not in America, but otherwise O'Driscoll could be writing about any executive anywhere.

This may seem too ordinary for readers who look to Ireland for a rural authenticity or mythic glamour missing from their own country.

 
POETS: ERNEST HILBERT

In honor of National Poetry Month:

Click open. This page is devoted to Hilbert's poems.

  contact Sheila Link: 4/17/2003 01:47:00 PM

 
POETS: SYLVIA PLATH

In honor of National Poetry Month:

I know, I know, most girls go through a Plath-ian phase. I sure did. To some degree, I will never emerge. Reading her poetry in high school changed my life forever. It wasn't until much much later, a decade and a half or so, that I could actually go back and read her stuff, without getting sucked into her mad feverish world. I could maintain distance between the poems and myself. This was impossible at age 17.

Hilbert's Bold Type essay on Plath is here. You can also listen to a recording of Plath read another one of her famous poems "Lady Lazarus", 2 months or so before she took her own life.

"Daddy" is probably her most famous poem. It's offensive, it's self-absorbed, it's shrill ... but it's a classic.

Daddy
by Sylvia Plath

You do not do, you do not do
Any more, black shoe
In which I have lived like a foot
For thirty years, poor and white,
Barely daring to breathe or Achoo.

Daddy, I have had to kill you.
You died before I had time--
Marble-heavy, a bag full of God,
Ghastly statue with one gray toe
Big as a Frisco seal

And a head in the freakish Atlantic
Where it pours bean green over blue
In the waters off beautiful Nauset.
I used to pray to recover you.
Ach, du.

In the German tongue, in the Polish town
Scraped flat by the roller
Of wars, wars, wars.
But the name of the town is common.
My Polack friend

Says there are a dozen or two.
So I never could tell where you
Put your foot, your root,
I never could talk to you.
The tongue stuck in my jaw.

It stuck in a barb wire snare.
Ich, ich, ich, ich,
I could hardly speak.
I thought every German was you.
And the language obscene

An engine, an engine
Chuffing me off like a Jew.
A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen.
I began to talk like a Jew.
I think I may well be a Jew.

The snows of the Tyrol, the clear beer of Vienna
Are not very pure or true.
With my gipsy ancestress and my weird luck
And my Taroc pack and my Taroc pack
I may be a bit of a Jew.

I have always been scared of you,
With your Luftwaffe, your gobbledygoo.
And your neat mustache
And your Aryan eye, bright blue.
Panzer-man, panzer-man, O You--

Not God but a swastika
So black no sky could squeak through.
Every woman adores a Fascist,
The boot in the face, the brute
Brute heart of a brute like you.

You stand at the blackboard, daddy,
In the picture I have of you,
A cleft in your chin instead of your foot
But no less a devil for that, no not
Any less the black man who

Bit my pretty red heart in two.
I was ten when they buried you.
At twenty I tried to die
And get back, back, back to you.
I thought even the bones would do.

But they pulled me out of the sack,
And they stuck me together with glue.
And then I knew what to do.
I made a model of you,
A man in black with a Meinkampf look

And a love of the rack and the screw.
And I said I do, I do.
So daddy, I'm finally through.
The black telephone's off at the root,
The voices just can't worm through.

If I've killed one man, I've killed two--
The vampire who said he was you
And drank my blood for a year,
Seven years, if you want to know.
Daddy, you can lie back now.

There's a stake in your fat black heart
And the villagers never liked you.
They are dancing and stamping on you.
They always knew it was you.
Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I'm through.

  contact Sheila Link: 4/17/2003 01:34:00 PM

 
POETS: e.e. cummings

In honor of National Poetry Month:

(Sheila's note: This might be one of the most romantic poems ever written. It kills me. Makes my heart ache.)

somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond
by e.e. cummings
somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond
any experience,your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near

your slightest look will easily unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skilfully,mysteriously)her first rose

or if your wish be to close me, i and
my life will shut very beautifully ,suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;
nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility:whose texture
compels me with the color of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing

(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens;only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody,not even the rain,has such small hands

  contact Sheila Link: 4/17/2003 01:10:00 PM

 
POETS: EDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAY

In honor of National Poetry Month:

Sonnet XLIII
by Edna St. Vincent Millay
What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why,
I have forgotten, and what arms have lain
Under my head till morning; but the rain
Is full of ghosts tonight, that tap and sigh
Upon the glass and listen for reply,
And in my heart there stirs a quiet pain
For unremembered lads that not again
Will turn to me at midnight with a cry.
Thus in winter stands the lonely tree,
Nor knows what birds have vanished one by one,
Yet knows its boughs more silent than before:
I cannot say what loves have come and gone,
I only know that summer sang in me
A little while, that in me sings no more.

Sheila's note: Ouch.

  contact Sheila Link: 4/17/2003 01:08:00 PM

 
POETS: HART CRANE

In honor of National Poetry Month:

My sister Jean turned me on to Hart Crane.

At Melville's Tomb
by Hart Crane
Often beneath the wave, wide from this ledge
The dice of drowned men's bones he saw bequeath
An embassy. Their numbers as he watched,
Beat on the dusty shore and were obscured.

And wrecks passed without sound of bells,
The calyx of death's bounty giving back
A scattered chapter, livid hieroglyph,
The portent wound in corridors of shells.

Then in the circuit calm of one vast coil,
Its lashings charmed and malice reconciled,
Frosted eyes there were that lifted altars;
And silent answers crept across the stars.

Compass, quadrant and sextant contrive
No farther tides . . . High in the azure steeps
Monody shall not wake the mariner.
This fabulous shadow only the sea keeps.

  contact Sheila Link: 4/17/2003 01:06:00 PM

 
POETS: THOMAS HARDY

In honor of National Poetry Month:

I had only read Hardy's novels, until a couple of years ago (through Ernie and his poetry email list I am on) when I discovered his poetry.

The Convergence of the Twain: Lines on the loss of the "Titanic"
by Thomas Hardy
I.
In a solitude of the sea
Deep from human vanity,
And the Pride of Life that planned her, stilly couches she.

II.
Steel chambers, late the pyres
Of her salamandrine fires,
Cold currents thrid, and turn to rhythmic tidal lyres.

III.
Over the mirrors meant
To glass the opulent
The sea-worm crawls--grotesque, slimed, dumb, indifferent.

IV.
Jewels in joy designed
To ravish the sensuous mind
Lie lightless, all their sparkles bleared and black and blind.

V.
Dim moon-eyed fishes near
Gaze at the gilded gear
And query: "What does this vaingloriousness down here?". . .

VI.
Well: while was fashioning
This creature of cleaving wing,
The Immanent Will that stirs and urges everything

VII.
Prepared a sinister mate
For her--so gaily great--
A Shape of Ice, for the time fat and dissociate.

VIII.
And as the smart ship grew
In stature, grace, and hue
In shadowy silent distance grew the Iceberg too.

IX.
Alien they seemed to be:
No mortal eye could see
The intimate welding of their later history.

X.
Or sign that they were bent
By paths coincident
On being anon twin halves of one August event,

XI.
Till the Spinner of the Years
Said "Now!" And each one hears,
And consummation comes, and jars two hemispheres.


The Darkling Thrush
by Thomas Hardy
I leant upon a coppice gate
When Frost was spectre-gray,
And Winter's dregs made desolate
The weakening eye of day.
The tangled bine-stems scored the sky
Like strings of broken lyres,
And all mankind that haunted nigh
Had sought their household fires.

The land's sharp features seemed to be
The Century's corpse outleant,
His crypt the cloudy canopy,
The wind his death-lament.
The ancient pulse of germ and birth
Was shrunken hard and dry,
And every spirit upon earth
Seemed fevourless as I.

At once a voice arose among
The bleak twigs overhead
In a full-hearted evensong
Of joy illimited;
An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small,
In blast-beruffled plume,
Had chosen thus to fling his soul
Upon the growing gloom.

So little cause for carolings
Of such ecstatic sound
Was written on terrestrial things
Afar or nigh around,
That I could think there trembled through
His happy good-night air
Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew
And I was unaware.

  contact Sheila Link: 4/17/2003 01:01:00 PM

 
POETS: LANGSTON HUGHES

In honor of National Poetry Month:

I, too, sing America
by Langston Hughes

I, too, sing America.

I am the darker brother.
They send me to eat in the kitchen
When company comes,
But I laugh,
And eat well,
And grow strong.

Tomorrow,
I'll be at the table
When company comes.
Nobody'll dare
Say to me,
"Eat in the kitchen,"
Then.

Besides,
They'll see how beautiful I am
And be ashamed--

I, too, am America.

  contact Sheila Link: 4/17/2003 12:57:00 PM

 
POETS: D.H. LAWRENCE

In honor of National Poetry Month:

This poem kills me. Just kills me.

The Elephant is Slow to Mate
by D.H. Lawrence
The elephant, the huge old beast,
is slow to mate;
he finds a female, they show no haste
they wait

for the sympathy in their vast shy hearts
slowly, slowly to rouse
as they loiter along the river-beds
and drink and browse

and dash in panic through the brake
of forest with the herd,
and sleep in massive silence, and wake
together, without a word.

So slowly the great hot elephant hearts
grow full of desire,
and the great beasts mate in secret at last,
hiding their fire.

Oldest they are and the wisest of beasts
so they know at last
how to wait for the loneliest of feasts
for the full repast.

They do not snatch, they do not tear;
their massive blood
moves as the moon-tides, near, more near
till they touch in flood.

  contact Sheila Link: 4/17/2003 12:54:00 PM

 
POETS: GERALD MANLEY HOPKINS

In honor of National Poetry Month:

God's Grandeur
by Gerald Manley Hopkins

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs--
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

  contact Sheila Link: 4/17/2003 12:53:00 PM

 
POETS: ROBERT BURNS

In honor of National Poetry Month:

I became acquainted with Robert Burns' stuff in a big way when I was doing mega-research for my L.M. Montgomery project. Lucy Maud adored Robert Burns.

A Red, Red Rose
by Robert Burns
O my luve's like a red, red rose,
That's newly sprung in June;
O my luve's like the melodie
That's sweetly played in tune.

As fair art thou, my bonnie lass,
So deep in luve am I;
And I will luve thee still, my dear,
Till a' the seas gang dry.

Till a' the seas gang dry, my dear,
And the rocks melt wi' the sun:
O I will love thee still, my dear,
While the sands o' life shall run.

And fare thee weel, my only luve,
And fare thee weel awhile!
And I will come again, my luve,
Though it were ten thousand mile.


  contact Sheila Link: 4/17/2003 12:51:00 PM

 
POETS: ROBERT BROWNING

In honor of National Poetry Month:

This is probably obnoxious to people who aren't into poetry, but oh well. Come back tomorrow. Robert Browning wrote "The Pied Piper of Hamelin" which, naturelment, tormented me as a child ... and, I suppose, still torments me today. Is there a sadder story ever written? It was the little lame boy left behind ... I just could NOT understand how such a mistake could have been made. I could NOT understand why the group could not just WAIT for him. I ached for that lame boy. I was so so so so sad for him. I was 7 years old. ha ha....There was a time when I knew some of this poem by heart. Here 'tis. (Damn. Just read it over and still got choked up at the end.)

The Pied Piper of Hamelin
by Robert Browning
I.
Hamelin Town's in Brunswick,
By famous Hanover city;
The river Weser, deep and wide,
Washes its wall on the southern side;
A pleasanter spot you never spied;
But, when begins my ditty,
Almost five hundred years ago,
To see the townsfolk suffer so
From vermin, was a pity.

II.
Rats!
They fought the dogs and killed the cats,
And bit the babies in the cradles,
And ate the cheeses out of the vats,
And licked the soup from the cooks' own ladle's,
Split open the kegs of salted sprats,
Made nests inside men's Sunday hats,
And even spoiled the women's chats
By drowning their speaking
With shrieking and squeaking
In fifty different sharps and flats.

III.
At last the people in a body
To the town hall came flocking:
"'Tis clear," cried they, 'our Mayor's a noddy;
And as for our Corporation--shocking
To think we buy gowns lined with ermine
For dolts that can't or won't determine
What's best to rid us of our vermin!
You hope, because you're old and obese,
To find in the furry civic robe ease?
Rouse up, sirs! Give your brains a racking
To find the remedy we're lacking,
Or, sure as fate, we'll send you packing!"
At this the Mayor and Corporation
Quaked with a mighty consternation.

IV.
An hour they sat in council,
At length the Mayor broke silence:
"For a guilder I'd my ermine gown sell,
I wish I were a mile hence!
It's easy to bid one rack one's brain--
I'm sure my poor head aches again,
I've scratched it so, and all in vain
Oh for a trap, a trap, a trap!"
Just as he said this, what should hap
At the chamber door but a gentle tap?
"Bless us,' cried the Mayor, "what's that?"
(With the Corporation as he sat,
Looking little though wondrous fat;
Nor brighter was his eye, nor moister
Than a too-long-opened oyster,
Save when at noon his paunch grew mutinous
For a plate of turtle, green and glutinous)
"Only a scraping of shoes on the mat?
Anything like the sound of a rat
Makes my heart go pit-a-pat!"

V.
"Come in!"--the Mayor cried, looking bigger:
And in did come the strangest figure!
His queer long coat from heel to head
Was half of yellow and half of red
And he himself was tall and thin,
With sharp blue eyes, each like a pin,
And light loose hair, yet swarthy skin,
No tuft on cheek nor beard on chin,
But lips where smiles went out and in--
There was no guessing his kith and kin!
And nobody could enough admire
The tall man and his quaint attire.
Quoth one: "It's as if my great-grandsire,
Starting up at the Trump of Doom's tone,
Had walked this way from his painted tombstone!"

VI.
He advanced to the council-table:
And, "Please your honors," said he, "I'm able,
By means of a secret charm, to draw
All creatures living beneath the sun,
That creep or swim or fly or run,
After me so as you never saw!
And I chiefly use my charm
On creatures that do people harm,
The mole and toad and newt and viper;
And people call me the Pied Piper."
(And here they noticed round his neck
A scarf of red and yellow stripe,
To match with his coat of the self-same check;
And at the scarf's end hung a pipe;
And his fingers, they noticed, were ever straying
As if impatient to be playing
Upon this pipe, as low it dangled
Over his vesture so old-fangled.)
"Yet," said he, "poor piper as I am,
In Tartary I freed the Cham,
Last June, from his huge swarm of gnats;
I eased in Asia the Nizam
Of a monstrous brood of vampyre-bats:
And as for what your brain bewilders--
If I can rid your town of rats
Will you give me a thousand guilders?"
"One? Fifty thousand!" was the exclamation
Of the astonished Mayor and Corporation.

VII.
Into the street the Piper stept,
Smiling first a little smile,
As if he knew what magic slept
In his quiet pipe the while;
Then, like a musical adept,
To blow the pipe his lips he wrinkled,
And green and blue his sharp eyes twinkled,
Like a candle-flame where salt is sprinkled;
And ere three shrill notes the pipe uttered,
You heard as if an army muttered;
And the muttering grew to a grumbling;
And the grumbling grew to a mighty rumbling;
And out of the houses the rats came tumbling.
Great rats, small rats, lean rats, brawny rats,
Brown rats, black rats, gray rats, tawny rats,
Grave old plodders, gay young friskers,
Fathers, mothers, uncles, cousins,
Cocking tails and pricking whiskers,
Families by tens and dozens,
Brothers, sisters, husbands, wives--
Followed the Piper for their lives.
From street to street he piped advancing,
And step for step they followed dancing,
Until they came to the river Weser
Wherein all plunged and perished!
‹Save one who, stout as Julius Caesar,
Swam across and lived to carry
(As the manuscript he cherished)
To Rat-land home his commentary:
Which was, "At the first shrill notes of the pipe,
I heard a sound as of scraping tripe,
And putting apples, wondrous ripe,
Into a cider-press's gripe:
And a moving away of pickle-tub-boards,
And a leaving ajar of conserve-cupboards,
And a drawing the corks of train-oil-flasks,
And a breaking the hoops of butter-casks:
And it seemed as if a voice
(Sweeter far than by harp or by psaltery
Is breathed) called out, 'Oh rats, rejoice!
The world is grown to one vast dry-saltery!
So munch on, crunch on, take your nuncheon,
Breakfast, supper, dinner, luncheon!'
And just as a bulky sugar-puncheon,
All ready staved, like a great sun shone
Glorious scarce an inch before me,
Just as methought it said 'Come bore me!'
-- I found the Weser rolling o'er me."

VIII.
You should have heard the Hamelin people
Ringing the bells till they rocked the steeple.
Go," cried the Mayor, "and get long poles!
Poke out the nests and block up the holes!
Consult with carpenters and builders
And leave in our town not even a trace
Of the rats!"-- when suddenly, up the face
Of the Piper perked in the market-place,
With a, "First, if you please, my thousand guilders!"

IX.
A thousand guilders! The Mayor looked blue;
So did the Corporation too.
For council dinners made rare havoc
With Claret, Moselle, Vin-de-Grave, Hock;
And half the money would replenish
Their cellar's biggest butt with Rhenish.
To pay this sum to a wandering fellow
With a gypsy coat of red and yellow!
"Beside," quoth the Mayor with a knowing wink,
"Our business was done at the river's brink;
We saw with our eyes the vermin sink,
And what's dead can't come to life, I think.
So, friend, we're not the folks to shrink
From the duty of giving you something for drink,
And a matter of money to put in your poke;
But as for the guilders, what we spoke
Of them, as you very well know, was in joke.
Beside, our losses have made us thrifty.
A thousand guilders! Come, take fifty!

X.
The Piper's face fell, and he cried,
"No trifling! I can't wait! Beside,
I've promised to visit by dinnertime
Bagdad, and accept the prime
Of the Head-Cook's pottage, all he's rich in,
For having left, in the Caliph's kitchen,
Of a nest of scorpions no survivor--
With him I proved no bargain-driver,
With you, don't think I'll bate a stiver!
And folks who put me in a passion
May find me pipe to another fashion."

XI.
"How?" cried the Mayor, "d'ye think I brook
Being worse treated than a Cook?
Insulted by a lazy ribald
With idle pipe and vesture piebald?
You threaten us, fellow? Do your worst,
Blow your pipe there till you burst!"

XII.
Once more he stept into the street
And to his lips again
Laid his long pipe of smooth straight cane;
And ere he blew three notes (such sweet
Soft notes as yet musician's cunning
Never gave the enraptured air)
There was a rustling that seemed like a bustling
Of merry crowds justling at pitching and hustling,
Small feet were pattering, wooden shoes clattering,
Little hands clapping, and little tongues chattering,
And, like fowls in a farm-yard when barley is scattering,
Out came the children running.
All the little boys and girls,
With rosy cheeks and flaxen curls,
And sparkling eyes and teeth like pearls,
Tripping and skipping, ran merrily after
The wonderful music with shouting and laughter.

XIII.
The Mayor was dumb, and the Council stood
As if they were changed into blocks of wood,
Unable to move a step or cry,
To the children merrily skipping by--
And could only follow with the eye
That joyous crowd at the Piper's back.
But how the Mayor was on the rack
And the wretched Council's bosoms beat,
As the Piper turned from the High Street
To where the Weser rolled its water's
Right in the way of their sons and daughters!
However he turned from South to West
And to Koppelberg Hill his steps addressed,
And after him the children pressed;
Great was the joy in every breast.
"He never can cross that mighty top!
He's forced to let the piping drop
And we shall see our children stop!
When, lo, as they reached the mountain-side,
A wondrous portal opened wide,
As if a cavern was suddenly hollowed;
And the Piper advanced and the children followed,
And when all were in to the very last,
The door in the mountain-side shut fast.
Did I say all? No! One was lame,
And could not dance the whole of the way;
And in after years, if you would blame
His sadness, he was used to say,--
"It's dull in our town since my playmates left!
I can't forget that I'm bereft
Of all the pleasant sights they see,
Which the Piper also promised me.
For he led us, he said, to a joyous land,
Joining the town and just at hand,
Where waters gushed and fruit-trees grew,
And flowers put forth a fairer hue,
And everything was strange and new;
The sparrows were brighter than peacocks here,
And their dogs outran our fallow deer,
And honey-bees had lost their stings,
And horses were born with eagles' wings:
And just as I became assured
My lame foot would be speedily cured,
The music stopped and I stood still,
And found myself outside the hill,
Left alone against my will,
To go now limping as before,
And never hear of that country more!

XIV.
Alas, alas for Hamelin!
There came into many a burgher's pate
A text which says that heaven's gate
Opens to the rich at as easy rate
As the needle's eye takes a camel in!
The mayor sent East, West, North and South,
To offer the Piper, by word of mouth
Wherever it was men's lot to find him,
Silver and gold to his heart's content,
If he'd only return the way he went,
And bring the children behind him.
But when they saw 'twas a lost endeavor,
And Piper and dancers were gone forever,
They made a decree that lawyers never
Should think their records dated duly
If, after the day of the month and year,
These words did not as well appear:
"And so long after what happened here
On the twenty-second of July,
Thirteen hundred and seventy-six;"
And the better in memory to fix
The place of the children's last retreat,
They called it the Pied Piper's Street,
Where any one playing on pipe or tabor
Was sure for the future to lose his labor.
Nor suffered they hostelry or tavern
To shock with mirth a street so solemn,
But opposite the place of the cavern
They wrote the story on a column,
And on the great church-window painted
The same, to make the world acquainted
How their children were stolen away,
And there it stands to this very day.
And I must not omit to say
That, in Transylvania there's a tribe
Of alien people who ascribe
To the outlandish ways and dress
On which their neighbors lay such stress,
To their fathers and mothers having risen
Out of some subterranean prison
Into which they were trepanned
Long time ago in a mighty band
Out of Hamelin town in Brunswick land,
But how or why they don't understand.

XV.
So, Willy, let you and me be wipers
Of scores out with all men--especially pipers!
And, whether they pipe us free, from rats or from mice,
If we've promised them ought, let us keep our promise.




  contact Sheila Link: 4/17/2003 12:45:00 PM

 
POETS: ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING

In honor of National Poetry Month:

Sonnet XLIII
by Elizabeth Barrett Browning
How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of being and ideal grace.
I love thee to the level of every day's
Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light.
I love thee freely, as men strive for right.
I love thee purely, as they turn from praise.
I love thee with the passion put to use
In my old griefs, and with my childhood's faith.
I love thee with a love I seemed to lose
With my lost saints. I love with the breath,
Smiles, tears, of all my life; and, if God choose,
I shall but love thee better after death.

Sonnet XXII
When our two souls stand up erect and strong,
Face to face, silent, drawing nigh and nigher,
Until the lengthening wings break into fire
At either curve-d point,--what bitter wrong
Can the earth do to us, that we should not long
Be here contented? Think. In mounting higher,
The angels would press on us and aspire
To drop some golden orb of perfect song
Into our deep, dear silence. Let us stay
Rather on earth, Belove-d,--where the unfit
Contrarious moods of men recoil away
And isolate pure spirits, and permit
A place to stand and love in for a day,
With darkness and the death-hour rounding it.

The Best Thing in the World
What's the best thing in the world?
June-rose, by May-dew impearled;
Sweet south-wind, that means no rain;
Truth, not cruel to a friend;
Pleasure, not in haste to end;
Beauty, not self-decked and curled
Till its pride is over-plain;
Love, when, so, you're loved again.
What's the best thing in the world?
--Something out of it, I think.



  contact Sheila Link: 4/17/2003 12:39:00 PM

 
POETS: GWENDOLYN BROOKS

In honor of National Poetry Month:

There's something about her stuff which gives me a big hard lump in my throat:

The Bean Eaters
by Gwendolyn Brooks
They eat beans mostly, this old yellow pair.
Dinner is a casual affair.
Plain chipware on a plain and creaking wood,
Tin flatware.

Two who are Mostly Good.
Two who have lived their day,
But keep on putting on their clothes
And putting things away.

And remembering . . .
Remembering, with twinklings and twinges,
As they lean over the beans in their rented back room that
is full of beads and receipts and dolls and cloths,
tobacco crumbs, vases and fringes.


The Mother
by Gwendolyn Brooks
Abortions will not let you forget.
You remember the children you got that you did not get,
The damp small pulps with a little or with no hair,
The singers and workers that never handled the air.
You will never neglect or beat
Them, or silence or buy with a sweet.
You will never wind up the sucking-thumb
Or scuttle off ghosts that come.
You will never leave them, controlling your luscious sigh,
Return for a snack of them, with gobbling mother-eye.

I have heard in the voices of the wind the voices of my dim killed
children.
I have contracted. I have eased
My dim dears at the breasts they could never suck.
I have said, Sweets, if I sinned, if I seized
Your luck
And your lives from your unfinished reach,
If I stole your births and your names,
Your straight baby tears and your games,
Your stilted or lovely loves, your tumults, your marriages, aches,
and your deaths,
If I poisoned the beginnings of your breaths,
Believe that even in my deliberateness I was not deliberate.
Though why should I whine,
Whine that the crime was other than mine?--
Since anyhow you are dead.
Or rather, or instead,
You were never made.
But that too, I am afraid,
Is faulty: oh, what shall I say, how is the truth to be said?
You were born, you had body, you died.
It is just that you never giggled or planned or cried.

Believe me, I loved you all.
Believe me, I knew you, though faintly, and I loved, I loved you
All.


  contact Sheila Link: 4/17/2003 12:37:00 PM

 
POETS: ELIZABETH BISHOP

In honor of National Poetry Month:

Elizabeth Bishop rocks. Here are three of my favorites. Her compiled book of letters is great reading as well.

Hilbert's Bold Type essay on Bishop is here.

One Art
by Elizabeth Bishop
The art of losing isn't hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.


--Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident
the art of losing's not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.


In the Waiting Room
by Elizabeth Bishop
In Worcester, Massachusetts,
I went with Aunt Consuelo
to keep her dentist's appointment
and sat and waited for her
in the dentist's waiting room.
It was winter. It got dark
early. The waiting room
was full of grown-up people,
arctics and overcoats,
lamps and magazines.
My aunt was inside
what seemed like a long time
and while I waited I read
the National Geographic
(I could read) and carefully
studied the photographs:
the inside of a volcano,
black, and full of ashes;
then it was spilling over
in rivulets of fire.
Osa and Martin Johnson
dressed in riding breeches,
laced boots, and pith helmets.
A dead man slung on a pole
--"Long Pig," the caption said.
Babies with pointed heads
wound round and round with string;
black, naked women with necks
wound round and round with wire
like the necks of light bulbs.
Their breasts were horrifying.
I read it right straight through.
I was too shy to stop.
And then I looked at the cover:
the yellow margins, the date.
Suddenly, from inside,
came an oh! of pain
--Aunt Consuelo's voice--
not very loud or long.
I wasn't at all surprised;
even then I knew she was
a foolish, timid woman.
I might have been embarrassed,
but wasn't. What took me
completely by surprise
was that it was me:
my voice, in my mouth.
Without thinking at all
I was my foolish aunt,
I--we--were falling, falling,
our eyes glued to the cover
of the National Geographic,
February, 1918.

I said to myself: three days
and you'll be seven years old.
I was saying it to stop
the sensation of falling off
the round, turning world.
into cold, blue-black space.
But I felt: you are an I,
you are an Elizabeth,
you are one of them.
Why should you be one, too?
I scarcely dared to look
to see what it was I was.
I gave a sidelong glance
--I couldn't look any higher--
at shadowy gray knees,
trousers and skirts and boots
and different pairs of hands
lying under the lamps.
I knew that nothing stranger
had ever happened, that nothing
stranger could ever happen.

Why should I be my aunt,
or me, or anyone?
What similarities--
boots, hands, the family voice
I felt in my throat, or even
the National Geographic
and those awful hanging breasts--
held us all together
or made us all just one?
How--I didn't know any
word for it--how "unlikely". . .
How had I come to be here,
like them, and overhear
a cry of pain that could have
got loud and worse but hadn't?

The waiting room was bright
and too hot. It was sliding
beneath a big black wave,
another, and another.

Then I was back in it.
The War was on. Outside,
in Worcester, Massachusetts,
were night and slush and cold,
and it was still the fifth
of February, 1918.

Sheila's note: Shit. Can this woman write, or what....


At the Fishhouses
by Elizabeth Bishop
Although it is a cold evening,
down by one of the fishhouses
an old man sits netting,
his net, in the gloaming almost invisible,
a dark purple-brown,
and his shuttle worn and polished.
The air smells so strong of codfish
it makes one's nose run and one's eyes water.
The five fishhouses have steeply peaked roofs
and narrow, cleated gangplanks slant up
to storerooms in the gables
for the wheelbarrows to be pushed up and down on.
All is silver: the heavy surface of the sea,
swelling slowly as if considering spilling over,
is opaque, but the silver of the benches,
the lobster pots, and masts, scattered
among the wild jagged rocks,
is of an apparent translucence
like the small old buildings with an emerald moss
growing on their shoreward walls.
The big fish tubs are completely lined
with layers of beautiful herring scales
and the wheelbarrows are similarly plastered
with creamy iridescent coats of mail,
with small iridescent flies crawling on them.
Up on the little slope behind the houses,
set in the sparse bright sprinkle of grass,
is an ancient wooden capstan,
cracked, with two long bleached handles
and some melancholy stains, like dried blood,
where the ironwork has rusted.
The old man accepts a Lucky Strike.
He was a friend of my grandfather.
We talk of the decline in the population
and of codfish and herring
while he waits for a herring boat to come in.
There are sequins on his vest and on his thumb.
He has scraped the scales, the principal beauty,
from unnumbered fish with that black old knife,
the blade of which is almost worn away.

Down at the water's edge, at the place
where they haul up the boats, up the long ramp
descending into the water, thin silver
tree trunks are laid horizontally
across the gray stones, down and down
at intervals of four or five feet.

Cold dark deep and absolutely clear,
element bearable to no mortal,
to fish and to seals . . . One seal particularly
I have seen here evening after evening.
He was curious about me. He was interested in music;
like me a believer in total immersion,
so I used to sing him Baptist hymns.
I also sang "A Mighty Fortress Is Our God."
He stood up in the water and regarded me
steadily, moving his head a little.
Then he would disappear, then suddenly emerge
almost in the same spot, with a sort of shrug
as if it were against his better judgment.
Cold dark deep and absolutely clear,
the clear gray icy water . . . Back, behind us,
the dignified tall firs begin.
Bluish, associating with their shadows,
a million Christmas trees stand
waiting for Christmas. The water seems suspended
above the rounded gray and blue-gray stones.
I have seen it over and over, the same sea, the same,
slightly, indifferently swinging above the stones,
icily free above the stones,
above the stones and then the world.
If you should dip your hand in,
your wrist would ache immediately,
your bones would begin to ache and your hand would burn
as if the water were a transmutation of fire
that feeds on stones and burns with a dark gray flame.
If you tasted it, it would first taste bitter,
then briny, then surely burn your tongue.
It is like what we imagine knowledge to be:
dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free,
drawn from the cold hard mouth
of the world, derived from the rocky breasts
forever, flowing and drawn, and since
our knowledge is historical, flowing, and flown.

  contact Sheila Link: 4/17/2003 12:34:00 PM

 
POETS: WILLIAM BLAKE

In honor of National Poetry Month:

Blake, that exhilarating visionary, who saw angels in the trees, who was a poet and an engraver, is also one of my favorite writers. Every single line, to me, seems a classic, vibrating with truth. Exciting stuff.

The Chimney-Sweeper
by William Blake
When my mother died I was very young,
And my father sold me while yet my tongue
Could scarcely cry 'Weep! weep! weep! weep!'
So your chimneys I sweep, and in soot I sleep.

There's little Tom Dacre, who cried when his head,
That curled like a lamb's back, was shaved; so I said,
'Hush, Tom! never mind it, for, when your head's bare,
You know that the soot cannot spoil your white hair.'

And so he was quiet, and that very night,
As Tom was a-sleeping, he had such a sight!--
That thousands of sweepers, Dick, Joe, Ned, and Jack,
Were all of them locked up in coffins of black.

And by came an angel, who had a bright key,
And he opened the coffins, and set them all free;
Then down a green plain, leaping, laughing, they run
And wash in a river, and shine in the sun.

Then naked and white, all their bags left behind,
They rise upon clouds, and sport in the wind;
And the angel told Tom, if he'd be a good boy,
He'd have God for his father, and never want joy.

And so Tom awoke, and we rose in the dark,
And got with our bags and our brushes to work.
Though the morning was cold, Tom was happy and warm:
So, if all do their duty, they need not fear harm.

A Divine Image
by Blake
Cruelty has a Human heart
And Jealousy a Human Face,
Terror, the Human Form Divine,
And Secrecy, the Human Dress.

The Human Dress is forge-d Iron,
The Human Form, a fiery Forge,
The Human Face, a Furnace seal'd,
The Human Heart, its hungry Gorge.

Sheila's note: I must excerpt from his long long long poem "A Marriage of Heaven and Hell". Can't post the whole thing here. But it is remarkable. Ooops. Starting to sound like a 6th grade book report here.

Excerpts from Marriage of Heaven and Hell
A Memorable Fancy
As I was walking among the fires of hell, delighted with the enjoyments of Genius; which to Angels look like torment and insanity. I collected some of their Proverbs: thinking that as the sayings used in a nation, mark its character, so the Proverbs of Hell, shew the nature of Infernal wisdom better than any description of buildings or garments.
When I came home; on the abyss of the five senses, where a flat sided steep frowns over the present world. I saw a mighty Devil folded in black clouds, hovering on the sides of the rock, with corroding fires he wrote the following sentence now percieved by the minds of men, & read by them on earth.
How do you know but ev'ry Bird that cuts the airy way,
Is an immense world of delight, clos'd by your senses five?

Proverbs of Hell
In seed time learn, in harvest teach, in winter enjoy.
Drive your cart and your plow over the bones of the dead.
The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.
Prudence is a rich ugly old maid courted by Incapacity.
He who desires but acts not, breeds pestilence.
The cut worm forgives the plow.
Dip him in the river who loves water.
A fool sees not the same tree that a wise man sees.
He whose face gives no light, shall never become a star.
Eternity is in love with the productions of time.
The busy bee has no time for sorrow.
The hours of folly are measur'd by the clock, but of wisdom: no clock can measure.
All wholsom food is caught without a net or a trap.
Bring out number weight & measure in a year of dearth.
No bird soars too high, if he soars with his own wings.
A dead body revenges not injuries.
The most sublime act is to set another before you.
If the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise.
Folly is the cloke of knavery.
Shame is Prides cloke.

Prisons are built with stones of Law, Brothels with bricks of Religion.
The pride of the peacock is the glory of God.
The lust of the goat is the bounty of God.
The wrath of the lion is the wisdom of God.
The nakedness of woman is the work of God.
Excess of sorrow laughs. Excess of joy weeps.
The roaring of lions, the howling of wolves, the raging of the stormy sea, and the destructive sword, are portions of eternity too great for the eye of man.
The fox condemns the trap, not himself.
Joys impregnate. Sorrows bring forth.
Let man wear the fell of the lion. woman the fleece of the sheep.
The bird a nest, the spider a web, man friendship.
The selfish smiling fool, & the sullen frowning fool shall be both thought wise, that they may be a rod.
What is now proved was once only imagin'd.
The rat, the mouse, the fox, the rabbet; watch the roots; the lion, the tyger, the horse, the elephant, watch the fruits.
The cistern contains: the fountain overflows.
One thought fills immensity.
Always be ready to speak your mind, and a base man will avoid you.
Every thing possible to be believ'd is an image of truth.
The eagle never lost so much time, as when he submitted to learn of the crow.

Sheila's note: The last line there about the eagle and the crow are words I try to live by. I have taped them on my mirror. This is tough powerful robust stuff. It seems to me that this poem read, as a whole, tells you everything you need to know about living. Being human. William Blake is a hero of mine.

  contact Sheila Link: 4/17/2003 12:24:00 PM

 
POETS: WENDELL BERRY

In honor of National Poetry Month:

This goes out to David, who turned me on to Berry.

The Peace of Wild Things
by Wendell Berry
When despair grows in me
and I wake in the middle of the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting for their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.


  contact Sheila Link: 4/17/2003 12:18:00 PM

 
POETS: W.H. AUDEN

In honor of National Poetry Month:

The first poem is, possibly, my favorite poem of all time.

Here is Ernie's Bold Type essay on Auden, if you are interested.

The More Loving One
by Auden
Looking up at the stars, I know quite well
That, for all they care, I can go to hell,
But on earth indifference is the least
We have to dread from man or beast.

How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.

Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
I cannot, now I see them, say
I missed one terribly all day.

Were all stars to disappear or die,
I should learn to look at an empty sky
And feel its total dark sublime,
Though this might take me a little time.

As I Walked Out One Evening
by Auden
As I walked out one evening,
Walking down Bristol Street,
The crowds upon the pavement
Were fields of harvest wheat.

And down by the brimming river
I heard a lover sing
Under an arch of the railway:
'Love has no ending.

'I'll love you, dear, I'll love you
Till China and Africa meet,
And the river jumps over the mountain
And the salmon sing in the street,

'I'll love you till the ocean
Is folded and hung up to dry
And the seven stars go squawking
Like geese about the sky.

'The years shall run like rabbits,
For in my arms I hold
The Flower of the Ages,
And the first love of the world.'

But all the clocks in the city
Began to whirr and chime:
'O let not Time deceive you,
You cannot conquer Time.

'In the burrows of the Nightmare
Where Justice naked is,
Time watches from the shadow
And coughs when you would kiss.

'In headaches and in worry
Vaguely life leaks away,
And Time will have his fancy
To-morrow or to-day.

'Into many a green valley
Drifts the appalling snow;
Time breaks the threaded dances
And the diver's brilliant bow.

'O plunge your hands in water,
Plunge them in up to the wrist;
Stare, stare in the basin
And wonder what you've missed.

'The glacier knocks in the cupboard,
The desert sighs in the bed,
And the crack in the tea-cup opens
A lane to the land of the dead.

'Where the beggars raffle the banknotes
And the Giant is enchanting to Jack,
And the Lily-white Boy is a Roarer,
And Jill goes down on her back.

'O look, look in the mirror,
O look in your distress:
Life remains a blessing
Although you cannot bless.

'O stand, stand at the window
As the tears scald and start;
You shall love your crooked neighbour
With your crooked heart.'

It was late, late in the evening,
The lovers they were gone;
The clocks had ceased their chiming,
And the deep river ran on.


In Memory of W.B. Yeats
by Auden
I
He disappeared in the dead of winter:
The brooks were frozen, the airports almost deserted,
And snow disfigured the public statues;
The mercury sank in the mouth of the dying day.
What instruments we have agree
The day of his death was a dark cold day.

Far from his illness
The wolves ran on through the evergreen forests,
The peasant river was untempted by the fashionable quays;
By mourning tongues
The death of the poet was kept from his poems.

But for him it was his last afternoon as himself,
An afternoon of nurses and rumours;
The provinces of his body revolted,
The squares of his mind were empty,
Silence invaded the suburbs,
The current of his feeling failed; he became his admirers.

Now he is scattered among a hundred cities
And wholly given over to unfamiliar affections,
To find his happiness in another kind of wood
And be punished under a foreign code of conscience.
The words of a dead man
Are modified in the guts of the living.

But in the importance and noise of to-morrow
When the brokers are roaring like beasts on the floor of the Bourse,
And the poor have the sufferings to which they are fairly accustomed,
And each in the cell of himself is almost convinced of his freedom,
A few thousand will think of this day
As one thinks of a day when one did something slightly unusual.

What instruments we have agree
The day of his death was a dark cold day.

II

You were silly like us; your gift survived it all:
The parish of rich women, physical decay,
Yourself. Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.
Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still,
For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
In the valley of its making where executives
Would never want to tamper, flows on south
From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,
A way of happening, a mouth.




III

Earth, receive an honoured guest:
William Yeats is laid to rest.
Let the Irish vessel lie
Emptied of its poetry.

In the nightmare of the dark
All the dogs of Europe bark,
And the living nations wait,
Each sequestered in its hate;

Intellectual disgrace
Stares from every human face,
And the seas of pity lie
Locked and frozen in each eye.

Follow, poet, follow right
To the bottom of the night,
With your unconstraining voice
Still persuade us to rejoice;

With the farming of a verse
Make a vineyard of the curse,
Sing of human unsuccess
In a rapture of distress;

In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountain start,
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.


  contact Sheila Link: 4/17/2003 12:13:00 PM

 
POETS: MATTHEW ARNOLD

In honor of National Poetry Month:

Dover Beach
by Matthew Arnold
The sea is calm tonight.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits; on the French coast, the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,

Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.

Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the Aegean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.

The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

  contact Sheila Link: 4/17/2003 12:11:00 PM

 
POETS: MARY OLIVER

In honor of National Poetry Month:

In Blackwater Woods
by Mary Oliver
Look, the trees
are turning
their own bodies
into pillars

of light,
are giving off the rich
fragrance of cinnamon
and fulfillment,

the long tapers
of cattails
are bursting and floating away over
the blue shoulders

of the ponds,
and every pond,
no matter what its
name is, is

nameless now.
Every year
everything
I have ever learned

in my lifetime
leads back to this: the fires
and the black river of loss
whose other side

is salvation,
whose meaning
none of us will ever know.
To live in this world

you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it

against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.



  contact Sheila Link: 4/17/2003 12:10:00 PM

 
POETS: SUZANNE WISE

In honor of National Poetry Month:

So. I know the world is going nuts. I am fully aware of most of what is going on. I keep up to date. All that stuff. But I'm searching out many of my favorite poems, on the web, to post here. In honor of National Poetry Month. Let's see how much I can find.

Lunchtime in the Kingdom of the Subjunctive
by Suzanne Wise
A spoon propels itself out of its soup
as a bone sprung free of skin

or a tuning fork
trembling into the background,

then arcing and returning
as a boomerang.

Meanwhile, the glass of milk glides up and out
of your hand, quietly streaking a gloss

of stars through your suddenly glowing hair.
Meanwhile, toast combusts in a golden dust.

Butter drops from clouds that release an ochre rain.
You grow misty-eyed, nostalgic.

This feeling is alleviated by a sense of dread
and instability as the tabletop turns metallic,

tips and revolves as a chain-saw blade
slicing the floor into windows

you slowly and gracefully crash through.
Splintered glass sequins your skin.

Your hands reaching for the doorknob
sharpen to cones. The door soars.

Your legs run too fast, lose their feet
to curls of smoke drifting up the stairs.

You spend hours, or possibly years, floating around like this—
light-headed, fuzzy-brained,

cotton-mouthed. You have fallen in love
with the way light refracts in impossible ways.

Later darkness barges in horizontally,

It is night without shadows
and everything is way too shallow.

You are too close to the picture
to see if you're included.

You fall headfirst down the drain
sucking the bright out of colors.

You become somber, colder, a kind of high-quality vinyl,
and, in some places, an old damp velvet.

Meanwhile your head continues to plummet,
has become a potholed highway

splitting into stalks, going to seed
as you talk yourself into the distance.

You are telling yourself: Do not be afraid.
You are begging: God help me.

You are whining: If only

If only I had some kind of anchor
in here. If only I could disappear.

You know you should be ashamed.
This is the kind of compulsive behavior

you are always being criticized for.
It's that soup bowl,
and singing, sparkling like a god and spitting
its empty refrain in the faces of all your best selves:

If only ______, then ______.
If only ______, then ______.

  contact Sheila Link: 4/17/2003 12:08:00 PM

 
APRIL IS....

In honor of National Poetry Month, and in honor of April, here is an excerpt from an appropriate poem:

THE WASTELAND, by T.S. Eliot
I. THE BURIAL OF THE DEAD

APRIL is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers.
Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee
With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade,
And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten,
And drank coffee, and talked for an hour.
Bin gar keine Russin, stamm' aus Litauen, echt deutsch.
And when we were children, staying at the archduke's,
My cousin's, took me out on a sled,
And I was frightened. He said, Marie,
Marie, hold on tight. And down we went.
In the mountains, there you feel free.
I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter.

What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water. Only
There is shadow under this red rock,
(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),
And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.
Frisch weht der Wind
Der Heimat zu.
Mein Irisch Kind,
Wo weilest du?
'You gave me hyacinths first a year ago;
'They called me the hyacinth girl.'
—Yet when we came back, late, from the Hyacinth garden,
Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not
Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither
Living nor dead, and I knew nothing,
Looking into the heart of light, the silence.
Od' und leer das Meer.

Madame Sosostris, famous clairvoyante,
Had a bad cold, nevertheless
Is known to be the wisest woman in Europe,
With a wicked pack of cards. Here, said she,
Is your card, the drowned Phoenician Sailor,
(Those are pearls that were his eyes. Look!)
Here is Belladonna, the Lady of the Rocks,
The lady of situations.
Here is the man with three staves, and here the Wheel,
And here is the one-eyed merchant, and this card,
Which is blank, is something he carries on his back,
Which I am forbidden to see. I do not find
The Hanged Man. Fear death by water.
I see crowds of people, walking round in a ring.
Thank you. If you see dear Mrs. Equitone,
Tell her I bring the horoscope myself:
One must be so careful these days.

Unreal City,
Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.
Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,
And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.
Flowed up the hill and down King William Street,
To where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hours
With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine.
There I saw one I knew, and stopped him, crying 'Stetson!
'You who were with me in the ships at Mylae!
'That corpse you planted last year in your garden,
'Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?
'Or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed?
'Oh keep the Dog far hence, that's friend to men,
'Or with his nails he'll dig it up again!
'You! hypocrite lecteur!—mon semblable,—mon frère!'

  contact Sheila Link: 4/17/2003 12:00:00 PM

 
SPEAKING OF POETRY

April, by the way, is National Poetry Month.

Ernest Hilbert, a poet and an editor, writes for Random House's online literary magazine Bold Type. Here are his words about April and poetry. (He's a much better writer than Adam Kirsch of the "I like Irish poets even when they write about stuff like rap music" school of literary criticism.)

  contact Sheila Link: 4/17/2003 11:47:00 AM

 
TIM ROBBINS

Tim Robbins continues to dig himself into a deeper and deeper hole. Every single statement he makes can immediately be countered with: "That is kind of stupid, Tim." He's just pissed that people disagree with him. He makes wild claims about "hate and invective" pouring out of the airwaves. Again: with a teeny knowledge of history, you know that Robbins is being melodramatic, speaking from a privileged position, and has never really known real "hate or invective" in his life. Read Victor Klemperer's diaries, and hear the kind of "hate and invective" that was on the airwaves THEN.

Anyway. Whatever. He's just a dumb celebrity, and all that, but his whole "I am the champion of free speech" stance is being crucified, and rightly so. He means "free speech that AGREES with me". Saying, "Tim Robbins, I think you are a total idiot" is ALSO free speech. That's the deal. Take your punches. Be a man.

Here are a couple of other pieces on the Tim Robbins debacle. The title of the first piece pretty much sums it up:

Freedom Of Speech Means You Can't Criticize Tim Robbins

Rachel Lucas' rant is particularly funny: Letter to Tim Robbins

The Volokh Conspiracy has an extended and very well-thought-out piece about boycotts, First Amendment, what actually is protected under the amendment, etc. Worth your time to read.

  contact Sheila Link: 4/17/2003 11:36:00 AM

 
SYRIA

Syria is all over the news at the moment. Syria Syria Syria.

Syria is another one of those stifling Arab dictatorships that I have been studying, on my own, for a while. I'll post a couple of book excerpts here later. May provide some helpful context. At least, it will give a fuller picture of the situation in Syria.

Context context context

  contact Sheila Link: 4/17/2003 10:56:00 AM

 
A LOAD OF SHITE

For some reason, the following Slate piece, written by Adam Kirsch, entitled "Why We Love Irish Poets" ANNOYED me. I am trying to figure out why. First of all, I think it is very badly written. 6th grade book report sentences:

Why do we love the Irish so much? In large part it's because these poets have portrayed an Ireland that seems glamorously different from our own modern, urban, technological society.

O'Driscoll, a 48-year-old Dubliner and the author of six collections of poems, is well-known in Ireland and Britain as a poet and critic, but he is little read in the United States. This is a shame, since he is one of the most interesting poets now writing in English.

I really like poetry. I especially really like Irish poets. Some Irish poets write about faeries and digging in the mud and stuff like that. I like those poems. They're really good. But some Irish poets write about things that are modern and everyday. Like Irish people at happy hours, or Irish people listening to rap music. Irish people are modern people. That is why I like to read these poems, too. I like to learn about other countries and other lands. But Ireland sounds a lot like America. And this is kind of confusing. But still. I like to read those poems. They're really good.

As these lines show, O'Driscoll's Dublin is a version of London or New York.

A few references to "VAT" (a European tax) and "EC directives" let us know that we are not in America, but otherwise O'Driscoll could be writing about any executive anywhere.

This may seem too ordinary for readers who look to Ireland for a rural authenticity or mythic glamour missing from their own country.

 
THE WINDOW

Woke up very early this morning, as always. Made coffee. Signed on. Read email. Etc.

Everything was still.

Yesterday was true spring weather ... it felt more like June than April. It was hot. We all knew it would not last. The weathermen told us so. I got off the bus in Hoboken after my writing group, and immediately felt that the wind had picked up. Something was approaching, and there was a chill in the air, pouring over me. Like the warmness of the day was exposing its cold underbelly.

This morning: a cool breeze streaming through the slightly open kitchen window. A bit chilly, but still ... kind of nice. Refreshing.

I looked at emails, not noticing how the light outside had changed.

And then, seemingly out of nowhere, a long loud rumble of thunder. (Thunderstorms. One of my favorite things on earth.) I glanced up, surprised. It hadn't felt like a thundery kind of day.

And now: it is pouring rain, and there is a wind literally shrieking against the building ... a la March or February.

Here's exactly what I see when I look up at my kitichen window, from where I sit at the table:

--The window over the sink
--Outside the window: you see only sky. We have an unobstructed view, facing north.
--Flourishing spider plant hanging, covering up the top pane partially
--A lamp on the shelf below the window
--In the bottom half of the window, is a triangular piece of free-standing stained glass, given to me years ago by dear friend Mitchell. In all of my many many many many moves since then, it has never broken or cracked or smashed.
--On the shelf below the window, along with the lamp: another spider plant, a smaller one, in a blue and white china bowl. A couple of small bottles of essential oil, and a small oil burner. It looks like magical elixir bottles. A couple of stones: a rough amethyst, a round rock cut open so that you can see the burgeoning crystals inside.
--On the side of the cupboard beside the window, a hilarious picture cut out of a magazine: best friends and former roommates (and hopelessly hot men) Jude Law and Ewan McGregor. Ewan McGregor is in the tub, holding a glass of tea, glancing at the camera as though it is candid. Jude Law is sitting on the toilet, pants around his ankles, holding an open newspaper. Also glancing at the camera, as though caught unaware.
--And again: through all of this, the sky. When the thunder clap happened, I looked at the window. The bottom half of the window was clear washed-clean sky, almost a peach color. Very very pale peach. The top half of the window was heavy swollen grey. There was literally a clear line between the two halves. The heavy grey stopped abruptly, the peach sky shining all the way up until the cloud.


  contact Sheila Link: 4/17/2003 08:16:00 AM

 
QUOTE FROM PEJMAN...

One last thing: My post below about writing and inspiration, reminded me of Pejmanesque's quote for the day, a classic if you ask me. Check it out. Words to live by. Definitely.



  contact Sheila Link: 4/16/2003 05:30:00 PM

 
WRITING GROUP

This evening I have my writing group. We meet every other Wednesday, and because of my show, I have not been able to go for the past couple of months. Now I am free. I am presenting a piece to the group which I began a couple of years ago, and have recently unearthed. I think I might be onto something special ... or I could be in total denial, and have just written a load of shite. We shall see. Both are highly possible at this point.

But regardless: this is something I feel I need to write.

If the form I have chosen to write it in is not effective yet, and it very well may not be, then I will keep writing ... keep pressing on ... until the right form presents itself to me. I will recognize it when I see it. This will ONLY occur, however, if I keep writing. Keep struggling, facing the blank page every day. Otherwise, I am waiting for the moment of inspiration when I will sit down at my desk, lit up with creativity, and, in one draft, write Catch 22 or Catcher in the Rye.

I know that inspiration does not work that way. You must prime the pump. You must keep showing up. You must keep at it. Good days, bad. This blog has helped. At least in setting up a structure where I write, for an audience, EVERY DAY.

Anyway. We shall see. I am very much looking forward to the group.

See you all tomorrow.

  contact Sheila Link: 4/16/2003 05:27:00 PM

 
TOUCHING HEARTS, NO ARMS...

Tim Blair notices an odd sentence in a Reuters article, and points it out. I laughed out loud. (Permalink not working ... at the moment, the post is the first one.)

God, the sentence Blair mentions seems funnier and funnier to me every time I read it.

HA

  contact Sheila Link: 4/16/2003 03:50:00 PM

 
PASSOVER DIET

Ah, the Weight Watchers hunker-down before a holiday ... I know it well. This post from Allison, at An Unsealed Room, (love her blog) describes a pre-Passover Weight Watchers meeting in Israel.

The last two lines of the post are so funny. Gave me a good laugh.

  contact Sheila Link: 4/16/2003 03:46:00 PM

 
AN ONGOING EYE??

I am laughing at my own "phrasology" in the post below. ("Phrasology" comes from the bombastic buffoonish mayor of River City in The Music Man, who continuously says to his malapropism-ridden wife: "Watch your phrasology!")

"I will keep an ongoing eye on the situation".

An ongoing eye? Excuse me?

  contact Sheila Link: 4/16/2003 11:51:00 AM

 
It appears that my archiving problem and permanent link problem is fixed. I will keep an ongoing eye on the situation.


  contact Sheila Link: 4/16/2003 08:41:00 AM

 
THE MESOPOTAMIAN PAST

The following passage from Mackey's book The Reckoning does much to explain why the Iraqis would trash their own museum.

Excerpt:

The long, often splendid span of history reaching from the Sumerians through the Abbasids seems to contain all the elements necessary to implant in contemporary Iraqis a deep sense of themselves as heirs of two great civilizations -- one Mesopotamian, one Islamic. But neither Mesopotamia nor Islam provides a common identity on which the Iraqis have been able to build a nation. Rather Mesopotamia's ancient past tends to serve in varying ways the interests of groups rather than the strength of the Iraqi state.

Inside Iraq, the regime of Saddam Hussein manufactures plastic images of Sumer, Assyria, and Babylon to promote its own political repression. Elsewhere the flameof Mesopotamia is tended by those who have migrated or fled Iraq. At the sad little Kufa gallery on Westbourne Grove in London, just around the corner from the Bayswater tube stop, Iraqi expatriates, mostly from the south, gather on Wednesday evenings to hear such programs as "Tales from Ancient Sumer" or wander in and out during weekdays to view rotating art exhibits. In May 1999, the Kufa mounted a one-man nshow by the noted Iraqi artist Faisel Laibi Sahi entitled, "O' My Country, O' Mesopotamia". Several months later, I sat in the nearly empty exhibition room talking to the artist, a man of striking good looks with a mane of silver-grey hair. I asked him to explain the title of the show. He pondered a moment before he responded: "It was to draw people into thinking about Iraq in its true light. To explain the suffering of the Iraqi people that began with Gilgamesh."

The only thing this group of displaced Iraqis shares with Saddam Hussein's regime is the ghost of Mesopotamia. It is a unique bod, for outside the scattered dreamers and official discourse mouthed from Baghdad, the glory that was Mesopotamia hovers on the outer fringes of identity for most Iraqis. This irony -- the absence of consciousness about a past that is so profoundly important to many of the world's civilizations -- is due in part to how little was known about Mesopotamia until the late nineteenth century, when European scholars and adveturers began to unearth the ruins of Ur, Babylon,and Nineveh. Little physical evidence of the ancient Mesopotamian past remains within Iraq's borders. In contrast to the dramatic stone ruins of the Persian Empire's capital of Persepolis in Iran or the mammoth monuments of ancient Egypt, the towering ziggurats raised by the Sumerians, Akkadians, and Babylonians were constructed of mud bricks dried in the hot sun. Over the centuries, almost all have crumbled to dust. The stone edifices of Nineveh and Nimrud, capitals of Assyria, were dismantled for building material by the locals and stripped of their magnificent sculptures by Europeans. Babylon, the most intact site of Mesopotamia, is a re-created stage set. But it is not this physicaal void that makes the essential statement about the Iraqi nation. It is its replication in the Iraqi psyche.

Mesopotamia simply does not vibrate in the soul of Iraqis the way the ancient past resonates within the heirs of the other great ancient civilizataions to the west and east. Through Egypt's long history that encompasses everything from the reign of Ramses II to the Arab nationalism of Gamal Abdul Nasser, the Egyptians along the Nile have never lost sight of their ancient past. As a result, they see themselves as uniquely Egyptian, as much a part of the Mediterranean as the Arab world. To the east of Iraq, the Iranians, who claim a continuous history of 2,500 years, so closely identify with their Persian past that some of the causes of the 1979 revolution took root in the expectation of leadership established by Cyrus the Great in the 4th century B.C. Despite turbulent political histories in both of these societies, the Egyptians and the Iranians know who they are. And it is this clear and almost universalsense of identity that undergirds the deep and emotional nationalism that characterizes both countries.

The Iraqis are different. According to Dr. Sami Zubaida of London's Birbeck College, "Visions of Mesopotamia are not important to Iraqis. It is nothing but official discourse. For the people, Mesopotamia is a dead issue." This leaves hanging the question of why the Iraqs share so little genuine sense of an ancient past, of continuity, of common identity. The answer is that few Iraqis see themselves as descendants of the Mesopotamians for the most basic and simple of reasons -- their ancestors never lived in the land between the rivers. They are the people of the high mountains of the north. They are groups from Central Asia who came through immigration and persecution. Most of all, they are the products of the Islamic conquest and the tribal migrations out of the Arabian Peninsul that laid the Arabic language and culture on hat had once been Mesopotamia. Nevertheless, Iraqis find no commonality in their cultural legacy that came out of the Islamic Empire.

The overwhelming majority of the population of Iraq defines itself as Arab through the Arabic language. And almost all of these Arabs are Muslims. But they adhere to to forms of Islam -- orthodox Sunni Islam and dissenting Shia Islam, each of which claims its own distinct identity. As a result, the Arabs, inextricably bound together by language, are segregated theologically, socially, and politically. Other fissures opened when imperial Britain created the state of Iraq by welding the non-Arab Kurds to the Arab population ofMesopotamia. Today Arabs and non-Arabs, Sunni and Shia, circle each other as separate and distinct planets within a galaxy known as Iraq.



  contact Sheila Link: 4/16/2003 08:20:00 AM

 
TO PEOPLE COMING HERE FROM DONALD SENSING/ONE HAND CLAPPING:

To anyone looking for the post linked to by Donald Sensing, it is a couple of posts below, entitled: "This just begs to be made fun of".

My permanent link function is, obviously, messed up! Trying to fix the problem now!

Welcome!

  contact Sheila Link: 4/16/2003 08:12:00 AM

 
IRAQ: BABYLON OR ISLAM

Sandra Mackey, in The Reckoning talks about Iraq's past: ancient and recent. As the conferences occur in Baghdad, trying to sort out a new government for this country, her words should be remembered and heeded:

From her chapter "The Land Between Two Rivers":

Inundated by salty groundwater and pillaged for buiilding bricks by generations of nearby villagers, Babylon remained largely a jumbled ruin -- that is, until the 1970s when Saddam Hussein ordered the restoration of Iraq's Mesopotamian past in an attempt to fortify the unity of thte Iraqi state through the symbols and imagery of the Sumerians, Assyrians, and Babylonians, the lords of ancient Mesopotamia between the Tigris and the Euphrates Rivers.

But Iraq possess another past, more real and more immediate than the distant, misty centuries in which Mesopotamia cradled civilization. Ever since the seventh century A.D. when Islam rode into Mesopotamia on the hooves of Arab horses, the land along the Tigris and Euphrates has been enfoldled in Arabic culture and language. Yet Arab culture and identity in Iraq dwell at the eastern edge of the Arab world. Bordering Persian Iran, Iraq is a crossroads where Arab culture has alays been infused with influences of the east. These attitudes, perceptions, and values coming out of the east have shaped a peoplel of whom large numbers have never accepted incorporation into the Arab world to the west. They are joinied by the non-Arab Kurds and other minorities attached to Arab Mesopotamia after World War I. As a result, Iraqis have always struggled with the essential question of whether the Iraqi state is part of the Arab world or is a unique entity demanding its own particular definition. For the Iraqs as well as the whole region of the Persian Gulf, this question of identity is real, not existential. Within it lies the ultimate survival of Iraq, which depends in large part on the Iraqis' ability to reach consensus on an identity that draws all the Iraqi state's disparate communities into a nation.

In the perpetual search for definition, every leader of Iraq, including Saddam Hussein, has sought identity for the Iraqs in either Arabism or a contrived Iraqi nationalism constructed from the history and symbols of ancient Mesopotamia. Neither approach has succeeded because Mesopotamia means little to Iraqs, and Arabism, hung on the framework of the orthodox Sunni Muslims, is rejected by non-Arabs andmost of the Arab Shia. Deprived by a ruthless regime of thirty years in which to develop an innovative alternative, these remain the only existing touchstonens on which even democratic successors to Hussein must attempt to build a nation.





  contact Sheila Link: 4/16/2003 07:59:00 AM

 
IRAQIS, LOOTING, MESOPOTAMIA

What I wrote yesterday, about the Iraqis looting their own museum, (I would link to it, but unfortunately BLOGGER WON'T LET ME) has been on my mind. Knowing the history of Iraq (thanks to my reading, and also to "the Gertrude Bell project" provides some necessary context. "Iraq" as a state is brand-new. It is artificial. The borders do not make sense. British and French officers drew it up on a map. None of it makes sense. And once again, like so many other Muslim countries, the inhabitants of Iraq primarily see themselves as Muslims, rather than seeing themselves as Iraqis. Religion before nationalism. A lovely idea, yes, but ... it is going to make the coming process highly difficult. Every Muslim, Sunni or Shia, thinks that their way is right. Every Muslim is filled with grievances and bones to pick with the other sects. Every Muslim thinks that the Prophet is on their side. A Sunni could not bear to be ruled by a Shia, and vice versa.

This is a huge problem.

And the Sunnis and Shias of Iraq have a long long history of violence and hatred between them.

I am still reading Sandra Mackey's book The Reckoning: Iraq and the Legacy of Saddam Hussein at the moment and ...it is helping me to understand what I see on the news. "Ohh. So that's why the Shiites are so pissed ... " "Oh, so of course the Sunnis would feel that way..."

  contact Sheila Link: 4/16/2003 07:41:00 AM

 
MY APOLOGIES -

Blogger is really beginninig to piss me off. My archives and permanent links are all messed up. I am sick of this shite.

To anyone looking for the post linked to by Donald Sensing, it is a couple of posts below, entitled: "This just begs to be made fun of".

Again, on behalf of Blogger, I apologize ... I am trying to fix it, but, quite frankly, I have no idea what I am doing.

Movable Type beckons.

Stay tuned.

  contact Sheila Link: 4/16/2003 07:34:00 AM

 
THANK YOU, DONALD

Thank you, Mr. Sensing, for sending so many people my way to read yesterday's rant. To everyone who has reached me, via One Hand Clapping, welcome!

  contact Sheila Link: 4/16/2003 07:08:00 AM

 
THIS JUST BEGS TO BE MADE FUN OF

The title says it all. I thought it might be a spoof piece, an Onion piece, but no. It is real. It is sincere.

It's almost a shame to make vicious fun of such earnest people, but in my opinion they are begging for it.

The first two sentencec of this "news" article are ridiculous on multiple levels:

"Many Iraqi citizens have taken to the streets in recent days to celebrate their freedom from dictator Saddam Hussein. But that joy could turn to sorrow, anti-war protesters warn, when the Iraqis begin to see their country adopt western cultural values."

Hi, there, earnest earnest reporter. I know you really believe what you are saying, you want to believe that what you say is true, you actually HOPE that the Iraqis joy will turn to sorrow, because then you will have been RIGHT: but I must ask: did you get a load of Saddam's love shack?? It is a shrine to western cultural values, and actually: as a woman from the West I take offense. The man's taste is heinous. An embarrassment to anything "Western". Lamps shaped like women, mirrored bedroom, air-brushed "paintings" (scare quotes necessary, pardon) of nude women in the arms of massive blonde muscle men...Beanbag chairs, whirlpool bath ... blah blah. The Marines who discovered the "love shack" kept referencing Austin Powers, walking through the opulent cheesy decor, calling out to each other, "Groooovy, baby!" You just can't get more stereotypically Western than that.

Saddam Hussein wasn't sitting around on dusty carpets from Mesopotamia's ancient past, drinking camel's milk, and sipping on tea brewed from a sacred recipe of the sheikh who founded his village in 654 A.D. (or whatever) ... Hussein was slugging back cognac and whiskey, watching porn videos, and taking bubble baths. I think the "adoption" of "western cultural values" started at the top.

Also: just a reminder: "Western cultural values" does not just mean McDonalds and the Gap. Western cultural values include such things as :freedom, liberty, human rights. These earnest anti-globalization types always conveniently forget that. Or they put all those values in scare quotes. To show their contempt. Because if a white man had anything to do with it, then it has to be evil, and corrupt.

Other stupid things in this article:

Quote from "Stephanie Schaudel, co-coordinator for Voices in the Wilderness, an anti-war group in Chicago":

"Some people would think that seeing a KFC (formerly Kentucky Fried Chicken) on a street corner is a sign of progress, I certainly don't ... You can just look at what those kinds of businesses have done to the diet and health of many Americans to think that it might not be the number one thing we should be exporting. Iraqis have really good food, they don't need a KFC."

OKAY. EARTH TO SCHAUDEL. I am a voice shrieking through your wilderness:

Iraqis are STARVING. Okay? "Iraqis have really good food." What an idiotic thing to say. Yes, they do, Middle Eastern food is one of my all-time faves, it is yummy, Iraqis have a lovely culinary tradition (why are we even talking about such a stupid thing when there are dictators running about, and torture chambers dripping in blood?? This sort of stance is why the anti-war people are viewed as deeply un-serious), but back to Iraqis and their food: they do not have access to food, good or bad, their leader has perpetuated international sanctions and let his people starve, etc. etc. When you are STARVING you don't give a crap if you are eating culturally appropriate food which appreciates the "rich culture" (her words) from which you spring. You just want FOOD in your stomach. A Chicken McNugget or an organically grown spinach salad ... doesn't frigging matter. It's the privileged namby-pambies in the west who would love to see quaint cultural artifacts like subsistence agriculture be perpetuated, because the only alternative to that is a Starbucks on the corner of every rice paddy, and a Burger King running the local felafel stand out of town.

Ethiopian food is fantastic. But I don't remember any boneheads (certainly not liberals) at the time of their famine worrying, "Ethiopians have really good food. Don't infect them with our cultural values, and give them Western food ... Their food is good enough on their own."

There was a famine going on. The point is: to bring them corn and grain and water, and try to stop the famine. That's it. Whether it's Americans handing out the aid or Italians or Ghanians ... it's FOOD. For people who need it.

So condescending. What an unbelievably condescending thing to say to people who have been starving for decades.

The point is: she is focusing on the "diet and health" of the Iraqis under AMERICAN influence (I mean, really, this could be a parody) ... and the fact that they don't "need" KFC, because they "have really good food". Diet??? This is a privileged concept, spoken by a highly privileged woman.

The last ridiculous thing about this article is:

She bemoans the loss of the "rich culture", trompled on by the culture-less Americans rolling into town.

What I am about to say is an unpleasant fact to face, but it must be faced:

The Iraqis looted their own museum, the Iraqis destroyed the cultural history of their own country by rampaging through their museum of treasures, the Iraqis destroyed relics cherished by the world that can never ever be replaced. I know it's just history they destroyed, but I still think it's tragic. The Iraqis are going to NEED a sense of their past, of HISTORY, if they are ever going to come together and cohere as a state. They just destroyed one of the primary things they can be proud of: that the land on which they live has been consistently inhabited for thousands and thousands and thousands of years. The birth of civilization happened here. The Garden of Eden was here. It is very very important land. Everyone acknowledges that. And they just ransacked their own museums, trashing it, defacing things, crashing mummy cases ...

The coalition forces are now guarding the few untouched relics left in that museum. Guarding it from the Iraqis.

This is not a good sign.

(I found this ridiculous article about the threat of fast food to the Iraqs -- I mean, really, it's laughable -- from Steven den Beste -- who has been on fire these days.)



  contact Sheila Link: 4/15/2003 05:14:00 PM

 
HAND AND FOOT

Does anybody else see a photo-strip down the right-hand side of my blog, showing a hand and a foot, over and over, ad nauseum? I don't see it when I look at my blog, but Beth out there sees it.

What is it? Where did it come from?

  contact Sheila Link: 4/15/2003 04:20:00 PM

 
OVERHEARD

My morning commute takes me every day from Hoboken to Port Authority Bus Terminal in Times Square. Because of how hardly hit the Port Authority was by September 11, there are constant reminders of that day, throughout the building. Memorials still exist, posterboards on the wall signed by well-wishers, and, lastly, the place is crawling with cops. They are everywhere. It is a police state, that building. There are probably two cops for every commuter. Now the National Guardsmen have been added to that force, and they stroll about, in groups of twos or threes, in fatigues, black berets, with massive rifles.

I see these people every day. Sometimes I say "Thank you", if I meet their eyes (they always nod, humbly, and not too much changes in their eyes, which remain kind of flat ... flat, yet alert ... they are not swayed by thank yous, or gratitude ... they are just doing their job.). But mostly I don't even notice them anymore. They are a part of the landscape now, like the Au Bon Pain where I get my coffee, like the newsstands, like the eyeglasses kiosk.

This morning, walking by two black-uniformed donut-fed cops and one gorgeous tall National Guardsmen, I overheard the soldier say to the cops, "Hey, did you read that Al-Jazeera piece on ...." (didn't hear the rest). Then I heard one of the cops say, "Well, Al-Jazeera's stance has always been..."

And that was that.

I was barely aware of Al-Jazeera on September 10, 2001. I don't know too many people who would sit around talking about Al-Jazeera, let alone know about Al-Jazeera's stance on certain issues. Now I am. Now many people are.

A beautiful moment.

  contact Sheila Link: 4/15/2003 01:30:00 PM

 
THE RUSSIAN ARK

I cannot get the film I saw last night out of my mind. I began surfing around, looking for more information on it: specifically, the filming of it ... how it was done in one take, what it was like, etc.

Here's a picture of the cameraman, a hero in my book, lugging that thing around for 90 minutes, having to hit his marks, pick up the behavior, not miss a beat. This photo is taken during the filming of the movie.

Some quotes: (All quotes come from here.)

On the 23rd of December an unprecedented event will take place in St Petersburg. Inside the Hermitage the film director, Alexander Sokurov, will shoot a feature-length film, The Russian Ark, in an hour and a half of real time. The camera will be switched on and ninety minutes later switched off after proceeding through thirty-five rooms, crossing four centuries, and re-enacting history on the grand scale by means of an array of sophisticated effects. As many as eight hundred and fifty actors and extras will take part in some of the scenes in this unique production.

The film, like all films by Sokurov, will contain his visual meditations on the history of the Russian people and the lives of their descendants today, an amazing voyage through war, revolution, and social upheaval, which has left in its wake all the landmarks of a great culture. Like the biblical Ark, the Hermitage has steered a difficult course through the adverse currents of time and tide. A treasure-house of life and art, it is also a testament to the buoyancy of the human spirit.

We have lost or forgotten some of our traditions; we have greatly altered our way of life, for better or for worse; and our social behaviour and attitudes towards each other have changed radically over the centuries. Only the creation of the finest art, architecture, music and literature can sustain the idea of a greater humanity, and give it a point of anchorage for the future, a safe haven from the storm.

We will enter the Hermitage through the eye of the camera, encounter Peter the Great and Catherine, be caught up in the glamorous whirl of the ball, and attend a reception for foreign ambassadors given by Nicholas the First. We will meet the academic Orbelly, and Piotrovsky the Elder, former director of the Hermitage, see the palace during the Siege of Leningrad, and commune with Rembrandt through his paintings. The film will encompass history, politics, fine art, music and dancing. Shooting, if everything goes according to plan, will take place on the 23rd of December, and we are working hard to prepare everything for that day. Although our budget is limited , I am determined to realize this project. This is a highly original venture and if we succeed it might even become possible to make a film in a single day within the confines of a studio. It is not, of course, the customary way of making a film, but how tempting it is, like leaping off a twenty-metre tower as an act of faith. You just take a deep breath and step into space, believing, but not really knowing if you are going to survive.

As I said, there have been films with very long takes. Tarkovsky, in his lectures, gave the example of several hour-long shot of a sleeping man, and we learn that when the man eventually wakes up everybody feels relieved. That was just a film-makers joke. But we are talking now about a serious artistic work and one of great importance. The official preparatory period for the film commenced on 9 April. I mean puzzling over the palaces intricate geography, and the orchestration of movement through the maze, looking for actors, making costumes, seeking properties, rehearsing with and without a camera. We will have to add the soundtrack to the film after shooting. We will not be able to record sound during the shoot because all the commands and remarks would be heard, so later on we will have to make some very complex and subtle adjustments to the film, but as I said there will not be a single cut. That is why our film is going to be a serious problem for TV producers. They will have to take a risk and show it without any advertisements, as every advertisement, no matter how short, entails a cut. On the whole, this is a project for experienced and dedicated professionals. Everything will have to be calculated down to the last second and the least detail. I appeal to the producers not to be too economical. What we are going to attempt is the cinematic equivalent of climbing at high altitude, of using a small window of opportunity, in the face of adverse conditions and limitations of time, to enter a highly rarefied atmosphere, and we need first-class equipment to attain our cinematic peak. This enterprise is going to consume all of our time and energy, our oxygen, so to speak, for a considerable period. Anyone involved in the work will have to set everything else aside until the project has been realized. And who knows, at the end of the day, what the result will be.

-- There will be some people who will say: What a blasphemy!

-- You are right. And we will answer: On the contrary, this is absolutely wonderful and in complete accord with the Hermitage tradition of educating people. We will make the Hermitage and its history available to all those who do not have the good fortune to come to St Petersburg in person. I mean even those who live in Las Vegas, for example, and I will explain why we are organizing an exhibition centre there.? We will demonstrate to everybody the great value of the Hermitage, which is the fact that it is in effect the living fabric of which history is made. There is a common feature in the histories of the Hermitage and the Louvre. Both used to be palaces. But the Louvre is bereft of its former human inhabitants. It is a great palace of art, but it is not more than that. By contrast, the Hermitage is haunted by its past, and Socorro will strive to embody and thereby reveal the spirits who still inhabit it. It is that sense of living history in the Russian Ark which we hope to convey to the wider world. That is our mission.

13. Considering the costumes, the actors and the scope of the production, "Russian Ark" must have cost a lot of money. How much did it cost? Where did the money come from?

The State Hermitage has an enormous stake in the film, as it put in its authorship rights, and Andrey Deryabin's Hermitage Bridge Studio also has an enormous stake. The creation of such massive scenes in our film was made possible by our being able to hold rehearsals in the Hermitage, and the production designers did a huge amount of preparation. We had a great deal of discussion about the historical contexts and the sub-texts of those events and stories. Week after week, thanks to the concrete input on every scene from our partners - and, first and foremost, that means the State Hermitage - this polyphonic spectacle was allowed to arise.

The orchestra of the Mariinsky Theater appears in the 1913 ball scene, playing the role of the orchestra of Nicholas II's era. And the maestro Valery Gergiev, who looks like himself, but twenty years younger also appears. The brilliant idea of inviting Valery Gergiev came from the producer Andrey Deryabin. I was very worried by the idea, as I thought that getting a world famous conductor to take part in our filming would be a very risky undertaking. Getting the leading orchestra and the leading conductor took a lot of work, because they're forever moving about the world giving performances. It took a lot of work and, of course, an enormous desire and sacrifice from the maestro himself.

You have to give credit to Valery Gergiev: from the very moment we proposed the idea to him, he took an active part in solving all the problems involved and he flew in specially from New York for four hours - for the time it took us to shoot the film. That's something that a real artist does, an artist that understands that real art and real artistic intentions need to be protected by concrete undertakings, by concrete participation in projects of this kind. Of course, it's no accident that that episode comes at the end of the film. It's a calculated and conscious dramatic resolution, the film's own peak. From the point of view of the dramaturgy, the film's construction is quite unusual, with the main visual event coming at the end. But the one-shot filming allows the dramatic center of the film to be moved closer to the end. It's a refinement, a concrete idea, that could only be accomplished by virtue of the fact that all the components of the ball were prepared and planned long in advance.

14. Is it difficult to live in Russia today? Difficult to be an artist?

ANS: Living in Russia is no more difficult or no easier than living in any other country. We were born here, our roots are here, and our loves and our disappointments are also here.

In our everyday lives there are difficult moments as we live in a country where the political and economic conditions, for its inhabitants, don’t look entirely stable. Our country is going through the terrible test that is terrorism, just as the USA is.

We have a dramatic past that is largely connected with war.

From a professional point of view, we’re under an additional pressure of responsibility. It's a responsibility that we have as filmmakers because every artistic author in this country is surrounded by truly great predecessors.

In Russia lived and worked Dostoevsky, Rakhmaninov, Tchaikovsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov ... I could go on listing just the summit of the culture that preceded me. And I, as a representative of such a young phenomenon in culture as cinema - 100 years for art is nothing – have to compare what I do with that which has already been achieved in the context of art in Russia. Russia, for me, is a colossal cultural space with an amazing past and a vast future.

Each time I begin work, I feel the test that that pressure brings. What's film? Just electricity, nothing more. It's the rest that's important. Art existed long before us. It exists.

I'd like to pass on my thanks to everyone that comes to see our film and to wish that each of them gets something that's important personally to them from it. I hope that the audiences that see the film in the warm and friendly city that is San Francisco understand that all times exist in parallel with each other. Nothing has passed and nothing has disappeared into a black hole and everything can be understood. Everything will change, if we make the effort to understand.

... We've just heard on the radio of the catastrophe that has happened on the American space shuttle. Let all of us light candles in their memory. Words are powerless ...

I've already had some feedback on the first screenings, and the results have been a very pleasant surprise. I wrote an appeal to the American public, in which I expressed my concerned, slightly ironic position. I should probably take back some of my words now and should happily admit that I'm very grateful to the Americans for their having made the effort to understand the film. Every artistic work lives its life and, in an absolute sense, doesn't even need a spectator. It's already been made, it already exists. A member of the audience at The Russian Ark has to do a lot of work to understand it. On the other hand, someone going to the film without any preconceptions, with an open heart, gets everything.

 
MIDDLE EAST ROUNDUP

Got this one off The Command Post. I actually had it printed out yesterday (for my own obsessive records), and thought I would share it here. It's an overview of all of the governments in the Middle East: each country and who is in charge, what is up there with elections, is it a dictatorship, blah blah. Good information.

And just so you know: I will never defend Muslim society, ever, I will not make excuses for them, I will not look at root causes ... for many reasons, but mostly because of their barbaric treatment of women, their views of women. The governments of these regimes get no pass from me, and they've never gotten a pass from me. I find them to be primitive, cruel, and nasty, quite frankly. The PEOPLE from these countries are often quite lovely. Amazing, incredible people, who do not take on their governments' positions. I love the literature from the Middle East, the poetry, the cinema ... all of it is spectacular stuff. I am on the side of artists in those countries, and intellectuals, and philosophers and THINKERS, for Christ's sake ... I support them with all my heart. But their governments? And their mean-spirited "Handmaid's Tale" way of looking at women?

Redheaded Sheila says: Screw you.

Not that United Arab Emirates or Oman gives a crap what I think, but I thought I'd just state my opinion.



  contact Sheila Link: 4/15/2003 11:09:00 AM

 
COMPREHENDING EVIL

A very insightful piece in The Washington Post, entitled "Lies in the Absence of Liberty". Found it via Donald Sensing (who has been blogging like a madman ... terrific stuff.)

It hit a nerve with me, still vibrating from the film "The Russian Ark" last night. Tyranny crushing people's souls, people's minds. Families turned against each other, fear, terror, mistrust. So difficult to comprehend, if you have not lived it.

Wonderful analysis of it all. Top-notch.


  contact Sheila Link: 4/15/2003 10:35:00 AM

 
NOTABLES

A wonderful piece in The Times Online.

William Rees-Morg, former editor of The Times of London, writes:

The United States usually intervenes with reluctance — it took 13 years to get from the original invasion of Kuwait to the removal of the Saddam Hussein regime. The US has even tried to avoid intervention by propping up authoritarian regimes, as in modern Saudi Arabia. Yet the underlying American idea is the most revolutionary idea in the world. It is the idea of liberty, of human freedom, of self-government and of democracy.

Last week France, Germany and Russia met in St Petersburg to concert their reaction to the American victory. All three had refused to agree to intervention in Iraq on behalf of the United Nations. They share responsibility for the impotence of the UN. Yet France has been saved three times in the past 100 years by the United States, from Prussian militarism in 1917, from Nazi occupation in 1944, and from Soviet communism in the postwar years. French liberty is the product of American interventions; the French Government finds it shocking that the people of Iraq should have the same assistance. Jacques Chirac was a good friend of the dictator Saddam for 25 years in which Saddam killed some 2 million people. It was a corrupt partnership.

French liberty is the product of American interventions; the French Government finds it shocking that the people of Iraq should have the same assistance.

 
TAX DAY.....

ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

  contact Sheila Link: 4/15/2003 08:21:00 AM

 
THE RUSSIAN ARK, PART DEUX

What a movie. If "The Russian Ark" is playing at an art-house movie theatre in your area, you must see it. So much about it was extraordinary.

First of all: there's the whole "the entire movie is one take" phenomenon. Just to make clear what an accomplishment this is: there are probably over 3,000 people in this film. The camera moves from room to room in the St. Petersburg hermitage (my God, so beautiful it took my breath away) -- strolling through different scenes of Russian history ... At times the camera follows people down teeny dark spiral staircases... then a character will open a door into a massive art gallery, or a spectacular ballroom, and suddenly you see thousands of people from czarist Russia all doing the mazurka ... Because the entire film is done in one take, then that means that ... those thousands of people have been waiting in that room, in costume, waiting for the rest of the movie to take place, so that then they can come to life.

The camera, on its way through the building, will peek through windows, into a dark interior room, 5 or so people inside, something intense happening. We spy on them for a couple of minutes, and then we move on.

All the time with uninterrupted takes.

I am in awe. Martin Scorsese, famously in "Good Fellas", did that entire scene at the nightclub in one uninterrupted take ... Ray Liotta entering through the back, strolling through a hallway, entering the kitchen ... As an actor, I am in love with the thought of LIFE going on whether or not the camera is pointed at you. That is one of the marks of great film acting. There is a palpable sensation that you are only watching a sliver of life. If only you could peek outside the frames, if only you could stay in this room for one second longer ... you'd see all kinds of amazing things.

"The Russian Ark" felt like a dream, one of those dreams where doors keep opening, or you are walking through a house that you thought was familiar to you, but suddenly you discover another wing, another room.

I want to know how the HELL they filmed this movie. I want the coffee table book. Were there Production Assistants running ahead to the people in the next room, informing them: "Okay, the camera is on its way ...Take your positions please!" Were walkie talkies involved? How did they do it?? And what was it like for the many many many people in the last scene ... who had to wait over an hour for the camera to arrive? The last scene was a ball, with a full orchestra playing... czars and czarinas and nobility, in incredible costumes, dancing, and laughing and talking ... 1,000 people in the scene probably.

There were times when my experience, as an audience member, was primarily about; "How the HELL did they do this??" I couldn't get over it. But then there were times that I completely forgot about the one-take, and got wrapped up in the events on the screen.

It certainly helped that I know a bit of Russian history, but it's not necessary to have that in order to get into the film. The film does a pretty good job of letting you know who is who. Oh, there's Catherine the Great, etc. However, if you do have a bit of context (CONTEXT IS DECISIVE), then you will have eerie moments of recognition. Encountering characters who you feel you know, as if these historical people were well-known by you personally ...

At one point, the camera enters this long spectacular green-walled hallway. In the hallway there are 4 vivacious young girls, so beautiful in a child-like way that you want to cry. They all have long ringlets, with flowers woven into their hair, they are wearing diaphonous dresses, and ballet slippers. They are heart-achingly beautiful, and they are in a riotous mood. Running as quickly as they can down the endless hallway, batting themselves back and forth, from wall to wall, laughing hysterically, their hair streaming behind them. They look like mermaids on the run. And nothing was said at first ... you just see the scene unfold. Everything bathed in a greenish light because of the walls, and these four rambunctious young fairies catapulting riotously down the hallway. And I knew who they were, as if they were from my own family. My heart tugged up at the sight of them, their youth, their beauty, their innocece ...They have no idea that they will all be murdered. The Romanov girls. And then a nurse-maid, or a nun, in another room, says, "Anastasia, what are you doing?" or something like that. I knew. I knew from the moment I saw them, who they were.

So a tiny bit of knowledge of Russian history certainly helps. Also, they found an actor who looks, no lie, EXACTLY like Nicholas. Jesus. He looked exactly like the dude. It was bizarre.

The movie works on another level, what I would call a subterranean level.

Ted and I were so stirred up by the whole thing that we had to go out afterwards and drink wine and talk like maniacs.

The Russians are trying to reclaim their long history, after decades of totalitarian silence. They are building an Ark. What will go in the Ark? What will survive? What already HAS survived, despite Stalin's attempts to wipe out the past? History did not begin in 1917.

I kept waiting for Stalin to appear. But he did not.

He does not get to go on the Ark.

This was fascinating to me. Tragic. The continued ambivalence of the Russian people toward this monster...He wasn't in the film at all, nobody spoke his name, he is unmentionable, and yet, for me, he hovered over the whole thing. All of these ancient events, the camera moving inexorably from room to room... I thought every time a door opened, he would be standing there.

That, to me, was a statement all on its own: the film's silence towards Stalin.

It was tragic.

The last scene of the film is the czarist ball, with the full orchestra, all of these people having the time of their lives ... the scene went on and on and on. The camera swooping around the dancers, entering the dance floor, following the couples dancing, moving along the spectators, then sweeping up to get an overview of the orchestra ... The scene had no beginning, middle, or end. It was just life. That's all. Life captured on celluloid.

But the very length of the scene caused a reaction inside of me ... I could sense we were nearing the end of the journey. And everyone kept laughing, and talking, and living their lives ... while (I knew this, just because of what happened next in the history books) revolution was stirring outside. I got an intense sensation of watching a world which was just about to die. And they have no idea how close the end is.

The orchestra finishes the song, and the crowd gives them an extended ovation. The clapping and cheering goes on and on and on. There were smiles on every face. The conductor continued to bow, gracious, smiling. It seemed that they would never stop applauding.

A happy scene, yes? But as it kept going, as they kept clapping ...suddenly, out of nowhere, I got this massive lump in my throat. Huge. I suddenly wanted to cry. It was more of a physical response, than a purely emotional one. it literally felt like my heart rose up into my throat. And I didn't know why ... but of course, on some level, I did know why.

The companion of the unseen narrator, who has been strolling thru the whole movie, taking us in and out of scenes, suddenly turns and looks directly at the camera. What a frigging look on this man's face. No words. It was just a look. All the sadness of the ages in his face. So incongrous, because all around them were laughing happy glamorous people. The narrator (who is just a voice throughout ... the man who, we assume, is holding the camera), suddenly says, in a confused voice, "I'm sad."

That may have been my favorite moment.

The narrator says then: "So where to now? Should we move forward?" (He means forward in time.)

A look flashes across the companion's face. Jesus. It was amazing. What was the look? I would say: I saw fear. And grief. Or maybe it was just terror I saw, and I, knowing the end, added the grief. Projected it onto him. I have no idea. And all he said was: "Forward?" He didn't want to move forward. We all know what happened next after the Czars. The Bolsheviks are next. The Bolsheviks are "forward".

And the companion does not want to go. "I don't want to go forward. I think I will stay here."

But the sadness I saw ... "sadness" is a tepid word to describe what I saw on that man's face.

I am not Russian. I do not have the Russian history behind me as a cultural memory. Their memories, as a people, are not mine. But that doesn't matter.

In that moment, that moment of terror and grief on his face, I "got" what has happened to Russia. I felt it. As opposed to just understanding it from books.

Jesus. It was amazing.

Ted and I were blown away.


  contact Sheila Link: 4/15/2003 06:54:00 AM

 
THE RUSSIAN ARK

Finally, I am going to go see the movie "The Russian Ark" tonight. I have heard much about it. Filmed entirely in the hermitage in St. Petersburg, it is a panoramic view of Russian history ... (a big deal for the nation, whose leaders so often want to erase the past). But the most fascinating thing about this movie is:

The entire 90 minutes of it is ONE TAKE.

People drool with praise over Martin Scorsese's 15 minute takes, or Robert Altman's unbelievably long take at the beginning of "The Player" -- and don't get me wrong ... they are masterful. It's so fun to try to imagine how they pulled it off. But "The Russian Ark", moving through the different rooms of the Hermitage is one long uninterrupted take.

Going with my friend Ted this evening. Then we'll grab a drink, something to eat. Should be good.

  contact Sheila Link: 4/14/2003 05:46:00 PM

 
LOSE THE SCARE QUOTES

I have always hated scare quotes. You know, like: "free", "patriotic", "tuna fish sandwich" -- whatever. They're cowardly. Sneaky. Lazy. Never could put my finger on why I felt this way, I just knew I couldn't bear to read an article filled with scare quotes. Especially if terrorism was put in the quotes, or terrorist. These writers are cowards.

Anyway, my emotions about the whole thing are rather vague, inarticulate ... but along comes this piece which describes exactly my problem with the scare quote epidemic. It's so comforting when another writer expresses exactly something you may have been struggling to describe.

I thought, reading it: "YES. That is exactly what bothers me about those snarky little quotes around everything, too!"

I call on editors to cut these cowardly quotes out and to notice when your journalists on this lazy tactic overuse the device. "Language" loses all "meaning" when every other "word" is in quotation marks. See what I mean? The reporter is then sneerig at everything, it's all post-modern, de-construction, blah blah. It's bad writing, is what it really is.

Or I should probably say "bad" "writing".

The whole thing makes me tired.


  contact Sheila Link: 4/14/2003 05:27:00 PM

 
DENNIS MILLER

Finally saw some of Dennis Miller's HBO special last night. I've always thought he was phenomenal, mainly because of his mastery of the English language. The man cannot be beat. I love a quick mind, I love language, and I also love his anger. I find it exhilarating. Especially because, of course, the rage is not inarticulate with him, as it often is with me. His way of dealing with how angry he is is by pouring it all into words. It doesn't hurt that I agree with most of his sentiments.

Judging from the cheering clapping crowd in Chicago, I am not alone.

Quotes from his special have already been posted far and wide ... but this one may be my particular favorite. I love, too, how caustic he gets. Sarcasm dripping off his lips, poison. He's PISSED.

He sets out to attack people who say, "But what about the Founding Fathers? They were civil libertarians ... they would not have wanted to see the government take away people's civil rights ..."

Miller says, "The Founding Fathers?? Gimme a break. Do you think for one second that the Founding Fathers would have put up with ANY of this shit? I mean, come on! They were blowing people's heads off because there was a tax on their breakfast drink, okay?"

  contact Sheila Link: 4/14/2003 08:05:00 AM

 
I should move to Wales. Or Ireland. Somewhere where it rains all the time.

We have had such a long extended winter here ... Everyone around me is dying for the spring. I wish that it would stay rainy and windy forever.

It is reverse SAD. I have a hard time during the sunny warm months. I relish the cold, the biting wind. I feel more creative and more energized in rainy grey weather. Sunshine makes me grumpy. Uninspired. A cranky crack-pot.

I had my women's group Friday night. We left at 11:30 or so, into a dripping rainy darkness. The air crisp and biting. I took a deep breath, God, so beautiful....I said, outloud, "It's so beautiful out..." at the very same moment that Brooke groaned: "GOD, will this rain every stop???"

We heard one another, and burst out laughing.

It's looking like it's going to be a bright warm blue-skied day.

Yuk.

  contact Sheila Link: 4/14/2003 07:59:00 AM

 
THIS JUST BEGS TO BE MADE FUN OF

The title says it all. I thought it might be a spoof piece, an Onion piece, but no. It is real. It is sincere.

It's almost a shame to make vicious fun of such earnest people, but in my opinion they are begging for it.

The first two sentencec of this "news" article are ridiculous on multiple levels:

"Many Iraqi citizens have taken to the streets in recent days to celebrate their freedom from dictator Saddam Hussein. But that joy could turn to sorrow, anti-war protesters warn, when the Iraqis begin to see their country adopt western cultural values."

Hi, there, earnest earnest reporter. I know you really believe what you are saying, you want to believe that what you say is true, you actually HOPE that the Iraqis joy will turn to sorrow, because then you will have been RIGHT: but I must ask: did you get a load of Saddam's love shack?? It is a shrine to western cultural values, and actually: as a woman from the West I take offense. The man's taste is heinous. An embarrassment to anything "Western". Lamps shaped like women, mirrored bedroom, air-brushed "paintings" (scare quotes necessary, pardon) of nude women in the arms of massive blonde muscle men...Beanbag chairs, whirlpool bath ... blah blah. The Marines who discovered the "love shack" kept referencing Austin Powers, walking through the opulent cheesy decor, calling out to each other, "Groooovy, baby!" You just can't get more stereotypically Western than that.

Saddam Hussein wasn't sitting around on dusty carpets from Mesopotamia's ancient past, drinking camel's milk, and sipping on tea brewed from a sacred recipe of the sheikh who founded his village in 654 A.D. (or whatever) ... Hussein was slugging back cognac and whiskey, watching porn videos, and taking bubble baths. I think the "adoption" of "western cultural values" started at the top.

Also: just a reminder: "Western cultural values" does not just mean McDonalds and the Gap. Western cultural values include such things as :freedom, liberty, human rights. These earnest anti-globalization types always conveniently forget that. Or they put all those values in scare quotes. To show their contempt. Because if a white man had anything to do with it, then it has to be evil, and corrupt.

Other stupid things in this article:

Quote from "Stephanie Schaudel, co-coordinator for Voices in the Wilderness, an anti-war group in Chicago":

"Some people would think that seeing a KFC (formerly Kentucky Fried Chicken) on a street corner is a sign of progress, I certainly don't ... You can just look at what those kinds of businesses have done to the diet and health of many Americans to think that it might not be the number one thing we should be exporting. Iraqis have really good food, they don't need a KFC."

OKAY. EARTH TO SCHAUDEL. I am a voice shrieking through your wilderness:

Iraqis are STARVING. Okay? "Iraqis have really good food." What an idiotic thing to say. Yes, they do, Middle Eastern food is one of my all-time faves, it is yummy, Iraqis have a lovely culinary tradition (why are we even talking about such a stupid thing when there are dictators running about, and torture chambers dripping in blood?? This sort of stance is why the anti-war people are viewed as deeply un-serious), but back to Iraqis and their food: they do not have access to food, good or bad, their leader has perpetuated international sanctions and let his people starve, etc. etc. When you are STARVING you don't give a crap if you are eating culturally appropriate food which appreciates the "rich culture" (her words) from which you spring. You just want FOOD in your stomach. A Chicken McNugget or an organically grown spinach salad ... doesn't frigging matter. It's the privileged namby-pambies in the west who would love to see quaint cultural artifacts like subsistence agriculture be perpetuated, because the only alternative to that is a Starbucks on the corner of every rice paddy, and a Burger King running the local felafel stand out of town.

Ethiopian food is fantastic. But I don't remember any boneheads (certainly not liberals) at the time of their famine worrying, "Ethiopians have really good food. Don't infect them with our cultural values, and give them Western food ... Their food is good enough on their own."

There was a famine going on. The point is: to bring them corn and grain and water, and try to stop the famine. That's it. Whether it's Americans handing out the aid or Italians or Ghanians ... it's FOOD. For people who need it.

So condescending. What an unbelievably condescending thing to say to people who have been starving for decades.

The point is: she is focusing on the "diet and health" of the Iraqis under AMERICAN influence (I mean, really, this could be a parody) ... and the fact that they don't "need" KFC, because they "have really good food". Diet??? This is a privileged concept, spoken by a highly privileged woman.

The last ridiculous thing about this article is:

She bemoans the loss of the "rich culture", trompled on by the culture-less Americans rolling into town.

What I am about to say is an unpleasant fact to face, but it must be faced:

The Iraqis looted their own museum, the Iraqis destroyed the cultural history of their own country by rampaging through their museum of treasures, the Iraqis destroyed relics cherished by the world that can never ever be replaced. I know it's just history they destroyed, but I still think it's tragic. The Iraqis are going to NEED a sense of their past, of HISTORY, if they are ever going to come together and cohere as a state. They just destroyed one of the primary things they can be proud of: that the land on which they live has been consistently inhabited for thousands and thousands and thousands of years. The birth of civilization happened here. The Garden of Eden was here. It is very very important land. Everyone acknowledges that. And they just ransacked their own museums, trashing it, defacing things, crashing mummy cases ...

The coalition forces are now guarding the few untouched relics left in that museum. Guarding it from the Iraqis.

This is not a good sign.

(I found this ridiculous article about the threat of fast food to the Iraqs -- I mean, really, it's laughable -- from Steven den Beste -- who has been on fire these days.)



  contact Sheila Link: 4/13/2003 01:34:00 PM

 
SANDRA MACKEY: THE RECKONING

Here is an excerpt from Mackey's book, which is essential reading at the moment. It breaks down the history, culture, problems of Iraq/Mesopotamia for the past 4,500 years, up through the regime of Saddam Hussein. It gives you a microscopic view which you just won't get in the media. It's too much information. Mackey's prose flows. It is eminently readable. Human.

It was published before this war began. It provides a roadmap of the cultural, religious, ethnic, economic boundaries which divide this nation. These problems will not dissolve because of April 9. Of course, those in charge, know this well, and much better than I! But reading this book has been an education.

I spoke about "context" on Friday. How the most important thing for those of us watching the events unfold is CONTEXT. Mackey's book provides context like nothing else.

From the introduction:

At some point, Saddam Hussein will fall from the oppressive weight of his own regime, rumored health problems, spontaneous rebellioin, or American action precipitated by the war on terrorism. When that happens, the United States must be prepared for what will follow. Immediately after the boot is lifted from the neck of the Iraqis, a bloodbath is likely to ensue as each group pours out its anger at decades of despotism,enormous suffering under the sanctions, and real and perceived injustices of one group against the other. Even without blood, there will be chaos within the ruins of a police state that never gave the Iraqis any opportunity to participate in governing. The Iraqis will not be able to restore order alone. And order cannot be maintained without an enormous, and perhaps unsuccessful, effort at nation building. Failing that, Iraq will likely fragment. Regardless of whether the Iraqis slaughter each other, go their separate ways, or somehow hold themselves together, the United States will be drawn into Iraq in a role it might not choose but cannot avoid. Caught in the swift currents of geography, history, ethnic identity, sectarianism, and tribalism, Iraq will become its own imperative to American interests.

Iraq is the bridge between the Islamic Republic of Iran and the heart of the Fertile Crescent. It possesses vast oil resources critically needed by the American and world economy. It is surrounded by neighbors, most of whom are American allies, who are terrified that the country will fragment, creating another whole set of problems for the internal order in each of these states. As a boiling cauldron of bitter resentment against the United States for its enforcement of the sanctions, Iraq is a place where ambitious China can flex its muscle on the international stage and a hungry Russia can attempt to reclaim its influence in the Middle East. For all of these reasons, the United States, whether it wants to or not,is going to be ensnarled in post-Hussein Iraq. To avoid the deceptive simplicity that the fall of Saddam Hussein by itself will bring security and stability to the Persian Gulf, both the U.S.government and the American people must face with brutal honesty the realities of the country of Iraq.

Iraq is a state, not a nation. Over the eighty years of their common history, the Iraqis have engaged in a conflicted, and at times convoluted, search for a common identity. At different times, different groups have sought this identity in the symbols of ancient Mesopotamia, pan-Arabism, a nebulous Iraqi nationalism, and the socialist agenda of Saddam Hussein. But Iraqis as a whole have never reached consensus within either a real or a manufactured singularity. Instead, they remain trapped in the mythology of Mesopotamia, the great 7th century schism of Islam, neglect under the Ottoman Empire, misguided British colonialism, a failed monarchy, savage domestic politics waged under military regimes, and the most brutal of police states run by Saddam Hussein. Each of these elements in its own particular way has contributed to what Iraq is today. This is the Iraq wiwth which American foreign policy must deal. The failure to understand the complications of Iraqi political culture, with or without Hussein, threatens to spring the same trap of misperceptions that ensnared the United States in Vietnam. But unlike the jungles of Southeast Asia that only shaded the strategic interests of the Cold War, Iraq sits on the Persian Gulf. What happensto the stability of the Gulf directly relates to the economic well-being of every American. A warning of the looming peril posed by chaos in Iraq sounded before the first bomb fell in the Gulf War. Boutros-Boutros Ghali, the Egyptian diplomat who later became secretary general of the United Nations, voiced the troubling truth: "The real problem for the Middle Ests is not the Gulf crisis per se, but the problems we will face after the crisis is 'resolved'." It is time to realize why. The hour is late.


  contact Sheila Link: 4/13/2003 01:08:00 PM