Having to stop a government

Not since that invasion,
announced histrionically
as not an invasion, of
Cambodia in 1970, have
Americans felt so close
to their natural obliga-
tion to set aside the
government purporting
to act for them. Their
sense of this would re-
quire another 4 years,
ultimately, to be vin-
dicated in connection
with a violation of an 
office of politicians.

How ironically close
to mockery, the facts
must sound, today. And
they are.

          Coldly the sun shone down on the moonlit scene.

          Our committee stirred uneasily in its sleep.

          Better not know too much too soon all about it.

          The knees of grammar and syntax touched each other,

          Furtive in pleasure under the oaken table.

          The river lay not moving under the light

          Of the shadowy earthly winter lunar scene.

          The ends of justice are determined in

          The conditions of our sleep. The spellbound scene

          Arranged itself in a traditional way.

          Transfixed and perfectly still. Unspoken agreements

          Spoke volumes on the bookshelves of the room.

We know the scent of stir-

ring from a slumber fed

by loyalty and trust; the

thirst for honest stories

heaves a warm, extracted 

must of provenance, reborn.

         _____

This posting was prepared be-

fore the government announced

its withdrawal of the United

States from co-operation with

what has come to be called,

the Paris Accord on Climate;

and the point of view given

above is based on vastly more

than policy distinctions. But

the day will come, and may it

be soon, when the government's

act toward that Accord pales,

utterly, beneath the tone and

texture of its pathetically de-

ranged arguments and excuses,

flooded with complexes of per-

secution, victimhood, tribal

piety and remorseless vengeance.

Our generation was not living,

when Hitler announced his with-

drawal from the Treaty of Ver-

sailles, but that pathology we

have all been raised to recog-

nize, is grotesquely projected

as patriotism by this government.

It is not well, it does not mean

well, and it can not bode well.

David Ferry

Of No Country I Know

    Dwelling Places

      The Committee

1993

University of Chicago Press, 1999©

Narcissistic foreplay

Don't we all just love it:

the American President's re-

nowned sense of the exquis-

ite (last exhibited by his

daughter on a billboard in 

Manila), is being brought

to bear upon his oft-bruited

promise of a grand decision,

with characteristic decisive-

ness, regarding his African-

American predecessor's sig-

nal foreign policy triumph.

Like all such benchmarks of

sobriety and progress, he

thrills in protracting an

animus without, in the event,

achieving quite the shred-

ding that he promises his

interesting adherents. Will

he work some accomplishment

now, on their behalf, they've

lacked since his investiture?

He's given himself a toy he

must break, called suspense.

But will he lose his racial

bogeyman, by unwonted deed?

And without that trusted pet,

would he not stand alone?

Nick Mutolo

Origins of Wednesday li: Displacements, ubiquitous

Ghoulish humor in particular
provided ways of starting to
assimilate the enormity of
what was happening without
fully accepting it as fact.
With flippant remarks, peo-
ple could try to displace
fact into the realm of the
absurd, without quite dis-
pelling their own profound
unease.

As a proud result of his incontinent

tour of Wahabi palaces and European

councils, the American President's

conduct abroad has resulted in his

nation's summary dismissal from the

Atlantic alliance of which it was a

founding architect, in his own life-

time. Two generations of prodigious,

if not prodigal sacrifice, pissed a-

way by blandishments of blackmail no

one was buying, a reversal of rôles

so diametric as to vindicate Hegel.

His art of the dull, that pulp comic,

has been exposed for what it is: o-

verreaching, untrustworthy, and bank-

rupt to the vacant core of its being.

Elsewhere, from the conservation of

the planet to the guardianship of dig-

nity, itself, his torch of vengeance

on life's worth ignites its inferno.

Now we have a sitcom to which human-

ity has turned to make light of the

facts of abysmal rot at the pinnacle

of the American government. Boys are

joking in their showers, of how many

aliens we have rendered into soap, as

the stench of shame gushing from the

White House drenches every nostril in

these borders. The people fervently

pray for foreign powers to ignore us,

only to find how meaningless we are.

This cannot go on, the PTA of the

media say, and will stop as soon

as the Republicans have bled the

Treasury dry for their donors. No

one who's read his Tacitus is buy-

ing into that, until the gorging

horde have raped this House apart,

and fed their priests our hearts.

By the time we're given an elec-

tion, they will welcome us to it.

Nicholas Stargardt

The German War

  The Shared Secret

The Bodley Head, 2015©

Remembering correspondences

  About untidiness. The stage 
  I object to is when a room 
  gets so untidy that one can't 
  find where anything is. I 
  don't mind things getting out 
  of place and dusty, as long as 
  I can find them as soon as I 
  want them. I don't believe 
  chaos begins until things get 
  lost. 
  I feel more and more strongly
  that I oughtn't to be doing his-
  tory: I really begin to regret 
  not having taken up English.
  It seems to be the only subject
  which gives you a chance to do a
  good deal of thinking on your 
  own.

Surely in either subject all one can do is to react originally. I mean when you were quite a small boy & I asked you what you were thinking about & you said - 'Whether Cromwell was really sincere' or that you were wondering what Napoleon could have done for France, if he'd cared more about France than himself ..




John Cornford's correspondence
with his mother while a school-
boy in Buckinghamshire, at 
Stowe, led to his taking First
Class honors in History and an
unforgettable career in Spain
as a soldier poet, where his
death at 21 in 1936 occurred 
on his birthday. His essay on
what was wrong with the teach-
ing of history at Cambridge
is the tale of how it was lost -
an objectionable untidiness.

                  All last night we lay so close,

                  All completeness of the heart

                  The restless future will efface -

                  Tomorrow night we sleep apart.

                  

                  The eyeless shutter clamping out,

                  Dear, the certainty of your touch;

                  All the warmth and all the light -

                  Oh don't think, it hurts too much.

                  

                  Though your nerves are frozen numb

                  Your sorrow will not make time stop,

                  You're not a statue but a man;

                  Oh don't grieve, it doesn't help.

While we're hung up still with

Cromwell, and whether he's sin-

cere, this is not the recurring

untidiness which a false sense

of history familiarly suggests.

Its a lingering one, how it was

lost.

John Cornford

  and Frances Cornford

1931

John Cornford

A Happy New Year

1936

Understand the Weapon,

  Understand the Wound: 

Collected Writings

Jonathan Galassi

  editor

Carcanet Press, 1976©

iv  Lee Yong Kun, undated

vi  John Cornford, undated

Freshman numerals

I don't know who this is

but I know what he means.

I assimilated that char-

acter of life from those

who went through it, who

lent scope and shape, to

a degree, to my own time.

I don't know who this is

but I know what he means.

Not through rhetoric but

through experience, some

spontaneous recognitions

affix themselves through

him to my understandings.

I don't know who this is

but I know what he means.

Not through rhetoric and

experience except in the

present in America, with

its harshnesses gathered

through time as if those

freshman numerals belong

to a jacket gone missing.

I don't know who this is

but I know what he means.

He means to sharpen vow-

els as consonants, fork-

ing us himself with pon-

iards of thrilling male-

volence, a jackboot mor-

on to soothe indignation

and deny reconciliations.

Not that this means he's

not an inexhaustibly use-

ful fool in his own sabo-

tage. Just as Republican

sages planned to exploit

his frailties, they show-

ed themselves as darken-

ing their own tidy name.

Oh, my. The scheme is up

in smoke; their embraces

of each other nullify it.

Geoff Brown

Worker in a tire shop

Nashville

undated

Achieving Thursday: learning from pictures

This excellent photograph, said by

our internet sources to come down

to us from the many-rivered vicinity

of Richmond, Virginia in the 1950s,

documents the adjustment in disposi-

tions we associate with a departure.

There has been a change, which will

play itself out through layers of

revision of this palpable bond, we

might not expect to see visibly ex-

panded, but we see its consequence.

To take a moment to take it in, has 

been to learn to govern projection 

of the self upon the data received,

but also to resolve to discover it.

It is the practice of citizenship,

whose mastery urges itself upon us

as an elementary discrimination now,

between sentiment and plain evidence.

Origins of Wednesday L: Look away? ii

         The Secession war? Nay, let me call it the Union war.

         Though whatever call'd, it is even yet too near us -

         too vast and too closely overshadowing - its branches

         unform'd yet, (but certain,) shooting far into the fu-

         ture - and the most indicative and mightiest of them

         yet ungrown. A great literature will yet arise out of

         the era of those four years, those scenes - era com-

         pressing centuries of native passion, first-class pic-

         tures, tempests of life and death - an inexhaustible

         mine for the histories, drama, romance, and even phil-

         osophy, of peoples to come - indeed the verteber of

         poetry and art, (of personal character too,) for all

         future America - far more grand, in my opinion, to the

         hands capable of it, than Homer's siege of Troy, or 

         the French wars to Shakespeare.

        

 But I must leave these speculations,

 and come to the theme I have assign'd

 myself to. Of the actual murder of

 President Lincoln, though so much has 

 been written, probably the facts are 

 indefinite in most persons' minds ..

Walt Whitman

Complete Poetry

  and Collected Prose

    Democratric Vistas

      Collect

1867

Justin Kaplan

  editor

The Library of America, 1982©

David Cole

The Sessions Threat

  More Dangerous than Trump

The New York Review of Books

May 23, 2017©

J.D. Crowe, drawing

2016