Saturday commute lxxxviii: frontiers of the railway child

.. for when you lose your happiness,

I always say, you lose your life.

.. Wordsworth dramatises the predicament

by recollecting the sense of alienation

and traitorous disaffection which he ex-

perienced in church during the prayers 

for the success of the English armies.

No shock before or since, Wordsworth says,

no blow administered to what he calls his

moral nature equalled the disorienting

force of this sudden fissure that had o-

pened in his loyalties. And, of course,

the poem in which Wordsworth reports the

trauma is the very poem whose composition

was part of the process of healing the

trauma. 'The Prelude' is about a conscious-

ness coming together through the effort of

articulating its conflict and crises. And

the same could be said of much poetry from

Northern Ireland. For the best efforts there

have been evident in writing that is a mode

of integration, of redistributing the whole

field of cultural and political force into

a tolerable order.

       

       When we climbed the slopes of the cutting

       We were eye-level with the white cups

       Of the telegraph poles and the sizzling wires.

       Like lovely freehand they curved for miles

       East and miles west beyond us, sagging

       Under their burden of swallows.

       We were small and thought we knew nothing

       Worth knowing. We thought words travelled the wires

       In the shiny pouches of raindrops,

       Each one seeded full with the light

       Of the sky, the gleam of the lines, and ourselves

       So infinitesimally scaled

       We could stream through the eye of a needle.

       

Seamus Heaney

The Burial at Thebes

  A Version of Sophocles' 'Antigone'

  Speech of The Messenger

Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2004©

The Redress of Poetry

  The Frontiers of Writing

  Oxford lecture

  November 23, 1993

Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1995©

Station Island

  The Railway Children

Faber & Faber, 1985©

                                                                                                          

Long night out

   But when the sun shines on the earth,

   In reality

   It does not shine on a thing that remains

   What it was yesterday.

   The sun rises

   On whatever the earth happens to be.

And there are indeterminate moments

Before it rises ..

Before one can tell

What the bottle is going to be -

Porcelain, Venetian glass,

Egyptian .

Well, there are moments

When the candle, sputtering up,

Finds itself in seclusion,

And shines, perhaps, for the beauty of shining.

That is the seclusion of sunrise

Before it shines on any house.

Wallace Stevens

Collected Poetry and Prose

Frank Kermode and

  Joan Richardson, editors

Three Travelers Watch a Sunrise

  A Play

1916

The Library of America, 1997©

I don't want to be in politics and war

  D'you remember John Adams?

  Of course you do. We share

  his dream of exemption for

  our youth, from war, poli-

  tics, and (although he did

  not say it), he implied, a

  money frenzy commonly pur-

  sued in the democracies.

  On the other hand, sharing

  Adams' dream does rely upon

  an a priori seizure of cap-

  ital, if not a government.

  Government is old but money

  is quite new. It is easier,

  and so few need ever notice.

  Our nations are for hire or

  for let, and gold is always

  fungible. They are cyphers

  to allow to flutter by day, 

  to haul them down at night.

  To be cut from that cloth.

If the shoe fits

Under the circumstances -

to which, momentarily, we

will come - it was perfect-

ly reasonable for Gérard to

wonder what footwear to ad-

opt for his parade by the

reflecting pool today. Hop-

ing for the best could take

at least two forms, and in

his permutative mind there

naturally were more.

The circumstances that per-

plexed him were not meteor-

ological or epistemological,

but tweakingly rhetorical:

the philosophes of the right

were out en masse, to giggle

at his naïveté. They accused

him of walking to summon a

better world; and nothing de-

lights a right-winger more,

than to cite the folly this

represents. 

No, he resolved, I'll just

show up for playing fair. 

An extreme lack of dignity in the conduct of the state

I could almost fancy my-

self ripening too, along 
with the oranges and the 
limes in that grateful 
warmth - or in watching 
the dace that darted to 
and fro in the fish-pond, 
at the bottom of the gar-
den, with here and there 
a great sulky pike hanging 
midway down the water in 
silent state, as if it 
mocked at their impertin-
ent friskings, - I had more 
pleasure in these busy-idle 
diversions than in all the 
sweet flavours of peaches, 
nectarines, oranges, and 
such like common baits of 

children.

Is this in the short list
of the brightest and most
humane prose writing this
language has heard? Ignor-
ing the intensity and del-
icacy of this writer's
bucolic similes, is there
not, when you hold your own
child close, praise for the
vision of his development?

Mr John Kerry attended the

St Paul's School. I hold a

Paulie, with several of whom

I rowed, and not a few with

whom I got drunk over cards

in those undergrad years, to

a reasonable standard of sob-

riety when introducing one to

a new war.

Now I hear, the sulky pike is

about to chastise the little

fish, for besmirching the vows

of a government which does not

reign over them. How used one

is, to this information!

Mad as it could be portrayed

to be, I feel an obligation 

to my readers to dissect this

tragic series of remarks, as

virtually a Virgilian ledger

of the corruption of a harvest.

The sensation - and we all do

know it - of ripening under a

struggle to learn and to mas-

ter - is such, in Lamb, that 

the catastrophe of any mis-

direction feels like a dis-

avowal of nature, itself.

At the moment, however, one

has to rely on the theory of

republican government: that

all are implicated by consent

in its conduct. If one can

consent to a war precipitated

on the basis of revolting pic-

tures; if one cannot contain

one's panic when the evidence

of rage's impotency is exposed; 

if one can honestly regard death

as an instrument of instruction,

then one may assert any umbrage
as a Cause. And cut the cards.

Charles Lamb

Elia
  Dream-Children,

  A Reverie

London Magazine

January, 1822

ibid.

Jonas Kloch

Theirs was a dignity springing

Theirs was a dignity springing

from the very depth of their

desolation; as to be naked is

to be so much nearer to the be-

ing a man, than to go in livery.

I wonder, that a lifetime of

listening to right-wing cal-

umnies against the human hand-

iwork of feudal oppression can

fail to inoculate one for their

refrain, every time demand for

justice gains a common cadence

in the street. Underneath all

the undoubtedly meretricious

manipulations of symbolism to

be expected in this week's re-

vival of 1963's mobilisation

at the Lincoln Memorial, in-

cluding yet another mockery

of commitment by the President,

there remains the unblinkable

fact of feudalism's enduring

fashion, and lower still, the

flippant phrases of its ideo-

logy. I remember when Summer

re-runs of our sitcoms could

draw us back to our devices

with more dramatic credibil-

ity. Suspense is not a strong

suit in our demagogues, and

human character is conspicu-

ous by its absence.

I've been spending the most

wonderful mid-August days

just now, thanks to my in-

dulgent Mayfair bookseller,

whose recommendation of a

philosophical new text has

filled some hours with the

tellingly distilled botan-

icals of pure Thatcherism.

John Gray's ruminations an-
ticipate so well Gerson's

and Will's, Krauthammer's

and Brooks' to befall us

this week, that I'm almost

ready to pay for them im-

mediately, instead of al-

lowing any implication of

Gray's being for hire to

mar his native villainy.

I have friends who make

the same excuse for these

four horsemen, emolument

exhibiting its gift for

redemption, yet again.

The catarrh of contumely

scarcely gathers specific

gravity of spittle, any-

more, clichés of contempt

cascading from the gorge

as the dessications of old

wind that they are. A few

dolorous misprisions of Con-

rad here, a putrefaction of

Pascal there, and we have a

text bought and paid for in

perpetuity, by the inculcated

prejudices of the lucky. The

gentlest essayist in this lan-
guage saw them coming by their
going, in satire struck from
Shakespeare - 

Age, thou hast lost thy breed.

Charles Lamb

Elia

  A Complaint of the Decay

  of Beggars in the Metropolis

London Magazine

June, 1822

Jonathan Bate, editor

Elia and The Last Essays

  of Elia

Oxford University Press, 1987©

Hermès, 2012