A Glorious Destiny

Well then. How do I grieve the academic career I never had?

In part, I guess, I’ve started: just by talking about it. It’s wound about with the grief of American decline in general, of course: in recent years I’ve realized that missing out on academia was dodging a bullet more than it was losing an opportunity. But that only makes the loss seem greater. I missed out because I was autistic, with all the passivities and deficits that entails: now everyone is missing out. Mourning that lost future can’t be and shouldn’t be untangled from mourning the future of America.

So I talk about it and I dedicate a time and a place set apart for it. And I give the loss its due. Those were hard years, between leaving Yale and becoming a massage therapist: not just in themselves, but because I had lost my luminous future, and everyone around me thought I had not just lost it, but wantonly thrown it away.

Really: I just lost it. No power on earth was going to make me a good or even an adequate classroom teacher. It wasn’t a failure of nerve or an unwillingness to work (though there was no way to know that at the time.) Successful classroom teaching requires maintaining multiple foci of attention and shuttling rapidly between them: not a thing I can do. Elephants will learn needlework before I will learn classroom teaching. I once knew a distinguished professor who couldn’t lead a classroom discussion to save his soul, and he struck me, and my friends, as one of the unhappiest people we had ever known.

Anyway, all that is over: water under the bridge. Not just water. All the debris of the flood. Are people even going to read old books any more? Maybe not. Ours might be the last generation.

All the work: all the careful, painstaking attention, all the fairminded discussion that brought these texts forward into the light: all that going dark. Maybe Europe will keep the lights on, at least for a while.

So these are sad thoughts all, and they twist and turn through each other. There is naught that an old Ent can do to hold back that storm: he must weather it or crack.

But for myself: I grieve partly to let go, and to let myself imagine – not a glorious destiny, let’s be done with those – but some destiny: some engagement with the world that uses my fifty-some years of literary study, and turns it to some account other than my private edification. That’s where this tends, isn’t it? Because in the next twenty years there may be some region in between holding a chair at Berkeley and playing online solitaire.

Late May

Now the mock orange sprawls in white blossom
over the white fence collar, leaning at ease, unshaven:
the June rain has not yet imposed its punishment
for extravagant foliation and flower. It will come

– or not, as the new gods ordain. Once I knew
the weather in the seeds of my bones: not now.
now there are steps missing, as I trip downstairs
to death’s cluttered basement: whoops! I land

too hard amid the unfinished projects, a jolt,
a hint of whiplash. Too soon! But it’s always like that,
I guess, so the old books say. Nobody says:
“Oh! Death! Right on time, I was expecting you!”

Wheel, wheel, old gray sky, wheel over my head,
ask for one more day of daily bread,
my intercessor, my old protector,
my forgiver and my inspector,
wheel once more: and then to bed.

On First Looking into Fitzgerald's Homer

I was seventeen, and blinded by youth: by my grandiosity and timidity. I wavered, as boys do nowadays, between thinking myself extraordinary and thinking myself worthless; but I didn’t recognize that about myself. So why Homer’s story of a fatherless boy setting out to discover whether he actually has a heritage (and whether it is ever coming home to save him) would move me, was mysterious to me. But move me it did.

I did know some things. I was reading the classics for the first time, and they were legible! So there was a heritage, it was a real thing, and I was up to receiving it! That, at least, I understood at the time.

But another thing that happened to me, I did not realize. It happened sotto voce. I was reading poetry for the first time. It was my great good fortune that I was given the Odyssey in Robert Fitzgerald’s translation: I was reading a master of English iambic pentameter. My ear was wholly untrained then. I was only vaguely aware that it was poetry, at first. I knew that that ragged right margin was supposed to signal something special, some elevation or sonority or affectation, but I didn’t really know what it was. So I just read it as though it were prose, galloping along, puzzling out the meaning. It was exceptionally clear language, very easy to grasp at first sight, but I was very young and very uneducated, and reading it at all was an athletic achievement. I was proud of it, and rightly so. So many foreign names, alien customs, weird locutions, puzzling repetitions! I marched through it, like Sherman’s troops through Georgia.

And something was happening besides the story. I was absorbing the fundamental rhythm of English poetry. I was learning it in probably the best, if not the most efficient way: just by reading it, line after line. When I read Shakespeare for the first time, later that year, I had a leg up: I already understood implicitly how this thing worked, how it steered, how you breathed when you read it. Poetry will eventually teach you how to read itself, if you give it time, and grant it authority.

The Ghost of Odysseus Arrives in Rivendell

So. Begin when all the rest had left behind them headlong death in battle or at sea…

Yah, yah. Okay. We are going to be gentle with the grandiosity, yes? Because it is at once fragile and formidable. Go carefully. It’s okay. Every man in his own mind gets to play Odysseus, no? 

But at the moment, last night and this morning, I seem to be completely unstrung. A guitar turned into a not very useful percussion instrument: all you can do is thump on it. It’s a sound, I guess. But it’s not what guitars are meant for.

Now. A day is too precious a thing to throw away. Take council: take council, my Lord.

All right then. I call the Sun who walks all day through Heaven.

---

Sun: I am here, in plain fact. You do have to call me, though. I can’t come on my own. To call me a god is a bit of an extravagance. Divine, perhaps. Immortal, possibly. But the distance between me and the Yahweh who created the heavens and the earth is much much farther than the distance between you and me, between any of you and me. So you have to call me, not because I have some weird celestial fetish, of “wanting to be asked,” but just because I can’t come, I can’t even be, without a call. Enough. Tell me what is worrying you. Anyone?

Ghost: what if it all comes apart next week? What if sex is the thing that unravels everything? It has been before.

Sun: it has always been the most undigested thing, maybe. Despite, or because of our focus on it. It’s hard to look directly at it and see it clearly. But come. What could unravel?

Ghost: Freud hovers here: the fear I guess partly at least is that all our motives are really disguised versions of wanting soft-focus Cindy from the March 1971 Oui Magazine, and we don’t want anything else, and everything – God, beauty, justice – is just crap I fiddle with because I can’t have Cindy.

Lieutenant: Cindy who crouched by the stream and smiled at us, as if she saw us, as if she knew us, and all would be well.

Captain: somewhere there was, or there would come to be, a country where we were at home and all the seventeen year old girls were mature adults who loved us.

Rat: and would trace divine characters on our flesh with slender fingers.

Ghost: I mean, yes, it resonates all the way forward with Tolkien’s Galadriel. The roots of this are deeper than any of ours. 

Captain: But MY job was going to be to make the divine earthly and the earthly divine, right? I was going to make it all happen.

Lieutenant: Except that we were a pudgy, easily confused eleven year old boy, yes. I guess thirteen by the time we were gazing at Cindy, and mistaking some photographer’s vision for a vision of reality. So we stepped sideways into fantasy, when we could. 

Sun: which was the right thing to do, at the time, and not to be scoffed at. Losing everything we wanted and aspired to would have been much much worse. It was a way of preserving things that were threatened by the reality of Springfield, and bullies, and people who weren’t interested in anything difficult to understand. We do still live on the outskirts of a brutal and uncomprehending people. We still rely daily on certain deceptions and elisions. Dear friends we are still spies, in important senses, and always will be. It’s not that we’ve arrived in paradise and can lay our burdens down. I’m sorry: I wish it were: but we are still in the thick of it.

Rat: But we need not any longer pretend to anyone near and dear that the case is any different than that. And the poor Captain here need not complete the repair of the world within ten business days. We have our eighteen years (if we have them) and I at least want us to get along and help each other.

Ghost: is what we have enough?

Sun: to make us live forever in the golden sunlight of the new Atlantis? No. We will die, we are dying now, and we will vanish entirely, But we have answers to all that. And right now I think we are more distracted, and confused, than we are confronting mortality. We are absorbing a lot of Martha’s anxiety, for one thing. Another instance of second-hand smoke. We don’t need to be worried about this trip, either for her or for us. 

Ghost: Well you know, what it is, is grief: grief at all the waste of days, all the hiding and sneaking, all the time spent under the domination of Ahriman. Grief and anger. It’s nobody’s fault, really, but such a life of loss! So much skulking. And we are still skulking, and we’re tired of it, and we’re afraid that at the very worst moment we’ll suddenly break everything for no reason and every reason. Because…. It shouldn’t have been this way. It shouldn’t be this way. 

Sun: yes. I can’t fix this, you know. I can’t make the world other than it is. 

Ghost: [grins] No. No, and we’re like those disappointed Christians who are so angry at God for not existing. 

Sun: But what we can do… is not blame each other for the way of the world, not expect each other either to make it right or to make us fit comfortably in it. The problem is not that we are in rebellion against the world. The problem indeed is that we are not resolute and cohesive enough in our rebellion, Not committed enough to it. We hide for good reasons. The hostility of the world is not a figment our our imagination, which will vanish when achieve an adult vision. We need to pull together and really be on our own side, wholeheartedly, though. And we can do that. And we can both do that and grieve, and honor the struggle, and have compassion for the times we have been defeated and caved in and let ourselves down and let others down. We can do both those things. In fact, we have to do both those things, they are actually the same thing. 

Ghost: …. Actually the same thing. I’ve traveled a long way to come and hear that.

Sun: A very long way. This has not been easy, and it’s not going to be easy. But take your seat with us, here. We need you.

A Compost Prayer

The knotted candyflower and the bleeding hearts
were supposed to like the shade: perversely
they are flourishing now in the bright sun
around the trunk of the cut down maple;
a surging lace skirt for the dragon lilies.
Nothing is as it was supposed to be, this year.
The lilies lift their horns, and their throats
are thick with flies. Here is the garden
where all our sins are remembered, where
all the embers are numbered, where the fires
join hands and sing across the Gorge: a canticle
for rain forests that were never meant to burn.
Well. Lift the black target of the compost bin,
upend the glass pan. Down falls the onion skin,
the flakes of garlic paper,
the potato that rotted on the shelf.
Down roll peels of bananas and oranges
from Costa Rica; the bamboo sleeves of
coffee grounds from the Eje Cafetero:
nymph, in thy orisons be all my words forgot.

Officers and Crew: Top Down and Bottom Up

Captain: And you could draw the analogy – I’m not saying you should, mind you, just that you could – that that’s what consciousness is, and that’s the role of human beings in a sentient universe: that our work is precisely figuring out what the work is. All very meta and suited to the 21st Century. But we actually are situated, not just under a cesspool with the ceiling cracking, but in a good place for seeing some things that other people in other times have been less able to see. Why be self-conscious at all? Because you need to other yourself, to be able to step outside yourself and look back, in order to attain some kinds of understanding. 

Lieutenant: though to complete it you have to step BACK again. Otherwise you get stuck in Descartes’ nightmare world of automata, and are susceptible to believing nonsense, like that the world is a simulation. Yeah. But we’re getting way way off the track here, Captain. I don’t think we want to lose the thread we followed last time. And you (of all people!) are the only one who has offered actual substantial answers. I’ll add one of my own: there’s poetry. Hell, we could start a poetry podcast. Amaze our friends.

Captain: And what Vlad said the other day is a key part. We need to deliberately, consistently plunge into beauty, even if it’s only for fifteen minutes a day. 

Lieutenant: In fact there’s two ways to go at this, and maybe we should do both at once. One is top down: to figure out the project in conceptual terms. The other is from the bottom up: we have some strong intuitions of what the component habits and activities are going to be. One of them is going to be that regular immersion in beauty. We don’t have to know what the project is before we start forming the habits. Not completely, anyway. By the way, where is the Sun?

Rat: where he often is when you need him most. Nowhere to be seen.

Kid: [unintelligible]

Rat: Well, what do you know. You got something to say, Kid?

Kid: No, not really, I mean – I don’t know. Sorry. I don’t really belong here.

Rat: [softly] Yeah you do, Kid. Hang out with us. You don’t have to say anything: you don’t have to make sense. We got all the top brass for that. They make sense all day long, the poor chumps. 

A Muezzin from the Tower of Darkness

Alike for those who for To-day prepare,
And those that after some To-morrow stare,
     A Muezzin from the Tower of Darkness cries
"Fools! Your Reward is neither Here nor There!"

Sun: So here’s one question. When we look for a home, or for a way to build an altar: are we looking for something that can actually be found, or built, in the workaday world? Or are we making a basic category mistake? Maybe home is elsewhere. I mean, that’s basically the answer that Christianity and Islam and many sorts of Buddhism give: you don’t feel at home because home is not available in this world. Home is somewhere else: this is the land of sin, where nobody is at home. So that’s an answer that a lot of very smart people have taken seriously. We have resisted that answer strenuously all our lives: not because we have a great refutation of it, but just because we don’t want it to be true. Or, rather, because we are afraid that “our reward is neither here nor there”: maybe there’s no home at all, and the search is a fool’s errand. If that were true, where would it leave us?

Rat: Scrabbling in the garbage, I guess.

Sun: Yes, and this is our perpetual alternation. It seems like a dead end, or at least a profitless cycle. What we what is to move, somehow, out of the plane of this discussion. We’re stuck in two dimensions and we need to move in a third one if we want to do anything but go back and forth.

Lt: Is there a third dimension?

Sun: Of course there is. Where else could WE live? Where would I come from? If there’s no home, we all become totally inexplicable and unintelligible. And, like the Zen people say, it’s not elsewhere: it’s right here. But

Captain: But but but – yeah. That’s fine for a framework, but it doesn’t answer Rat’s question. What IS our business? It’s a fair question, and we have not begun to answer it. Is it writing poetry? Is it building model airplanes? Is it learning to carve walking sticks with elaborately worked knobs? Is it designing the history game to end all history games? Is it REALLY learning Spanish (French, Greek, Latin, Hebrew)? Is it discovering (making, unearthing, disclosing, refurbishing) the one true church?

Rat: And this is where someone pipes up and says it doesn’t matter so long as we pick something. The existentialist move. And I would say, if it doesn’t matter then none of this matters. The center doesn’t hold, and the whole thing collapses. It does matter. And if, as the Sun says, there IS this third dimension, then there actually IS an answer.

Lieutenant … and our business is in fact to figure out what it is: and – until we have figured it out we actually have no other business that matters. We have our work cut out for us. Our work is figuring out what our work is. NOT what we would like to do. What we MUST do because it’s the right thing to do. I mean, I don’t see any other way to read our predicament.