When He Cried the Little Children Died in the Streets

MUSEE DES BEAUX ARTS

W.H. Auden

About suffering they were never wrong,
The old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position: how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water, and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

The Traditional High Egoslavian Holy Day Auden's Birthday Post. Born 118 years ago today. I always post that photo, then Musee Des Beaux Arts (it still gets better with each rereading) and then some version of these paragraphs:

Some personal history: besides taking classes from Anthony Hecht, I did basic research grunt work for him on his final two books of criticism in exchange for his company, On the Laws of the Poetic Arts and The Hidden Law, a book specifically about Auden's poetry, which Hecht respected deeply. In the process of the research for and conversations with Hecht over years I must have read the majority of Auden's poems at least once, some countless times, some, like the above and below, literally dozens of dozens of times.

I've told some version of this story countless times: I was hired by Georgetown University mid-August, I sought Hecht out immediately and asked to audit his Fall semester grad poetry class, telling him not only was I only a Georgetown staffer but I hadn't an undergraduate degree and asking please let me audit the class. It focused on five main poets - Frost, Eliot, Auden, Bishop, and Wilbur - but we spent more than half the semester on Auden alone. I've probably spent more time with Auden than with any other poet, and if I only read him now on his birthday, I can pull up countless poems in my head whenever I want.

EPITAPH ON A TYRANT

Perfection, of a kind, was what he was after,
And the poetry he invented was easy to understand;
He knew human folly like the back of his hand,
And was greatly interested in armies and fleets;
When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter,
And when he cried the little children died in the streets.







THE FALL OF ROME

The piers are pummelled by the waves;
In a lonely field the rain
Lashes an abandoned train;
Outlaws fill the mountain caves.

Fantastic grow the evening gowns;
Agents of the Fisc pursue
Absconding tax-defaulters through
The sewers of provincial towns.

Private rites of magic send
The temple prostitutes to sleep;
All the literati keep
An imaginary friend.

Cerebrotonic Cato may
Extol the Ancient Disciplines,
But the muscle-bound Marines
Mutiny for food and pay.

Caesar's double-bed is warm
As an unimportant clerk
Writes I DO NOT LIKE MY WORK
On a pink official form.

Unendowed with wealth or pity,
Little birds with scarlet legs,
Sitting on their speckled eggs,
Eye each flu-infected city.

Altogether elsewhere, vast
Herds of reindeer move across
Miles and miles of golden moss,
Silently and very fast.







THE MORE LOVING ONE

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.

Who Could Have Called Their Slow Creation *Rage*?

Anthony Hecht born 101 years ago today. I deliberately did not post this shitty blog's traditional Hecht birthday post last year (and am not this year) though I knew last year was his centenary and though I can imagine all the possible reasons I didn't I can't remember which one I chose (I'll not choose one today). Yesterday was Captain Beefheart's birthday, Don Van Vliet born 83 years ago, I deliberately did not post this shitty blog's traditional Beefheart post this year and though I can imagine all the possible reasons I didn't I can't remember which one I chose. Four days ago was Morton Feldman's birthday, he was born 98 years ago, I did not post this shitty blog's traditional Feldman post this year and though I can imagine all the possible reasons I didn't I can't remember which one I chose

Can't bring myself to shred that though I haven't used that avatar in years (though there's still one on the blogroll), the pin fell off my backpack years ago. Shredding continues apace nonetheless. I've also removed and destroyed all hard drives from dead computers, not that I could ever access them again and not that anyone who works for Power would access them (yet) but the discs are smashed to slivers. People keep asking when I'm going to retire, that's the wrong question. I'm destroying all my stuff because I plan on surviving our looming internment and immiseration and incineration, I just want it to be me who destroys me, he types into the cloud

Tell me again it's my fault if I don't vote and Trump wins
Today in Joe Biden's genocide!
"Worst man-made medical disaster in modern history”
The Killing of Gaza’s Environment
Always instructive to compare what is done in the name of facilitating the free flow of commerce with what is done in the impeding the free flow of persons.
The five Ds of US Middle East policy
Inside a psyop: Harvard & the Gazan genocide
Starvation as a Method of Warfare
The question is no longer whether the Israeli government is racist and genocidal but whether the Israeli Jewish majority supporting its crimes against Palestinians also fit this description
Autochthonous Wars				ISRAELI ACTIONS IMPLEMENTED IN BATH UK
Our shitlords are batshit crazy sociopaths
Hypocrisy and savagery					How to hate
Motherfucking Obama and cosplaying progressives
VITAL REMINDER: Malcolm X on white liberals
On our batshit crazy shitlord sociopaths
The American Way of Life in its Foulest Manifestation
There’s a Huge Covid Surge Right Now and Nobody Is Talking About It
Maggie's weekly			{feuilleton}'s weekly links }
As always, pigs protect the fash
Arctic News: 2024 looks worse than 2023
RIP John Pilger				Monster Train 2020
John Pilger: a fierce critic of empire
Hecht	Feldman	Beefheart	Hecht	Feldman	Beefheart	Hecht	Beefheart
Repurposing old fountain pen ink
Why you should eat lentils every day
Quintessential quadrumvirate of camp comedians!
New year, same you				On Jason Molina
The Sonic Revolutions of George Lewis
Alice Notley - telling the truth as it comes up
Bernadette Mayer's writing experiments
Find a private place and read the Hecht out loud, loud

GREEN: AN EPISTLE

Anthony Hecht

I write at last of the one forbidden topic
We, by a truce, have never touched upon:
Resentment, malice, hatred so inwrought
With moral inhibitions, so at odds with
The home-movie of yourself as patience, kindness
And Charlton Heston playing Socrates,
That almost all of us were taken in,
Yourself not least, as to a giant Roxy,
Where the lights dimmed and the famous allegory
Of Good and Evil, clearly identified
By the unshaven surliness of the Bad Guys,
The virginal meekness of the ingenue,
Seduced us straight into that perfect world
Of Justice under God. Art for the sake
Of money, glamour, ego, self-deceit.
When we emerged into the assaulting sunlight,
We had a yen, like bad philosophers,
To go back and stay forever, there in the dark
With the trumpets, horses, and ancient Certitudes
On which, as we know, this great nation was founded,
Washington crossing the Delaware, and so forth.
And all of us, for an hour or so after,
Were Humphrey Bogart dating Ingrid Bergman,
Walking together but incommunicado
Till subway and homework knocked us out of it.
Yet even then, whatever we returned to
Was not, although we thought it was, the world.

     I write at last on the topic because I am safe
Here in the grubby border town
With its one cheap hotel. No one has my address.
The food is bad, the wine too expensive,
And the local cathedral marred by restorations.
But from my balcony I view the east
For miles and, if I lean, the local sunsets
That bathe a marble duke with what must be
Surely the saddest light I have ever seen.
The air is thin and cool at this elevation,
And my desk wobbles unless propped with matchbooks.

    It began, I suppose, as a color, yellow-green,
The tincture of spring willows, not so much color
As the sensation of color, haze that took shape
As a light scum, a doily of minutiae
On the smooth pool and surfaces of your mind.
A founding colony, Pilgrim amoebas
Descended from the gaseous flux when Zeus
Tossed down his great original thunderbolt
That flashed in darkness like an electric tree
Or the lit-up veins in an old arthritic hand.

     Here is the microscope one had as a child,
The Christmas gift of some forgotten uncle.
Here is the slide with a drop of cider vinegar
As clear as gin, clear as your early mind.
Look down, being most careful not to see
Your own eye in the mirror underneath,
Which will appear, unless your view is right,
As a darkness on the face of the first waters.
When all is silvery and brilliant, look:
The long, thin, darting shapes, the flagellates,
Rat-tailed, ambitious, lash themselves along -
Those humble, floating ones, those simple cells
Content to be borne on whatever tide,
Trustful, the very image of consent -
These are the frail, unlikely origins,
Scarcely perceived, of all your shall become.
Scarcely perceived? But at this early age
(What are you, one or two?) you have no knowledge
Nor do your folks, not could the gravest doctors
Suspect that anything was really wrong.
Nor see the pale beginnings, lace endeavors
That with advancing ages shall mature
Into sea lettuce, beard the rocky shore
With a light green of soft and tidal hair.

     Whole eras, seemingly without event,
Now scud the glassy pool processionally
Until one day, misty, uncalendared,
As mild and unemphatic as a schwa,
Vascular tissue, conduit filaments
Learn how to feel the outposts of that small
Emerald principate. Now there are roots,
The filmy gills of toadstools, crested fern,
Quillworts, and foxtail mosses, and at last
Snapweed, loment, trillium, grass, herb Robert.
How soundlessly, shyly this came about,
One thinks today. But that is not the truth.
It was, from the first, an everlasting war
conducted, as always, at gigantic cost.
Think of the droughts, the shifts of wind and weather,
The many seeds washed to some salt conclusion
Or brought to rest at last on barren ground.
Think of some inching tendrils worming down
In hope of water, blind and white as death.
Think of the strange mutations life requires.
Only the toughest endured, themselves much altered,
Trained in the cripple's careful sciences
Of mute accommodation. The survivors
Were all, one way or another, amputees
Who learned to live with their stumps, like Brueghel's beggars.

     Yet, for all that, it clearly was a triumph,
Considering, as one must, what was to come
And, even by themselves, those fields of clover,
Cattails, marsh bracken, water-lily pads
Stirred by the lightest airs, pliant, submissive -
Who could have called their slow creation rage?

     Consider, as one must, what was to come.
Great towering conifers, deciduous,
Rib-vaulted elms, the banyan, oak, and palm,
Sequoia forests of vindictiveness
That also would go down on the death list
And, buried deep beneath the alluvial shifts,
Would slowly darken into lakes of coal
And then under exquisite pressure turn
Into the tiny diamonds of pure hate.
The delicate fingers of the clematis
Feeling their way along a face of shale
With all the ingenuity of spite.
The indigestible thistle of revenge.
And your most late accomplishment, the rose.
Until at last, what we might designate
As your Third Day, behold a world of green:
Color of hope, of the Church's springtide vestments,
The primal wash, heraldic hue of envy.
But in what pre-lapsarian disguise!
Strangers and those who do not know you well
(Yourself not least) are quickly taken in
By a summary prospect, shades of innocence.
Like that young girl, a sort of chance acquaintance,
Seven or eight she was, on the New York Central,
Who, with a blue-eyed, beatific smile,
Shouted with joy, "Look, Mommy, quick, Look. Daisies!"

     These days, with most of us at a safe distance,
You scarcely know yourself. Whole weeks go by
Without your remembering that enormous effort,
Ages of disappointment, the long ache
Of motives twisted out of recognition,
The doubt and hesitation all submerged
In those first clear waters, that untroubled pool.
Who could have hope for this eventual peace?
Moreover, there are moments almost of bliss,
A sort of recompense, in which your mood
Sorts with the peach endowments of late sunlight
On a snowfield or on the breaker's froth
Or the white steeple of the local church.
Or, like a sunbather, whose lids retain
A greenish, gemmed impression of the sun
In lively, fluctuant geometries,
You sometimes contemplate a single image,
Utterly silent, utterly at rest.
It is of someone, a stranger, quite unknown,
Sitting alone in a foreign-looking room,
Gravely intent at a table propped with matchbooks,
Writing this poem - about me.

Glintless Monotones of Graveyard Weather

For twenty-four hours this past Sunday afternoon and Monday morning, driving around Pennsylvania Wilds, going out to dinner, breakfast, hanging out and talking with my wife and daughter, hanging out and not needing to talk with my wife and daughter, I wasn't sideways at the world and didn't realize I wasn't sideways at the world until I was sideways at the world again, for twenty-four hours I was



Above done the evening after getting back from Pennsylvania, below done two nights ago, sideways again. I remember my sideways at America's 911 Vengeance Tours in Iraq and Afghanistan as much less visceral than today's sideways, dope that I was then I could curse the Supreme Court for gifting Bush the 2000 election and Bush for the Vengeance Tour, yes I know major Democrats supported but enough major Democrats objected that I could pretend my (then) team not as bloodshitty as Republicans, jesusfuck, what a dope, I should have been as sideways then as now but now's sideways makes then's sideways seem a joy ride

• Friendly colleague, tenured professor (edited and paraphrased for brevity): But Hamas attacked first and Gazans getting just retribution delivered upon them
• Me: Sigh
• FC, TP: I didn't peg you for an antisemite
  
  

I did not remind him that Netanyahu created, funded, and supported Hamas as a bulwark against any two-state solution, that Israelamerica deliberately set policies towards Palestinians guaranteed to provoke armed resistance to occupation, that Israelamerica is DELIGHTED Hamas attacked, that this war as presented for consumption is.....

Sigh. Links today done before this typed, when I scream at this Israelamerican war of choice and its atrocities and its barkers and cheerleaders and bloodshitty backers and especially the shitlords who profit by it (reminder: if this wasn't in shitlords interest - and this war is about MUCH more than Gaza and Israel - it wouldn't be happening on this scale with these goals) I hope it will only be through links and in the grid, I'm done typing about it here and writing about it in journal

The monsters that rule the world have bigger and broader goals in this genocide beyond the extermination of Gazan Palestinians (though they consider that an excellent side benefit)
Reminder: our shitlords are preparing for their war against you
Inside the Israeli Crackdown on Speech
Apartheid Defense League					This is me
The ten dumbest things we're being asked to believe about Gaza
How (not) to Relativize the Holocaust
"This has nothing to do with Judaism and it's antisemitic for anyone to suggest it does."
Sign the letter protesting Poetry Foundation pulling a review of the poetry of a American Jewish Anti-Zionist
Motherfucking crackerchrister zionists
Motherfucking corporate Democrat zionists
"Tlaib is an embarrassment to other Democrats. She's an embarrassment because she exposes as a sham their claim to defend human rights. She's an embarrassment because she endures so much when they sell out so cheap. She reminds them that their lack of courage is a choice"
EVERY DEMOCRAT NEXT YEAR
Voting will not save you, America
Meanwhile, in black southern towns
Maggie's weekly				EKGMOWECHASHALA
Cats have 300 facial expressions
{ feuilleton }'s				EVERY DAY
Collected Tony Hecht, the best thing that happened to me in my 35 years at Hilltop is meeting and working with Tony Hecht
The new Sloppy Heads album is !!!!!

CURRICULUM VITAE

Anthony Hecht

As though it were reluctant to be day,
         Morning deploys a scale
         Of rarities in gray,
And winter settles down in its chain-mail,

Victorious over legions of gold and red.
         The smokey souls of stones,
         Blunt pencillings of lead,
Pare down the world to glintless monotones

Of graveyard weather, vapors of a fen
         We reckon through our pores.
          Save for the garbage men,
Our children are the first ones out of doors.

Book-bagged and padded out, at mouth and nose
         They manufacture ghosts,
         George Washington's and Poe's,
Banquo's, the Union and Confederate hosts',

And are themselves the ghosts, file cabinet gray,
          Of some departed us,
          Signing our lives away
On ferned and parslied windows of a bus.