Tabula Rasa

Nature or nurture?  The vexed question thus posed in shorthand was thorny enough even before it became supercharged by certain topics of bitter debate in the current Academy.  I have been thinking about two of these Third Rail issues—the theory of the radical “social construction of gender” and the investigation of large data sets concerning the distribution of varying intelligence quotients among human populations—but in terms of a blog “publication” I have sufficient good sense to stick to my cobbler’s last, which I take to be philology. 

The question is whether we human beings come into this world furnished or unfurnished with cognitive content, so to speak.  Are there such things as innate ideas?  Are certain skills—a capacity for language, for instance—“hard-wired” at birth?  Or was everything “within” us once “outside” us?  The old idealist tradition, carried on and Christianized by so many of the medieval writers I most admire, generally believed in innate ideas, but believed also in a kind of curse of ethical amnesia that so dimmed and blurred them as to leave us struggling in a moral fog as we become ever more mired in the world and its experiences.  That is a main theme of Wordsworth’s great “Immortality Ode.”  The child enters the world “trailing clouds of glory”—with a soul “not in entire forgetfulness, and not in utter nakedness” but, alas, pretty close to it.  Perhaps the best-known philosophical denier of innate ideas was John Locke in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689), a work of enormous influence on modern political thought, especially radical thought.  The less “essential” human nature there is, the more formless and malleable it is taken to be, the better it is for political radicals like the Marxists.  If “human nature” is entirely created by socio-economic forces external to the individual, social engineering is not merely acceptable but laudable

What interests me now are the metaphors that have been used to describe the human mind in its supposedly original empty state, for they are scriptorial and bibliographical images: the tabula rasa, the clean slate, the blank page.  Other metaphors for filling a void might seem more apt: filling up an empty vessel with liquid from a pitcher, for example.  But we find in the figurative language a kind of mini-history of writing methods.  The tabula, or wax-covered board, was an accouterment of ancient and medieval schools.  A student could incise the wax with a hardwood or metal stylus, creating legible signs.  We still can use the word tablet of certain notebooks.  If you then heated the wax you could easily scrape it flat again, creating a new usable surface or tabula rasa, rasa being the feminine participle of rado, “to scrape or shave”.  At a later date the more common writing surface in the schoolroom was slate, a small slab of fine-grained, foliated metamorphic rock on which chalk marks could be easily made and easily erased.  A big piece of slate used for this purpose is usually called a blackboard.

It turns out that certain common ideas and terms are surprisingly hard to nail down securely.  I am just at the moment not able to get to the library so frequently as I would wish, and my Internet search for the actual first known use of the phrase tabula rasa to denote the infant consciousness in an “originary” state has been inconclusive.  Younger readers may be startled to learn that there are things, including some important ones, that aren’t on the Internet.  (Alternatively, I might be entirely unsurprised to realize that they are there, but that I am incapable of finding them!)  I suspect that tabula rasa must show up in one of the medieval Latin translations of Aristotle; but that is just a guess.   Locke himself, though the purported inventor of the tabula rasa theory, was too modern to bother with waxed boards or thinly-sliced rocks.  As somebody who did a lot of writing, he knew what it was that people actually preferred to write upon.  “Let us then suppose the mind to be, as we say, white paper, void of all characters, without any ideas:—How comes it to be furnished? Whence comes it by that vast store which the busy and boundless fancy of man has painted on it with an almost endless variety? Whence has it all the materials of reason and knowledge? To this I answer, in one word, from experience.”

Alas, my own mind is far too often very like “white paper, void of all characters, without any ideas”.  Except that the experienced void appears closer to cotton wool or the styrofoam packaging peanuts that follow me through life.  Impelled by random forces of static electricity they fall to the carpet or cling in chains to the Amazon box.  These things certainly do look “socially constructed” to me.

Haitian Art

          A hundred years ago and more the Pioneer Works  in Brooklyn’s Red Hook district housed a massive heavy metal industrial site at which, among other things, locomotive engines and cars were built and repaired.   In many parts of the country the architectural reclamation and imaginative repurposing of such industrial white mastodons is one of the impressive cultural achievements of our own age.    I have written about this one—on Pioneer Street off Van Brunt, Red Hook’s main drag--once before, as the venue of the wedding dinner of our son Richard and his bride Katie Dixon.  Six years later its evolution toward its proposed artistic mission is much more articulate.  On Friday last there was the opening at the Pioneer Works of a striking new exhibition entitled “PòtoPrens—the Urban Artists of Port-au-Prince”.  Its principal curator, Leah Gordon, a leading expert on contemporary Haitian art, is a friend of Richard’s.

  

               Unfortunately we were not able to make it to the opening, which was apparently mobbed, but as the show will be running through November 11 we shall certainly have our chance for a proper visit.  What I did have is a kind of privileged and informal preview a couple of days earlier.  I was in the City for an appointment scheduled at an upper-east-side venue for the late morning on Wednesday.  I was able to stay with the Brooklynites over Tuesday night and then hang out for about an hour at the Pioneer Works to watch Rich help with the installation of his own imaginative contribution to the show. 

               I have a few times been in museums on a Monday, when they are usually closed to the public but sometimes make special arrangements for visiting firemen in the categories of donor, big-wig, or academic authority.  You can easily guess my supposed category.  But even for those at the bottom of the privilege chain, the feeling of entitlement is nearly obscene.  I had never before, however, experienced a privileged survey of a large holding area crammed with the focused materials of a substantial art exhibition in embryo--huge sculpted stone heads, recycled bright bricolage of every genre (though with a specialized subspecialty of multiform constructions made of old bicycle parts), and importunate panchromatic panels of a sort guaranteed to make the vicar blush—all of it, presumably, awaiting its carefully premeditated gallery deployment within the next forty-eight hours.  In this exhibition of a collection of the work of more than twenty contemporary Haitian artists, the Pioneer Works is breaking new grounds.  The potential exhibition space—once an enclosed quadrangular garage that could accommodate the assembly of a couple of steam locomotive engines at a time—is vast, with walls soaring upward from a shining floor of highly finished concrete burnished by diamond polishing pads.

               But Richard’s contribution is not mounted in the interior space of the Pioneer Works, but in its intriguing outdoor garden.  In this surprising setting—essentially a patch of brownfield transformed into luxurious Mediterranean greenery—carpenters have constructed a replica of a typical Haitian barbershop.  Barbershops, which have historically played an important social role in the lives of various communities—including especially, in our country, various African-American communities—are of particular importance in urban Haiti.  Concerning the model building erected upon the gravel of the Pioneer Works courtyard, the curatorial notes read as follows:

 

“The innumerable barbershops competing for attention amidst the visual chaos of Port-au-Prince are the fundamental small business of the city. Built from recycled shipping containers, box trucks or sheets of plywood, decorated with giant portraits of celebrities and haircuts, they are often a kind of neighborhood social club. They are also sculptural objects in their own right.

“The Salon de Beauté Marie Rogère at Pioneer Works extends a long-term collaboration between documentarian Richard Fleming and Grand Rue portraitist Michel Lafleur, the Amazing Barbershop Project. This Unisex shop honors Lafleur’s mother, Destin Marie Rogère, who passed away in June.”

               The “Amazing Barbershop Project” here referenced is a continuing initiative which my son has pursued on a long-term basis in Port-au-Prince.  You can learn more about the project via Instagram (@amazingbarbershop).  It has several thrusts, but one of the most important is the encouragement, appreciation, and wider recognition of the Haitian barbershop painting—half vernacular portraiture, half “pop art”—that is a distinctive feature of the “visual chaos” of the capital city.  When I saw it mid-morning Wednesday a week ago the building was up and framed, but that was about all.  The speed and skill with which the carpenters finished the job is evident from the photographs taken a day later.  I am told that it is authentic in all respects, including the most important one.  When you visit the show, if you happen to hit things just right, you might also be able to get a haircut there at the hands of highly experienced Haitian barber Patrick Goby, whose permanent shop is a couple of miles away in Flatbush.

The exhibition PòtoPrens runs at the Pioneer Works, 158 Pioneer Street, Red Hook, Brooklyn, until November 11.

Benefit of Clergy (With and Without)

Perhaps if I begin this time with the digression—get it out of the way early, so to speak--my eventual topic may emerge more clearly.  I first encountered the odd phrase benefit of clergy in the title of a Kipling short story by Rudyard Kipling.  Kipling was one of two very great writers, contemporaries—the other being Joseph Conrad—who are suffering what I pray is temporary academic neglect for their crimes of political incorrectness.  The full title of his story is “Without Benefit of Clergy,” and its subject is amazingly “modern” and shockingly “transgressive” for something published in 1890.  It is about a British colonial bureaucrat, John Holden, with a secret double life.  Everyone takes Holden for a bachelor, but actually he is shacked up with a young Muslim girl, Ameera, whom he bought, in a little house on the edge of town.  She gives birth to their child, and for a while they are blissful.  Then the baby dies.  Then the girl-mother dies.  End of idyll, end of story.  It’s as though it all never happened.

The phrase “without benefit of clergy,” of course alluded to the irregular sexual union at the center of the story, unsanctified by religion and therefore presumably deeply shocking to Victorian readers, or at least those unfamiliar with Kipling’s 1892 poem “Road to Mandalay” in which he has an ordinary British sailor wistfully hoping to be shipped “somewhere East of Suez, where the best is like the worst, Where there aren’t no Ten Commandments an’ a man can raise a thirst.”  Actual Victorians were not all that Victorian.

I have seen the idea of “benefit of clergy” used in a similar manner in many other places, though such usage misunderstands the phrase.  Benefit of clergy is actually a technical legal term dating from the Middle Ages.  It refers to the legally enshrined clerical privilege of exemption from the civil courts or their penalties for felonies under certain circumstances.  The clerus in Christian Latin, the generic word for the clerical estate, suggested a special degree of education.  The “clerics” or “clergy” were the educated ones, and they were afforded special legal advantages.  So there was one law for the lettered men and another for the lewd men or lay men.  The origins of this legal peculiarity are obscure.  But there is a probably relevant biblical passage in the First Book of Chronicles (16:22) that reads “Touch not mine anointed, and do no evil to my prophets” (Nolite tangere christos meos, et in prophetis meis nolite malignari).  The Chronicles (or Paralipomenon as they were generally called in the Latin Bible) are of course history books, and for the most part not merely prose but distinctly prosaic.  But most of this one chapter is a pretty fancy poem, a kind of misplaced psalm, that seems to suggest that the special function of the “anointed” is literary: to proclaim among the nations the glory and dominion of the Lord.  And, indeed, the special office of the medieval clergy—actually called that, “the Office,” was the faithful recitation of the psalter.

All this is speculative, but it fits in so nicely with another aspect of the “benefit of clergy” that I cannot resist bringing it up.  That aspect is the means by which an accused person could actually claim clerical exemption from the penalties of the secular law.  Remember that English law was pretty sanguinary, becoming ever more so with the advancement of modernity.  Somebody has made an actual census, and by the beginning of the nineteenth century there were two hundred and twenty-two statutory crimes for which the penalty was hanging.  It is a number that sticks in the mind.  In the gentler, good old medieval days of Merry England there were probably only half that number, but every town had its gibbet, and many of them more than one.  So if you were a Friar Tuck type, prone upon occasion to poach a rabbit or two in Lord Oswald’s timber reserve, you needed some definite means of demonstrating that you were too erudite to swing.

The legal convention that emerged was this: a defendant could establish claim to benefit of clergy by being able to read the opening verse or verses of the Miserere, the fiftieth psalm: “Have mercy on me, O God, in your goodness: in the greatness of your compassion wipe out my offense.  Thoroughly wash me from my guilt, and of my guilt cleanse me” et caetera.  The Miserere is the most famous of the penitential psalms, and indeed it grew out of a matter needing much penance.  Its medieval rubric identified it as “a psalm of David, when Nathan the prophet came to him after his sin with Bathsheba,” discreetly leaving unmentioned the fact that David had also arranged to have Bathsheba’s husband killed by way of anticipatory cover up.  Thus by being able to bewail your guilt in biblical Latin, you might dodge guilt’s hempen and vernacular guerdon.  This biblical passage was aptly called “the neck verse,” and it makes numerous witty appearances in medieval literature.  One of them is this: Miserere is the very first word spoken by the pilgrim-narrator of the Divine Comedy (Inferno, 1:65).  I suspect that Kipling himself was aware of the cultural background of “benefit of clergy,” and were there but world enough and time I might even write an essay about it.

The Third Man

T. S. Eliot

I got to thinking about the third man.  What third man? you might ask, and that’s the whole point.  There are so many of them.  A small convention of third men joined in my consciousness last week in a curious fashion.

At the time I first became seriously interested in poetry, in the 1950s, T. S. Eliot still wielded great prestige among academic intellectuals.  I didn’t like Eliot, and I certainly didn’t understand him; but I knew I was supposed to, and I soldiered on.  But he is not a poet for a tutorless adolescent in a hick highschool, and it was only in my fifties and sixties that I really “got” it.  These days any casual rereading is likely to yield a new surprise.  Last week I was dipping into “The Wasteland,” where in the final section  (“What the Thunder said”) you find this:

Who is the third who walks always beside you?

When I count there are only you and I together…

These lines, Eliot says, “were stimulated by the account of one of the Antarctic expeditions (I forget which, but I think one of Shackleton’s): it was related that the party of explorers, at the extremity of their strength, had the constant delusion that there was one more member than could actually be counted.”

Orson Welles

            I’ll return to this somewhat obscure third man in a moment, but he raised in my mind a more obvious one, Orson Welles’s The Third Man, the most famous British film ever made, and among the contenders for best made anywhere.   I first saw it, probably, in 1952.  No one reading this essay will need to be told about it, or its haunting musical theme.  The plot involves the topos of the dead man who is not actually dead.  It established important elements of the iconography of the Cold War for many of us who lived through that period.  In 1951 two British diplomats, Burgess and Maclean, who happened also to be two Soviet spies, disappeared just before they could be arrested by British intelligence agents.  Obviously, they had been tipped off.  By whom?  By a Third Man, of course.  This eventually turned out to have been super-spy Kim Philby.  This affair was certainly the most famous episode in the lively history of Cold War espionage, and the fact that there eventually turned out to be a fourth man, a fifth man, and for all we know a fourteenth man did nothing to dull the world’s definitive fascination with the concept of the Third Man.  How else than by early and obsessive engagement with the Cold War could a medievalist come to write a book about Cold War literature? 

"Road to Emmaus" by Duccio

            The third man of Orson Welles was mysterious and malign; Kim Philby was mysterious and malign.  What about Eliot’s?  He is mysterious to be sure, perhaps even spectral; but since he is Jesus, he is definitely benign.  The allusion is not even all that obscure.  It is to the great but puzzling story (Luke, cap 24) of the encounter of two disciples (Cleopas and possibly Luke himself) with the risen Christ as, shortly after the Crucifixion, they were walking along the road from Jerusalem to the nearby village of Emmaus.  All this vaguely coalesced in my mind in this most recent casual dip into Eliot; but why does the poet’s note talk about Antarctic exploration rather than the gospel of Luke?  For elucidation I turned to my son Richard, the only Antarctic explorer of my immediate acquaintance.  He didn’t know off the top of his head, but he performed a twelve second google, which did the trick—a little embarrassing, since I am the one who is supposed to be the literary scholar in the family.  Rich sent me to an excellent brief essay by Sandra Lockwood, a Canadian graduate student at Simon Fraser University, entitled “Third Man Phenomenon.” (https://dornsife.usc.edu/assets/sites/221/docs/Lockwood_GLS2012_USC.docx)  The essay includes bibliographical notes of an illuminating nature.  Of Shackleton she writes thus: “Shackleton’s story is one of the great epics of human survival and the best-known example of Third Man phenomena. However, his experience is not unique. Mountaineers, astronauts, athletes, sailors, and 9/11 ‘Twin Tower’ survivors have recorded similar encounters with a life saving presence. This presence is often described as that of a guardian angel, a helper ghost, a shadow being, a heavenly guide, and a divine companion.”  

 A Day at the Beach, South Georgia Island

           Shackleton’s is perhaps the best known example of the phenomenon as it applies to physical danger and distress, but if we expand the field to include the spiritual, surely the twenty-fourth chapter of Luke, which has attracted reams of exegetical commentary and a significant visual iconography, would claim precedence.  I presume Ms. Lockwood invokes Eliot, though not the Emmaus story, because the poet himself speaks of the Shackleton episode (rather inexactly) in his notes.  But the section called “What the Thunder said” begins with a medley of scriptural allusions to the Passion narrative, which the poet assumes do not need footnoting—the Agony in the Garden, the betrayal on the Mount of Olives, and the hubbub at Pilate’s palace: “He who was living is now dead /We who were living are now dying”.  The narrative counterpoint is the Third Man of the Emmaus road, and the man who was dead and is now living.

            Whatever the case, my third men were dragging me back over decades to the 1950s—when I first read Eliot, when I first saw the Orson Welles film, and when I first became immersed in the dubious battles of the Cold War.  And if Sterne could write a whole shaggy dog novel (Tristram Shandy) on the basis of Locke’s whimsical theory of the “association of ideas,” surely I can get by with a short blog post?

Shiten Shepherds

The Good Shepherd (4th century)

In a fairly recent post, in which I tried to identify one important source of our political malaise in the appalling ignorance and/or credulity of the American electorate, I mentioned “Pizza-Gate.”  This was the name given to the “news” story that John Podesta and Hilary Clinton were running a pedophile ring out of a Washington stromboli emporium called Pizza Planet.  “The manifest implausibility of this story reaches the threshold of the insane,” I wrote.  “Nonetheless it was duly believed by a sector of the American electorate.”  I now regret I wrote those words.  For even less plausible on the face of it is the undeniably true report that the Roman Catholic bishops of several dioceses in Pennsylvania were running a pedophile ring out of chancery offices in places like Pittsburgh and Altoona!  Three hundred priests.  Seventy years.  A thousand abused parishioners.

  Yes, I know “running” is putting it too strongly.  But the bishops were doing little to stop the sexual abuse and practically nothing to expose it—being principally concerned with covering it up, warehousing the perps, and intimidating or buying off the victims.   All this was being done with the ostensibly virtuous motive of avoiding scandal.  There is a great line in Ovid, in his description of the sculptor Pygmalion, who carved a simulated girlfriend so realistic that no human eye could distinguish between the finished stone and alluring female flesh: ars adeo latet arte sua, “with his art he covers up his art”.  Of the Pennsylvania bishops I would say that by scandal they covered up the scandal.  For here we find more scandals than one.  It is of course scandalous in and of itself that certain men take perverse sexual gratification in the exploitation and injury of children.  Surely it is a greater scandal that such crimes be covered up in the name of avoiding scandal.

A catchy political axiom became current in the national press in the wake of the Watergate Affair: it’s not the crime, but the cover-up.  This is not invariably true.  Jean-Paul Sartre is supposed to have said that the horrors of life under Stalin should not be made public lest their discussion might shake the socialist faith of French auto workers.  In that instance the cover-up—though a living monument to intellectual fatuity--did not surpass a crime that, from an historical point of view, may be unsurpassable.  But so far as the Pennsylvania episcopate is concerned it is a much closer thing.  One of the enablers, now of course in deep denial, is the current Cardinal Archbishop of Washington.  Unless this man resigns, trades in his crimson skull cap for a hair shirt, and hies him to a hermitage, the Pope’s platitudes will continue to ring hollow.

Though the Roman and Reformed churches vary greatly in their ecclesiastical structures there are certain overlaps in vocabulary.  The ordained head of a particular congregation is likely to be called a pastor.  I note that the newspapers seem increasingly to use the word as a semi-technical term, as for instance with regard to the American Protestant missionary currently being detained by the Turkish authorities.  Actually pastor (the Latin word for shepherd) is a biblical metaphor, as in old Protestant America’s favorite psalm, the twenty-third, “The Lord is my Shepherd”.  Jesus himself used the term as a metaphor for spiritual care-givers, even as he used the words sheep and flock for those receiving such care.  John the Baptist called Jesus the “lamb of God”, and that image is developed with elaboration in the Revelation of John.  One of the earliest artistic representations of Jesus in early Christian poetry and visual art is that of the Good Shepherd. 

The pattern of imagery, practically inevitable in the long-enduring agricultural and nomadic cultures of the ancient world in which Christianity was born, is for us archaic and rather forced.  For early Christian writers still everywhere surrounded by agricultural community it remained potent and precise.  Thus it is with Chaucer’s description of a good priest.  Among the Canterbury pilgrims there are many professional religious figures.  Mostly they run the moral gamut from hideous evil to vapid triviality.  One alone—a poor, rural parish priest—is presented for our unqualified approbation.  He is a true pastor (shepherd), and his description is a virtual riot of pastoral imagery.  He carries a staff.  He tends his sheep.  He presents to his lay flock a model for moral imitation.  He is called to a higher standard.  For if gold rust, what shall iron do?  And since unlike most modern pastors Chaucer actually knew something about animal husbandry and the habits of sheep in flocks, the text gets a little “earthy”.  The poet had observed, for instance, the tendency of sheep to get fouled in their own excrement.  How can you hope to have “clean sheep”, he wonders, if the sheep are in the care of a shiten shepherd?  Let alone three hundred of them.

The Church pretends to a unique magisterium—that is, to a divinely inspired power of teaching moral truth.  This means that every pastor is also a teacher; and on this score Chaucer has further wisdom.  Of his own good shepherd he wrote this: “first he wrought, and afterward he taught.”

Infantile Laughter

The Montréalers

In America the aging process has been minutely studied by the commercial sector.  It can be documented quite accurately through the larger rhythms of your junk mail.  And since practically nobody writes real letters anymore, except perhaps at Christmas, that means most of what shows up in the box.  The future is laid out before you in mimeographed flyers and glossy brochures.  At first this may seem rather curious to you.  At approximately forty you start getting regular communications from AARP—the American Association of Retired People.  They continue for the next twenty or thirty years, by which time you may actually be thinking about retirement.  You get a lot of stuff about insurance, naturally, supplementary medical plans, dental implants, hearing aids, and a bewildering number of ingenious gizmos and gadgets especially designed ease the burden of the increasingly arthritic housewife or gardener as we go around our daily chores. And since we live in an Age of Experiences—at least so far as the burgeoning travel industry is concerned—there are marvelous opportunities to search for whales off the coast of Alaska, or join in the Kangaroo Count in the Outback or to “discover” various islands that have been in a state of unceasing discovery since the fifteenth century.  And there are cruises galore.  We have just signed up for our first.

            We have the good fortune, by no means shared by all, of having pleasant experiences to pick and being able to afford to pick a few of them.  Not surprisingly growing old delivers plenty of experiences free of charge and on its own, and a certain number of them are frankly unpleasant.  That I’m having a few of those myself at the moment may be what has led me to this week’s essay, though what I am most conscious of is something very different: namely wonderful experiences unavailable to the young.  There are more of these than you might think, but at the top of the list is an indisputable one, the experience of having grandchildren.  On that score we have pretty well hit the jackpot.  We have six of them, by actual count.   And they are not merely numerous and delightful, but also proximate.  Four of them live in New York, less than sixty miles away.

            For purposes of specific identification we invoke geographical place names, as they did in the Middle Ages.  Thomas Aquinas got his name not from being the son of Mr. and Mrs. Giuseppe Aquinas but because he came from a place called Aquino.  Thus among our New York grandchildren we have the three Manhattanites (Sophia, Lulu, and Cora) and the Brooklynite (Ruby).   Rather farther afield we have the two Montréalers (John Henry and Hazel), though just at the moment they are not far afield at all, but actually under our roof.

            The Montréalers are still quite young—six and four—and they can make quite a lot of noise.  To be honest, the sonic production of young children, which can include wailing, squabbling, sudden shrieks of indignation, alarming coughs, the mysterious thuds of heavy things dropping—is not always welcome.  Such noises can lead to grandparental ire, parental admonition, or even a trip to the ER—all of which we have already had in a rather short period of time.  But it is all drowned out and forgotten in the blessed noise of spontaneous laughter of unseen children coming from some corner of the house.

            It was the sing-song voices of little children playing on the other side of his garden wall that led to the conversion of the young Augustine.  What a laugh that was!  Many years ago in England, when our two older kids were roughly the age of John Henry and Hazel, we visited one of Joan’s aged aunts and the aunt’s even more aged husband.  I have only vague memories of the visit, but one thing sticks in my mind.  The husband was infirm as well as antique.  I believe he had met his wife when he was already an invalid and she a care provider.  He was in a wheel chair.  He dressed in an old-fashioned, formal manner that reminded me of the rich guy on the Monopoly cards.  But he was greatly animated by our visit.  The children delighted him.  “Listen to that!” he commanded me, referring to the noise emanating from our offspring in another room.  “Listen to that infantile laughter!”  It was one of the few times in my life I have encountered the word infantile in its literal and affirmative sense.

            What I thought was white birds.  That is because I often am “triggered” to remember lines of poetry.  The poem that came to my mind was one that nobody else seems to have read: John Masefield’s “The Everlasting Mercy”.  To guarantee that you will never be tempted to repair that lacuna I can tell you that it is a kind of Edwardian Methodist update of “Piers Plowman”.

O Christ who holds the open gate

O Christ who drives the furrow straight,

O Christ, the plough, O Christ, the laughter

Of holy white birds flying after…

Annals of Contemporary Verse

I hope that my indulgent readers can believe that my intentions for this week’s essay were good.  I had identified a topic (category: “general interest”) that might have bored you but was unlikely to antagonize you.  The entire country is inundated in waves of vitriolic controversy, everywhere amplified by screaming headlines, screaming demonstrators, and screaming heads on television programs.  We could all do with a holiday from politics, and from those widening manifestations of it known as the Culture Wars.  But I made the mistake of beginning my day by perusing the newspaper, wherein I found an article thus titled: “The Nation Magazine Betrays a Poet—and Itself,” by Grace Schulman, a former poetry editor at that magazine.  As I am a lover of poetry, as well as a professor of it, this caught my eye.

            It might seem unlikely that a story needing so much preliminary explanation could be of much weight, but here goes.  The Nation, historically one of the country’s important voices of left-wing politics, though fallen on hard ideological times, still has a small cultural following.  A recent issue included a short poem by one Anders Carlson-Wee, a name previously unknown to me, as are the names of most obscure young American poets.   The poem is slight, but I thought pretty interesting; and I’ll tell you about it in just a minute.  But first you need to know what happened.  The Nation has two poetry editors, a number that might seem excessive in terms of the journal’s marginal role in the contemporary literary scene.  Both of these women found the poem praise-worthy and recommended its publication.  But what is called a “Twitter storm” soon led to what is called a “critical reappraisal”.  After finding on their phones outraged comments from self-appointed spokespersons of various “communities” they concluded that Carlson-Wee’s poem—far from being good—was actually bad, really bad, probably racist, certainly “ableist,” and unquestionably appropriationist.  Culturally speaking, that is.  So the poetry editors actually published an apology in their journal for having published the poem!  That sentence probably requires two exclamation points, one for each editor.  But then what would I do with the fact that Mr. Carlson-Wee himself twittered out an abject apology dripping with socialist self-criticism?  That one merits a haud credibile.

            What was all this about?  I attach, obviously for “fair use” pedagogical purposes, the full text of Carlson-Wee’s poem as I find it on the Internet.  Though lacking the disciplinary constraints of a conventional sonnet, it is fourteen lines long.  Like, say, a Browning monologue, this poem has an imaginary voice, a voice that a reader will likely suppose is that of an uneducated but savvy black street person. This voice offers on the basis of personal experience cynical advice concerning more and less effective ploys for that species of passive panhandling characterized by down-and-outs sitting on the sidewalk while holding a cardboard sign identifying the sitter’s particular circumstances and/or difficulties.  As a literary critic I find the situation interesting and daring.  Though not without offenses against both lexicon and narrative plausibility, the poem has an ethos that comforts the afflicted and afflicts the comfortable.  It certainly tries to “give voice to the marginalized” and “invert hierarchies” and do other good stuff like that.  It actually invokes something of the complex discomfort that I (and I suspect many others in the demographic of actual readers of the Nation and other journals of similar intellectual ambition) not infrequently experience on the streets of New York.  I think it’s a pretty good shot at socially conscious art.

            Yet both the poetry experts at the magazine and the poet himself turned on a dime when upbraided by censors.  In a blinding flash they grasped the profound political incorrectness of what they had done.  They had allowed a white man to drop from his declarative sentences various forms of the verb to be, a colloquial feature of non-standard dialect in the speech of millions of his fellow citizens.  They had let stand the word crippled, a barbaric linguistic fossil painful to the differently abled.  Above all they had not guaranteed that the poet “stay in his lane”.  They had allowed, nay encouraged, an artistic attempt beyond solipsism, one in which the artist attempted to imagine something other than himself.   In his tweeted mea culpa the poet wrote: “I am beginning a process of talking to people and reevaluating what it means to make art in this world from a place of privilege….I will be donating my publication honorarium to Downtown Congregations to End Homelessness.”  It is no mean feat to grovel and virtue-signal in the same utterance, but Mr. Carlson-Wee pulls it off.

            I thought of the writing assignment required of the child Augustine.  This young Roman boy was made to write a lament in the voice of Dido—a woman, a queen, a Carthaginian!  I thought of Max Eastman’s book entitled Artists in Uniform, in which he delineated the cruel victory of Marxist dogma over a brilliant poetic efflorescence.  I though of such triumphs of the imagination as Gulliver’s Travels and The Memoirs of a Midget by Walter de la Mare.  And I felt that I would weep.

How-To

If you got hiv, say aids.  If you a girl

say you’re pregnant—nobody gonna lower

themselves to listen for the kick.  People

passing fast.  Splay your legs, cock a knee

funny.  It’s the littlest shames they’re likely

to comprehend.  Don’t say homeless, they know

you is.  What they don’t know is what opens

a wallet, what stops em from counting

what they drop.  If you’re young say younger.

Old say older.  If you’re crippled don’t

flaunt it.  Let em think they’re good enough

Christians to notice.  Don’t say you pray,

say you sin.  It’s about who they believe

they is.  You hardly even there.

                                    Anders Carlson-Wee