Llyn Clague’s new book of poems is a charmer. It does what poetry, long expected to do, seems these days to do less and less: it tries to build a bridge – tenuous, delicate, easily breakable as it must be – between the individual and society at large, between the reader and the world.
…. Why
when it is so widely dismissed
as “all about me” – why poetry
about India?
…
… can poetry –
more allusive than analytic
daemonic than descriptive –
in flashes of India reveal landscapes
inside you?
Subjectivism has long been the presiding curse of modern poetry, to say nothing of modern culture, which has turned self-centeredness from the acme of sin into society’s prime motivator.
The philosophical roots of subjectivism go back to the idealism of modern thought, beginning with Descartes but finding its strongest support in Kant, who convinced many thinkers up to our time that “reality” is not directly accessible to us, that the only access we have is to the thoughts in our minds – although today even the word “mind” is suspect, and only “the brain” is scientifically correct, although even the doughtiest neuroscientist has yet to locate a thought in the brain.
Rheims Cathedral, burning during the early days of World War I (G. Fraipont, 1915)
The Beast and Mr. James (an excerpt)
A play about Henry James and World War I, by Christopher Bernard
Act 2: 1914
London. Evening. A lobby in Covent Garden with stairs sweeping upward in the background; “Libiamo” from Verdi’s La Traviata is playing in the background.
HENRY JAMES is anxiously pacing the lobby, occasionally chewing a thumbnail. His hat and cane lie on a nearby lobby bench. He is dressed, with subdued elegance, for the opera – dark suit, light vest, elegant cravat, patent leather shoes, etc.
The music fades a little; a box door has closed.
HENRY JAMES (to himself): What did dear, kind Edith call me? A nervous nelly, with the imagination of disaster. Oh fie! I’m as nervous as a young cat. The worst can’t possibly be upon us – not now. They must settle something between them. They can’t be so mad as not to. They must see the stakes. Our countries are no longer run by lunatics and the brain-dead spawn of in-bred families. Common sense must have come to count for something in this bloody epoch.
USHER enters.
USHER (with a deeply reproving look; very loudly): Please, sir, be quiet so that the members of the audience can enjoy the music! Thank you, sir!
He leaves with a departing scowl at HENRY JAMES, who glares after him.
BURGESS, JAMES’s valet, dressed in outdoor ware, enters, carrying a newspaper.
HENRY JAMES (with a flushed hope, takes the paper; in a loud whisper): Thank you, Burgess, forgive me for driving you out in the middle of the night, but I just could not … (At sight of the front page, he lets out a cry, almost a shout.) No! … The Kaiser, that … no, no! …
He reads the column with moments when he pauses and stares over the top of the paper in despair, as the music continues in the background.
HENRY JAMES (with no attempt to be quiet): He’s mad! They are allmad!
He then takes his hat and cane and leaves hurriedly, with a gesture to BURGESS to follow, as the USHER re-enters, looking like thunder at them as they depart. “Libiamo” swells to a climax and ends, with wild applause.
“Dazzling, brilliant, inspiring, eloquent, demanding, confusing, chaotic, flummoxing, the work of a mad genius, the work of a genius madman” are some of the things that may come to mind as one reads the work of Ivan Argüelles. And this is what one might expect of someone whose dense and difficult poetry is some of the most vital literary work by a contemporary American writer. Dark, lyrical, intense, and at its best of a deep, if at times willful brilliance, Argüelles’ writing shows little patience with the flippant ironies of the postmodernists, yet he takes the modern skepticism of any metaphysical certainty seriously and uses his work to probe some of its darker implications. His work has long been a Commedia of our nihilism.
And yet he is a natural ecstatic, which gives his writing a profound poignancy. He subscribes to a kind of maximalist Augustan modernism, seized with prophecy and the divine afflatus, though fully capable of dips into the slangy and demotic; he is, refreshingly, a master of that rarest of literary voices, the contemporary high style, a style unafraid to assert and insist, yet that, at every step, undermines its own insistence:
It was Sam who got me thinking, one day, after I read a book about how mankind was causing the greatest extinction of species on earth in 65 million years. Sam’s my dog, a black Labrador with deep, sad eyes. It was what I saw in those eyes that changed my mind – actually, it changed my whole life. My name is Johnny José Brennan, and I live in Davenport, Iowa, not far from the Mississippi River.
I read the book over one of my few weekends away from the office. As I read, I often shook my head in alarm and amazement. I’d followed reports on global warming and humanity’s other devastating effects on other living creatures over the years, and fully accepted these were serious issues, but I’d had no idea about this; I’d believed it was mostly a question of rising oceans and more violent hurricanes and unstable weather that would have an effect a couple of generations down the road. But this was a different order of magnitude altogether.
I vaguely remembered my Uncle Jésus (on my Mexican mother’s side) railing against what he called “ecocide” when I was little, and something he had called, with a melodramatic flourish, “the coming holocaust of the species.” My dad, an Irishman with family still in Donegal, had claimed global warming was all made up by liberals, that environmentalism was just a way for Big Science to get grants from Washington and take more of people’s rights away; he and his brother-in-law had had many a memorable shout-’n’-out (angry shouts followed by even angrier, if possible, slamming of doors) while I was growing up, so I dismissed both of them, my father’s conspiracy theories and my crazy uncle’s rants about “species collapse.” But now I wasn’t so sure.
Various formats, including electronic and a paper edition, available at cclapcenter.com/onbeinghuman
An essay review by Christopher Bernard
The question “what does it mean to be human?” has become daunting. Both more urgent and more problematic in recent decades, it promises to become even more so in years to come. This short book of brief and stimulating essays on “novels and movies that examine the question of humanity,” written by Karl Wolff, a staff writer and associate editor for the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography, brings a number of these concerns to sharp focus. His book does what criticism does at its best: not only raising important questions and suggesting new avenues of exploration but introducing readers to ideas and works new to them, or encouraging readers to revisit and understand them in new ways.
It is odd that up until a few decades ago, the title “On Being Human” could have been used for some anodyne book in an undergraduate “humanities” course on “the miracle of Greece,” the marvels of the Renaissance, and the triumph of the Enlightenment, with a few passing references to such modern sages as Tolstoy, Albert Schweitzer, and Gandhi. Only in the last century, especially the last generation, has the category “human” become problematic, troubling, even empty, as the lessons of the “inhumanity” of human beings learned from the monstrosities of slavery to the carnage of Verdun to the death camps and killing fields of Europe and Asia to the Sixth Extinction have sunk in, and the virtues of our humanity have seemed increasingly overwhelmed by our evils.
“Did I ever tell why I no longer call myself a humanist?” —Overheard at a climatology conference
So, the word’s finally out:
I am the world’s Caesar, and you are my Christians.
Not that I hate you absolutely—
on the contrary, for the most part
I enjoy you;
those of you I cannot eat
or flog into subservience,
to help me, or amuse me, or decorate my
upscale live-work high-end design space
now, or by no later than the end of next quarter,
are just in the way,
as I thrust ahead
to glory, to a sweet, psychotic power,
and a suffocating wealth
built on the dependable human delight
in the enchanted moment of acquisition.
I’ve got you,
I’ve got the world.
It is no longer God’s or nature’s;
it is mine,
I own you,
I who hate to have and love to get.
There was once a despot
whose footsteps bloodied his time.
After he had conquered the world,
bored with his possessions,
he decided to destroy them:
slaughtered his slaves, his women, his sycophants,
sent his soldiers to the ends of his empire
to pillage and sack it, out of boredom and rage
that he had no more worlds to conquer.
He burned his own palaces to the ground.
In a crazy drunk one night,
he broke his neck in a ditch.
The peasants crept up to his small, pale body,
the body that had conquered the world,
and watched the flies flickering above it.
Today there were no peasants.
There were no flies.
____
Christopher Bernard is a poet, novelist, essayist, photographer and filmmaker living in San Francisco. He is author of the novel A Spy in the Ruins,The Rose Shipwreck: Poems and Photographs, and a collection of stories, In the American Night. He is also co-editor of the webzine Caveat Lector.
Minoan bowl depicting the Minotaur, from www.nem.tku.edu.tw
The Minotaur Speaks
By Christopher Bernard
In the darkness a line glimmers~ like a piece of spider silk, a tendril of its web~ quivers and pulls around another corner, then disappears in the gloom, trembling in the rancid darkness, hot and stale as a cellar, binding the random corners of my chaotic home.
At one end clings the man the gods have sent to kill me~ (we’ll see about that!)~but the thread’s other end winds and coils and shines, leading . . . where?
Oh, farther into the maze where father Minos left me, the bestial child his whore of a wife, my mother Pasiphaë, dropped nine months after coupling with the Thracian bull whose member she had coveted~
mating monster with monster, how did they expect to escape having a monster for their offspring!
And so Minos threw me into this foul place, scrawled into confusion like a ball of tangled yarn, no one can find a way out of, no matter how brave or cunning, a darkness I explore to find but deeper darkness, and there left me, to feed on sacrificial virgins, the beautiful, pure-skinned, untouched children of the Greeks.
I trip over their bones as I bang from wall to wall, lost, hungry, bellowing in the dark, still hearing the echoes of the weeping that come from the maze’s mouth, where the others cower, crowd, and wait their turn in the labyrinth, their death duel with the Minotaur.
The line tugs. Where does it go? It slackens again~who bound it to the one Greek they promised would kill that abortion, the bull-man~
as if I had no soul, no mind, no heart, no memory of happiness under the sun’s gaze, and only howl and snort, bucking my horns on the rocks in an agony of memory of those few weeks I knew the bright flash of day.
It tugs again, and thrums~he is looking for me, this Theseus, with his smooth face, his eyes shining with bald terror, imagining me~
one hand trembling on the rock face, the other sweating at the end of the thread. The thread! it may lead back to the maze’s entrance, escape out of this stinking darkness into the air and sun,
the immensity of light and breath of cloud and the sweet moon, the high sky above me~could it?
Of course, it could! Someone~ a lover?
someone who loves Theseus (even my mother didn’t love me!)
gave him, of the thread, one end. And the other she holds, waiting for him, standing patiently at the dark hole where she saw him disappear, frightened and hopeful, feeling each quiver and jerk with fear,
to keep her dearest love from being killed and eaten by me.
What if I follow the line itshows,sowhite,inthe darkness?
Lord sun above me, beyond this mantle of rock~ if I follow the thread, will it lead me back up to the flowery air and the sighing of the sea, back to light and life and even a hope for love under the stars, back to the heaven called day?
It slackens. Grab it, now, beast! It is so light~so frail~ how could anything so fragile be a promise a beast could believe, a hope in this slaughterhouse, this fist of stench and weeping~ my hope?
I’ll let you guide me, one way to my death at the hands of Theseus, the other to my life in a girl’s hands, bright with day.
Lead me, thread. And do not break until I am dead or free.
_____
Christopher Bernard is a poet, novelist, essayist, photographer and filmmaker living in San Francisco. He is author of the novel A Spy in the Ruins, the short-story collection In the American Night, and The Rose Shipwreck: Poems and Photographs. He is also co-editor of the webzine Caveat Lector.
