Thought of this before the disaster, but have been working on it during; so I think some of our situation has filtered in.
A Vision
1
When Mother, in her last years of teaching,
came home from battling
her incredibly stupid, new-professional-style
principal, she would tell me, near tears or
drinking (she never drank), at some length
what she had said, professionally and
unheard, but never what
he said. “What did he say?”
I asked. And, later, of
friends confronting glass ceilings, former
or other lovers, exes, officials, believers,
workers they were trying to
organize, members of some
social or mental underclass they
professionally had to break through to, I
asked the same question.
… Words grasped
at random, hysterical defensiveness,
dogma … really, they
(my friends) couldn’t
recall what the others had said. I wanted to know
because from the start
I knew there was an enemy
I thought I could evade
by knowing, defeat by despising.
(Really I don’t remember either,
and now there’s such a fog of remarks!)
It’s an interesting point:
intelligent people – a fortiori
intellectuals – often
forget what stupid people say
for we remember shapes and it has none.
2
If he stumbled into my mind he’d feel pain.
A lack of the free, basic air
of profit. Dark forms,
revealed by his keychain light as
abstractions, impeding movement.
Grit, buried mines:
words. A steady background moaning
instead of the usual easy listening.
Pitfalls, pits.
It’s Bush I’m picturing here, the image of man.
But that’s unfair.
Perhaps each mind would look this way to another. –
No. No “perhaps.”
3
Father couldn’t tell me what to be.
His own career was so improvised.
Years of subway reading, experience,
couldn’t stack up, by the mid-Fifties,
against an advanced degree or any degree;
as he learned when he published his book,
and in the relevant syllabi
it was always “recommended,” never assigned.
Cheating at solitaire. Scotch –
Black & White – with a twist. That wife.
On the day of the Nazi-Soviet Pact
he was on a boat on Lake Michigan
with Boris Topchevsky, head of
the Communist Party in Chicago,
Topchevsky’s aide, and someone
else, a rich red, the owner.
(“You’ve got to go to Spain, Pete,”
Topchevsky had said two years before.
“We need a Byron in the Movement.”
But my father neither went
nor joined.) Over the shortwave,
the delighted German voice: “Herr Ribbentrop
descends from the plane, is greeted … ”
My father and the host yelled
at Topchevsky: “What the hell is going on?”
“Turn this boat around,” said the Communist.
“Get back to shore.” And neither he
nor his aide spoke again;
ran off the dock and caught a bus downtown.
Three days later there was a rally
at Soldiers Field. My father went
with a red friend and thirty thousand other
“Friends of the Soviet Union.”
Half an hour passed. Forty-five minutes.
The stage remained empty.
Movement behind a curtain.
No one had received a phone call,
you see, from New York, or New York from Moscow.
For Stalin the issue was loyalty.
Suddenly Mother Bloor,
who had started life as a nun,
ran out, grabbed a mike
and cried, “You must have faith.
You must have faith in Comrade Stalin!”
My old man turned to his friend and said,
“I never liked you people and now I know why.
It’s just the goddam Church all over again!”
Each often-repeated, well-remembered phrase
and image like a thing in a museum,
impossibly ancient, precious,
its use obscure, and only accidentally art.
But he urged me, when I visited,
to go to college (as if there were
a plausible alternative) and try
for the best schools,
not only for the career angle
but because I would meet “great minds.”
He believed in great minds
and that they were at universities,
and was right, not realizing
they are often invisible, distant,
talking only to useful grad students
and dangerous department heads;
going home, disarming a security system
to enter, then arming it again
in case they doze; pouring drinks,
watching the tube, wanting never
to say or read another word.
4
The mines have been closed
for thirty years, the mills for twenty, but
the city councils – all Republican –
reflect and augment
the hate the locals feel
for newcomers, interlopers, “granolas,”
who want to open hip boutiques,
spas, decent restaurants … The locals
want jobs they understand
(or which their grandparents understood) as jobs;
meanwhile they hang around the 7/11.
And the granolas, the liberals
from Baltimore and Philly and DC
build or refurbish hilltop homes
with gardens, ducks, sometimes a cow or two,
hope for the best, paint
(like Linda, who left New York
to marry a local
carpenter/restorer who
works all day and broods all night
and has at last word only hit her twice);
sign petitions, hold fundraisers
with each other, and, from their decks at night,
look out upon a dozen points of light –
descending Sunday mornings
to the least inadequate market, where
they try to make eye contact with the locals,
seeing mostly their bad teeth.
5
Is there anything in Foucault that isn’t
in Collingwood? I mean,
is the idea of an “archaeology of knowledge”
so different from that of “locating
the transcendent presuppositions of an era”?
And what about Nietzsche? I mean
was his aim merely to make
available to academics
an endless play of shifting paper screens,
or to create, to have you transform yourself
into, the Superman?
“WE GOOD, POWERFUL, BEAUTIFUL, NOBLE, HAPPY ONES!”
I could also cite Fichte: “The kind of
philosophy one adopts
depends upon the sort of man one is;
for a philosophical system is not
a lifeless piece of furniture one might take or discard
but is animated by the soul of the man who has it.”
I dream that eventually poetry
will say everything, anything,
will reabsorb philosophy, science, and
subsume our dusk in dawn. (What is this doing here?)
6
At the faculty dinner,
one of the new adjuncts
was gorgeous. The black spaghetti straps
admitted it, the fixed patient glow
finessed it, deflecting, sublimating
attention.
We were talking prose.
She hadn’t heard of Saramago, Sebald.
“It’s been so long,” she breathed, almost
wonderingly, “since I read anything
by a male.
I only read novels by women.
My favorite is Tony Morrison.”
Abruptly I had a vision
of her imaginative life:
a garden of feelings, nostalgias, grievances, carefully
separated, labeled, tended … “How,
I wonder, would you react
if I said I only read novels
by men?” But
of course I didn’t say it and don’t know
what I would have forgotten she said.
7
On the terrace, that night, looking down
at Redneck Valley, stood
one of my familiars:
indistinct, cold, wise-sinister,
older male figures. Their meaning
has always been transparent, their aura
almost exhausted now
that I am an older male figure.
He indulged in Schmittian reflections.
The myth of the thirtieth century
will be Stalin, who will have the face of Christ.
For the masses in their warrens
will only be able to imagine
food, and someone to give them food and care.
And the unscrupulous, sociopaths,
will still be at the top;
for the secret aim of society
is to destroy its own infrastructure
until only status is left, brutal and pure.
– But I had heard, had imagined this before
and interrupted: Where will the poor in their tunnels
go to plug into love and hope?
Or what at last will make them pull that plug? –
He seemed disconcerted, hesitant suddenly, styleless;
mumbled something
about how commonplaces of the future
drift back through time to shape our revelations:
“You think you have awakened but have only
passed from a shallow to a deeper sleep.” –
I glared, feeling as ornery
as the unemployed below us and
as short-term in my views. Death is the future.
8
It became accepted, said Vidal,
that art is the expression of
a private vision. Which is true enough,
with the unfortunate proviso
that the private visions of men without genius
are uniformly gray.
|
