quoted

The Poet, II

My body was once a beautiful house of marble,
Kissed to pale rose by the passionate heat of the sun,
Wherein through cunning channels flowed forever
Health-giving crimson blood in steady tides.

My eyes were then quick to see and to welcome beauty,
My lips smiled often with gratified desire,
My hands shook not, but were fit for caress or grapple,
My arms rose and my body moved in strength.

Then not a single line of any poem
Had my hands raped from my brain, but untouched and pure
They abode in the land of distant visions where no man
Heard my voice calling for them at eventide.

My blood lies in great black lakes now, sluggish and frozen,
Or fumes in like some boiling, stinging, poison brew
Till it suddenly stops in a lassitude unspoken,
Or bursts through my pores and covers me with red dew:

My eyes are bleared now and dull with sleepless midnights,
My lips are shrunken purses—their gold is spent,
My hands unsteadily clutch and paw and tremble,
My arms are as strings of macaroni bent.

And as for my chest, ’tis like a leaky air-box
Fixed to some cheap melodeon out of tune,
The bellows creak, the loose and brown keys rattle,
And the music that comes is like a dog’s sick moan.

But in my brain there seethes an adulterous hotchpotch
Of poems clean and disgusting, mad and sage;
And pain, like a dry fire, keeps them ever a-boiling
Till they splash over and blacken some wasted page.

Yes, I am a poet now to be mocked and applauded,
A turnspit that turns and must never taste the meat:
Behold how great I am, but I wait for a greater,
Even Death, who will silence the march of these crippled feet.

—John Gould Fletcher (1886–1950), “The Poet, II,” Fire and Wine, 1913

How fares it?

Thigh-bone said to breast-bone:
      “How fares it, dead,
now heart’s soft hammer
      is silencèd?
How fares it, brother,
      when the only sound
is slow roots thrusting
      into the ground?”
Breast-bone said to thigh-bone:
      “How fares it, friend,
with no errands to run,
      no knee to bend?
How fares it ghost, now
      the only stir
is of quiet becoming
      quieter?”
Thigh-bone and breast-bone
      said to skull:
“What of dead Plato
      and the Greek trull?
How fares it, emblem
      of death, set free
from wisdom and lust’s
      infirmity?”…

—Humbert Wolfe (1885–1940), from “A Conversation,” 1932

Inflame them to madness

“Whosoever contributes, especially with success, to enlarge the Understandings of Men, and to mend their Hearts, is entitled to the Friendship and Protection of the Governors of Men, I mean of such as would truly answer the noble end of Government; who, if they pursue their duty, and consult the honour and improvement of human nature, will chearfully and generously promote whatever has that good tendency. And they who practice different Politics, by cramping the human Soul, possessing it with false awe, and debasing it through Darkness and Ignorance, do not deserve, but rather disgrace and forfeit, the glorious and endearing title of Magistrates and Protectors.

“True and extensive Knowledge never was, never can be, hurtful to the Peace of Society. It is Ignorance, or, which is worse than ignorance, false Knowledge, that is chiefly terrible to States. They are the furious, the ill taught, the blind and misguided, that are prone to be seized with groundless Fears, and unprovoked Resentment, to be roused by Incendiaries, and to rush desperately into Sedition and acts of Rage.

“Subjects that are most knowing and best informed, are ever most peaceable and loyal. Whereas the Loyalty and obedience of such, whose understandings extend not beyond Names and Sounds, will be always precarious, and can never be thoroughly relied upon, whilst any turbulent or artful men can, by dinn and clamour, and the continual application of those Sounds, intoxicate, and inflame them even to madness, can make them believe themselves undone though nothing hurts them, think they are oppressed when they are best protected, and can drive them into riots and rebellion, without the excuse of one real grievance. It will always be easy to raise a mist before eyes that are already dark: and it is a true observation, ‘that it is an easy work to govern Wise Men; but to govern Fools or Madmen, is a continual slavery.’

“It is from the blind zeal and stupidity cleaving to Superstition, ’tis from the Ignorance, Rashness, and Rage attending Faction, that so many, so mad, and so sanguinary evils have afflicted and destroyed Men, dissolved the best Governments, and thinned the greatest Nations. And as a people well instructed will certainly esteem the Blessings which they enjoy, and study public Peace, for their own sake, there is a great merit in instructing the people, and in cultivating their Understandings. They are certainly less credulous in proportion as they are more knowing, and consequently less liable to be the Dupes of Demagogues, and the property of Ambition. They are not then to be surprized with false cries, nor animated by imaginary Danger; and wherever the Understanding is well principled and informed, the Passions will be tame, and the Heart well disposed.

“They therefore who communicate true Knowledge to their species, are true Friends to the World, Benefactors to Society, and deserve all encouragement from those, who preside over Society, with the applause and good wishes of all men.”

—Pierre Des Maizeaux (1673–1745), Dedication, The Dictionary Historical and Critical of Mr Peter Bayle, Second English Edition, Volume the First, 1734

Confessions of a Worrier

“If any man or woman knows more about worrying than I do, that man or woman is sincerely to be pitied. To begin with, I come of honorable generations of worriers, all of whom seemed to be deeply sensible of their responsibility for the carrying on of a world which they did not create. My grandfather used to worry about the weather and crops. My mother worried with an elaboration and finish which really lent distinction to her performance. She could worry harder and longer on less provocation than anybody else I ever knew. When it became my turn to take up the burden of the universe I was quite as successful as she.

“As a child, I worried about the end of the world, and the Unpardonable Sin, which I knew I had committed, if I could only find out what it was. I worried my way through school and into college, where my course in worry was so complete that I came out with nervous prostration and two deep furrows between my eyebrows which I shall wear, like the scars of battle they really are, to my dying day. And then I worried about the furrows!

“I began to see the light through reading Menticulture by Horace Fletcher which put a vague old Buddhist doctrine into a modern, concrete formula — ‘Anger and worry are bad habits of the mind. They are not necessary ingredients.’ Worry not necessary! I had always supposed it was as much my business to worry as it was to breathe, and I looked upon people who did not worry as the shirks and cowards of creation, who were easy in their minds simply because they were criminally indifferent to their duties.”

—Mary Boardman Page, “The Confessions of a Worrier,” 1899, a little altered

Literary LOL

This tweet from a guy named Ben had me laughing harder than I have in a long while. —

Herman Melville’s “Moby Dick” has perhaps the most memorable opening line in all of Western literature:

“I hope you motherfuckers like reading about whales”

—Ben, @pixelatedboat, 2018 August 12, onegianthand.com

2018 August 21

Ex Libris R. Le G.

“…multum ille et terris jactatus et alto
Vi superum, saevae memorem Junonis ob iram,
Multa quoque et bello passus, dum conderet urbem
Inferretque deos Latio:…” —Virgil, The Aeneid

Having no home, what should I do with these,
Tossed as I am about the sounding seas,
Sport of exiling winds of change and chance—
Feet in America, and heart in France.
Homeless, ’tis meet I find my books a home:
Coffined in crates and cases long they lay,
Distant from me three thousand miles of foam
Dungeoned in cellars cold and nailed away,
As in a sepulchre, till Judgment Day.
Lost to their gentle uses in the tomb,
Cobwebbed companions of the spidered gloom,
At last they rise again to live once more,—
Dread resurrection of the auction room.

Books I have loved so well, my love so true
Tells me ’tis time that I should part from you,
No longer, selfish, hoard and use you not,
Nor leave you in the unlettered dark to rot,
But into alien keeping you resign—
Hands that love books, fear not, no less than mine.

Thus shall you live upon warm shelves again,
And ‘neath an evening lamp your pages glow,
Others shall press ‘twixt leaf and leaf soft flowers,
As I was wont to press them long ago;
And blessings be upon the eyes that rain
A tear upon my flowers—I mean on “ours”—
If haply here and there kind eyes shall find
Some sad old flower that I have left behind.

—Richard Le Gallienne, “Ex Libris R. Le G.,” May 1905