The Market Economy

It's hard to feel lucky in February. I think it's easier to feel that you're putting together a lot of the details that will make good things happen in subsequent months, things that aren't even noticed now but will soon come poking up like green shoots out of melting snow.

I spent a month working on a proposal for my 1/6 time job last September, and even though it wasn't accepted by the people I pitched it to, I've pasted an idiot grin on my face and continued to wave around the thick sheaf of paper describing it. Now another proposal is in the works--a bigger one which includes the first as an appendix--and it offers a chance that my job will be classified as at least half time in the next few years.

I thought I needed to give this work most of my attention for a year, to see if I can turn it into more of what it should be, but it's hard going some days. I think of my life in the village where I work as if I'm a character like Auden describes Brueghel's Icarus in "Musee des Beaux Arts," someone who is "not an important failure," but that's not the perception of the people I pass on the streets of the small town where I live. Their situation is a lot more like the one in Marge Piercy's 1977 poem "The Market Economy":

Suppose some peddler offered
you can have a color TV
but your baby will be
born with a crooked spine;
you can have polyvinyl cups
and wash and wear
suits but it will cost
you your left lung
rotted with cancer; supposed
somebody offered you
a frozen precooked dinner
every night for ten years
but at the end
your colon dies
and then you do,
slowly and with much pain.
You get a house in the suburbs
but you work in a new plastics
factory and die at fifty-one
when your kidneys turn off.

But where else will you
work? where else can
you rent but Smog City?
The only houses for sale
are under the yellow sky.
You've been out of work for
a year and they're hiring
at the plastics factory.
Don't read the fine
print, there isn't any.

Where else will you work? I keep asking myself that. Why did you quit commuting, with college costs looming over your head like a cartoon anvil? Suppose you get what you want--you get paid for working full time--and then you have to do this work for the rest of your life?

"What if" is a wearying game. It's easier to plod along doing the same thing every day without ever thinking about it, except then one day the snow is all melted and you realize that you're older without having gotten any wiser.

Jonathan Franzen is giving a talk at the college tonight, and I'm going to put on my insulated parka and venture out to hear it. You know the saying about ventures, don't you?

Doom is dark and deeper than any sea-dingle

We're having a January thaw, and I've been slowly exhaling the breath I'd been trying to hold for almost a month. Despite assurances that worrying doesn't change anything, I'm almost superstitious about it. If I imagine it, it won't happen... like the joke about taking an umbrella with you so it won't rain.

This time of year is when I think more about the possibility of doom. When we have to get out from under the covers in the dark--particularly if it's one of those mornings when I've woken up at 3:30 am to the realization that I haven't called an electrician yet to look at those old wires we found connected to the fluorescent light that stays on in the utility room or finished dealing with the insurance company about the medical bill from last summer. When the sound of waking is everyone--including the cats--sneezing and coughing. During one of those icy interminable afternoons when Ron's forgotten his phone.

Doom is dark and deeper than any sea-dingle.
Upon what man it fall
In spring, day-wishing flowers appearing,
Avalanche sliding, white snow from rock-face,
That he should leave his house.
No cloud-soft hand can hold him, restraint by women;
But ever that man goes
Through place-keepers, through forest trees,
A stranger to strangers over undried sea,
Houses for fishes, suffocating water,
Or lonely on fell as chat,
By pot-holed becks
A bird stone-haunting, an unquiet bird.

There head falls forward, fatigued at evening,
And dreams of home,
Waving from window, spread of welcome,
Kissing of wife under single sheet;
But waking sees
Bird-flocks nameless to him, through doorway voices
Of new men making another love.

Save him from hostile capture,
From sudden tiger's spring at corner;
Protect his house,
His anxious house where days are counted
From thunderbolt protect,
From gradual ruin spreading like a stain;
Converting number from vague to certain,
Bring joy, bring day of his returning,
Lucky with day approaching, with leaning dawn.

Every day we all return intact is one more day that our letter of ruin must still be lost in the mail. We can have incandescent light. And supper, and maybe a round of our new favorite game, Lie-brary.

In Praise of Limestone

The end of July is almost here, and we haven't quite managed any unscheduled days yet. It hasn't been good enough weather for swimming on the afternoons we might have been free to go, and already next week my daughter starts high school band practice and my son starts high school soccer practice.

This week is still mostly free of school-related activities because it's the week of the county fair, which is a big deal around here. We haven't yet made time to go out there and admire the percherons and llamas, eat corn dogs and fried oreos, and try to resist the toss-a-ball-in-a-fishbowl-and-win-a-goldfish game. We really should go by and at least smile at the courageous people volunteering at the local gay-straight alliance information booth.

I'm contemplating why I think it's not a good idea for me to read fiction that describes how awful people can be to each other. Yes, it's good to be aware that sexual trafficking and repressive theocracies exist in the world, but I don't think that reading extended descriptions of the degradations women suffer in either of these situations, as in Levin's The Blue Notebook or Hosseini's A Thousand Splendid Suns, is good for me. I don't think that the danger for me, personally, is what one blogger recently described as Moral Tourism, but more the moral paralysis you feel when you don't think you can possibly make a difference. Maybe, like Blanche Dubois, I want to hang onto a few of my illusions, to believe that people are basically good.

And so I'm already in between seasons, in between chauffeuring duties and riding with my daughter as she learns to drive. I am moving forward without moral certainty. I'm contemplating W.H. Auden's poem In Praise of Limestone:

If it form the one landscape that we the inconstant ones
Are consistently homesick for, this is chiefly
Because it dissolves in water. Mark these rounded slopes
With their surface fragrance of thyme and beneath
A secret system of caves and conduits; hear these springs
That spurt out everywhere with a chuckle
Each filling a private pool for its fish and carving
Its own little ravine whose cliffs entertain
The butterfly and the lizard; examine this region
Of short distances and definite places:
What could be more like Mother or a fitter background
For her son, for the nude young male who lounges
Against a rock displaying his dildo, never doubting
That for all his faults he is loved, whose works are but
Extensions of his power to charm? From weathered outcrop
To hill-top temple, from appearing waters to
Conspicuous fountains, from a wild to a formal vineyard,
Are ingenious but short steps that a child's wish
To receive more attention than his brothers, whether
By pleasing or teasing, can easily take.

Watch, then, the band of rivals as they climb up and down
Their steep stone gennels in twos and threes, sometimes
Arm in arm, but never, thank God, in step; or engaged
On the shady side of a square at midday in
Voluble discourse, knowing each other too well to think
There are any important secrets, unable
To conceive a god whose temper-tantrums are moral
And not to be pacified by a clever line
Or a good lay: for, accustomed to a stone that reponds,
They have never had to veil their faces in awe
Of a crater whose blazing fury could not be fixed;
Adjusted to the local needs of valleys
Where everything can be touched or reached by walking,
Their eyes have never looked into infinite space
Through the lattice-work of a nomad's comb; born lucky,
Their legs have never encountered the fungi
And insects of the jungle, the monstrous forms and lives
With which we have nothing, we like to hope, in common.
So, when one of them goes to the bad, the way his mind works
Remains comprehensible: to become a pimp
Or deal in fake jewelry or ruin a fine tenor voice
For effects that bring down the house could happen to all
But the best and the worst of us...
That is why, I suppose,
The best and worst never stayed here long but sought
Immoderate soils where the beauty was not so external,
Something more than a mad camp. "Come!"cried the granite wastes,
"How evasive is your humor, how accidental
Your kindest kiss, how permanent is death." (Saints-to-be
Slipped away sighing.) "Come!" purred the clays and gravels,
"On our plains there is room for armies to drill; rivers
Wait to be tamed and slaves to construct you a tomb
In the grand manner: soft as the earth is mankind and both
Need to be altered." (Intendant Caesars rose and
Left, slamming the door." But the really reckless were fetched
By an older colder voice, the oceanic whisper:
"I am the solitude that asks and promises nothing;
That is how I shall set you free. There is no love;
There are only the various envies, all of them sad."

They were right, my dear, all those voices were right
And still are; this land is not the sweet home that it looks,
Nor its peace the historical calm of a site
Where something was settled once and for all: A backward
And dilapidated province, connected
To the big busy world by a tunnel, with a certain
Seedy appeal, is that all it is now? Not quite:
It has a worldly duty which in spite of itself
It does not neglect, but calls into question
All the Great Powers assume; it disturbs our rights. The poet,
Admired for his earnest habit of calling
The sun the sun, his mind Puzzle, is made uneasy
By these solid statues which so obviously doubt
His antimythological myth; and these gamins,
Pursuing the scientist down the tiled colonnade
With such lively offers, rebuke his concern for Nature's
Remotest aspects: I, too, am reproached, for what
And how much you know. Not to lose time, not to get caught,
Not to be left behind, not, please! to resemble
The beasts who repeat themselves, or a thing like water
Or stone whose conduct can be predicted, these
Are our Common Prayer, whose greatest comfort is music
Which can be made anywhere, is invisible,
And does not smell. In so far as we have to look forward
To death as a fact, no doubt we are right: But if
Sins can be forgiven, if bodies rise from the dead,
These modifications of matter into
Innocent athletes and gesticulating fountains,
Made solely for pleasure, make a further point:
The blessed will not care what angle they are regarded from,
Having nothing to hide. Dear, I know nothing of
Either, but when I try to imagine a faultless love
Or the life to come, what I hear is the murmur
Of underground streams, what I see is a limestone landscape.

Can you pick out a line or two that speaks to you in this poem? Mine is "the monstrous forms and lives/With which we have nothing, we like to hope, in common."

I would like to open my eyes on a summer morning and have the strength to seek out new landscapes, undeterred by dreams of monsters. And also schedules of children.

Someplace with Monkeys

This morning I read the newspaper and looked at google news, and then I read some of the blogs I follow, and all of the sudden, some of my inarticulate fears coalesced into an image, and that image is the house in Dr. Zhivago full of desperate people after the revolution, courtesy of the Green-Eyed Siren. She says what a lot of bloggers are feeling about the economic crisis:
"... I feel like I’m developing dual identities. One part of me is happily Facebooking and Tweeting and blogging about all that is random and useless, generally with an ample helping of bad-economy gallows humor. The other part of me is in a constant state of fear and depression, like a background application gone haywire, breaking through my online party time more and more frequently to have anxiety attacks about our collective future."

I've been feeling this way since September, when I started feeling like maybe I was like Nero, fiddling in the local symphony and reading books to escape present reality. And yet, as the Siren points out, what more can any of us non-experts do than continue to take care of the things important to us, including our children? One of the questions Harriet got this week is about whether we should all chuck our "serious writing pursuits" and collaborate on a money-making romance novel, and she said yes, "let's go write it in Bermuda. Or someplace with monkeys." Now, that's escapism.

But I'm thinking about W.H. Auden (which you know I do a lot), and about how his poem "September 1, 1939" was revised during his lifetime and then how very often it was quoted in September, 2001, and how important it still seems right now:

I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-Second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives:
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night.

Accurate scholarship can
Unearth the whole offence
From Luther until now
That has driven a culture mad,
Find what occurred at Linz,
What huge iimago made
A psychopathic god:
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.

Exiled Thucydides knew
All that a speech can say
About Democracy,
And what Dictators do,
The elderly rubbish they talk
To an apathetic grave;
Analysed all in his book,
The enlightenment driven away,
The habit-forming pain,
Mismanagement and grief:
We must suffer them all again.

Into this neutral air
Where blind skyscrapers use
Their full height to proclaim
The strength of Collective Man,
Each language pours its vain
Competitive excuse:
But who can live for long
In an euphoric dream;
Out of the mirror they stare,
Imperialism's face
And the international wrong.

Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play,
All the conventions conspire
To make this fort assume
The furniture of home;
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.

The windiest militant trash
Important Persons shout
Is not so crude as our wish:
What mad Nijinsky wrote
About Diaghilev
Is true of the normal heart;
For the error bred in the bone
Of each woman and each man
Craves what it cannot have,
Not universal love
But to be loved alone.

From the conservative dark
Into the ethical life
The dense commuters come,
Repeating their morning vow,
"I will be true to the wife,
I'll concentrate more on my work,"
And helpless governors wake
To resume their compulsory game:
Who can release them now,
Who can reach the deaf,
Who can speak for the dumb?

All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.

Defenceless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.

All I have is a voice, and even if I would like to go write nonsense someplace with monkeys, that's just talk. It's connecting with others. And if "we must love one another or die" or any of the variations on that line that Auden tried, connection itself is important.

And humor is important; think of the father in Life is Beautiful, and the courage it can take to get through what later might be identified as a Bad Time in History. Also, Dr. Zhivago may be scary, in parts, but why is it one of the few Russian novels made into a movie that many Americans have seen? It's a love story.

Prolonged Whining

So it's been an entire week without power. I've made my first impression on my students after dressing and brushing my hair in the dark. We've been to all the local restaurants (it's a pretty small town). Rather than becoming closer as a family, like all the local newspaper columnists gush, we've attempted to make it to our usual after school and evening events, and then we've come home and showered in the dark, while Ron has spent most of his evenings at work. We've discovered that we can make hot water on the side burner of our propane grill, and that has made the black and chilly mornings more bearable. Our local Wal-Mart got a delivery of D batteries and ice, so we can keep the carrots and lettuce that we feed to the guinea pig and the rabbit from rotting and can continue to light our way from room to gloomy room.

The bright spot in my week has been this award from Harriet:
arte y pico

She says she likes reading the poems I often post, so in her honor, there's a new one for today. One of my most outdated skills is that I can touch-type about 100 words per minute, so most of the time when I quote or reprint something in its entirety, I'm typing it in. I think this makes me stand out in the world of book blogs... maybe my ability to provide poems from obscure sources makes up for some of my technical incompetence. I can hope!

Since I'm in a whiny mood and the headlines have been so bleak, between the local storm damage, the Texas storm damage and gas prices, and the financial markets, it's kind of a pessimistic poem. But since it's by W.H. Auden, it's not without an ironic edge.

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
Extoll 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.

Don't you just love the idea that the literati have imaginary friends? I wish David Foster Wallace had been a bit closer to his. I also love the image of the evening gowns growing more fantastic. If the public utility structure continues its decline, perhaps the gowns will feature little battery-operated Christmas lights up and down the skirts.

Let Us Now Praise Famous Poems

Lemming says people are sending her poems this month and that they're poems that she already knows, old chestnuts. Of course, she admits that she has some background as an English major, so I assume that she knows more poems than other people. Certainly I think I know more poems than many people, so it's never easy for me to figure out if everyone I know agrees on which poems are most famous. A friend from grad school, a good poet in her own right, was raised on the poems of Robert Service ("The Cremation of Sam McGee"). And I was surprised once, years ago, to find out that two of my closest friends, people who went to the same liberal arts college that I did (Hendrix College, in Conway, Arkansas), didn't know Auden's poem "Musee des Beaux Arts," which is one of my top favorite poems of all time.

Here is a very short list of some of the most-beloved and well-known poems of all time (from my 1986 edition of the Norton Introduction to Poetry). These are poems that every educated person should know:
Elizabeth Barrett Browning, How Do I Love Thee?
Howard Nemerov, The Vacuum
Byron, She Walks in Beauty
Shakespeare, Let Me Not to the Marriage of True Minds, That Time of Year, Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer's Day?
Thomas Wyatt, They Flee from Me
Sylvia Plath, Daddy, Black Rook in Rainy Weather
Emily Dickinson, A Narrow Fellow in the Grass, After Great Pain, Because I Could Not Stop for Death, My Life Had Stood--A Loaded Gun
Robert Browning, Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister, My Last Duchess
William Wordsworth, She Dwelt Among the Untrodden Ways, Nuns Fret Not, Tintern Abbey
Tom Wayman, Picketing Supermarkets
John Donne, The Flea, Batter my Heart, The Sun Rising, Death Be Not Proud
Matthew Arnold, Dover Beach
Robert Herrick, Delight in Disorder, To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time
William Carlos Williams, The Red Wheelbarrow
e.e. cummings, anyone lived in a pretty how town
Robert Burns, A Red, Red Rose
Randall Jarrell, The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner
Philip Larkin, Church Going
T.S. Eliot, Journey of the Magi, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
Edwin Arlington Robinson, Miniver Cheevy
John Crowe Ransom, Bells for John Whiteside's Daughter, The Equilibrists
Edwin Arlington Robinson, Richard Cory
Percy Bysshe Shelley, Ode to the West Wind, Ozymandias
Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Break, Break, Break, Ulysses
Gerard Manley Hopkins, Spring and Fall, The Windhover
Christopher Marlowe, The Passionate Shepherd to His Love
John Keats, On First Looking into Chapman's Homer, Ode on a Grecian Urn, To Autumn
Adrienne Rich, Diving into the Wreck
Wilfred Owen, Dulce et Decorum Est
Richard Lovelace, To Amarantha, that She Would Dishevel Her Hair
Andrew Marvell, To His Coy Mistress
Ben Jonson, Come, My Celia
William Butler Yeats, The Second Coming, Leda and the Swan, Sailing to Byzantium, Among School Children
William Blake, The Lamb, The Tiger
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Kubla Khan
Robert Frost, Birches, Design, Fire and Ice, The Road Not Taken, Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening
Thomas Hardy, The Convergence of the Twain, Hap
A.E. Housman, To an Athlete Dying Young, Terence, This Is Stupid Stuff
Langston Hughes, Theme for English B
Edna St. Vincent Millay, What Lips My Lips Have Kissed
Edgar Allan Poe, The Raven
Ezra Pound, In a Station of the Metro
Marianne Moore, Poetry
Wallace Stevens, The Emperor of Ice-Cream, Sunday Morning, The Idea of Order at Key West
Dylan Thomas, Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night, Fern Hill
Walt Whitman, When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed
Richard Wilbur, Love Calls Us to the Things of This World

And here is W.H. Auden's poem "Musee des Beaux Arts," which refers to a famous Brueghel painting hanging in that Brussels museum, entitled "Landscape with the Fall of Icarus."
http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/auth/bruegel/icarus.jpg

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 Brueghel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the plowman 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.

If you have been sailing on past any of the poems on my list, it's time to stop and take a deep, deep breath. And then find one of these poems and read it; most of them are available on line.

The Appalling Snow

This morning I went to physical therapy and, during a discussion of the impending snowstorm, suddenly realized that my knee hadn't responded to the drop in barometric pressure by aching like a bad tooth all night. It is another one in the growing list of blessings I am counting since I had my knee replaced. Until you have lived with pain for so long that those who love you think that irritability is part of your personality, you have no idea what a relief it is to run errands and not pay with pain the rest of the day, or to attend an evening event and realize that part of your attention has not been distracted by the fact that you hurt so much at that hour. It makes me think of an Auden poem that I have felt too intensely the past few years, an early poem known by its first line: "As I walked out one evening." It came into my head today because of the line about "the appalling snow"--any snow in March is pretty darn appalling, if you ask me. These lines, in particular, used to resonate with me:

O let not Time deceive you,
You cannot conquer Time.

In the burrows of the Nightmare
Where Justice naked is,
Time watches from the shadow
And coughs when you would kiss.

In headaches and in worry
Vaguely life leaks away,
And Time will have his fancy
To-morrow or today.

Into many a green valley
Drifts the appalling snow;
Time breaks the threaded dances
And the diver's brilliant bow.

O plunge your hands in water,
Plunge them in up to the wrist;
Stare, stare in the basin
And wonder what you've missed.

I thought of these lines, and I realized that they don't resonate with me the same way they used to. Putting your hands in the dishwater, often more than once a day at our house, isn't the same kind of repetitive, despondent action when you haven't been able to do it for a while. The old sense that time is passing but my life isn't changing is gone. Once some of the headaches go, some of the worries go with them. Of course, there's my brother's immortal line about worry: "You can worry, Jeannie. But it won't change anything."

I'm doing less worrying, including less about slipping on slick roads and sidewalks, because I have more control--literally, I can control what my legs do a lot better than I used to be able to. The "surgery leg," as they call it at physical therapy, is not yet as strong as the other leg, but it's getting there. Life isn't leaking away for me anymore. I have faith that spring will come, despite today's snow.