Left: William Desmond, photographed on March 15, 2018, at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth.


I'm currently reading Wonder Strikes, a book on the philosopher William Desmond by Steven Knepper: "Tragedy chastens systematic philosophy, with its confidence in the comprehensive power of the logos and its tendency to abstract from the particular into categories or concepts. Systematic philosophy often excludes first-person experience. The experience of the philosopher is hidden behind 'an impersonal universal system' (Beyond Hegel and Dialectic, 163). Philosophers who hear Lear’s howl and see him carrying the body of Cordelia, who fully reckon with being at a loss, will be left questioning their systems’ ability to account for such loss. They will be confronted with the impossibility of words ever doing it justice." [Knepper, Steven E. Wonder Strikes: Approaching Aesthetics and Literature with William Desmond (p. 255). State University of New York Press. Kindle Edition.]

If tragedy challenges the generalizations of philosophy, literature itself can challenge the generalizations used to characterize it. Here's a quotation I lifted many years ago from a biography of the French thinker Pierre Duhem: "Auguste Angellier (1841-1911) completed his doctoral dissertation on the poetry of Burns. Duhem most likely heard Angellier argue its principal thesis: abstract categories are useless for literary criticism which rather must take account of the ‘immense complexity of things, of their inextricable confusion, and of their apparent contradictions’ (see ‘Angellier’ in Dictionnaire de biographie francaise, 2:1073). This reminder of the complicatedness of the historical record could strike but responsive cords in Duhem.” [Stanley L. Jaki, Uneasy Genius:  The Life & Work of Pierre Duhem. Boston: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1987, Page 85, note 50.]

Lance-leaved loosestrife, a native east of the Mississippi. The pictures were all taken in the last couple of days. All of these plants were sold by the nurseries as native plants. 

The flowerhead of the joe-pye weed is forming very slowly, with a faint flush in the center promising color to come.

A native catchfly. The granules are nontoxic and intended to keep passing critters from eating the blooms. 

A blurry picture of the first buds spotted on native honeysuckle. I hope there will be better pictures to follow. 

Balloon flowers (Platycodon grandiflorus) are said to have come originally from China, Korea, Japan, and Russia. They prefer temps in the 60-80 F range, but can do OK in warmer weather if provided shade. I planted mine several years ago in a spot where nothing had done well. I tried balloon flowers because they were described as easy to grow and I am lazy. The spot is perhaps a bit shady for them, but it does protect them from hot afternoons. They spread slowly by self-sowing their seeds, but they are not aggressive. Despite my trend towards native perennials, I see no need to remove them.

I enjoy watching the pale green balloons turn to puffy pillows then to wide-open blue stars. For me, there is something comic as well as beautiful about its transformation. 

Recently I noticed that I was born under a thin crescent moon, just one night after a new moon, at the end of October 1951. The moon probably set unseen, since it flurried snow that evening in the mountains of North Carolina. Daddy drove from work in Charlotte to the hospital in Jefferson. Mom was 18. She had graduated in the spring already pregnant with me, just a few months after she and Daddy had eloped to South Carolina. Daddy had turned 25 just eleven days before my birth. He was probably the dominant person in my life for the next twenty-six years until he died by his own hand in December 1977, just one night after the new moon.
 
That my birth and his death occurred under the same phase of the moon is a meaningless coincidence, of course, but it illustrates how we live at once in both cyclical and linear time.
 
A well-known nursery rhyme lists the milestones of Solomon Grundy’s life; milestone suggests a road, a linear arrangement of time. But Grundy’s milestones are distributed in an order determined by cyclical time, the days of the week:
 
Solomon Grundy,
Born on a Monday,
Christened on Tuesday,
Married on Wednesday,
Took ill on Thursday,
Worse on Friday,
Died on Saturday,
Buried on Sunday,
That was the end,
Of Solomon Grundy.
 
If I remember correctly, I learned the rhyme from my sister, who I believe learned it as a rope skipping chant. The rope skipper who proceeds down the sidewalk, sing-songing the rhyme as the rope cycles around her, does a fine job of illustrating linear and cyclical motion and time. The events in Grundy’s life fall in succession on the seven days of the week, corresponding to the seventy years allotted to human life in the Hebrew Bible. Given that Grundy’s illness and death take up four days of the week, it is not surprising that the poem has the somber tone of Psalm 90:10: “Our days may come to seventy years, or eighty, if our strength endures; yet the best of them are but trouble and sorrow, for they quickly pass, and we fly away” (New International Version).
 
The beginning and ending of Grundy’s life dominate the poem's timeline. Two days for birth and christening and four days for illness and death leave only a single day—“Married on Wednesday”—for healthy maturity. The primacy of the beginning and ending recalls a phenomenon known as “serial position effects in memory.” These effects include “the primacy effect and the recency effect, by virtue of which people tend, respectively, to recall early or later items in a series or narrative better than middle items.” [See the note]
 
I wandered into these musings as I was working on my memoir of my father (nine parts have been posted, beginning here). My father told and wrote stories almost entirely about his childhood and youth, though a few stories took place in his early married life. He wrote only a page or two about his approaching end, painful pages to read. My writing about him has been dominated by his childhood and my childhood and by his death. I sometimes think I have written him—his beginning, my beginning, his end—out of my system, but the need always returns.
 
NOTE
“Serial position in memory”—Don Bradley, The Lost 116 Pages: Reconstructing the Book of Mormon's Missing Stories. Greg Kofford Books. Kindle Edition. Footnote 16 to “Introduction.”

“It is as though beautiful things have been placed here and there throughout the world to serve as small wake-up calls to perception, spurring lapsed alertness back to its most acute level.”—Elaine Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just (Princeton, 1999), 85.

After a six-day trip home to see my mother, I arrived at home yesterday evening to see the first buds on a milkweed I planted last year. 

Also greeting me, from its perch on our sidewalk lamp post, is my  friend of 14 years standing, a clematis. Three or four times each year, it dies back then blooms again. Its most beautiful season is spring. 

Like the milkweed, I planted the penstemon last year after completing my wall to nowhere, and, like the milkweed, it is blooming for the first time. 

On February 15, 2015, terrorists decapitated on camera twenty Coptic Christians working in Libya, as well as worker from Ghana. The beheadings were rehearsed many times and filmed. One cannot remember every act of terror in our world—there are too many. I remember this one as a symbol of them all.
 
The Forgotten: A Memorial Service (1) 

     mouths dripping with the saliva of terror
     —Czeslaw Milosz, “From the Chronicles of the Town of Pornic”
 
     From afar I bear timid witness.
 
February 2015 – February 2024
 
Nine years have passed, nine winters
whose lies and self-deceptions
have not effaced the horror

Today I remember

Hani Abdel Messihah
one of twenty-one beheaded
on a cold beach just after

the day we give to Valentine--
a saint who, before we prettied him up,
was himself beheaded.

His color is red.
The surf on the beach
in Libya was bloody.

Join me in mourning.


MAGDA, HANI'S WIFE (2)

I felt he was an angel.
A prayer
was in every word he said.


THE MOTHERS
adapted from a Coptic hymn (3)
 
I am the mourning mother. Who now will comfort me?
Let the death of your Son be life to those who lose it.
 
The Mother of Jesus wept and then the watchers wept.
Let the death of your Son be life to those who lack it.
 
The dove sighed for the scattering of her family.
Let the death of your Son be life to those who seek it.
 
The daughters of Jerusalem cry for their lost sons.
Let the death of your Son be life to those who want it.
 
Come to Mary His mother to weep and comfort her.
Let the death of your Son be life to those who love Him.


THE POET

I could not sleep--
in the street
another lonesome dog.


THE SWORD OF ISIS

I am a thirsty mouth--
your bodies were
my drinking cup.


THE ORANGE JUMPSUITS

In me you looked alike
and easier to kill.


HANI

I prayed death would not call
till I had named all I love
and loved all I name.


THE MARTYRS

History
a gift from God
we would like to give back.


THE POET

Sudden death
moon
slips below the horizon.


MEMORY

So many have fallen, without my inspiration
how can anyone remember them?
But now I recall for you the twenty-one
for whom between the shoulder and the mouth
a holy chasm opened. They will be named
on this little wall of poem:

Abanub who fell by Milad,
waiting his turn by Maged,
     for they were patient men
in line with Kirollos,
Ezzat and Tawadros,
Bishoy, and Samuel
     for they were orderly men
wishing they could say
to Malak, Mina, and Hani,
God bless you, farewell,

and to two named Girgis,
another Malak and Samuel,
and to Youssef “who lived
according to the Book”
     for they were faithful men.
They were weeping for Loqa,
for Munir and Esam,
for Sameh and themselves,
     for they were kind-hearted men.
These poor Egyptians wept

for Matthew of Ghana
who had joined them to work
in the oil-rich country
of kidnappings and killings
     for they were brave men
and send money home. He worked
with them and died with them,
and like them said, “Yes, we need
to flee—but not yet,”
     for they were sometimes foolish men.

In each of them a world
lost its husband, father, son;
creation lost men who loved
the cooing of the doves in the tall dovecotes,
the songs that wail from the speakers
in the souk, the smells
of pounded sesame and honey,
the mud of the Nile drying on the feet.

Weep for the sand they stood on, big as a sea.
Weep for the sea they looked out on, big as the sky.
Weep for the sky they looked up to, bigger than everything. 

Hear their prayer as they died with Jesus on the tongue:

We thank You for everything,
concerning everything, and in everything
for You have covered us, helped us, guarded us,
accepted us to Yourself,

You have spared us, supported us, brought us to this hour

in which we have been unguarded, unhelped, and uncovered,
our flesh neither spared nor supported,
but for which ascending on high we thank You in everything,
concerning everything, for everything.4


THE POET (5)

Seventy times seven times each one died.
At the first rehearsal the twenty-one cried.
Then, numbed, drugged, frightened into compliance,
only their murmured prayers disturbed the silence.
Then the performance: heads fell by their sides.

Their souls, to Jesus’ love securely tied,
rose on the fledgling wings they’d never tried
but trusted. Forgiveness is the holy science:
seventy times seven times

it flew them higher, still higher, into the side
wounded by a spear, where they abide.
In what hope can we place a sure reliance
when evil flourishes in arrogance?
Let us be of this mind—God will provide
seventy times seven times.


Notes:
(1) Unless otherwise noted, information on the martyrs is from Martin Mosebach, The 21: A Journey into the Land of Coptic Martyrs. Translated by Alta L. Price. Plough Publishing House, 2020.
(2) Sophia Jones, “ISIS Boasted of These Christians’ Deaths. Here Are the Lives They Lived. Huffington Post, 18 February 2015 (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/02/18/isis-christians-killed-_n_6703278.html). An excellent photo-essay. 
(3) Ana Al-om Al-hazeina, http://tasbeha.org/hymn_library/view/1694?mid=7401.
(4) The final three stanzas of this section are based on a Coptic prayer of Thanksgiving (http://tasbeha.org/hymn_library/view/1833).
(5) The beheadings were repeatedly rehearsed to make the final on camera “performance” perfect.

Source: Union Republican, Winston-Salem, NC (15 Sept 1898, 4).

This post is part of an ongoing series to understand the situation in 1895 when several hundred people, mostly African American men, guarded the Forsyth County Jail in Winston (now Winston-Salem), North Carolina, to protect a young African American man from lynching. My main goal is to understand the background and, to the extent possible, the motivation of the almost fifty men known by name to have participated in the action to protect Arthur Tuttle.
     In this part of the series, I am reviewing two anonymous letters published in the Winston Union Republican during the electoral campaign of 1898. Although these letters were written three years after the incident in question, they provide a contemporary view of the political situation, albeit from a white perspective. The writer is blind to the the failure of the Republicans to treat African Americans fairly, a failure that contributed to the 1898 electoral and moral debacle. To quote from a previous post (“An Introduction to the Background: Suicide Wrapped in an Illusion”; see below for the link), “To some extent, white Republicans were willing to grant a degree of political equality to blacks, but they resisted social equality, particularly in any setting that brought black men into relations with white women or placed blacks in authority over whites. Only a courageous genius could have navigated those stormy straits. But white Republicans—reluctant to appoint their African American allies to lucrative patronage positions or elect them to higher office—were not courageous or generous, and were all too were eager to find an excuse to abandon the backbone of the party.”
      Why then print the letters? The writer may be blind to the faults of his own side, but he is acutely aware of the manipulative and racist bloody-mindedness of his Democratic opponents. 

The posts that have brought us to this point are:

• "'Pluck Enough': The Story So Far”
• "'Pluck Enough': An Introduction to the Background: Suicide Wrapped in an Illusion" 
• "'Pluck Enough': A Note on Methodology”
• “The Ruffin Letter #1—A Survey of Political History in NC, 1865-1898”

     The second letter is longer than the first and reflects recent speeches and action by Democrats reported in the press. I have divided it into two parts. The purpose of the letter is to describe the “arguments” with which the Democrats will conduct the 1898 campaign. It labels as arguments the following means of persuasion and intimidation—the Democratic party handbook, cartoons (presumably editorial cartoons), the rally, demagogic speeches, and the threat of violence.
     In the second part of the letter, the writer will discuss the Democrats’ abuse of language and their use of a false analogy between the period of Reconstruction after the war and the period of Republican-Populist rule after the elections of 1894 and 1896.
     Throughout, the writer fails to acknowledge the weakness of the coalition (the Fusion) of Republicans and Populists opposing the Democrats. After their successful campaigns in 1894 and especially 1896, the coalition had achieved many of the legislative goals they agreed on, for example, capping interest rates, moving control of local government from the legislature to local voters, and reforming the election machinery to ensure an accurate count of the vote. But they disagreed on the way forward. All they offered in the 1898 election was opposition to the Democrats.
 
*****
 
Mr. Editor:
     The position of this State’s Democracy being grounded in hatred and hypocritical pretense, it follows logically that the plan of campaign shall harmonise [sic] with the position. That it does so, it will be the burden of this article to show by noticing their chief arguments in the order of their importance. On what means then does Democracy base its expectations of a return to power? If Democratic press reports are to be credited, the hand-book is to play an important role. It has been long in preparation by a committee of experts and past grand masters in the art of deceiving and missleading [sic] the people. Too little is known of it yet to review it here, but it is heralded as a terrible engine of destruction. I would simply caution Republicans and Populists not to be swept off their feet by this book which may have to be withdrawn for repairs before the campaign is over. On the other hand if they have succeeded in getting out a hand-book that will stand the vicissitudes of a heat [sic] campaign, let them have fun with it, as it would be cruelty to require them to make two campaigns without a hand-book to go by. This may be termed the hand-book argument.
     The next is the cartoon argument. The people have some experience with this argument, so they are somewhat prepared to estimate it at its true value. They once saw pictures of Vice-President Morton closing out this State under mortgage, but they remember that he was elected and the sale never really came off. The cartoon is not likely to cut much figure except as a boomerang.
     [para break inserted] The next, while not entirely new, presents some novelty in that it is intended to influence the judgment by way of the stomach, and may be denominated argument through the stomach. This is an old racket worked over and more formidable to meet. What then, is there is the much heralded politico-social pic-nic, the grand rally, with farfamed bands of music, the presence of the beauty and chivalry, barbecued meats, and Democratic oratory galore? Ostensibly, here is an altogether praise-worthy affair, a day off with much good things to eat, good fellowship, and just a little politics thrown in for variety and diversion. Give me your attention while I unmasque this humbug, for here, as in everything touched by Democracy, is hypocritical pretense and deception
     [para break inserted] The object of the grand rally is not for pleasure and entertainment, but to get votes, to accomplish by circumlocution what is unattainable in the open. The underlying purpose is to influence a class of voters for whom inwardly, the Democracy entertains the most hearty contempt, the common laborer, the presumption being that he will sell his vote for a mess of meat. Lured to the grounds by flaming hand-bills, after seeing the crowd and listening to the music, the physical appetite after awhile [sic] begins to assert itself. He sees the fat of the land which a liberal campaign fund has provided spread out before him, with the very first society in waiting, with most bewitching smiles, inviting him to eat, drink, and make himself welcome. If he yields, he compromises his self-respect, and from the stand-point of the campaign committee enters into a tacit agreement to deliver his vote in November. What! eat Democratic meat, and then vote against the party? Will a campaign committee invest three to five hundred dollars in a big spread merely in the interest of good fellowship? Is there anyone so unsophisticated as not see in a grand rally a very serious and shrewd form of business politics?
     It must be granted for this argument that it bears the stamp of antiquity, for away back in the dawn of history did not the wily Jacob put up a job on his brother Esau by which the latter forfeited his birthright? As to the origin of this argument, we get a further glimpse from the latter incident in which the Saviour, after the forty days fast, was approached by Satan with the proposition: “If thou be the Son of God, command that these stones be made bread.”
     Another point to this argument is its appeal to another weakness of human nature—the disposition to float with the current, to go with the multitude, irrespective of the merits of the question at issue. The grand rally to the voter without entitled convictions is expected to produce the impression, by the force of numbers, that there is only one side, the Democratic. For effect in other parts of the State the number actually present is exaggerated till the proverbial fish-liar has become a back number and not to be compared to the Democratic liar who counts the number present at a grand rally.
     [para break added] The Democracy having lost the election machinery of the State, and with it the power to count in its ticket, it is driven in this year of grace to rest its case wholly on its ability to deceive a majority of the voters, so this brings me next to consider the strongest card, at least, from the Democratic standpoint, the inflammatory shriek of the demagogue. He is to be much in evidence at the grand rally, and is expected to get in his work on a full stomach. Let it be understood that he has the unqualified endorsement of an unscrupulous State press, both the gold bug and free silver wings flapping together in substantial harmony. Masquerading in the uniform of a patriot, arrogating to himself the guardianship of the State’s honor, he assumes to represent the virtue and intelligence of the State, and to be engaged in waging an altogether unselfish warfare against official corruption and incompetency, and in the interest of good government and the peaceful reign of law and order, all unconscious that the means and methods to make good his claims are an insult to the intelligence and law abiding sentiment which he feigns to represent. The devil is never so dangerous as when he assumes the form of an angel of light.
     Let’s pull aside the lion’s skin that the ass’s ears may come into view. Let’s strip the cloak of virtue off hypocrisy. Vainglorious old Democratic humbug! Inglorious old fraud! Your cheek is colossal, your effrontery is mountain high. You have not had an issue since the war. You have only had a cry, a wail, a shriek—white man! n***r get you! Nor have you an issue now. Tariff reform? Free silver? Merely different forms of soothing balm for the consciences of those who shrink from more drastic measures. Listen to ex-American tourist to Europe, Bellamy on tariff reforms and free silver: “These are our tenets, but they are to some extent secondary in this campaign,” and half a minutes [sic] time is all he takes to enumerate these profound doctrines and his position thereon! [Bellamy was from a prominent family in Wilmington and a Democratic candidate for Congress. He was a key figure in the Red Shirt movement and the Wilmington coup, both intended to suppress the Black vote in anticipation of constitutional changes to disenfranchise African Americans and many poor whites. At this time he was crisscrossing the state giving inflammatory speeches.] I charge the State Democracy that just now, while it is posing as the self-appointed guardian of the State’s honor, and the gratuitous champion of “law and order” that through its campaign shriekers and State press, it is dragging the good name of the State in the mire, is by false accusation, casting suspicion on its credit, is by mean insinuation stabbing one of its most sacred institutions; and by incendiary appeal, is fomenting sedition, anarchy and bloodshed. The highwayman accosts the traveler with the alternative, your money or your life!

Email comments and questions to [email protected]

I’ve been impressed with several of the 2023 readings lists I’ve seen on Facebook, so I’ve come up with my own list. I’m a sloppy reader—sometimes reading just parts of books, rereading books in whole or part, unsystematically taking notes. I’d like to think my reading habits are like the bee described by Jonathan Swift, that “visit[s] all the Flowers and Blossoms of the Field and Garden, but whatever I collect from thence, enriches my self, without the least Injury to their Beauty, their Smell, or their Taste.”

Below are some of the books I visited this year, with quotations from some. In the spirit of Swift’s bee, they are presented as I think of them.

• The Book of Mormon: The Earliest Text:
  “And when he had said these words, he wept;
  and the multitude bare record of it.
  And he took their little children, one by one, and blessed them
  and prayed unto the Father for them.
  And when he had done this, he wept again.
  And he spake unto the multitude and saith unto them:
  Behold your little ones.
  And as they looked to behold,
  they cast their eyes towards heaven;
  and they saw the heavens open,
  and they saw angels descending out of heaven
  as it were in the midst of fire.
  And they came down and encircled those little ones about
  —and they were encircled about with fire--
  and the angels did minister unto them.”—3 Nephi 17:21-24
• Kate Holbrook, Both Things Are True: “For me, the most urgent and relevant questions about the truth of the Church have to do with our relationships to one another and to God. Do you find God in the Church? Does earnest Church participation bind you to others? Does the ritual and service you engage in at Church enlarge your soul?”
• Simon Leys, The Hall of Uselessness: “Unamuno was a Catholic for whom the problem of faith remained all his life the central issue: not to believe was inconceivable—and to believe was impossible. This dramatic contradiction was well expressed in one of his poems:
  ‘ . . . I suffer at your expense, / Non-existing God, for if You were to exist, / Me too, I would truly exist.’”
• Clive James, Cultural Amnesia: “When young and cocky, I had defined a poem as any piece of writing that could not be quoted from except out of context. Older but even more ambitious, I had the temerity to define prose in the same way: a prose work of whatever length should be dependent, in each part, on every other part of what was included, and so respect the importance even of what had been left out. From the force of cohesion would come the power of suggestion, and one of the things suggested should be the existence of other voices.”
• Winston Churchill, The River War
• Randolph Churchill and Martin Gilbert, the first four volumes of the eight-volume biography of Winston Churchill
• Geoffrey Hill, Broken Hierarchies: Poems 1952-2012: “Even now one is amazed / by transience: how it outlasts us all” ("Scenes with Harlequins")
• Andrew Skinner and Gaye Strathearn, Third Nephi: An Incomparable Scripture
• Joan Barasovska, Orange Tulips. My review is forthcoming in the NC Literary Review (online) (along with a review of the next book by Janis Harrington). Here's part of a poem from Orange Tulips: 
  At night the trees lie down to rest.
  They unclench their roots, groan,
  and all sink down....
  At sunrise they rustle,
  yank themselves upright.
  Some leaves get lost.
  They twist to get the angle right
  and dig in for the day.
• ​Janis Harrington, How to Cut a Woman in Half:
  Jeweled colors splash to the horizon:
  yellow fennel, poppies, verbena, blue lupine.
  Annie parks on the shoulder, opens the door,
  finds a path to the meadow. Shedding
  her jacket, she lifts her face to the sun.
  Let this temporary parole from distress
  remind her that beauty and joy still exist. 
  (“Prayer for My Sister,” 57)
  
• N.T. Wright, Paul: A Biography
• Joseph Bathanti, Light at the Seams, and Joseph Mills, Bodies in Motion. My review has been published by the NC Literary Review (online). Bathanti: “Each year, the centurial black walnut / threatens to expire, // yet flowers branch by branch, bud by bud, magisterial / in its hour” (“Daylily”).
• Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory, esp. the intro. by Harold Bloom
• Roberto Calasso, The Ruin of Kasch: “Tsar Peter III, who played games with wooden soldiers and had a mouse court-marshaled and hanged for daring to climb over two cardboard fortresses, decided to introduce in Russia the code of law that Frederick the Great had recently brought into force in Prussia. ‘But,’ as Claude Rulhière noted, ‘both through the ignorance of the translators and the shortage of words in the Russian language for all the ideas of law, not a single senator could understand the code; and the Russians saw this vain attempt merely as a sign of contempt for their own ways and a foolish attachment to foreign ways.’ When it came to the age that sought to explain history step by step, Frederick’s enlightened and military law was replaced by Marx’s law of the phases of development of productive forces. But both of these served above all to perfect the practices of the Bureau of Secret Affairs, set up by Peter the Great to oversee the conduct of the nation through a sophisticated policing system—and which continued operating with zeal and providence under various names, from Ochrana to the KGB, offering among other things the only example in Russia of the undeniable march of progress.”
• Roger Scruton, Fools, Frauds and Firebrands
• Roger Scruton, Philosopher on Dover Beach
• Richard Lyman Bushman, Joseph Smith’s Gold Plates
• Mattias Desmet, The Psychology of Totalitarianism
• Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary: “Metaphoric thinking is fundamental to our understanding of the world, because it is the only way in which understanding can reach outside the system of signs to life itself. It is what links language to life.” “The point of metaphor is to bring together the whole of one thing with the whole of another, so that each is looked at in a different light. And it works both ways, as the coming together of one thing with another always must. You can’t pin one down so that it doesn’t move, while the other is drawn towards it: they must draw towards each other. As Max Black says: ‘If to call a man a wolf is to put him in a special light, we must not forget that the metaphor makes the wolf seem more human than he otherwise would.’”
• Samuel Beckett, “Krapp’s Last Tape” [a play]
• Mary Terrall, Catching Nature in the Act
• Horace’s Odes, in translations by David Ferry and James Michie
• W.G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn: “If we stand today before the large canvas of Rembrandt’s The Anatomy Lesson in the Mauritshuis we are standing precisely where those who were present at the dissection in the Waaggebouw stood, and we believe that we see what they saw then: in the foreground, the greenish, prone body of Aris Kindt, his neck broken and his chest risen terribly in rigor mortis. And yet it is debatable whether anyone ever really saw that body, since the art of anatomy, then in its infancy, was not least a way of making the reprobate body invisible. It is somehow odd that Dr Tulp’s colleagues are not looking at Kindt’s body, that their gaze is directed just past it to focus on the open anatomical atlas in which the appalling physical facts are reduced to a diagram, a schematic plan of the human being, such as envisaged by the enthusiastic amateur anatomist René Descartes, who was also, so it is said, present that January morning in the Waaggebouw. In his philosophical investigations, which form one of the principal chapters of the history of subjection, Descartes teaches that one should disregard the flesh, which is beyond our comprehension, and attend to the machine within, to what can fully be understood, be made wholly useful for work, and, in the event of any fault, either repaired or discarded."
• Kevin and Leah Klein, Showdown Symphony
• Ethan Unklesbay, “Dust.” I published a brief appreciation on my blog.
• Peter Brown, Journeys of the Mind: A Life in History
• Nigel Steel and Peter Hart, Passchendaele: The Sacrificial Ground
• John Keegan, The Face of Battle​: “Just as the Lisbon earthquake is said to have given a timely stimulus to religious observance in eighteenth-century Europe, it is often adumbrated that the battle of Stalingrad has been the most important single lesson in the education of a democratic Germany. How true is that? The repression of the Paris Commune in 1871 undoubtedly left scars on the psyche of working-class Paris which ache to this day. But what exactly did the battle of France in 1940 do to the psyche of the French nation? The very size of the question ought not to deter the historian from attempting an answer. A few have already had a bite at it. Alistair Horne had tried to demonstrate that the experience of Verdun in 1916 led the French, by way of the building of the Maginot line, to the construction of the fortress of Dien Bien Phu, and its fall to the collapse of their colonial empire. But a real examination requires ... a very special sort of historical expedition: not so much a plunge into the archives as a voyage through a nation’s literature, from Sartre’s La Mort dans l’Ame via the script of Les Jeux Interdits to the soundtrack of Le Chagrin et la Pitié.”
• Charles Habonimana, Moi, Le Dernier Tutsi: "J'ai 12 ans et je vais mourir." Here's my rough translation of the first chapter:
  Calvary
       My name is Charles. I’m twelve years old and I’m going to die.
       Like those who preceded me to the top of the hill and who lie in a heap before my eyes, bodies mutilated, limbs scattered, heads decapitated. Bodies everywhere, and all around, the mob beside itself. Hundreds of faces I know, neighbors and former friends, who have come running to participate in the executions as if they were hurrying to a family party. They want to see. They must see. So they trample the corpses, climb the heaps of broken bodies.
       Many are ready to finish off the dying. The blood flows and they chant their victory to the insistent pounding of feet beating the earth in time. Like a warning signal, in the din I hear the rasping of the machetes as they scrape against rock and sharpen their blades. Something in the air impels, inebriates more than beer, clutches tighter than hate. Something awe-inspiring and insane.
       Before me, so close that I can almost touch, lies our dear Léonard Sebuyonde, who served as a priest in the village. Immobile, lying on his back, his arms crossed, crucified on the rock like Jesus on the cross. Slashed in so many places I can’t count his wounds.
       Over there are my buddies, who played football after school. In the middle, Toto, my dear cousin: his face, cleanly cut off with a machete, lies to the left of his head, which is no more than a gaping wound open to the sky. Farther away, Eustache Kayihura, the old wise man, the intellectual, so respected in the village, rigid in his Sunday suit, with his beautiful white beard soaked in blood. Throat cut.
       Lying against him is another elder, Daniel Mujyarugamba, survivor of the [mass] murders of 1973. His right arm was then severed by a machete blow and he has since worn a sort of rod in its place. This time, the machete struck him on the left and a club killed him. The force of the blow made his eyes start from their orbits. Below, a young married couple is dying; she is still in her white dress, shaken by spasms that make her swallow her tongue, he is still in his elegant suit begging for someone to finish them off. But no one comes. There is also the old Anastasia, bleeding in her ceremonial outfit; Évariste Birikunzira and her brother Vincent Nzitabakuze, struck down side-by-side; and all those whom I do not recognize—too much blood, too many corpses.
       I’m afraid. I look at Papa, seated next to me with his cousin Fidel Rwirangira.
       We have climbed together our familiar hill, since this morning rebaptized “the way of Calvary” by the killers themselves. Since then they’ve made their prey—women, men, children, old people—climb up. The hunt began at first light, around 5 o’clock, and has not stopped. As the day of their hellish work has gone on, the captured have formed a long moving column, like ants that stubbornly follow each other and that I’ve annoyed with a twig without ever making them leave their route.
       Then it was our turn to take the path. From his first steps, Fidel understood that this was his way of the cross. Official propaganda identified him to the crowd as the leader of the “cockroaches,” the leader of the “snakes.” Those who must be crushed like vermin. Then, all along the climb, two rows of villagers unleashed their blows on him. Everyone took turns taking a swing, with a club, with a stick or machete, and with a powerful leap each landed a blow on Fidel. His beautiful suit, his Sunday suit, gradually turned red, was torn to shreds, as blow followed blow. Each time he fell. Each time he rose alone; the torturers stopped us from helping him.
       Fidel has arrived at the summit a thousand times dead, but is still with us, still in his Passion. Until the last three club blows, the spurting blood, the cheers.
       He is no longer moving.
       I do not wish to die like him. Not by the club—I prefer the machete, like my buddy Toto. A blow, a single one, to end it all. I’m so afraid, Papa. But you can no longer hear me. The killers circle you. They chant, shout, whistle. They already rejoice in your death, here, under the eyes of your child. Papa, you who always seemed so strong, so courageous, are now powerless, resigned. Like an animal at the slaughterhouse waiting for the knife.
       They call out to the cook of my father’s cabaret, whom father threatened one evening during an argument. They push him to kill: “he wanted to kill you, so kill him!” The feet, the spears, the rhythm on the rock, the earth, the skin, the terror. Two men press him, encourage him. All three begin the work. They strike in rotation, blow after blow. The back, the head. At each impact, I cry out. Papa falls, the blood flows from his mouth, his nose, the ears, the eyes. I see the jolts [of his body]. It is the 24 of April 1994.
       I am twelve years old and I am going to die.
  by Charles Habonimana and Daniel Le Scornet, Moi, le dernier Tutsi (French Edition) (pp. 4-6). Place des éditeurs. Kindle Edition.
• Hart Larrabee, trans., Haiku Illustrated
• Dominic Hibberd and John Onions, The Winter of the World. An excellent anthology of British poetry from the First World War. I visit it often. 

Updated 2-3, 10 January 2024. 
Send comments, questions, critiques to [email protected]

“History means thinking into other people’s minds,” according to N. T. Wright (Paul: A Biography, 8-9). This is one reason I value histories that use, as primary sources, poems and other literary works contemporaneous with the events being described, as well as diaries and letters. It’s true that the poet’s mind comes to us filtered by poetic technique and literary convention (this is also true of other forms of writing); but we always encounter the minds of historical figures in written works that necessarily reflect their culture’s intellectual and expressive conventions. We are no different: even the avant-garde has its own rhetorical conventions and toolkit of transgressive (unmannerly) manners.

In this little essay I’ll discuss briefly two works: (1) Paul Stephenson’s New Rome: The Empire in the East (Belknap Harvard, 2021), a book chosen by the Times of London as one of the best history books of 2022, and (2) Martin Gilbert’s The First World War: A Complete History (Holt, 1994), a book I first read when I was preparing to teach the literature of World War 1 at Southern Virginia University in 2016.

I have not yet begun to read Stephenson’s work—I received it for Christmas—but, wondering if he drew on the Greek Anthology as a source, I checked the index. The anthology is a rich collection of Greek poems, mostly epigrams, from the earliest poets through the Byzantine era. According to Wikipedia, “the Greek tradition of epigrams began as poems inscribed on votive offerings at sanctuaries – including statues of athletes – and on funerary monuments.” Often epigrams that were written only to be shared on paper made a pretense of being epigrams—poetic inscriptions—in the original sense. To my delight, Stephenson does make use of the anthology and other Greek poems. 

Among the sources used by Stephenson are inscriptions to charioteers who raced in the hippodrome. The Greek Anthology has fifty-four such epigrams, “each copied down from a charioteer’s statue base in the hippodrome” (73). Poems are sometimes a key source for an emperor’s reign; in the case of Justin II, key sources are a long narrative poem by Corippus and a cycle of epigrams written by Agathias and included in the Greek Anthology. In some cases (for example, the reign of Theodosius), scant poetry remains, though the emperor’s court at the time was renowned for the outpouring of literary works.

Another poet that Stephenson mentions by name is Paul the Silentiary, a friend of Agathias. Silentiaries were “court officials of privileged backgrounds,” according to Wikipedia, “whose first duty was maintaining order and silence in the Great Palace of Constantinople.” I’ve always found this somewhat amusing, but I suppose we would describe the 30 silentiaries as Secret Service agents or security staff, distinctively less amusing. It was a prestigious post; the officers were assigned “important commissions, especially in church matters,” and belonged to the highest social rank in the empire. An indication of Paul’s importance was the speech he was invited to give at the rededication of the Hagia Sophia (215), a speech characterized by its “complex imagery” (350).

Stephenson cites lines from Paul’s description of an imperial villa: “The sea washes the abode of the earth, and the navigable expanse of the dry land blooms with marine groves. How skilled was he who mingled the deep with the land, the seaweed with gardens, the floods of the Nereids with the streams of the Naiads” (118).

This brief summary hardly exhausts Stephenson’s use of poetry to depict the events, monuments, rulers, and ideologies of Byzantium, but it indicates how poems can be used in historical works to conjure a sense of the past and to enter at least partway into the minds of those who lived then.

Perhaps a more accessible use of poems to enliven and instruct the study of history is Martin Gilbert’s one-volume history for the First World War.  Gilbert's use of poems is not surprising. A bibliography compiled by Catherine Reilly lists "2,225 British writers who experienced the war and published poems about it” (The Winter of the World; see below). More than thirty anthologies were published in Great Britain during the war years, most of the poems by forgotten writers. But many are well known in Great Britain and elsewhere. A contemporary anthology that I highly recommend is The Winter of the World: Poems of the Great War (Little, Brown, 2007), edited by Dominic Hibberd and John Onions. 

Gilbert places the poems in two contexts—the campaigns and battles that evoked them and the experiences of the poets who wrote them. The history and the poems illuminate each other. The poems have many styles and points of view, but the best known arguably belong to the late Romantic era and seem to speak directly to the common reader, however skillfully crafted they may be, however consciously embedded in the poetic tradition. For readers 2000 years from now, if there be any, the conventions will loom as artificial barriers between them and the experiences that animated the poets. Some readers already feel that way.

As in the Greek Anthology, a number of the poems are inscriptions on monuments, but most are standalone poems, sometimes the soldier’s only surviving poem. Gilbert’s account of the death of Wilfred Owen is perhaps representative of his approach:
 
“In the British assault on the Sambre Canal on November 4 [just a week before the Armistice], an attempt by engineers to throw a temporary bridge over the canal was prevented by heavy German artillery and machine-gun fire. Almost all the engineers were wounded, and the canal was unbridged. The poet Wilfred Owen was seen encouraging his men to try to get across on rafts. 'Well done!' and 'You are doing well, my boy,' an officer in his company recalled him saying. The rafts proved unsuccessful, however, so planks and duckboards were put together. At the water's edge, helping his men in this task, Owen was hit and killed. ... At the place where Owen was killed, near the village of Ors, the canal remained unbridged. His battalion eventually crossed on an existing bridge a few miles lower down. On his tombstone in the village of Ors are inscribed the words of one of his poems:
 
Shall life renew
These bodies?
Of a truth
All death will he annul.

In the original poem, the second sentence also ended with a question mark.” (492)
 
As to why Gilbert uses poetry so often, perhaps his concluding lines explain: “All wars end up being reduced to statistics, strategies, debates about their origins and results. These debates about war are important, but not more important than the human story of those who fought in them.” (Kindle edition, 543)

A bowl of sycamore wood

Mouth Work was my third book of poetry. Winner of the Lena Shull Award from the North Carolina Poetry Society, it was published by St Andrews University Press in 2016. The book is dedicated to three young men, brothers, that my wife and I befriended when they arrived in North Carolina from the refugee camp in Rwanda where they grew up. Recently we flew to Rwanda to attend the wedding of the youngest brother, a wonderful trip that set me to thinking again about one of my favorite poems in Mouth Work, or anywhere else, titled simply “A Song.” It’s a poem where the young men play a brief but key role.

Famous poets have no need to explicate their own work—others will do it for them—but an audience exists if they care to do so. As to us who are unknown, no one will do it for us: if there is no audience for the poem, there is certainly none for the explication. For the poet to do it is a vain endeavor in both senses of the word vain, and yet for this poem it seems, to me, worthwhile to do, if only to revisit the poem and breathe again its clear air.

It's quite likely that my understanding of the poem is now shaped by my recent reading in Iain McGilchrist’s The Master and His Emissary. The world we live in is increasingly virtual, he writes, that is, it is increasingly “mechanistic, fragmented, [and] decontextualized.” It is a “self-reflexive … world,” a “hall of mirrors” with the exits blocked.

A Song

A poem for the sycamore,
a sycamore for the snake
that swims in the shallows
sheltered by its roots, roots
for the land, to hold it in place,

land for the sycamore, on whose
long thick limb we’ve lain
cantilevered over the river
in shade, shade as blue as a jay’s
feathers and free to all comers.
 
* * *
 
A poem for board feet standing
in a mane of leaves fluttered by air
of their own making, air
for poet and spouse,
poet and spouse for each other

and land and snake
and river and sycamore,
sycamore for the leaves,
leaves for the air, air for the song
of marriage we are singing.
 
* * *
 
Those who venture off trail--
booted against snakes,
whistling Colonel Bogey’s March,
surveyor’s maps rolled underarm--
see dimity patterns

the roots make on ground
checkered with shadow and light,
and with every step are wary:
clutters of leaves may strike,
the stepped-on stick bite back.
 
* * *
 
Those tongues flicker
to find us out, warm-blooded
calculators who fell
and bark, slab and mill
through knot and burl

till the tree of knowledge
is pollarded and bare,
a lacquered coat rack
where perch the birds
of abstraction.
 
* * *
 
This sycamore rising dog-legged--
or is it a god’s leg, or that
of a god’s horse straining
the wooden musculature
to rear against the bit?--

is hard to fix in words
that do not hobble the power,
but when saw and dozer
cut their buck and wing,
easy to reckon the board feet.


* * *
 
By this border of blooming
surveyor’s flags in weeks
we’ll step arm in arm
then do-si-do over hardwood;
on a bed as wide as a pond

glimpse in our dreams
afternoons that stretched
a heron’s wing over the river
in woods whose high crowns
for us have been lopped and pulped
 
* * *
 
and made into this paper
on whose void the words
elusive as a swarm of gnats
reeling and spinning
bless our reading chair,

our table where a boy
not long from Africa
types the home row letters:
lads fall; all sad lads;
half sad half glad: all fall;


* * *
 
bless the safe place we have made,
the wooden bowl on the table,
the fruit that fills it, the gnats
eating the ripe fruit, the fruit
of prayer and meditation;

and bless the headboard in whose
shadow we dream the tree
whose fruit we are—logger,
surveyor, poet and spouse,
lads: same tree, same fruit. 
 
I began the poem many years ago, in the first class I took from Ann Garbett’s continuing education poetry class at Duke University. The first finished version was rather moralistic, and as such was strongly criticized by a group member. So it went back into the slush pile, was pulled out from time to time, revised, then thrown back as still unsatisfactory.

At some point I hit on the device of anadiplosis to enact verbally the interchanges and trade-offs in life that constitute the theme of the poem. In anadiplosis, the words at the end of a phrase or clause are repeated at the beginning of the next: “A poem for the sycamore, / a sycamore for the snake.”

“A Song” has 16 five-line stanzas, divided into eight two-stanza sections. Anadiplosis figures most in the first two sections: “sycamore for the leaves / leaves for the air, air for the song / of marriage….” The device is used to emphasize the interplay of energies and gifts: “roots / for the land, to hold it in place, // land for the sycamore.” The roots of the sycamore hold the riverbank in place, and earth is what the sycamore needs to put down roots.

One thematic thread begins in the 1st section, with a water snake swimming in the shallow pool created by the sycamore’s roots; later, snakes are concealed in the woods amid the roots running along the ground, and further hidden by fallen leaves and the checkered light filtered through the foliage. The reader may be reminded of Moses’s staff that turned to a snake in the court of the Pharoah (3rd section). In the next section, the camouflaged snakes size up the booted surveyors wandering with their maps into the snakes’ mysterious, dangerous domain. The abstracting, calculating, geometric science of the surveyors turns the tree of knowledge in Genesis into a “pollarded and bare /… coat rack,” an abstraction of a tree shorn of leaves and unable to generate the air we breathe (4th section).

This theme is repeated in the next section with different imagery—the muscled trunk of the sycamore suggests a god’s or at least a horse’s powerful leg, a presence of the living tree that one can only evoke but not explain; it is far easier to articulate the commodity value of trees considered as board feet. Back in the 2nd section, the mysterious, unifying interchanges among leaves, air, land, snake, and tree evoke the mystery of the married couple singing a song they did not know until that moment.

In the next section, a couple “step arm in arm” past the surveyor’s flags into their home, onto their bed “as wide as a pond.” And what do they dream about? The woods before they were cleared for their homesite.

In the original version, which was far different in many ways, it was at about this point, then almost at the end of the poem, that the member of the critique protested. I believe the gist of his critique is that people must live somewhere; a poem that does not understand that is empty moralizing. I have since tried hard to avoid the simplicities of ideological judgments.

After rumination of several years, and after becoming happily involved with the young men from Africa, I understood that a way of life has costs, but it has also benefits. The trees that are “lopped and pulped” at the end of the 6th section become paper in the next; and on this paper a young man from Africa prints words he has typed on a computer as he masters his keyboarding skills (he was using Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing). The lesson begins with the plaintive messages he can find on the home row, the letters ASDF and JKL where the typist’s fingers rest, plus the letters G and H.

The fallen trees give the table the young man works at, the wooden bowl and the apples that fill it, the married couple’s headboard. They dream about the tree of life to which we all belong.

Comments or suggestions? Email me at [email protected]