Sunday, November 30, 2008

The Dislocated

I fell asleep in Cincinnati, and woke up 36,000 feet above England
A little lost but still fed by a happiness drawn from the roots of another place
Like a cutting suddenly removed from a garden to a botanist’s specimen box
Carried through customs to a train station and given a free map of London
A color-coded vascular knot of streets that gave me a destination 
The names on signs where I could roll my luggage around with purpose
Up and down the sidewalks where scattered groups of workers smoked
Chatting about their lives and the abundant lies of perception
How much has to be left out for any of it to be useful. 

The St. James on Buckingham Gate has Cuban cigars and Polish waiters
A place to adjust to another time and purchase some much-needed rest
Until the open window of my room in the cool afternoon 
Admits the voices of children playing on an asphalt school ground 
The shouts of familiar words in unfamiliar accents
Strange adverbs of time and place and manner of action
The playground is empty when I finally get out of bed and leave
Take their memory, a gift they never knew they gave, one that cost them nothing
But has it really changed anything?

From London, the road leads west, towards the edge of old Saxon Briton
Where moonrakers once stirred the ponds for cheese
Towards a hilltop with holy wells and steep sides facing south 
To a room in the Old Bell, near where the west wall used to stand 
War makes a village.
 
Malmesbury pulls me out of my room like water from a spring. 
The sounds of bells from the abbey and the church near the car park 
Small tires on wet pavement on the wrong side of the road
An Alfa Romeo or Audi with a small engine
It is impossible to drive fast on narrow roads with blind curves
So many pedestrians for such a small place
People walk, run towards the center of the old town 
Footsteps on stone sidewalks before stone houses of the same stone 
Is there a stone left in these fields after twenty-five centuries?

If not stones, then certainly children and the old people who follow them
Here bound together by the elastic space between generations
The young are eager to live, to be somewhere other than where they are
Would the silent old ones with canes run if they could
Has the acquisition of so many memories taught them 
Nothing worth keeping is made in just one lifetime?

Something is happening in Malmesbury tonight 
Up the hill from the Ingleburn and the Avon
There is a celebration near the grave of King Athelstan
It draws people up the sidewalks and past straight walls of broken stone
An old man going the opposite way, heading west out of town alone 
Perhaps he forgot something, perhaps he is weary from the hard work of history 
Perhaps he is thinking of the way he used to measure his life in good years 
Now he hopes for a good day or two
A boy runs, two children skip, excited as only the young are
Unconcerned about what they will do and how they will pay for it 
A woman carries a dish covered in aluminum foil, a gift or a product 
A celebration must have food, prepared fresh and enjoyed right away. 

Up Abbey Row, white lights illuminate the old ruins
Strands of bulbs across High Street glow alternating red, green and yellow
Lights above children excited by a taste of freedom, life out of the ordinary
The allure of familiar faces in unfamiliar shades and poses
A night when something, anything might happen, everything might change
Either under the lights or in the dark places of the town
There could be love, or pleasure, or danger, and everything might change again.

A four-piece band that has not missed a meal plays Christmas carols
Just steps away from the ancient dead, behind wet stone and iron
Inflatable playgrounds near Market Cross, the drone of compressors
The living move without fear past the dead in shadows
The living move past stones no more than ornaments
A kind of yard art in the perception of those who do not yet realize 
Everything important begins in a crowd of inconsequential events
Only the passage of time conceals what is lost, reveals what is worth possessing
What should be thrown away, forgotten, or buried in the ground.

Friday, November 28, 2008

E pur si muove

Right now, in the imperfect probabilities of this moment
The surest thing that we possess is not stable
Even the past is not stationary; it moves with the present
The heretics of one generation become the heroes of the next
And little children learn what once would have cost a man his life.

Thursday, November 27, 2008

No Imagination

"In any case, the time I'm now talking about, he went down very angry, ready for a hard war. With him was the marquess of Monferrato, as well as the cities of Alba, Acqui, Pavia, and Como..."

"But you just said that Pavia had gone over to the League?"

"Did I? Oh, yes, before. But in the meantime it had come back to the emperor."

"Oh, Lord!" Niketas cried, "our emperors dig each other's eyes out, but at least, as long as they see, we know whose side they are on....."

"You people have no imagination."

Wednesday, November 26, 2008

You See What a City Is?

"You see what a city is?" Ghini said to him. "And if it's like this before it's even finished, imagine what will happen afterwards: it's another life. Every day you see new people -- for the merchants, just think, it's like having the Heavenly Jerusalem; for the knights, since the emperor forbade them to sell lands so as not to divide the fief, and they were bored to death in the countryside, now they command companies of bowmen, they ride out in parades, they give orders left and right. But things don't prosper just for the gentry and the merchants: it's a providence also for a man like your father, who doesn't have much land but has some livestock, and people arrive in the city and ask him for stock and pay cash; they're beginning to sell for ready money and not through barter. I don't know if you understand what that means: if you exchange two chickens for three rabbits sooner or later you have to eat them, otherwise they grow too old, whereas two coins you can hide under you mattress and they're good ten years from now, and if you're lucky they stay there even if enemies come into your house. Besides, it's happened in Milan and in Lodi and Pavia, and it will also happen here with us: it's not that the the Ghinis or the Aularis have to keep their mouths shut and only the Guascos or the Trottis give the orders. We're all part of those who make the decisions: here you can become important even if you're not a noble, and this is the fine thing about a city, and it's specially fine for one who isn't noble, and is ready to get himself killed, if he really has to (but it's better not), because his sons can go around saying: My name is Ghini and even if your name is Trotti, you're still shit" (Eco, pgs. 162-163). 

Tuesday, November 25, 2008

Too Small for a Republic

"South Carolina is too small for a republic and too large for an insane asylum."

Former South Carolina Attorney General and anti-secessionist James L. Petigru, 1860

Monday, November 24, 2008

Cover the State With Ruin


"I would be willing to appeal to the god of battles -- if need be, cover the state with ruin, conflagration, and blood rather than submit." 
 
Pro-secessionist South Carolina Governor Francis W. Pickens, November 1860 (Edgar, pg. 376)

Sunday, November 23, 2008

Voices from the Necropolis

Nature is not cruel, just sometimes clumsy
Stumbling upon new possibilities
In the slow violence of geologic time.

The streets came first, familiar names on paper
Drawn broad and straight in squares
Like razor wounds on earth
Secure high ground near water
Where rivers the colors of rust and jade
Cut through the boneless crust of clay
An Eocene shore of warm and iceless seas
Lay bare the granite ribs of sinless worlds.

Where we could not build rivers, we built streets
Our marks upon the surface, the work of men
Blind with purpose you still misunderstand
The beauty you admire, the vows that you exchange
Was not our beauty and were not our vows
Even cruelty is redefined in time.

We built streets we thought too broad to burn
For a city that would burn at the end of our age.

We built because we had to
The deep necessity of our nature
What is art but knowledge in reserve
Perhaps never useful, but used nevertheless
More than instinct, less than revelation
Our precarious urge to disturb the surface of things.

On random days in summer, the heat could kill a man
The air was hot enough to make us believe
We could not breath, and we would never be happy again
The physics of temperature and humidity
Drove us to seek the cool spaces of our creation,
Shade trees, high ceilings and porches,
Where we tried to beg or steal or trade our happiness.

What is the soul that it is so easily troubled by a happiness that cannot last?
Something shocked and saddened by constant motion
When everything is crushed like water trapped in ice
The rain of restless storms, the clouds that block the sun
The sudden and unexpected chill of unforgiving seasons.

The ages end more quickly now
The transient world reforms itself
Unconstrained by the chemistry of the past.

Saturday, November 22, 2008

Prologue

Why do you want to know something that can only make you miserable?
Do not mistake what is truly useful for what is merely true
Watch your diet, exercise, balance your checkbook
Enjoy the stained glass of churches and museums
Each luminous fragment of meaning arranged in painless beauty
Like shells scattered on a beach by a storm
Like the endless light of shattered stars 
Something made beautiful by one catastrophe after another.

Friday, November 21, 2008

No Stories Without Meaning


"In saving my life you have given me what little future remains to me and I will repay you by giving back the past you have lost..."

"But maybe my story has no meaning."

"There are no stories without a meaning. And I am one of those men who can find it even where others fail to see it. Afterwards the story becomes the book of the living, like a blaring trumpet that raises from the tomb those who have been dust for centuries...Still it takes time, you have to consider the events, arrange them in order, find the connections, even the least visible ones." 
(Eco, pg. 12)

Thursday, November 20, 2008

Peace and Security

"When people are saying, "Peace and security, then suddenly disaster comes upon them, like labor pains upon a pregnant woman, and they will not escape."

Wednesday, November 19, 2008

Timeline

1670 - Charles Town founded

1680 - Charles Town moved to present location, Oyster Point

1778 - First state constitution, Protestant Christian preference

1786 (March 22) - Columbia created by act of legislature

1789 to 1799- The French Revolution

1789 (August 24) - St. Mary's, first Catholic Church in the Carolinas and Georgia, established in Charleston. Records kept in French until 1822. 

1790 - Second state constitution, disestablishment 

1799 - Napoleon I stages coup d'etat

1801 - Thomas Jefferson elected third President, succeeding John Adams; served until 1809

1803 - The Louisiana Purchase under President Jefferson

1804 - Napoleon crowns himself Emperor of the French

1805 - WR born in SC

1809 - James Madison elected President; served until 1817

1812 - France invades Russia

1826 (July 4) - Thomas Jefferson dies

1826 - Bishop England preaches to the US House of Representatives

1828 - Mills Building of the SC Lunatic Asylum completed

1838 (April 28) - Ansonborough district in Charleston, including St. Mary of the Annunciation Roman Catholic Church, is destroyed by a fire

1861 (April 12) - The Civil War begins

1864 (Oct.) - POW camp on grounds of lunatic asylum 

1865 (Feb.) - POW camp moved from grounds of lunatic asylum

1865 (Feb. 17) - Columbia burns

1865 (Feb. 26) - Skirmish at Lynch's Creek 

1865 (April 9) - The Civil War ends

1865 (May 13) - WR dies, POW

Tuesday, November 18, 2008

Ancient Morning Light

Ancient morning light 
Fills my room with a question 
I almost answer. 
But I will not get out from
Underneath all my blankets.

My cat knows morning
Makes his choice to stay in bed
Sleeping at my feet.
But the trough is planed with glass
I feel, and too, the small pond.

Monday, November 17, 2008

Mist From the Blue Ridge

Mist from the Blue Ridge
Comes down the old forest roads 
To Columbia.
The fishermen in their boats
Always catch what they cannot see. 

Sunday, November 16, 2008

Lay There



"Now lay there, me bye. Lay there quite till the doomsday trump. And dont ye be fomenting no more rebellions down there where ye're burrning." (pg. 189)

Saturday, November 15, 2008

Pro Patria Mori


"When a man gives his life for his country he wants to get the worth of it, if you see what I mean" (pg. 190).

Friday, November 14, 2008

Regret of a Particular Regional Form

"When I heard this, that the general had died because of his consideration for men who a short time before had been shooting at him and doing all their power to wreck his cause, I remembered what my father had said about the South bearing within itself the seeds of defeat, the Confederacy being conceived already moribund. We were sick from an old malady, he said: incurable romanticism and misplaced chivalry, too much Walter Scott and Dumas read too seriously. We were in love with the past, he said; in love with death.

He enjoyed posing as a realist and straight thinker -- war was more shovelry than chivalry, he said -- but he was a highly romantic figure of a man himself and he knew it, he with the creased forehead and his tales of the war in Texas, with his empty sleeve and his midnight drinking beneath the portrait of his wife in that big empty house in New Orleans. He talked that way because of some urge for self-destruction, some compulsion to hate what he had become: an old man with a tragic life, who sent his son off to a war he was to maimed to take part in himself. It was regret. It was regret of a particular regional form" (pg. 199-200).

Thursday, November 13, 2008

Great Things


"All great things mature slowly" 

(Campbell, quoting Schopenhauer, pg. 39)

Wednesday, November 12, 2008

A Vision of A Universe

“What these pages [in the National Geographic Atlas of the World] opened to me was the vision of a universe of unimaginable magnitude and inconceivable violence. Billions, upon billions, literally, of roaring thermonuclear furnaces scattering from each other. Each thermonuclear furnace being a star and our sun among them. Many of them actually blowing themselves to pieces, littering the outermost reaches of space with dust and gas out of which new stars with circling planets are being born right now. And then from still more remote distances beyond all these there come murmurs, microwaves which are echoes of the greatest cataclysmic explosion of all, namely the Big Bang of creation which according to recent reckonings must have occurred some 18 billion years ago” (Program 5, track 13).

Tuesday, November 11, 2008

The Artist and Myth

"Myth must be kept alive. The people who can keep it alive are artists of one kind or another. The function of the artist is the mythologization of the environment and the world" (Program 3, track 9).

Bill Moyers on Faith & Reason

Monday, November 10, 2008

Life, Intended

No one gets to live the life he intended, but everyone gets the chance to enjoy the life he lives.

Saturday, November 8, 2008

Meaning in Suffering

"If there is a meaning in life at all, then there must be a meaning in suffering. Suffering is an ineradicable part of life, even as fate and death. Without suffering and death human life cannot be complete." (pg. 76)

Thursday, November 6, 2008

One Thing I Dread


"There is only one thing I dread: not to be worthy of my sufferings."

Viktor Frankl quoting Fyodor Dostoevsky (pg. 75)

Wednesday, November 5, 2008

The Ineffable


The best things cannot be told. The second best are misunderstood. The rest is what we talk about everyday.

Paraphrase of Joseph Campbell, remembering Heinrich Zimmer

Monday, November 3, 2008

A Mightly Avalanche

"Let me tell you what is coming. After the sacrifice of countless millions of treasure and hundreds of thousands of lives you may win Southern independence, but I doubt it. The North is determined to preserve this Union. They are not a fiery, impulsive people as you are, for they live in colder climates. But when they begin to move in a given direction, they move with the steady momentum and perseverance of a mighty avalanche."

Sam Houston of Texas, 1861

Sunday, November 2, 2008

Idols of the Tribe

"At State, everybody calls diversity dispersity. What happens is, everybody has their own clubs, their own signs, their own sections where they all sit in the dining hall -- all the African Americans are over there? ... and all the Asians sit over't these other tables? -- except for the Koreans? -- because they don't get along with the Japanese, so they sit way over there? Everybody's dispersed into their own little groups -- and everybody's told to distrust everybody else? Everybody's told that everybody else is trying to screw them over -- oops!" Laurie pulled a face and put her fingertip over her lips -- "I'm sorry!" She rolled eyes and smiled. "Anyway, the idea is, every other group is like prejudiced against your group, and no matter what they say, they're only out to take advantage of you, and you should have nothing to do with them -- unless you're white, in which case all the others are not prejudiced against you, they're like totally right, because you really are racist and everything, even if you don't know it? Everybody ends up dispersed into their own like turtle shells, suspicious of everybody else and being careful not to fraternize with them." (pg. 550)

Saturday, November 1, 2008

A Modern Creed

"The man sitting across from him, the butterball grotesquely squeezed into a dark gray sweater, was of another sort entirely, despite the fact that they were both Jewish and agreed on practically every public issue of the day. Both believed passionately in protecting minorities, particularly African Americans, as well as Jews. Both regarded Israel as the most important nation on earth, although neither was tempted to live there. Both instinctively sided with the underdog; police violence really got them steamed. Both were firm believers in diversity and multiculturalism in colleges. Both believed in abortion, not so much because they thought anyone they knew might want an abortion as because legalizing it helped put an exhausted and dysfunctional Christendom and its weird, hidebound religious restraints in their place. For the same reason, both believed in gay rights, women's rights, transgender rights, fox, bear, wolf, swordfish, halibut, ozone, wetland, and hardwood rights, gun control, contemporary art, and the Democratic Party. Both were against hunting and, for that matter, woods, fields, mountain trails, rock climbing, sailing, fishing, and the outdoors in general, except for golf courses and the beach." (Wolfe, pg. 511)