If in that Syrian Garden, ages slain,
You sleep, and know not you are dead in vain,
Nor even in dreams behold how dark and bright
Ascends in smoke and fire by day and night
The hate you died to quench and could but fan,
Sleep well and see no morning, Son of Man.
But if, the grave rent and the stone rolled by,
At the right hand of majesty on high
You sit, and sitting so remember yet
Your fears, your agony and bloody sweat,
Your cross and passion and the life you gave,
Bow hither out of heaven and see and save.
-A.E. Houseman-
Sunday, July 20, 2008
Thursday, July 17, 2008
By the Statue of King Charles at Charing Cross
Sombre and rich, the skies;
Great glooms, and starry plains.
Gently the night wind sighs,
Else a vast silence reigns.
The splendid silence clings
Around me; and around
The saddest of all kings
Crowned, and again discrowned.
Comely and calm he rides
Hard by his own Whitehall:
Only the night wind glides:
No crowds, nor rebels, brawl.
Gone too, his Court: and yet,
The stars his courtiers are:
Stars in their stations set;
And every wandering star.
Alone he rides, alone,
The fair and fatal king:
Dark night is all his own,
That strange and solemn thing.
Which is more full of fate:
The stars, or those sad eyes?
Which are more still and great:
Those brows; or the dark skies?
Although his whole heart yearn
In passionate tragedy:
Never was face so stern
With sweet austerity.
Vanquished in life, his death
By beauty made amends:
The passing of his breath
Won his defeated ends.
Brief life, and hapless? Nay:
Through death, life grew sublime.
Speak after sentence? Yea:
And to the end of time.
Armoured he rides, his head
Bare to the stars of doom:
He triumphs now, the dead,
Beholding London's gloom.
Our wearier spirit faints,
Vexed in the world's employ:
His soul was of the saints;
And art to him was joy.
King, tried in fires of woe!
Men hunger for thy grace:
And through the night I go,
Loving thy mournful face.
Yet, when the city sleeps;
When all the cries are still:
The stars and heavenly deeps
Work out a perfect will.
-Lionel Johnson-
Great glooms, and starry plains.
Gently the night wind sighs,
Else a vast silence reigns.
The splendid silence clings
Around me; and around
The saddest of all kings
Crowned, and again discrowned.
Comely and calm he rides
Hard by his own Whitehall:
Only the night wind glides:
No crowds, nor rebels, brawl.
Gone too, his Court: and yet,
The stars his courtiers are:
Stars in their stations set;
And every wandering star.
Alone he rides, alone,
The fair and fatal king:
Dark night is all his own,
That strange and solemn thing.
Which is more full of fate:
The stars, or those sad eyes?
Which are more still and great:
Those brows; or the dark skies?
Although his whole heart yearn
In passionate tragedy:
Never was face so stern
With sweet austerity.
Vanquished in life, his death
By beauty made amends:
The passing of his breath
Won his defeated ends.
Brief life, and hapless? Nay:
Through death, life grew sublime.
Speak after sentence? Yea:
And to the end of time.
Armoured he rides, his head
Bare to the stars of doom:
He triumphs now, the dead,
Beholding London's gloom.
Our wearier spirit faints,
Vexed in the world's employ:
His soul was of the saints;
And art to him was joy.
King, tried in fires of woe!
Men hunger for thy grace:
And through the night I go,
Loving thy mournful face.
Yet, when the city sleeps;
When all the cries are still:
The stars and heavenly deeps
Work out a perfect will.
-Lionel Johnson-
Thursday, July 10, 2008
On Learning from History- Part I*
Santayana's Rule, which I will not insult my readers by here repeating, has never succeeded in putting the fear of a vicious cycle into me. There stands behind this stern charge the not so well disguised belief that nobody has ever done right by its admonition, and presumably never will. It goes far in damning mankind's common span of attention. This is its only virtue. Otherwise, to adopt a cyclical view of history is to solicit the applause of defeatists at the price of little exercise of one's own imagination. Certainly if history makes no steady, if not uninterrupted motion forward, its own inertia testifies against it. For who wants to take part as a character in a tale whose author (or authors) has no thought as to arc and climax? Presuming our own free will to do so, I believe the most humane course of action we could take in such an instance would be to refuse to participate; to become the audience of history rather than its actors; critics, rather than co-creators.
If this strikes some as unmanly, they have my sincerest apologies, but the charm of playing out a saga of three hundred and sixty degrees is hopelessly lost on me. As a Theist, I find myself hard pressed to say that I would not join the other camp if I felt that God's construction of the Great Tale had the shape of the self-devouring serpent. I say this simply as a matter of aesthetic principle. I enjoy the notion, however naive, that history improves upon itself, and is driven to do so from time to time by the jolts and goadings of the Numinous.
This said, I cannot go further to describe what form our final triumph will take, or even if the appearance will be of a kind as would now touch us as particularly becoming a triumph. There may be no laurels. I cannot say whether the consummation, when it comes, will have been driven more by the operations of politics or of religion, if its success will lie at the doorsteps of the Church or of the courts and capitol buildings. My only reason for hoping as I do is this, that when the testimony of mankind's failed endeavors to improve itself, either in its nature or its circumstance, stands in contradiction to the testimony of the nature of God, that willed that our first nature be pure, and our first circumstance be a paradise, we give little credit to ourselves to let the reproachments of the first drown out the appeals of the second.
I am a Humanist as well as, or even because, I am a Christian. If the Son of God was willing to become the Son of Man then there is a native dignity in mortal flesh. I also believe personality and its expressions to be blessings as great as grace. That God would endow us with these gifts, and then leave us no applications for them, save those whereby we sank ourselves irrecoverably in the pit, seems to me an odious notion. There are those fellow travellers who persist, often with noble motives, in pointing to the adage "Narrow is the way, and those that find it are few." To them I would say that history partakes of more than the present tense; "Are" is not "Ever shall be." I do not mean here to stage my argument on purely theological grounds, because the world's last triumph must resound with a richer timbre than the feeble cantus Ecclesiae seems capable of producing at the present moment, just as the full scope of its causes, I expect, were they revealed to any historian living today, would still exceed his talents of transcription; the heart of man from age to age remains in large measure the same, but the list of his material motivations and the political vocabulary with which he keeps their record are ever increasing. The list of our cardinal vices and virtues is the same now as it has been for two thousand years. The names political philosophers give them- Capitalism, Marxism, Industrialization, Globalization- appears to be without limit. To describe the interplay of these forces in the future lies beyond the powers of even the most prescient theorist. Its events would be, and must be too large to rise fully formed in his imagination before their day should come. Let them come as they will.
It is of course pompous to assign ourselves a seat at the center of these events I have suggested, and to hope too much after these things invites disappointment. We should know the place that moderation supplies to our expectations as well as our desires. We should feel both our greatness beside all created things and our insignificance next to the Creator. Our own place is a great and glorious one, but it may not be a vantage from which we can view the pinnacle of the human monument. Let that be enough. As Browning says in his "Andrea del Sarto,"
If this strikes some as unmanly, they have my sincerest apologies, but the charm of playing out a saga of three hundred and sixty degrees is hopelessly lost on me. As a Theist, I find myself hard pressed to say that I would not join the other camp if I felt that God's construction of the Great Tale had the shape of the self-devouring serpent. I say this simply as a matter of aesthetic principle. I enjoy the notion, however naive, that history improves upon itself, and is driven to do so from time to time by the jolts and goadings of the Numinous.
This said, I cannot go further to describe what form our final triumph will take, or even if the appearance will be of a kind as would now touch us as particularly becoming a triumph. There may be no laurels. I cannot say whether the consummation, when it comes, will have been driven more by the operations of politics or of religion, if its success will lie at the doorsteps of the Church or of the courts and capitol buildings. My only reason for hoping as I do is this, that when the testimony of mankind's failed endeavors to improve itself, either in its nature or its circumstance, stands in contradiction to the testimony of the nature of God, that willed that our first nature be pure, and our first circumstance be a paradise, we give little credit to ourselves to let the reproachments of the first drown out the appeals of the second.
I am a Humanist as well as, or even because, I am a Christian. If the Son of God was willing to become the Son of Man then there is a native dignity in mortal flesh. I also believe personality and its expressions to be blessings as great as grace. That God would endow us with these gifts, and then leave us no applications for them, save those whereby we sank ourselves irrecoverably in the pit, seems to me an odious notion. There are those fellow travellers who persist, often with noble motives, in pointing to the adage "Narrow is the way, and those that find it are few." To them I would say that history partakes of more than the present tense; "Are" is not "Ever shall be." I do not mean here to stage my argument on purely theological grounds, because the world's last triumph must resound with a richer timbre than the feeble cantus Ecclesiae seems capable of producing at the present moment, just as the full scope of its causes, I expect, were they revealed to any historian living today, would still exceed his talents of transcription; the heart of man from age to age remains in large measure the same, but the list of his material motivations and the political vocabulary with which he keeps their record are ever increasing. The list of our cardinal vices and virtues is the same now as it has been for two thousand years. The names political philosophers give them- Capitalism, Marxism, Industrialization, Globalization- appears to be without limit. To describe the interplay of these forces in the future lies beyond the powers of even the most prescient theorist. Its events would be, and must be too large to rise fully formed in his imagination before their day should come. Let them come as they will.
It is of course pompous to assign ourselves a seat at the center of these events I have suggested, and to hope too much after these things invites disappointment. We should know the place that moderation supplies to our expectations as well as our desires. We should feel both our greatness beside all created things and our insignificance next to the Creator. Our own place is a great and glorious one, but it may not be a vantage from which we can view the pinnacle of the human monument. Let that be enough. As Browning says in his "Andrea del Sarto,"
. . .and I stand on alien ground,
Surveying a while the heights I rolled from into the deep;
Which, hark, I have dared and done, for my resting place is found,
The C major of this life, so, now I will try to sleep.
Surveying a while the heights I rolled from into the deep;
Which, hark, I have dared and done, for my resting place is found,
The C major of this life, so, now I will try to sleep.
*Special thanks to Messrs. J. Moss and E. Wilson for the help I had from them gathering these thoughts in various conversations, though I think the above trifles imply disagreement with both.
Sunday, July 6, 2008
Our Debt to the Serpent
If the first fruit of Romanticism was the belief that Man may feel as he will, and if the subsequent harvest of Modernism dictated that he may then do as he feels, it is a question worth pondering why even now we have such a word as "Inhibitions." The ethical interests of Modernism have not shifted much with the passage of a century, and when the word in question is brought up and tossed about, it is most always in a tone of voice reserved for discussions of Richard Nixon, Kristlnacht, or Evangelical Christianity, subjects which, in the mind of the speaker, are inseparably related.
Inhibition, as the speaker would have us believe, makes a man's soul small and his glands defective. It leaves him to be governed by values without, rather than within himself. The inhibited man is a suspicious citizen, but his suspicion is turned on himself rather than his neighbor. The two gentlemen act with no fear of one another aside from "What he might think if he saw me engaged in. . ." But this in no way stumbles either in their exchanges of politesse. Thus it is that inhibition bodes well for democracy. In fact, democracy is the only bedfellow inhibition, in its shivering chastity, is willing to keep, and democracy, ever considerate, must make plenty of room under the sheets. The repressed man must be made to feel "Self-actualized," and to this end requires outlets for that potentially baser energy which he has bottled up inside of him. The political left ingeniously offers this in the form of any number of popular causes that afford him both personal satisfaction and a purchased morality, while keeping him an affectionate ward and dutiful philistine.
Were I to write the history of inhibition, I should no doubt have to include some discussion of the Puritans, the adjectival form of whose name attends inhibition as crumpets attend tea. But I should be wise to go only this far: the Puritans did not introduce us to inhibition. They introduced us to representative government, and representative government, given a couple of centuries, did the rest. The Puritans were radicals and fomentors, two personality traits which, while completely intolerable to a civilized man, leave little room for repression. The best of them appear to have had guts and testicles in due proportion.
We must go further back. To recount the history of inhibition is to recount the history of Original Sin, for both begin at the same moment, with the eating of the apple. It was then that Adam and Eve saw that they were naked and knew Shame. Before this, thoughts of propriety and personal reservation were as alien to them as thoughts of evil. This is why it is foolish to blame hypocritical forms of repression on Christianity, or even more absurdly, on God Himself. Restriction in the Garden of Eden was nothing if not itself restricted. I would advise anyone who thinks the breadth of Adam and Eve's allowances too closely fenced to reflect on the fact that the first list of "Thou Shalt Nots" God ever imposed upon mankind began and ended with a bit of damned foliage. Let us pursue some other case study of despotism, shall we?
Many of the same people who read despotism into a single restriction have sought in themselves not a New Adam but the Original, sans the Original Sin. They have attempted to speak his language, but the sincere poetry of "Flesh of my Flesh, Bone of my Bone" can only sound cynically contrived in modern mouths. Language becomes less sincere the older it gets, which it in part makes up for with a wider and more varied vocabulary. It makes us capable of greater ironies, all of which have at the back of them a refined and middle class knowledge of Good and Evil, a knowledge which makes us not only sinners but gentlemen. So before we crush the serpent's head for the first we can thank him for the second.
-Thomas Banks-
Inhibition, as the speaker would have us believe, makes a man's soul small and his glands defective. It leaves him to be governed by values without, rather than within himself. The inhibited man is a suspicious citizen, but his suspicion is turned on himself rather than his neighbor. The two gentlemen act with no fear of one another aside from "What he might think if he saw me engaged in. . ." But this in no way stumbles either in their exchanges of politesse. Thus it is that inhibition bodes well for democracy. In fact, democracy is the only bedfellow inhibition, in its shivering chastity, is willing to keep, and democracy, ever considerate, must make plenty of room under the sheets. The repressed man must be made to feel "Self-actualized," and to this end requires outlets for that potentially baser energy which he has bottled up inside of him. The political left ingeniously offers this in the form of any number of popular causes that afford him both personal satisfaction and a purchased morality, while keeping him an affectionate ward and dutiful philistine.
Were I to write the history of inhibition, I should no doubt have to include some discussion of the Puritans, the adjectival form of whose name attends inhibition as crumpets attend tea. But I should be wise to go only this far: the Puritans did not introduce us to inhibition. They introduced us to representative government, and representative government, given a couple of centuries, did the rest. The Puritans were radicals and fomentors, two personality traits which, while completely intolerable to a civilized man, leave little room for repression. The best of them appear to have had guts and testicles in due proportion.
We must go further back. To recount the history of inhibition is to recount the history of Original Sin, for both begin at the same moment, with the eating of the apple. It was then that Adam and Eve saw that they were naked and knew Shame. Before this, thoughts of propriety and personal reservation were as alien to them as thoughts of evil. This is why it is foolish to blame hypocritical forms of repression on Christianity, or even more absurdly, on God Himself. Restriction in the Garden of Eden was nothing if not itself restricted. I would advise anyone who thinks the breadth of Adam and Eve's allowances too closely fenced to reflect on the fact that the first list of "Thou Shalt Nots" God ever imposed upon mankind began and ended with a bit of damned foliage. Let us pursue some other case study of despotism, shall we?
Many of the same people who read despotism into a single restriction have sought in themselves not a New Adam but the Original, sans the Original Sin. They have attempted to speak his language, but the sincere poetry of "Flesh of my Flesh, Bone of my Bone" can only sound cynically contrived in modern mouths. Language becomes less sincere the older it gets, which it in part makes up for with a wider and more varied vocabulary. It makes us capable of greater ironies, all of which have at the back of them a refined and middle class knowledge of Good and Evil, a knowledge which makes us not only sinners but gentlemen. So before we crush the serpent's head for the first we can thank him for the second.
-Thomas Banks-
Wednesday, July 2, 2008
Tuesday, June 3, 2008
One More, 'Cause I Couldn't Resist, and It's a Crime I Hadn't Posted This before
The Song of Wandering Angus
I went out to the hazel wood,
Because a fire was in my head,
And cut and peeled a hazel wand,
And hooked a berry to the thread,
And when white moths were on the wing,
And moth like stars were flickering out,
I dropped the berry in a stream
And caught a little silver trout.
When I had laid it on the floor
I went to blow the fire aflame,
But something rustled on the floor,
And someone called me by my name;
It had become a glimmering girl,
With apple blossom in her hair,
Who called me by my name and ran
And faded through the brightening air.
Though I am old from wandering
Through hollow lands and hilly lands,
I shall find out where she has gone
And kiss her lips and take her hands,
And walk among long dappled grass
And pluck till Time and times are done
The silver apples of the moon,
The golden apples of the sun.
-William Butler Yeats-
I went out to the hazel wood,
Because a fire was in my head,
And cut and peeled a hazel wand,
And hooked a berry to the thread,
And when white moths were on the wing,
And moth like stars were flickering out,
I dropped the berry in a stream
And caught a little silver trout.
When I had laid it on the floor
I went to blow the fire aflame,
But something rustled on the floor,
And someone called me by my name;
It had become a glimmering girl,
With apple blossom in her hair,
Who called me by my name and ran
And faded through the brightening air.
Though I am old from wandering
Through hollow lands and hilly lands,
I shall find out where she has gone
And kiss her lips and take her hands,
And walk among long dappled grass
And pluck till Time and times are done
The silver apples of the moon,
The golden apples of the sun.
-William Butler Yeats-
Monday, June 2, 2008
Goodnight and Farewell
I am taking off for Virginia in two days' time, and will likely be gone for at least a couple of months. I intend to purchase a laptop as specie and circumstance afford the chance, but don't expect any posts for a while. Best wishes.
-T.B.-
-T.B.-
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