Contagion!

Contagion!
Your form is like the bee's
Who, with his duty executed,
Rests in jubilee.

The Contract

Love is an unraveling thing
That, after the contract pledged,
Reveals to each the lengthy verse
--The contract to be read.

Wearing horn-rimmed spectacles
Or sipping tea from cup,
The lovers' eyes traverse the words
Which then had seemed so brusque.

Litigation not required,
The lovers mend their terms;
With compromise - not compromised -
Once lawful love confirmed.

Slowly of its character
Does the eye discern,
In fullness only to be held
When lovers rest in urns.

And if law had held together then
When love would now suffice,
Was study of that Mosaic law
Not worth the sacrifice?

Flatulence

Some say my poetry is austere.
Curs! Venom-tongued snakes!
If they took the slightest glimpse
Inside austerity, they would weep
Ten daggered tearsFor want of ----
My forgiveness is, however, unconditional.
Pity for the passers-by, who know
Not what they see: Victorian custom,
Tight-collared shirts are merely
A measure of precaution; for in me
Wails a song, which bloats my belly
And, at times, is so inarticulate that my bowels shake.
Others dismiss it as a symptom of my poor diet. Wiser others
See that it is lunatic frenzy frothing inside me.
When it passes from belly through heart and to lips,
The mind snatches up what scattered fragments it finds
And, sensing that it can't make sense of the fizzing mess,
Reveres the music as
Revelatory.

If flatulence of word or deed does, as it will,
Overtake my outward felicity, don't think
But rather eat.
And find yourself, from then on,
Abiding rules called heretofore "trite" and "glib" and "unfree."
You will lament from then on, and pray
That what escapes will come out with decency.

Who will relieve us hungry men whose appetites are never cloyed,
And who feed upon what the eye
Cannot with certainty speak?
What adjective have your vocabulary
To properly honor the queen, the nymph, the bee?
Come Savior, with lotus to eat!
Come take us down from our terrible seat!
Our internal orchestra is not played out of key;
Only our words are remiss, constrained by the tongue;
That is what these slanderers forget.

So if I seem austere, I remind you that
Not Hercules has strength enough
To lift from my shoulders the weight of the object of my love.
And having no recourse, what little penance I can give
Is never enough.
The best a man can do is mind his manners,
And let out his euphoria most discrete.

Internal War: On Dickinson's "To fight aloud, is very brave"

To fight aloud, is very brave --
But gallanter, I know
Who charge within the bosom
The Cavalry of Woe --

Who win, and nations do not see --
Who fall -- and none observe --
Whose dying eyes, no Country
Regards with patriot love --

We trust, in plumed procession
For such, the Angels go --
Rank after Rank, with even feet --
And Uniforms of Snow.

-Emily Dickinson

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Dickinson begins with a statement: "To fight aloud, is very brave." This is intentionally ambiguous. Who are we fighting aloud with?: you can talk out loud to yourself all the time. Whether alone or with others, fighting aloud takes a bit of courage; anybody could hear us. What might they think?

However, according to Dickinson, it is "gallanter" to "charge within the bosom/The Cavalry of Woe." 'Gallantry' is some kind of 'etiquette,' for lack of a better term, that requires nobility. Hamlet considered "whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer." What is noble is a very, very complicated question. I get the sense that it is looking beyond yourself for the sake of something greater. But how does nobility fit in, then, when the only thing you are dealing with is yourself? Why would it be nobler for Hamlet or Dickinson to keep things in their mind, or in their bosom?

The best I can answer that question is that when you win an internal war, "nations do not see." When you fall, "none observe." Fighting valiantly with yourself is something "no Country/Regards with patriot love." The battle is not for honor, reputation, identity, or anything we get from somebody else. If we are going to actually fight ourselves, it requires deeper compulsion. The good we get out of it comes from something internal -- nobody else even cares if we do it. How many people go to AA or quit smoking because of other people? How many people do it by their own self-will? Who is stronger?

When you are fighting with yourself, you go through the world in a "plumed procession." You create some facade that says "hey, I am happy!" Even the Angels deal with their own internal war: Their "Uniforms of Snow" are beautiful, and their whiteness signifies purity. But snow is cold to the touch, not the eye. Putting on the angelic "Uniform" is a lot different than seeing it. The external tranquility covers some deep, ugly wounds.

If even the Angels "charge the Cavalry of Woe," my only conclusion is this: gallantry comes from the recognition that everyone has problems, and your wars are yours to fight - not somebody else's. Furthermore, it is noble to do this, because you don't burden somebody else for your own sake. Would you ask them to sacrifice their own war, just to help yours? Asking someone else to fight your war is a lot easier, and it also doesn't fix things completely: why else would psychologists get paid so much? a) People are willing to take the easy route and b) People keep coming back -- the conflict is unsettled.

Too often we 'help' by forgetting our own wars, and as a result victory comes to none.

Recent Thoughts on Obama: Individual vs Group

Recently, the Ashbrook Center put out a podcast between Drs. Schramm and Sikkenga talking about Obama's inaugural speech. Sikkenga was very thoughtful, as always, telling about how he concieves Obama's understanding of America.

As a man without a race, Obama essentially diverges with the Founders' belief in individual rights, because you cannot understand human beings outside of groups. He doesn't abandon Founding principles, but just thinks that they don't belong to each citizen by himself, rather they are 'our' rights.

It requires a knowledge of Obama's background to understand why -- the guy was essentially 'raceless' in his early life. Basically, Obama had to decide to be black. This kind of identity doesn't limit who somebody is, but is an essential part of who they are.

Obama is a very smart guy, and it sounds like his idea of America draws from a deep-seated philosophy of man. The new administration is ushering in not only policy change, but a change in American politics as we know it from Washington and Jefferson. Policy change is just sort of the icing on the cake. 'Fixing' the deeper meaning of politics - how to live well - is Obama's biggest task.

But haven't people lived well with absolutely nobody around them? Isn't solitude good? And aren't there deep differences between human beings collectively vs. individually? This may be completely wrong, but it all sounds a little like Rousseau - according to Obama, all of us together have a 'general will.' This isn't self-interest -- what's good for you or for me as individuals -- but what is good for America itself.

I really wish I was a lot better at political philosophy and could explain all of the implications of this, but God, it's sort of scary. Obama makes a lot of assumptions about mankind here -- these are serious considerations. We're not talking about something silly and meaningless like European socialism, but, and I'm stealing from Sikkenga, some 'wisdom' Obama has gotten about 'man' and wants to teach to all of us.

I'd really like to get some conversation going on this -- if any of you actually read here, take ten minutes and listen to Sikkenga's talk. Think about it for a while, and comment about what you think it means for our next 4 years.

"A legion of horribles:" On Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian and The Problem of Evil

A legion of horribles, hundreds in number, half naked or clad in costumes attic or biblical or wardrobed out of a fevered dream with the skins of animals and silk finery and pieces of uniform still tracked with the blood of prior owners, coats slain of dragoons, frogged and braided cavalry jackets, one in a stovepipe hat and one with an umbrella and one in white stockings and a bloodstained weddingveil and some in headgear of cranefeathers or rawhide helmets that bore the horns of buffalo and one in a pigeontailed coat worn backwards and otherwise naked and one in the armor of a spanish conquistador, the breastplate and pauldrons deeply dented with old blows of mace or sabre done in another country by men whose very bones were dust and many with their braids spliced up with the hair of other beasts until they trailed upon the ground and their horse's ears and tails worked with bits of brightly colored cloth and one whose horse's whole head was painted crimson red and all the horsemen's faces gaudy and grotesque with daubings like a company of mounted clowns, death hilarious, all howling in a barbarous tongue and riding down upon them like a horde from a hell more horrible yet than that brimstone land of christian reckoning, screeching and yammering and clothed in smoke like those vaporous beings in regions beyond right knowing where the eye wanders and the lip jerks and drools.

Oh my god said the sergeant.
-Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian
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Cormac McCarthy is lauded by some as the best living author for his work, such as Blood Meridian or the Evening Redness in the West and No Country for Old Men. He is known for his ability to weave both sparsity and intense detail into his books, but far more importantly McCarthy's ideas should somehow provoke the reader to think.

I know a lot of you guys were mad about the ending of No Country because Anton sort of got away; the only way he was hurt was by the freak chance that a car side-swiped him running a red light. It was clear all through the movie that Anton had absolutely no tempering influence and would even spit in the face of God were he able, but the fact that such evil could happen in our world raises questions.

What does this passage above say? Well, to put the whole thing in context, Blood Meridian takes place out in the lawless West theatre of the Mexican War. 'The kid' (BM's main character) has just been involuntarily placed in the service of a small irregular regiment on the American side, submerged in the hostile environment near the border.

There are basically no rules to speak of--they've all been thrown out the window. Violence is spurred by the subtlest acts, and spirals out of control ex nihilo. The Indians the band encounters are described best as barbaric and, to say the least, illiterate to the customs of polite civilization.

They kill without discrimination and do not generally know who they kill. In one scene, all of the cavalry receive their fates, given to them in Spanish from unidentified riders via Tarot cards. The combination of these two traits bases life on one thing simply: chance.

When one experiences a world like this, justice isn't really possible. That's why people usually get a little wary talking about things like Calvinist predestination (ie, how did people actually BELIEVE in this?!). Well, the thing is, piety depends on a just God who dispenses his will to the world. But religion gets a little bit tougher when surrounded by "vaporous beings from regions beyond right knowing where the eye wanders and the lip jerks and drools."

The irregulars are quaking with fear. They know a white flag doesn't stop their skin from being separated by a metal tool from their head. Providence to these people becomes a hilarious idea, which, if personally expressed, would probably result with the speaker mortally wounded (cf. the priest of Blood Meridian run out of town and murdered because he was an 'alleged' pedophile [which he wasn't]).

Therefore, any attempt to sanction the people of Blood Meridian with law or God becomes an impossibility; chaos is the only law, and it is as binding as gravity. Modern political science sort of labels this as the 'State of Nature,' but there is one problem with it: 'reason' is the law of the State of Nature. Therefore, this 'State' naturally ends because people will opt for the better idea of civility.

Yet Blood Meridian happens all the time: look at any odious regional mufti in the Middle East! By fiat the people are subject to terrible things and shared wisdom does not exist. People grow up around blood and guts as a way of life and think of each other as one man's chattel. How does Locke explain when people don't abandon this for something better? Is it as if small-time dictators have the resources or man-flesh the Brits did in 1776?

We like to think that these people's only grievance is the fact that they are depraved--that some money or food or comfort would remove the instinct to kill for the plain fact that they can kill. This is soothing because it makes them more 'normal' kinds of people, but they have already been pretty screwed up to the point that this becomes impossible: if God was gone then, what's he think he's doing coming back all of a sudden? How is that just? The evil springs from the brutal appetites of man that are as old as the Greeks themselves--and it makes life just that much more contemptible. Solving the problem becomes a contemporary version of Alexander the Great's Gordian Knot: you can't figure out how to logically untie everything, you just have to hack through it.

This Dust Was Once the Man: Lincoln Considered

This dust was once the man,
Gentle, plain, just and resolute, under whose cautious hand,
Against the foulest crime in history known in any land or
age,
Was saved the Union of these States.
-Whitman, on Lincoln

*****************************************************

It has been a trend in academia to argue over what Abraham Lincoln fought the Civil War for. Yet in fact, Lincoln made it quite clear himself: "I would save the Union."

Whitman gets it right, though. The war simultaneously ended slavery and kept the Union together. One cannot understand Lincoln without also understanding why the fate of slavery was predicated by an intact Union, however.

In his letter to Horace Greeley of August 22, 1862, Lincoln says, "My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves, I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving other alone I would also do that."

An omitted sentence from the letter reads, "Broken eggs can never be mended, and the longer the breaking proceeds the more will be broken."

Wait -- this all sounds very confusing. Lincoln wished only to save the Union, and cared about slavery merely in the sense that it helped that cause? This letter has been the object of frustration for some, and vindication for others, depending on which side of the issue they stand regarding Lincoln's political thought.

But what did the Union mean to Lincoln? How did the Union even start? Lincoln felt that when Britain unclenched its fist from the colonies, it was only natural that the people had themselves declared independence. What implications does that idea have?

Government -- even state government -- had its power derived only from the single legitimate source of authority: the people. But how?

The idea of the Declaration of Independence is the only way to answer this fully and correctly. Accepting the Declaration's idea that 'all men are created equal' was not popular. In fact, many deemed it superfluous to the Declaration because it "wasn't necessary" to Jefferson's cause of claiming independence--that was Woodrow Wilson's treatment of it, anyway.

Others like Stephen Douglas declared the Declaration only applied to white property holders; this school felt the colonists were merely asserting their own rights to be political equals with citizens of England. Arguments were made against the Declaration on empirical as well as 'moral' grounds. What did Madison, Washington, Hamilton and Jefferson think about slavery? Most of the Founders had slaves! Wasn't it clear that all men, with their differing faculties, weren't equal?

They get it wrong: this has to do with origins. This has to do with history. I might argue it even has to do with religion. When we say men are created equal, we mean that they are all given by their Creator certain rights. They are natural rights, present even before government was around.


Other national documents, viz. the U.S. Constitution, were merely the "silver frame for the golden apple;" they were instruments for the greatest claim that the Union made. The truth is, without the Declaration, the Constitution was a pro-slavery document. However, the natural law inherent to the Declaration is what Lincoln argued to be our greatest law: it is our golden apple. The Union and slavery were definitively incompatible.

This is all really cool and interesting, but what does it tell us about Lincoln's original claim in his letter to Horace Greeley -- that he would "save the Union?"

It's simple: the death of the Union meant the death of the Declaration. The idea of 'all men created equal' would reside only in the memories of a few old men. Men who become dust.