Antiquitopia

"Most people enjoy the sight of their own handwriting as they enjoy the smell of their own farts." (W.H. Auden, "Writing," in The Dyer's Hand)

Beckoned anew to a World where wishes alter nothing, expelled from the padded cell of Sleep and re-admitted to involved Humanity, again, as wrote Augustine, I know that I am and will, I am willing and knowing, I will to be and to know, facing in four directions, outwards and inwards in Space, observing and reflecting, backwards and forwards through Time, recalling and forecasting. (W.H. Auden)

Animal femurs ascribed to saints who never existed, are still more holy than portraits of conquerors who, unfortunately, did. (W.H. Auden, "Marginalia" IV)

In physics, an event is the intersection of the three dimensions of space and the dimension of time. In ritual, I would say, an event is the coordination of sacred space and sacred time. W.H. Auden discusses the event poetically: Between those happenings that prefigure it And those that happen in its anamnesis Occurs the Event, but that no human wit Can recognize until all happening ceases. An event is what happens between foreshadowing and retrospection, yet it is unrecognizable until its passage. It is only knowable in retrospect rather than in the moment. Perhaps. I think it is strange to express this in the perpetual present of poetry. Can there by retrospective poetic moments? Or is poetry, at least modern (and non-epic) poetry, only introspective? As such there is no poetic event, since there is no moment to see it from. Perhaps this is the point of the final line: "until all happening ceases." Is this the "happening" of a single event? Or is THE E...

The Geography of the House Seated after breakfast In this white-tiled cabin Arabs called The House where Everybody goes , Even melancholics Raise a cheer to Mrs Nature for the primal Pleasures She bestows. Sex is but a dream to Seventy-and-over, But a joy proposed un- -til we start to shave: Mouth-delight depends on Virtue in the cook, but This She guarantees from Cradle unto grave. Lifted off the potty, Infants from their mothers Hear their first impartial Words of worldly praise: Hence, to start the morning With a satisfactory Dump is a good omen All our adult days. Revelation came to Luther in a privy (Cross-words have been solved there): Rodin was no fool When he cast his Thinker, Cogitating deeply, Crouched in the position Of a man at stool. All the Arts derive from This ur-act of making, Private to the artist: Makers' lives are spent Striving in their chosen Medium to produce a De-nacissus-ised en- -during excrement. Freud did not invent the Constipated miser: Banks have lett...

I can imagine a forger clever enough to imitate another's signature so exactly that a handwriting expert would swear in court that it was genuine, but I cannot imagine a forger so clever that he could imitate his own signature inexactly enough to make a handwriting expert swear that it was a forgery. (Or is it only that I cannot imagine the circumstances in which anyone could want to do such a thing?) (W.H. Auden, Dichtung and Wahrheit X) It is almost like taking Polonius' advice to Laertes in Shakespeare's Hamlet as inevitable: not only "to thine own self be true" but one cannot but be true to oneself. Although one's signature is duplicable, one can only falsify others and not oneself. It is an interesting idea to express in handwriting. Although I am not sure it is true, and, in fact, Auden himself expresses parenthetical doubts that not being able to think of one who could falsify oneself is due to a lack of imagination.

For the garden is the only place there is, but you will not find it Until you have looked for it everywhere and found nowhere that is not a desert .... The Real is what will strike you as really absurd (W.H. Auden, "Advent IV," For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratio )

Anthem Let us praise our Maker, with true passion extol Him. Let the whole creation give out another sweetness, Nicer in our nostrils, a novel fragrance From cleansed occasions in accord together As one feeling fabric, all flushed and intact, Phenomena and numbers announcing in one Multitudinous oecumenical song Their grand givenness of gratitude and joy, Peaceable and plural, their positive truth An authoritative This, an unthreatened Now When, in love and in laughter, each lives itself, For, united by His Word, cognition and power, System and Order, are a single glory, And the pattern is complex, their places safe. ~W.H. Auden~

What signs ought we to make to be found, how can we will the knowledge that we must know to will? (W.H. Auden, "The Dark Years")

May May with its light behaving Stirs vessel, eye and limb, The singular and sad Are willing to recover, And to each swan-delighting river The careless picnics come In living white and red. Our dead, remote and hooded, In hollows rest, but we From their vague woods have broken, Forests where children meet And the white angel-vampires flit, Stand now with shaded eye, The dangerous apple taken. The real world lies before us, Brave motions of the young, Abundant wish for death, The pleasing, pleasured, haunted: A dying Master sinks tormented In his admirers' ring, The unjust walk the earth. And love that makes impatient Tortoise and roe, that lays The blonde beside the dark, Urges upon our blood, Before the evil and the good How insufficient is Touch, endearment, look. (W.H. Auden)

They wondered why the fruit had been forbidden: It taught them nothing new. They hid their pride, But did not listen much when they were chidden: They knew exactly what to do outside. They left. Immediately the memory faded Of all they'd known: they could not understand The dogs now who before had always aided; The stream was dumb with whom they'd always planned. They wept and quarrelled: freedom was so wild. In front maturity as he ascended Retired like a horizon from the child, The dangers and the punishments grew greater, And the way back by angels was defended Against the poet and the legislator. (W.H. Auden, Sonnets from China II)

Epitaph on a Tyrant Perfection, of a kind, was what he was after, And the poetry he invented was easy to understand; He knew human folly like the back of his hand, And was greatly interested in armies and fleets; When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter, And when he cried the little children died in the streets. (W.H. Auden) My mind automatically wanders to ancient Rome: to Augustus whose pax was really a pacification; to Caligula (but not much a poet); to Nero, who played the part of the poet. Or is it a combination of all of them? A meta-tyrant? It is quite interesting how many dictators are writers: Julius Caesar has his Gallic Wars ; Augustus has the Res Gestae ; Mand arcus Aurelius wrote his Meditations --that actually would be a good fit for the description. Of course, looking to Auden's own context, Hitler had Mein Kampf ; and, for those who didn't know, evidently Saddam Hussein wrote pseudonymous novels, such as Zabibah and the King . Literature ...

Foucault argued (I think in the History of Sexuality --don't ask me which volume off the top of my head) that the medieval Catholic confessional is the predecessor to the psychologist's analysis (I think he was thinking mostly of psychoanalysis of a Freudian bent), but, perhaps, it is also the predecessor of the advice column and even the bathroom graffito confessional in a post-Reformation, Protestant, predominantly Anglophone context (outside of Foucault's France): For since the British Isles went Protestant A church confession is too high for most. But still confession is a human want, So Englishmen must make theirs now by post And authors hear them over breakfast toast. For, failing them, there's nothing but the wall Of public lavatories on which to scrawl. (W.H. Auden, "Letter to Lord Byron") I am beginning to find many of Auden's lines (especially in this particular poem) rather strained, but I like this particular stanza. It just stands out. It is...

I just finished teaching Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice , and so this excerpt from W.H. Auden's "Letter to Lord Byron" caught my attention: There is one other author in my pack: For some time I debated which to write to. Which would least likely send my letter back? But I decided that I'd give a fright to Jane Austen if I wrote when I'd no right to, And share in her contempt the dreadful fates Of Crawford, Musgrove, and of Mr Yates. Then she's a novelist. I don't know whether You will agree, but novel writing is A higher art than poetry altogether In my opinion, and success implies Both finer character and faculties. Perhaps that's why real novels are as rare As winter thunder or a polar bear. The average poet by comparison Is unobservant, immature, and lazy. You must admit, when all is said and done, His sense of other people's very hazy, His moral judgments are too often crazy, A slick and easy...

Luther With conscience cocked to listen for the thunder, He saw the Devil busy in the wind, Over the chiming steeples and then under The doors of nuns and doctors who had sinned. What apparatus could stave off disaster Or cut the brambles of man's error down? Flesh was a silent dog that bites its master, World a still pond in which its children drown. The fuse of Judgement spluttered in his head: "Lord smoke these honeyed insects from their hives. All Works, Great Men, Societies are bad. The Just shall live by Faith..." he cried in dread. And men and women of the world were glad, Who'd never cared or trembled in their lives. I think this poem captures Luther's psychological sensitivities, his general perturbations of mind quite well--his "dread." It makes the final couplet that much more caustic. Luther, whether you like him or not, struggled greatly within his own tormented self to come to his formulation of "by faith alone." But how easy s...

I thought this poem by Auden, originally entitled "Funeral Blues" but later left untitled, would be appropriate for Good Friday: Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone, Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone, Silence the pianos and with muffled drum Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come. Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead Scribbling on the sky the message He is Dead, Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves, Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves. He was my North, my South, my East and West, My working week and my Sunday rest, My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song; I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong. The stars are not wanted now: put out every one; Pack of the moon and dismantle the sun; Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood; For nothing now can ever come to good. Now as recited by the actor John Hannah ("Matthew") in the movie Four Weddings and a Funeral , which made the poem famous for a bro...

Montaigne Outside his library window he could see A gentle landscape terrified of grammar, Cities where lisping was compulsory, And provinces where it was death to stammer. The hefty sprawled, too tired to care: it took This donnish undersexed conservative To start a revolution and to give The Flesh its weapons to defeat the Book. When devils drive the reasonable wild, They strip their adult century so bare, Love must be re-grown from the sensual child, To doubt becomes a way of definition, Even belles lettres legitimate as prayer, And laziness a movement of contrition.

It seems that I am now in the habit of giving not a quote per day, but a poem per day. I am working through the collected works of W.H. Auden, sometimes proceeding in the order of the book, but sometimes jumping around to titles that catch my eye. My interest in time led me to this one: No Time Clocks cannot tell our time of day For what event to pray, Because we have no time, because We have no time until We know what time we fill, Why time is other than time was. Nor can our question satisfy The answer in the statue's eye. Only the living may ask whose brow May wear the Roman laurel now: The dead say only how. What happens to the living when they die? Death is not understood by death: nor you, nor I.

Since I study the intersections of sacred space (Sanctuary) and sacred time (Sabbath) in ancient Jewish and Christian literature, I am often attracted to their invocations in modern literature as well. Paul Celan, for example, often talks about the Sabbath in his poetry. Here is a meditation by W.H. Auden: The Sabbath Waking on the Seventh Day of Creation, They cautiously sniffed the air: The most fastidious nostril among them admitted That fellow was no longer there. Herbivore, parasite, predator scouted, Migrants flew fast and far-- Not a trace of his presence: holes in the earth, Beaches covered with tar, Ruins and metallic rubbish in plenty Were all that was left of him Whose birth on the Sixth had made of that day An unnecessary interim. Well, that fellow had never really smelled Like a creature who would survive: No grace, address or faculty like those Born on the First Five. Back, then, at last on a natural economy, Now His Impudence was gone, Looki...

Memorization is something that is quickly flying out the window. Growing up, we were encouraged to memorize swaths of the Bible, something I should probably do more of (but now in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek). If that's not your ticket, how about modern poetry? An article in the NYTimes talks about reasons for and gives tips how to memorize some Auden, Yeats, Chaucer, Shakespeare, etc., in tiny increments each day. With just a few lines each day, over time you'll have a vast collection of poems at your memory's disposal. There have been a few times I have pulled a few lines out of Shakespeare when relevant for my class (and not just when I was teaching Shakespeare). And I've actually been wanting to read some W.H. Auden, but haven't had the chance. The best reason beyond any cultural literacy, etc., is just for your own pleasure. Why not give a short poem a shot? Here is a poem by W.H. Auden : The Fall of Rome The piers are pummelled by the waves; In a lonel...