Month: November 2004

Lowell’s “Hawthorne”

As noted before, Robert Lowell includes numerous allusions to the history of New England in his poetry, and that’s particularly true in the section entitled To the Union Dead. While the title poem of this section is certainly a powerful statement of how our nation’s values seem to have been corroded by commercialism, my favorite poem in the section is:

HAWTHORNE

Follow its lazy main street lounging
from the alms house to Gallows Hill
along a flat, unvaried surface
covered with wooden houses
aged by yellow drain
like the unhealthy hair of an old dog.
You’ll walk to no purpose
in Hawthorne’s Salem.

I cannot resilver the smudged plate.

I drop to Hawthorne, the customs officer,
measuring coal and mostly trying to keep warm-
to the stunted black schooner,
the dismal South-end dock,
the wharf-piles with their fungus of ice.
On State Street
a steeple with a glowing dial-clock
measures the weary hours,
the merciless march of professional feet.

Even this shy distrustful ego
sometimes walked on top of the blazing roof,
and felt those flashes
that char the discharged cells of the brain.

Look at the faces-
Longfellow, Lowell, Holmes and Whittier!
Study the grizzled silver of their beards.
Hawthorne’s picture,
however, has a blond mustache
and golden General Custer scalp.
He looks like a Civil War officer.
He shines in the firelight. His hard
survivor’s smile is touched with fire.

Leave him alone for a moment or two,
and you’ll see him with his head
bent down, brooding, brooding,
eyes fixed on some chip,
some stone, some common plant,
the commonest thing,
as if it were the clue.
The disturbed eyes rise,
furtive, foiled, dissatisfied
from meditation on the true
and insignificant.

I’m sure my preference for this poem is colored by my own historical awareness of New England, an awareness that has stemmed primarily from my study of literature. It obviously doesn’t hurt that Hawthorne is one of my favorite writers from the area. Perhaps, even more importantly, despite my fondness for Emerson and Thoreau, there is something almost redemptive about Hawthorne’s brooding sense of the darkness of the human soul.

It is apparently a brooding suspicion that Lowell shares, perhaps identifying more with the sensitive Hawthorne than the more stoic Romantic images of his own forefather.

It’s obvious that the outwardly pietistic Puritans hold no appeal for Lowell, as suggested in the lines “You’ll walk to no purpose/ in Hawthorne’s Salem.” And, like Hawthorne, Lowell seems to feel trodden down by “the merciless march of professional feet.”

Like his transcendentalist contemporaries Emerson and Thoreau, Hawthorne sought the miraculous in everyday life, but unlike them he was unable to find it there, instead finding something much darker, much more threatening. While it may not be what h was looking for, it, nevertheless, seems “true” and may well leave us with a “disturbed,” if not bewildered, look in our own eyes.

While we may well want to believe the best of our fellow man, we do not have to look too far to see evidence that shows otherwise, do we?

Lowell’s “Terminal Days At Beverly Farms”

Although the much more famous and anthologized “Skunk Hour” is included in [from] Life Studies, my favorite poem in this section is “Terminal Days At Beverly Farms” because it seems to lie at the heart of this section focusing on Lowell’s family, particularly his father, but also his grandfather and his mother, and, finally, the narrator’s own life.

The poem is preceded by a much longer poem entitled “Commander Lowell 1887 – 1950” which contains the revealing lines “Smiling on all, Father was once successful enough to be lost/ in the mob of ruling-class Bostonians.” These poems, in their own inexplicable way, the same way life often fails to shed light on itself even while revealing its final secrets, provide a strange insight into a poem like “Walking in the Blue,” a poem which seems to take place in a “house for the “mentally ill.'”

TERMINAL DAYS AT BEVERLY FARMS

At Beverly Farms, a portly, uncomfortable boulder
bulked in the garden’s center
an irregular Japanese touch.
After his Bourbon “old fashioned,” Father,
bronzed, breezy, a shade too ruddy,
swayed as if on deck duty
under his six pointed star-lantern-
last July’s birthday present.
He smiled his oval Lowell smile,
he wore his cream gaberdine dinner-jacket,
and indigo cummerbund,
His head was efficient and hairless,
his newly dieted figure was vitally trim.

Father and mother moved to Beverly Farms
to be a two-minute walk from the station,
half an hour by train from the Boston doctors.
They had no sea-view,
but sky-blue tracks of the commuters’ railroad shone
like a double-barreled shotgun
through the scarlet late August sumac,
multiplying like cancer
at their garden’s border.

Father had had two coronaries.
He still treasured underhand economies,
but his best friend was his little black Chevy,
garaged like a superficial steer
wtih gilded hooves,
yet sensationally sober,
and with less side than an old dancing pump.
The local dealer, a “buccanneer,”
had been bribed a “king’s ransom”
to quickly deliver a car without chrome.

Each morning at eight-thirty,
inattentive and beaming,
loaded with his “calc” and “trig” books,
his clipper ship statistics,
and his ivory slide rule,
father stole off with the Chevie
to loaf in the Maritime Museum at Salem.
He called the curator
“the commander of the Swiss Navy.”

Father’s death was abrupt and unprotesting.
His vision was still twenty-twenty.
After a morning of anxious, repetitive smiling,
his last words to Mother were:
“I feel awful.”

There is something deeply dismaying in this father whose “figure was vitally trim” and spent the morning of his death in “anxious, repetive smiling,” all the time feeling “awful.”

It is a portrait of an ineffectual man so out of touch with his very self, so fascinated with an image of himself, that he never recognizes the spotlight of the train of history aimed at him “like a double-barreled shotgun,” approaching so fast that in the end his death is “abrupt and unprotesting.”

When death finally comes I won’t be greeting it with polite civility (my apologies to Emily). No, I’ll be raging, raging against the dying of the light, not standing around with my “cream gaberdine dinner-jacket,/
and indigo cummerbund sipping an “old-fashioned.”

It’s Fall

As if I weren’t
already
paying
enough
attention

Life

tapped me
once more
on the shoulder.

“Pay
attention,

dammit,

You’re dying

one day
at a time.”

And I paid

attention,
and more,

and the sun was shining,
and the air crisp

golden, fallen leaves
encircled
a barren tree

and it was
almost like
I wasn’t
dying

at all.

Thomas Frank’s One Market Under God

Reading Thomas Frank’s One Market Under God is not easy; if it were, I suppose I would have finished the book quite awhile ago. Part of the problem, of course, is simply that I don’t have much of a background in economics. However, reading the books is also complicated by a somewhat disorienting switch in tone from a formal, philosophic style to an in-your-face kind of salesmanship. I suspect the latter may, unfortunately, be a requirement to sell such a book to a wide audience. Still, it does not make it any easier to follow an argument.

That said, I’m finding much in the book that interests me. Even a simple statement of purpose helped me to focus on some ideas that I’ve considered but hadn’t quite put into words:

It is the argument of this book that destroying the old and making the world safe for billionaires has been as much a cultural and political operation as an economic one. Consider for a minute the factors-weak trade unions, a declining regulatory apparatus, and the outright repeal of the welfare state under presidents Reagan and Clinton-that distinguish the United States, with its New Economy, from the other industrialized nations. Aside from the technological advances of recent years (which may or may not live up to the world-historical importance we routinely ascribe to them), very little of the New Economy is new. What the term describes is not some novel state of human affairs but the final accomplishment of the long-standing agenda of the nation’s richest class. Industries come and industries go, but what has most changed about America in the nineties is the way we think about industries, about economies. Once Americans imagined that economic democracy meant a reasonable standard of living for all-that freedom was only meaningful once poverty and powerlessness had been over come. Today, however, American opinion leaders seem generally convinced that democracy and the free market are simply identical. There is precious little that is new about this idea, either: For nearly a century, equating the market with democracy was the familiar defense of any corporation in trouble with union or government; it was the standard-issue patter of corporate lobbyists like the National Association of Manufacturers. What is “new” is this idea’s triumph over all its rivals; the determination of American leaders to extend it to all the world; the general belief among opinion-makers that there is something natural, something divine, something inherently democratic about markets. A better term for the New Economy might simply be “consensus.”

If it wasn’t already clear before, it is now painfully clear I am officially living in the past, something ex-students tried to convince me of many years ago. I still believe that “Once Americans imagined that economic democracy meant a reasonable standard of living for all-that freedom was only meaningful once poverty and powerlessness had been overcome.” And personally, I find it rather disturbing that “Today, however, American opinion leaders seem generally convinced that democracy and the free market are simply identical.” I don’t believe that, and, quite the contrary, would argue that unfettered capitalism would probably lead to an oligarchy rather than a democracy.

Of course, the further I read the more I discovered just how far out of touch I am with most of our political leaders, including ex-President Clinton:

In a manner largely unprecedented in the twentieth century, leaders of American opinion were in basic agreement on the role of business in American life. Daniel Yergin, a great celebrator of the laissez-faire way, called the new conviction that government had almost no legitimate place in economic affairs the “market consensus”; in international monetary dealings it was referred to as the “Washington consensus. Luttwak exaggerates only slightly when he remarks that, “At present, almost all elite Americans , with corporate chiefs and fashionable economists in the lead, are utterly convinced that they have discovered the winning formula for economic success-the only formula-good for every country, rich or poor, good for all individuals willing and able to heed the message, and, of course, good for elite Americans: PRIVATIZATION + DEREGULATION + GLOBALIZATION = TURBO-CAPITALISM = PROSPERITY”

I am convinced that privatization of, oh, say, Social Security would in the long run be a disastrous mistake, endangering the economic well-being of a large number of our citizens. Removing environmental regulations and leaving the protection of the environment up to business would also be disastrous. Nor am I convinced that in the long run globalization benefits either third-world countries or ourselves, though I suspect such development is probably inevitable. I was more than a little shocked to learn that there were actually people like this:

For Texas congressman Ron Paul (a former Libertarian elected as a Republican), the market populist equation was so self-evident that he asked Congress to repeal antitrust law on the simple grounds that ‘bigness in a free market is only achieved by the vote of consumers.” Corporations are the product of a democratic process far more sensitive and sophisticated than elections; by definition corporate behavior reflects popular consent. Compared to the market, in fact, government just plain sucks. The marketplace, at least, yields up ‘profits for stockholders” and happiness for consumers while the actual institutions of democracy- the various branches of government-are staffed with what Paul called “little men filled with envy” capable of producing nothing.””

who had somehow managed to be elected to congress.

So far, though, the real “AHA” in the book has been this observation:

Backlash populism has envisioned a scheming “liberal elite” bent on “social engineering.” A clique of experts who thought they knew what was best for us ” busing integration, the coddling of criminals, co-existence with Communism. Market populism simply shifted the inflection. Now the crime of the elite was not so much arrogance in matters of values but in matters economic. Still those elitists thought they were better than the people, but now their arrogance was revealed by their passion to raise the minimum wage, to regulate, oversee, redistribute and tax.

All those years of teaching have finally had their effect for I have become an “elitist” worried about minimum wages and regulation of environmental controls. No wonder I resent Limbaugh and his ilk so much:

“Liberals fear me,’ he once wrote, because “I represent middle America’s growing rejection of the elites.” Limbaugh could be very specific about who made him mad. In addition to the liberal media conspirators who so haunted the imagination of nineties populism, Limbaugh extended his list of “so-called ‘professionals’ and ‘experts'” to include “the medical elites, the sociology elites, the education elites, the legal elites, the science elites … and the ideas this bunch promotes through the media.” In contrast to the “arrogance” of these elites, Limbaugh offered his own humility before public tastes. While their social programs revealed a contemptuous desire to use “all Americans as their guinea pigs,’ and while they wanted only to “grab even more power and control over the lives of individuals,” Rush wanted merely to “let the marketplace rule,” to let each of us “think for yourselves.” His success, as he repeatedly reminded listeners, was due to the fact that he respected us

There I am, part of the “educational elite.” Too bad I wasn’t more aware of that when I was being dismissed as a mere high school teacher.

Still, this vision of “liberals” as somehow part of an “elite” seems a rather accurate picture of what has just occurred in the latest election, where Kerry and his supporters were denigrated as part of an Eastern liberal elite, who were trying to undermine the “moral values” of everyday Americans.

It’s easy to image how many conservative Americans must have felt vindicated when so many bloggerts in the blue states accused Bush supporters of being “stupid.” You can just hear the “told you so’s.”

“I told you so! They think they’re better than us. Bastards. We showed them.”