Sherry Chandler

Here follows a collection of unrelated statements that have somehow struck me as profound in my reading lately:

…Eliot’s The Waste Land and Virginia Woolf’s last and most profound book, Between the Acts, have in common (a fact more striking because they have nothing else in common) a sense of contrast between the course of a whole civilization and the tiny flashes of significant moments which reveal its meaning.

— Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton University Press, 1957)

I think maybe one mark of a genius, a poetic genius anyway, is to be able to recognize those tiny flashes.

The whole mark of fundamentalism is their absolute lack of self-reckoning.

— Rosie Jackson, “Between the Lines. Of Eros and Dust,” in Tears in the Fence, Autumn 2005

Our nation was founded on three pillars: a political theory of individual rights and civil liberties, an economic view of the beneficence of free markets, and a religious vision of souls that have been emancipated from the bondage of original sin.

This seems to be the text of a sermon given on March 5 by Galen Guengerich at All Souls Unitarian Church in New York City. I found it here.

A vile conceit in pompous words expressed
Is like a clown in regal purple dressed…

— from Alexander Pope, “Essay on Criticism”

The Gospels are scary, dark and demanding. It is not surprising that people want to tame them, dilute them, make them into generic encouragements to be loving and peaceful and fair. If that is all they are, then we may as well make Socrates our redeemer.

— Garry Wills in the NYTimes

And I’ll tell you what. Those apocryphal gospels, such as the much touted and “newly-discovered” Gospel of Judas, are even scarier. No time, I think, when we get really deep into religion of any kind, are we dealing with sweet little guardian angels.

Wills’s is a fine and widely-circulated essay on why politicians on either side cannot and should not invoke Christ. I’d recommend that you read it all.

A few weeks ago, a friend remarked to me that any one picked up from the year 2000 and dropped into 2006 would be appalled to see what has happened to our nation. Those of us who have lived through the last five years mostly have come to accept it. Just once in a while we see a hint, as in this news report from the NYTimes this morning. “Librarians win…”:

After fighting ferociously for months, federal prosecutors relented yesterday and agreed to allow a Connecticut library group to identify itself as the recipient of a secret F.B.I. demand for records in a counterterrorism investigation.

The decision ended a dispute over whether the broad provisions for secrecy in the USA Patriot Act, the antiterror law, trumped the free speech rights of library officials. The librarians had gone to federal court to gain permission to identify themselves as the recipients of the secret subpoena, known as a national security letter, ordering them to turn over patron records and e-mail messages.

Think about that for a while. The librarians were suing not to be able to protect the privacy of their clients, not to disclose the nature or subject of the investigation, but just to be able to tell the world that they’d been subpoenaed.

We have a government that can investigate us without telling us the nature of that investigation or even that the investigation is going on. We have a government that can eavesdrop on our telephone conversations and e-mails without so much as a court review. We are a paranoid nation, afraid of our own shadows, willing to sell our birthrights for very questionable security.

The parallels from history are sobering.

I try not to steal too much from other people’s ideas on this weblog but I do want to share Daniel Hoffman’s Poetry Month Pick with you. Wilde is a 19th century American poet, having immigrated from Dublin to Augusta at age 12. The poem below, which Hoffman found in John Hollander’s American Poetry: The Nineteenth Century, he presents as one of the first to refer to distinctly American fauna: the mockingbird instead of the nightingale.

To the Mocking-Bird

WHO shall thy gay buffoonery describe?
Winged mimic of the woods! thou motley fool!
Thine ever ready notes of ridicule
Pursue thy fellows still with jest and gibe.
Wit, sophist, songster, Yorick of thy tribe,
Thou sportive satirist of Nature’s school,
To thee the palm of scoffing we ascribe,
Arch-mocker and mad Abbot of Misrule!
For such thou art by day–but all night long
Thou pourest a soft, sweet, pensive, solemn strain,
As if thou didst in this thy moonlight song
Like to the melancholy Jacques complain,
Musing on falsehood, folly, vice, and wrong,
And sighing for thy motley coat again.

— Richard Henry Wilde (1789-1847)