Poetry

[Dekalb_Blues]

Four Burnt-Out Cases Walk Into A Bar In Manhattan
Or,
Pledging Undying Love To Rosetta
(And In The End — With Time And Luck...)

I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade....

W. H. Auden, "September 1, 1939"

"The Age of Anxiety" is the strangest flower of a marvelously fertile period. The decade following WH Auden's emigration to New York in 1939 produced not only the long poems "For the Time Being", "New Year Letter" and "The Sea and the Mirror" — his sublime meditation on The Tempest — but some of the finest works of this or any 20th-century poet: "In Memory of WB Yeats", "At the Grave of Henry James", "If I Could Tell You", "The Fall of Rome", "The Quest". And the great — and latterly disavowed — lament for a falling world "September 1st, 1939"....

It is in "September 1st, 1939" that we first glimpse the setting for what would become "The Age of Anxiety":

Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play . . .
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.

At the outset of "The Age of Anxiety" Auden spotlights four of these faces, solitary drinkers in a wartime New York bar: Malin, a Canadian airman; Quant, a world-weary clerk; Rosetta, a buyer for a department-store; and Emble, a young naval recruit. Over six sections — a prologue, a life-story, a dream-quest, a dirge, a masque and an epilogue — they meditate on their lives, their hopes, their losses, and on the human condition. In real terms they get talking at the bar, grab a booth together, get plastered and stagger back to Rosetta's place. There they drink some more and dance a bit until the two older gents drift home and the younger one pledges undying love to Rosetta before crashing out on her bed....

Unsurprisingly Malin, Quant, Rosetta and Emble all sound like Auden, who wrote some lively charades but wasn't really a playwright. Then again, because they sound like Auden, what they say is mostly brilliant, beautiful, or both. Here is Malin's description of the death of an airman: 

We fought them off 
But paid a price; there was pain for some. 
'Why have They killed me?' wondered our Bert, our
Greenhouse gunner, forgot our answer,
Then was not with us . . .

While Quant imagines the decay of the dead: 

Soil accepts for a serious purpose 
The jettisoned blood of jokes and dreams . . .

And Rosetta imagines, with striking prescience, the world to come:

Odourless ages, an ordered world 
Of planned pleasures and passport-control,
Sentry-go sedatives, soft drinks and
Managed money, a moral planet
Tamed by terror . . .

After several pages of the poem one is aware only of Auden.... That is to say, Auden fourfold. When it becomes clear that the puppet-master has handed out abstractions to all his characters — Malin is "Thought", Quant "Intuition", Rosetta "Feeling" and Emble "Sensation"....

Auden's burned-out Manhattanites are under no more obligation to chat in American slang than Hamlet is to murmur in Middle Danish. The speeches are meant to be taken as inward monologues, dream-soliloquies, while the uniform shape of utterance suggests a commonality, a shared and inescapable plight. Verse should be neither too free nor too formed, as human experience is also neither: breath and bloodstream hold in place a struggling spirit, and Auden is a master of human utterance only insofar as he's a master of form....

One must love Auden's poetry to be able to speak this heresy, but I can't help wondering what fun he might have had — we might have had — with, instead of the poem, a wartime novel in the vein of Henry Green or Elizabeth Bowen. In virtually the last words of the poem something is revealed: "[Malin] returned to duty, reclaimed by the actual world where time is real and in which, therefore, poetry can take no interest . . ." This points to the problem with "The Age of Anxiety": time is real to real people. Abstractions can't change, so they don't listen.

A lesser poet wrote a greater poem for the age of anxiety: in Louis MacNeice's "Autumn Journal", set in London on the brink of the war, a recognisably human voice is blown hither and thither by memories, lusts and terrifying headlines. Auden's "The Age of Anxiety" isn't even the best work of art called "The Age of Anxiety": if I'm a junior minister in Auden's world, I'm barely a tea-boy in that of Leonard Bernstein, but I'd accord that honour to his Symphony No 2. Bernstein found the poem "fascinating and hair-raising". From the time he read "The Age of Anxiety" in 1948 "the composition of a symphony based on [it] acquired an almost compulsive quality", he wrote, describing an "extreme personal identification of myself with the poem, the essential line [of which] is the record of our difficult and problematic search for faith." Three years after the Holocaust, in the year of the founding of Israel, one can scarcely imagine how "difficult and problematic" faith had become for Bernstein.

―(above excerpted from https://www.theguardian.com/books/2010/a...-bernstein )





MacNeice's poem describes the poet's thoughts and feelings between August and December 1938 as the Second World War approaches. With echoes of the First World War and elements of reportage, ethics, love poems, and politics, it contains, as MacNeice wrote to TS Eliot, "everything which from first-hand experience I consider significant." 


[Excerpt from "Autumn Journal":]

iii

August is nearly over, the people
Back from holiday are tanned
With blistered thumbs and a wallet of snaps and a little
Joie de vivre which is contraband;
Whose stamina is enough to face the annual
Wait for the annual spree,
Whose memories are stamped with specks of sunshine
Like faded fleurs de lys.
Now the till and the typewriter call the fingers,
The workman gathers his tools
For the eight-hour day but after that the solace
Of films or football pools
Or of the gossip or cuddle, the moments of self-glory
Or self-indulgence, blinkers on the eyes of doubt,
The blue smoke rising and the brown lace sinking
In the empty glass of stout.
Most are accepters, born and bred to harness,
And take things as they come,
But some refusing harness and more who are refused it
Would pray that another and a better Kingdom come,
Which now is sketched in the air or travestied in slogans
Written in chalk or tar on stucco or plaster-board
But in time may find its body in men's bodies,
Its law and order in their heart's accord,
Where skill will no longer languish nor energy be trammelled
To competition and graft,
Exploited in subservience but not allegiance
To an utterly lost and daft
System that gives a few at fancy prices
Their fancy lives
While ninety-nine in the hundred who never attend the banquet
Must wash the grease of ages off the knives.
And now the tempter whispers 'But you also
Have the slave-owner's mind,
Would like to sleep on a mattress of easy profits,
To snap your fingers or a whip and find
Servants or houris ready to wince and flatter
And build with their degradation your self-esteem;
What you want is not a world of the free in function
But a niche at the top, the skimmings of the cream.'
And I answer that that is largely so for habit makes me
Think victory for one implies another's defeat,
That freedom means the power to order, and that in order
To preserve the values dear to the élite
The élite must remain a few. It is so hard to imagine
A world where the many would have their chance without
A fall in the standard of intellectual living
And nothing left that the highbrow cared about.
Which fears must be suppressed. There is no reason for thinking
That, if you give a chance to people to think or live,
The arts of thought or life will suffer and become rougher
And not return more than you could ever give.
And now I relapse to sleep, to dreams perhaps and reaction
Where I shall play the gangster or the sheikh,
Kill for the love of killing, make the world my sofa,
Unzip the women and insult the meek.
Which fantasies no doubt are due to my private history,
Matter for the analyst,
But the final cure is not in his past-dissecting fingers
But in a future of action, the will and fist
Of those who abjure the luxury of self-pity,
And prefer to risk a movement without being sure
If movement would be better or worse in a hundred
Years or a thousand when their heart is pure.
None of our hearts are pure, we always have mixed motives,
Are self deceivers, but the worst of all
Deceits is to murmur 'Lord, I am not worthy'
And, lying easy, turn your face to the wall.
But may I cure that habit, look up and outwards
And may my feet follow my wider glance
First no doubt to stumble, then to walk with the others
And in the end — with time and luck — to dance.

(https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/10...ber-poetry)



8.14 ▶ Questioner: What do the Orion group have -– what’s the objective with respect to the conquest of the Orion group?

Ra: I am Ra. As we have said previously, their objective is to locate certain mind/body/spirit complexes which vibrate in resonance with their own vibrational complex, then to enslave the un-elite, as you may call those who are not of the Orion vibration.


16.17 ▶ Questioner: What was their purpose in doing this?

Ra: I am Ra. The purpose of the Orion group, as mentioned before, is conquest and enslavement. This is done by finding and establishing an elite and causing others to serve the elite through various devices such as the laws you mention and others given by this entity.


11.18 ▶ Questioner: Then we have crusaders from Orion coming to this planet for mind control purposes. How do they do this?

Ra: As all, they follow the Law of One observing free will. Contact is made with those who call. Those then upon the planetary sphere act much as do you to disseminate the attitudes and philosophy of their particular understanding of the Law of One which is service to self. These become the elite. Through these, the attempt begins to create a condition whereby the remainder of the planetary entities are enslaved by their own free will.






Accurate scholarship can
Unearth the whole offence
From Luther until now
That has driven a culture mad,
Find what occurred at Linz,
What huge imago made
A psychopathic god ...
https://theamericanscholar.org/what-occu...orgetting/



We who are four
Were once but one.
Before his act of
Rebellion ...
http://assets.press.princeton.edu/chapters/i9412.pdf




More original & improvised musical offerings from Dan Dechellis — for those who seek to limit the exercise of their inescapable elitist urges to that of the STO-friendly domain of the mindfully empathic aesthetic cognoscenti.   Who appreciate some damn good tunes by a wonderfully lyrical & sympatico musician.