Shelley, Painted Veils, and Politics 2013

In the midst of our current political debacle, there's a tenuous pause in the government-shutdown danse macabre, but the best news is that most American citizens are finally getting disgusted. As I look back at our 1960s Civil Rights movement and the protests about the American war in Vietnam, I’m still bewildered at how long it took the general public to feel sickened by burning crosses and lynchings at home and body bags abroad, which is our home away from home.

I’m still not sure Main Street worries enough about racial injustice, or class warfare, or the irrational features of every clergicalized religion, or the human fondness for war (while we make Christian or Buddhist noise about abhorring war, turning cheeks, and judging not lest we be judged). But every once in awhile Main Street just says No to mindless meanness, or it behaves in an utterly compassionate way toward another human or animal, and I just can’t quite give up on us. So, with continued embarrassment, I offer more words, words, words and ignore the fact that less is more.  

 
Something in all the current political idiocy made me think of Shelley’s seemingly apolitical sonnet, “Lift Not the Painted Veil.”

            Lift not the painted veil which those who live

            Call Life: though unreal shapes be pictured there,

            And it but mimic all we would believe

            With colours idly spread,--behind, lurk Fear

            And Hope, twin Destinies; who ever weave

            Their shadows, o'er the chasm, sightless and drear.

            I knew one who had lifted it--he sought,

            For his lost heart was tender, things to love,

            But found them not, alas! nor was there aught

            The world contains, the which he could approve.

            Through the unheeding many he did move,

            A splendour among shadows, a bright blot

            Upon this gloomy scene, a Spirit that strove

            For truth, and like the Preacher found it not.

I’m not wild about the poem except for its opening and closing two lines, which I’ve remembered since college. Shelley seems to be distinguishing between the material (matter-ial) world—the painted veil—and something like a Platonic ideal or spiritual world behind and beyond the veil.

As human matter—atomic particles and whatnot—driven by appetite, we naturally care about alluring, sexy, tangible veils. (I've sometimes wondered what Shelley would think of Las Vegas). We don’t know what’s behind them, but the little philosopher or theologian in us “would believe” there is something bigger, better, less concrete and crass than gaudy physicality, with its “colours idly spread.” To be idly spread suggests randomness and chaos, so the visual surface would be fetching but ultimately pointless.

Shelley’s sparkly veil is what we call life; we’re satisfied with the surfaces of things. Like crows drawn to shiny baubles, we like a casino on our river. We are drawn to painted masks—unless we are that other kind of seeker, wannabe mystics, oddballs hoping to find a larger truth beyond the appearances of things, beyond matter, like Shelley’s “one who had lifted it” in his search for “things to love.” That guy fails. That “one” ends up wandering in “this gloomy scene” where there was nothing “which he could approve,” as he traveled among the “unheeding many.” It's the thinkers who are likely to end up in this state--only briefly and from time to time, one hopes. 

Sidebar One:  The title character of Hawthorne’s short story, “Ethan Brand,” has a similar problem. He sets out to find “the Unpardonable Sin” and in so doing, he commits the Unpardonable Sin, which consists of setting himself above the masses, even though the masses are a sorry crowd, drunk, disorderly and aggressively stupid. But the story seems to say those are our choices:  be a seeker, which causes the heart to turn to stone, or humbly accept our lot as just one more among the miserable, mindless many.

Sidebar Two: Although Shelley and Hawthorne are concerned with philosophical and theological issues, I’m feeling a parallel in politics. If there’s a star in that sordid arena, “A splendour among shadows” as Shelley labels him, as well as Shelley’s oxymoronic “bright blot,” how is that hero to proceed among the “unheeding many”? 

Politics is a painted veil in the sense that it’s a dance of psychopaths, liars and thieves who are concerned only with matter, not self-examination, or transcendence, or love, kindness and compassion. What conservative ideologues in particular care about, when you strip away the rhetoric, is protecting their pile. I wonder if anyone noticed the way knee-jerk Republicans went like jackals for Obama’s throat when he said, a few months ago, that none of us get what we have entirely on our own. We all have had luck and help from someone along the way.

That statement is self-explanatory and valid to people of good will. However, the president should have padded his point with more context and explanation—a rhetorical diaper for all those infantile foot-stompers at the peak of an orgasmic tantrum.

But humans of good will and adequate intelligence knew what he was saying. For example, in America a white male, like me, is given extra help from his culture the moment he emerges from the womb. No matter what his hardships have been, they’ve been less challenging than they would have been for a woman or a minority. Yes, that is changing, but anyone who denies that as our history, so far, is being willfully stupid or deceitful.

Yes, some people work a lot harder than others to achieve their pile, but no one got his pile without luck and help from others. Anyone who denies that is undeserving of the benefits of American democracy and capitalism.

Most of the people crowing about creating their own pile and defending it with many guns are Christians—you know, the religion that says the meek are blessed. It’s the religion whose hero was a hippie born in a manger and hanged with two thieves.  Between the manger and the cross was a lot of wandering, like Shelley’s “one,” and meditating, and praying, and talk of turning the other cheek, and forgiveness, and care for the poor. Christianity is anything but the religion of the rich. I was taught Jesus showed anger only once—when the money lenders (hear, bankers) entered the temple. Oh, and there’s that business about the camel—it’s easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven.  How many Christians work on Wall Street? How many are totin' steel in the NRA? No, I mean real Christians. How many conservatives call themselves Christian? Do you see how all that oddness adds up to a painted veil? A theater—devoid of fact and truth?

It’s a “miracle of rare device” that conservatives have turned the essence of Christian self-effacement into the politics of greed, guns, and deception. It’s a miracle of absurdity that politicians now paint the average citizen as a white guy sitting at the kitchen table, paying the bills and feeling victimized by Commie-liberals and people of color.

An even greater miracle is the way Democrats have permitted it, have passively held open the door and failed to demand better behavior and consistent logic. Extremist conservatives love the constitution and the Bible only when it helps them hoard, pile up their pile, stuff upon stuff, and keep undesirables away from their golf sanctuaries (their gulf clubs). 

So, yes, politics is a painted veil. Is Shelley right? It’s “Fear/And Hope, twin Destinies” back there behind the veil--something darker and more absurd even than the veil itself? We might do well to settle for surfaces, if the scene behind the curtain consists of ersatz Christians stroking their guns and raiding Grandma’s retirement funds, while Democrats, the party of godless Commie Libs, are pushing for compassion and being ignored.

And, Percy Bysshe Shelley, when the images on the painted veil can be so gorgeous, maybe we ought to settle for what's there instead of groping for more. And more.

HAPPY HOPKINS, 2: "THE WINDHOVER"

The Windhover by Gerard Manley Hopkins : The Poetry Foundation [poem] : Find Poems and Poets. Discover Poetry.


“The Windhover” might be Hopkins’ most famous poem, unless that would be “God’s Grandeur,” another work of praise for natural beauty and the divinity within it. “More complex and more interesting than “God’s Grandeur” or “Pied Beauty,” “The Windhover” is an Italian sonnet in which a central metaphor compares Jesus Christ to a falcon, a bird of spectacular physical beauty, a bird of prey, a killer—which is also seen as a knight, a lover, and a plowman.

These dramatic, shocking, and beautiful aspects of the falcon are most evident when it dives, which is signaled by the (curious) word buckle. That is, the falcon’s hovering collapses, as in knees buckling, and all the bird’s glorious qualities latch together like a belt buckle and shine as he dives, seeming to fall toward his prey.

Consider the qualities of Jesus that most emphatically and happily stun Hopkins into ecstasy and adoration (and a whiff of lust). The falcon is royalty, a prince, a knight and warrior (“dauphin,” “dangerous . . . chevalier”). He's even French, for heaven's sake. True, he’s also a servant (“minion”) but a servant who’s a darling (again that word, “minion”) of the morning sky, (“daylight’s dauphin,” a prince of the whole sky). And maybe most shocking—unless it’s more a part of Catholic doctrine than I realize—Hopkins’ Jesus stirs potentially erotic feelings: “my heart in hiding / Stirred” and “ah, my dear.”

Is this somewhere close to the idea that nuns marry Jesus? If so, is the speaker presenting himself as a female admirer? If so, is Hopkins, as author, aware of that, or has the poem gotten away from him—maybe the way, according to some scholars, that Milton’s Satan got away from him in Paradise Lost and became the most attractive character in the story?

In any case, the Jesus of “The Windhover” is no meek, poverty-stricken, pal-of-the-beggars or turning-the-other-cheek kind of guy. Christian humility is not what has snowed Hopkins. This is a Jesus of speed and power in the free-fall dive of a predator who stabs field mice and soars upward with them. This Jesus is one of those bullying knights with “brute beauty, valor, pride, plume.” And the speaker feels such a suggestion of erotic love for Jesus as falcon, or the falcon as Jesus, that his heart must stay “in hiding” as he expresses his rapture.

What would Pat Robertson think of Hopkins’ Lord? What would the Puritans have said?

As he was in “Carrion Comfort,” Hopkins is so excessive about his emotions, his word choice, and his indulgence in sound devices that he risks self-mockery. (In my judgment, this is only true in “my heart . . . / Stirred for a bird”). But if we’re supposed to think of a Christian’s religious love as a passion, what better illustration of it than to make lovers of the mortal servant and his eternal Lord?

Notice, however, that the bird’s flashy power has not come out of nowhere; he has to earn it. In the poem’s opening six lines, notice the hints of labor, as the falcon works in the wind, and has to “rebuff” it. That’s beautiful in its way, but finally in lines 5 and 7—and not until then—we come to freeing words of soaring or victory, like “ecstasy” and “rebuffed the big wind.”

In the poem’s final three lines (the second half of the Italian sonnet’s sestet), we return explicitly to the idea of labor coming to fruition—something like the way “Sheer plod makes plow down sillion shine” in “Pied Beauty.” The soaring of the falcon is now (re)viewed as “blue-bleak,” or nearly dead, “embers.” But like the diving falcon, they suddenly, dramatically “fall.” Even in a domestic hearth, they crash, and it’s in that fall that they “gall” themselves and produce a flash of brilliance that can “gash gold-vermilion.”

So it’s at least a plausible argument to say the whole poem has been about a prince (or merely a knight) who’s had to struggle against, negotiate with nature’s “rolling level underneath him steady air” before he can dive into glory, fall, plummet, and in that descent become “fire” and “mastery.”

I haven’t been back to “The Windhover” for a while, and I must say, it holds up terrifically well for me. I’m not sure I can think of a poem that’s any better in demonstrating what I’ve meant at Banjo52 when I’ve harped about super-good poetry offering gifts along the way to the even greater gift of a whole that consists of major ideas, emotions, experiences. Maybe a great poem is something like a falcon—we stand and witness as it hovers, it dives.

The Windhover by Gerard Manley Hopkins : The Poetry Foundation [poem] : Find Poems and Poets. Discover Poetry.

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GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS, "CARRION COMFORT"

GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS AND DEAN YOUNG: STRANGE BEDFELLOWS?





“Carrion Comfort” is one of the “Terrible Sonnets,” poems of religious questioning, doubt and anguish by Gerard Manley Hopkins, a Jesuit priest in Victorian England and Ireland. The poem also illustrates some points I was trying to make in response to the visitor comments on March 15 and 16, concerning Dean Young’s poem, as well as poetry in general.

Some grim, sad, and depressing poems are also difficult, perhaps never completely understood by Reader X. Yet he might love such a poem or at least some of it if it offers gifts along the way, probably images, lines, passages and music to feel connected to, but also thoughts and emotions, conveying something of what Reader X had thought or felt himself, but would never have considered uttering in this way.

A Victorian poet (1844-1889), Hopkins’ language can be, or seem at first, self-conscious, jerky, grandiose. His experiments with language can be so dramatic, so bold that many scholars say he is (along with Emily Dickinson and Robert Browning) more modern than Victorian in manner and maybe thought as well. I take that as high praise, but I also worry that some readers will find these experiments excessive, or even an unintended self-parody. So let’s keep in mind how bizarrely unconventional Hopkins’ style is for its era. Let’s cut him some slack, for it’s in these very excesses that we’re likely to find the “wow factor” as he blazes new trails in poetry.

Carrion Comfort by Gerard Manley Hopkins : The Poetry Foundation [poem] : Find Poems and Poets. Discover Poetry.

Hopkins doesn’t strike me as all that different, conceptually, from the Romantics. In nature, he finds not only the variety, beauty, and awe of the physical details, but also a revelation of God. I see a blend of Christianity and Pantheism (though for honesty’s sake, I must add that I don’t know enough about either of those schools to make such a statement).

With Hopkins, I allow myself another privilege: violating the New Criticism’s "Biographical Fallacy" (and you thought I was timid!). I find it unusually important to remember that Hopkins was a Catholic by conversion—that is, he presumably knew something about the faith before committing to it. He believed in it so completely that he became a Jesuit priest. So, while I don’t usually like reading much of an author’s life into his work, in this case I’m moved by the fact that this writer is not just you, me, or Joe Schmoe having a crisis of faith, but a man who lived his religion as completely as Hopkins did.

Maybe I need to add that, if someone hasn’t had a few crises of faith, I don’t put much stock in that person’s faith (including atheism). So I can only try to imagine how agonizing it must have been for the devout Hopkins when he had these times of wondering, fear, intense doubt.

Back to context: I was not planning to post Hopkins any time soon, but I think he illustrates what I was trying to say one and two days ago about poets who leave plenty of gems along the way to a poem's closure and wholeness. We might not like, agree with, or understand the entire poem, but we can be bowled over by individual images, lines, passages, or the work’s overall music, atmosphere, texture. In turn, those gifts might keep us coming back until we feel comfortable with more and more of its parts, or even its entirety.

Carrion Comfort by Gerard Manley Hopkins : The Poetry Foundation [poem] : Find Poems and Poets. Discover Poetry.

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