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The Mountebanks Congregate

In the early-mid 2000s there existed an essential and amazing weblog called The Poorman. Its disappearance in the early teens was completely understandable, as these things go. But what happened to The Poorman? Who is and where is Andrew? I’m sure there are people who know. Yours is not one of those people.

However, among their truly too-numerous-to-count hilariously poignant bits of writing about the complete and utter moral corruption of the Bush II administration and the media super-structure that served as its lifeline at each and every turn was a very insightful post about the founding of this great nation and especially the writing of its constitution. I wish I could find it for you dear people, but alas the wayback machine does not provide all. And so, I will attempt to re-create its fundamental point here.

So, back in ye olden revolutionary and post-revolutionary times, about July to September 1787, committees of the Constitutional Convention hashed out drafts of said document in grand strokes and fine detail, style and arrangements by Hamilton, Madison et al. Per the Poorman’s apt telling, near the end of this period, say around the middle of August, the entire crew of slave-owning inspired statesmen reached a point where they were sure the document was finished. What needed to be codified in order for the young country to function and treat itself justly had been put down in as clear a language as possible, easy and simple for all to parse. They had done it. In a humbling, electric moment, tired yet buzzed with destiny, they gathered up their finished draft and went out from Independence Hall in Philadelphia to get some fresh air and ponder the reach of their elegant treatise.

In the glare of late morning, the exhausted but exhilarated committee members poured out onto the streets of Philadelphia. But when they saw their fellow countrymen on the streets, began talking to a few and listening to more and realized the depths of a flimflammery and skallywaggery already afoot in the young country, the collection of mountebanks, the depraved and ignorant if eloquent tip of the hateful and begrudging masses for whom their toil was meant to soigner, they turned heel and headed back inside. There was yet more work needed on the document of their dreams and duty, to assure the perpetual longevity of the country of people it was designed to protect from themselves.

So as an update to the mysterious and direly missed Poorman, the descendants of those people that ran the writers back into the Hall to perfect their document are now in charge of everything.

And re: Harvard – pour encourager les autres works both ways, MFs.

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Alice

Alice WThe great American novelist and poet Alice Walker was in town the last two days, and I was fortunate enough to be in attendance at her public event last night at the Morton Theatre. It was a conversation with a great and generous soul, who reminded us to be kind, generous, curious and grateful to the wonder of which we are all a part, and to which we are ever-present witnesses. She instructed us to read, read, read, and to be aware of all that we allow into our consciousness via the invasive nature of electronic and broadcast media. We should be mindful of our ancestors and their suffering, because of which we should work to alleviate all suffering that we are aware of and encounter. Truly amazing and inspiring. She even read a couple of pages of dialogue between Shug and Celie talking about God from The Color Purple. I hope your Thursday night was good, too.

But here, I’ll share a poem from her website [yes, she blogs]. This is The Future Captured in A Heartless Fist by Alice Walker:

Somehow it is left to us

This most hopeful of generations

To bear

The unbearable.

We do not need to have given birth

To the children

Who are being destroyed

To know they are our children

Not only in the present and the past

But certainly in the future.

All children are connected at birth

To all the others ever to arrive.

Their faces turned upward

Toward the parents all grown-ups were meant to be.

How can you separate your child

From mine?

Little one, they have captured you

And placed you in a cage.

What are we to make of this?

Are we supposed to see you

As an animal?

Though animals also do not deserve

This fate.

Are we supposed to think

That you are, at five years old,

Already a “terrorist”?

Are we to believe you deserve

To stand alone in this tiny jail

Obviously constructed with you in mind

While grownups stand around

And frighten you?

Who paid for this cage

Anyway?

Whose taxes?

Whose labor?

Whose sweat?

Little One,

You are Palestinian

You are also Earthling,

You are Every Child.

By most humans of this planet

You are beloved.

But in this moment,

So hard to own

As what any parent or grownup

Anywhere

Could desire or wish

You are The Future

Captured in a heartless

Fist.

Image from last night, stolen without permission from fB.

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September 1, 1939

By W.H. Auden

I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright 
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night.

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:
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return. 

Exiled Thucydides knew
All that a speech can say
About Democracy,
And what dictators do,
The elderly rubbish they talk
To an apathetic grave;
Analysed all in his book,
The enlightenment driven away,
The habit-forming pain,
Mismanagement and grief:
We must suffer them all again.

Into this neutral air
Where blind skyscrapers use
Their full height to proclaim
The strength of Collective Man,
Each language pours its vain
Competitive excuse:
But who can live for long
In an euphoric dream;
Out of the mirror they stare,
Imperialism's face
And the international wrong.

Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play,
All the conventions conspire 
To make this fort assume
The furniture of home;
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.

The windiest militant trash
Important Persons shout
Is not so crude as our wish:
What mad Nijinsky wrote
About Diaghilev
Is true of the normal heart;
For the error bred in the bone
Of each woman and each man
Craves what it cannot have,
Not universal love
But to be loved alone.

From the conservative dark
Into the ethical life
The dense commuters come,
Repeating their morning vow;
"I will be true to the wife,
I'll concentrate more on my work,"
And helpless governors wake
To resume their compulsory game:
Who can release them now,
Who can reach the deaf,
Who can speak for the dumb?

All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.

Defenceless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.

See more.

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World of Waldman

The poet Anne Waldman is a national treasure, a connection to some of the most profound American cultural high notes of the last 40+ years who is still showing us the way today.

I interviewed her for my show last year (video soon here) and she was an endearing guest who shared with me some of the simple joys of conversation, even amidst the enormous breadth of her poetic presence. In honor of that, here is her poem, “The Lie” from Helping the Dreamer: Selected Poems, 1966-1988 (Coffee House Press, 1989):

Art begins with a lie

The separation is you plus me plus what we make

Look into lightbulb, blink, sun’s in your eye

I want a rare sky

vantage point free from misconception

Art begins with a lie

Nothing to lose, spontaneous rise

of reflection, paint the picture

of a lightbulb, or eye the sun

How to fuel the world, then die

Distance yourself from artfulness

How? Art begins with a lie

The audience wants to cry

when the actors are real & passionate

Look into footlight, then feed back to eye

You fluctuate in an artful body

You try to imitate the world’s glory

Art begins with a lie

That’s the story, sharp speck in the eye.

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Ballad of the Sleepwalker

So I’m in this semi-disclosed location working on a novel about a play and… reading about Garcia Lorca I came across his gypsy ballads. This one is the Ballad of the Sleepwalker:

THE BALLAD OF THE SLEEP-WALKER

Green, lo i love you green;
green wind, green branches;
the ship on the sea
and the horse on the mountain.

With a shadow around her waist
she dreams on her balcony,
green flesh, hair of green,
and eyes of cold silver.

Green, lo i love you green.
Under the gypsy moon
all things are watching her
but she cannot see them.

Green, lo i love you green.
Big frosty stars
come with the fish of darkness
that opens the road of dawn.
The fig tree rubs its belly
with a rasp of branches,
and the mountain, a filching cat,
bristles its angry spikes.
But who will come, and from where?
She lingers on her balcony,
Green flesh, hair of green,
dreaming in the bitter sea.

“Friend, i want to change
my horse for your house,
my saddle for your mirror,
my knife for your blanket.
Friend, i come bleeding
from the passes of Cabra.”
“If only I could my son
a deal would easily be done.
But no more i am myself
nor is my house now my house.”
“Friend, i want to die
decently in my bed;
of iron if possible,
with sheets of fine linen.
Cant you see the wound i have
from my breast to my throat?”
“Three hundred dark roses
cover your white shirt-front.
Your blood oozes and curdles
under your belt.
But no more i am myself
nor is my house now my house.”
“Let me climb at least
up to the high balustrades.
Let me come, let me come,
up to the green balconies;
balconies of the moon
where the water murmurs.”

The two friends go up
to the high balconies
leaving a trail of blood,
and a trail of tears.
Tiny tinfoil lanterns
trembled on the rooftops.
A thousand crystal tambourines
tore wounds across the dawn.

Green, lo i love you green.
Green wind, green branches.
The two friends ascended.
The long wind left
in the mouth a rare taste
of gall, mint and sweet basil.
Friend, where is she, tell me,
where is your sorrowing girl?
How often she has waited for you.
How often she might have waited,
cool face, black hair,
on this green balcony.

The gypsy girl rocked
on the face of the cistern.
Green flesh, hair of green,
with eyes of cold silver.
An icicle of moonlight
suspends her above the water.
The night grew intimate
as a little square.
Drunken civil guards
were beating on the door.

Green, lo i love you green;
green wind, green branches;
the ship on the sea
and the horse on the mountain.