Author: Sam

QOTD (2010-01-26)

Whitman, from the Calamus poems, because I was reading about John Addington Symonds today:

The Base of All Metaphysics

And now gentlemen,
A word I give to remain in your memories and minds,
As base and finalè too for all metaphysics.

(So to the students the old professor,
At the close of his crowded course.)

Having studied the new and antique, the Greek and Germanic systems,
Kant having studied and stated, Fichte and Schelling and Hegel,
Stated the lore of Plato, and Socrates greater than Plato,
And greater than Socrates sought and stated, Christ divine having studied long,
I see reminiscent to-day those Greek and Germanic systems,
See the philosophies all, Christian churches and tenets see,
Yet underneath Socrates clearly see, and underneath Christ the divine I see,
The dear love of man for his comrade, the attraction of friend to friend,
Of the well-married husband and wife, of children and parents,
Of city for city and land for land.

And on the facing page:

When I heard at the close of the day how my name had been receiv’d with plaudits in the capitol, still it was not a happy night for me that follow’d,
And else when I carous’d, or when my plans were accomplish’d, still I was not happy,
But the day when I rose at dawn from the bed of perfect health, refresh’d, singing, inhaling the ripe breath of autumn,
When I saw the full moon in the west grow pale and disappear in the morning light,
When I wander’d alone over the beach, and undressing bathed, laughing with the cool waters, and saw the sun rise,
And when I thought how my dear friend my lover was on his way coming, O then I was happy,
O then each breath tasted sweeter, and all that day my food nourish’d me more, and the beautiful day pass’d well,
And the next came with equal joy, and with the next at evening came my friend,
And that night while all was still I heard the waters roll slowly continually up the shores,
I heard the hissing rustle of the liquid and sands as directed to me whispering to congratulate me,
For the one I love most lay sleeping by me under the same cover in the cool night, In the stillness in the autumn moonbeams his face was inclined toward me,
And his arm lay lightly around my breast—and that night I was happy.

To a Western Boy

Many things to absorb I teach to help you become eleve of mine;
Yet if blood like mine circle not in your veins,
If you be not silently selected by lovers and do not silently select lovers,
Of what use is it that you seek to become eleve of mine?

Also:

I hear it was charged against me that I sought to destroy institutions,
But really I am neither for nor against institutions,
(What indeed have I in common with them? or what with the destruction of them?)
Only I will establish in the Mannahatta and in every city of these States inland and seaboard,
And in the fields and the woods, and above every keel little or large that dents the water,
Without edifices or rules or trustees or any argument,
The institution of the dear love of comrades.

I love the Calamus poems dearly; it was difficult to only pick four of them to quote here. And I see why Symonds (and Carpenter, and Wilde, and all their many descendants) might have gone looking for something in Whitman, and why they might have believed themselves to have found it. And yet I maintain that what they might have thought of Whitman, what they might have so desperately wanted Whitman to be, is woefully incomplete—although I do sympathize deeply with the quest for external validation.

Housekeeping

Updated my about page, again. Trying to find the right inscrutability-to-information ratio.

And for stalking and documentary purposes, here’s my schedule for the new semester, which starts next Monday:

There’s just one precept missing, which I’ll try to squeeze in… somewhere.
Key:
ENG 301 – Old English
ENG 335 – Children’s Literature
FRE 207 – Studies in French Language and Style
HIS 280 – Approaches to American History
NES/HIS 245 – The Islamic World from Emergence to the Beginning of Westernization

QOTD (2010-01-25)

By Jorge Luis Borges, trans. M. Picciotto:

Camden, 1892

The smell of coffee and the daily news.
Another Sunday and the Sunday blues.
Morning. Printed on a hazy page,
some happy other poet’s vain displays
of allegoric verse. And in this place,
poor but still well-kept, the old man lies
white and flat in bed. His idle eyes
look in the tired mirror at his face.
He thinks – it doesn’t shock him now – that face
is him. His absent-minded fingertips
pluck at his muddy beard and plundered lips.
The end is not far off. His voice now says:
I almost am not. But my lines keep the rhythm
of life and its splendor. I was Walt Whitman.

QOTD (2010-01-24); or, The Bloom of Youth and “all the joy, hope, and glamour of life”

Linda Dowling, Hellenism and Homosexuality in Victorian Oxford:

With this realization [that the “nonphysical eroticism of the Platonic doctrine of eros” was, basically, insufficient], Symonds comes to a bitter new assessment of his old teacher Jowett, as though Jowett’s Socratic “corruption” had somehow consisted in tempting suggestible young men down the delusive path to spiritual procreancy rather than fleshly excess. Writing from Davos in 1889, Symonds confronts his old tutor across a crevass of ancient and mutual misunderstanding into which the bitter sufferings of thirty years now pour. When young men in whom the homoerotic passion is innate come into contact with the writings of Plato, as Symonds now tells Jowett, “they discover that what they had been blindly groping after was once an admitted possibility—not in a mean hole or corner—but that the race whose literature forms the basis of their higher culture, lived in that way, aspired in that way…. derived courage, drew intellectual illumination, took their first step in the path which led to great achievements and the arduous pursuit of truth” (Letters 3:346). Symonds is making explicit here his sense of the cruel pedagogical contradiction within Oxford Hellenism which had harried him for so many years—his instruction in Platonic thought by the same teachers of Hellenism who denounced erotic relations between men as “unnatural”: “those very men who condemn him, have placed the most electrical literature of the world in his hands, pregnant with the stuff that damns him” (3:347).

And I mean, dude. Can you imagine being Symonds and discovering this? Well, maybe you can—maybe you, dear reader, have had realizations which are not dissimilar. But I am so, so very interested in this keen desire to, and profound experience of, discovering oneself in the classics—and then the notion that discovering oneself in the classics legitimates oneself. It could also work the other way around, though, as it did when Symonds and Edward Carpenter, among others, were just so eager to get Whitman to confess his own homosexuality (or whatever they would have called it)—knowing something about themselves, they were desperate to get some legitimation from respected authorities, regardless of whether the authorities themselves were likely to actually give it.

But, in the end, what I am most interested by is what an entirely different cultural moment we live in, because it is no longer a shock that idealized Platonic paiderastia should have a conceptual link to sexual practices, as it was (or so I understand) to some of those 19th-century intellectuals. In fact, in our time, it seems nearly impossible to unwind the two strands, and the only people who seem interested in doing so are those for whom the thought of “posing as a somdomite” is so terrifying that they work as desperately as they can to remove somdomy [sic for deliberate comic effect and the sake of allusion, obvs] from the picture. In our time, putting somdomy away in a proverbial closet such that it becomes mentally safe to conform to the Platonic ideal is something that comes from surely just as much a place of fear as that with which the young Symonds confronted his own sense of self reflected back at him from the pages of the “Greats”—only now the fear is called “homophobia,” and it’s a hard fear to pity when it acts to make some of our lives that much more difficult.

These are, of course, only absent thoughts, an entry in the 21st-century incarnation of a commonplace book, which is a segue into mentioning that I was glancing through Oscar Wilde’s own university commonplace book today, struck by how much more he knew and had read when he was just about my age. Never has the need to make room in my course schedule for Greek, for instance, seemed more pressing. At the end of an evening’s intentionally oxymoronic frenetic meander through the world of Victorian cultural history, and just a week before my twentieth birthday, what I am truly struck by is how young university-educated adults generation after generation, alumni class after alumni class, go through so many of the same thought processes, discoveries, adoptions and rejections of ideals, on the road to intellectual maturity. Some of us braid intellectual-cultural threads together, some of us undo the strands, and some of us step back and watch what happens. And all of us, I think, like the naïve young adults we are, are always surprised by the patterns that occur.

Hope for the Human Race; or, Seek Beauty

Friends, let me thank you for coming to this wonderful old auditorium, and I hope we’re going to get some good harmony tonight. No, really! If there’s hope for the human race to learn to live in the machine age… it’s gonna be when people learn to balance things so that they can do something on their own, without a machine, something creative, no matter what it is. Of course, I love music. I wish every family could make music, and I often think the best time to start is when you’re just as young as possible. If you know someone with a baby, try singing to them.
—Pete Seeger playing Sanders Theater at Harvard, 1980

This afternoon I walked across my little town to Princeton High School, where Peter Yarrow (of Peter, Paul, and Mary) was doing a children’s concert as a benefit for the Princeton Public Library. I sat in the second-to-last row of the high-school auditorium and listened to one of my favorite singers sing some of my favorite songs: “Day Is Done,” “Puff the Magic Dragon,” “Marvelous Toy,” “Leaving on a Jet Plane,” all the songs I have on cassettes in a drawer in my old bedroom because we used to play them over and over again when I was little, when cars all had tape decks. Now I have all these songs in iTunes on my computer, and I also have them in my head and in my heart, and in the songbook I use when I get together with friends every week to sing folk music, because that’s the sort of thing you can do in college.

Peter, I’m sure, embraces the precepts of the other Peter I quoted above. He had children up on stage left and right—singing along, turning the pages of picture books, and making us older people laugh. He sang “Leaving on a Jet Plane,” and dedicated it to Mary Travers (who died last September) in such a touching speech. He sang a song called “Don’t Laugh At Me,” and prefaced it with a story about a program he’s working on in Israel, trying to bring Israeli and Palestinian children together to be children together and to end the cycle of hate and violence their parents can’t. To be sure, he made parents’ jokes too—like suggesting that the sound effects in “Marvelous Toy” were what he thought of the US Senate, or saying of “Day Is Done,” “unlike ‘Puff,’ this song has only one meaning.” But above all this was a concert for the children, and I was glad of it, because it meant the concert could be about joy and innocence, not explicitly about stopping war and hate. One of the little children Peter invited onstage was a three-year-old girl with a pink tiara. Peter complimented her on her crown, and asked where she got it. Her answer was, “I have two, so that when I have a friend over we can both be queen. Isn’t that cool?”

Yes. Oh yes, it’s so very cool, because that’s what activism through this kind of music is all about. More than a piece of legislation or a policy proposal, it represents the longing for a world where we can all be queen, where there are enough pink foam crowns to go around. As Pete Seeger said in 1980, we must learn to live in the machine age—and thirty years later, we’re still learning. It’s because we grow up and we see how much awfulness exists in the world, and we either become cynical or we compartmentalize or we get subsumed by machines and become them. We become alienated from our species-life. We forget the words to “Puff the Magic Dragon.”

But keep seeking beauty and peace, love, and understanding, and keep hoping for a happy ending. Put your trust in the children and give them a world they won’t be ashamed to inherit. Teach them the words to “Puff.” Teach them an old union song. And someday, by the grace of any god or none, we may all have our own pink crowns; we’ll all be queen. Wouldn’t that be cool?

QOTD (2010-01-22)

More from Wilde, “The Soul of Man Under Socialism,” rapidly shaping up to be the most interesting thing I’ve read this week:

We are dominated by Journalism. In America the President reigns for four years, and Journalism governs for ever and ever. Fortunately in America Journalism has carried its authority to the grossest and most brutal extreme. As a natural consequence it has begun to create a spirit of revolt. People are amused by it, or disgusted by it, according to their temperaments. But it is no longer the real force it was. It is not seriously treated. In England, Journalism, not, except in a few well-known instances, having been carried to such excesses of brutality, is still a great factor, a really remarkable power. The tyranny that it proposes to exercise over people’s private lives seems to me to be quite extraordinary. The fact is, that the public have an insatiable curiosity to know everything, except what is worth knowing. Journalism, conscious of this, and having tradesman-like habits, supplies their demands. In centuries before ours the public nailed the ears of journalists to the pump. That was quite hideous. In this century journalists have nailed their own ears to the keyhole. That is much worse. And what aggravates the mischief is that the journalists who are most to blame are not the amusing journalists who write for what are called Society papers. The harm is done by the serious, thoughtful, earnest journalists, who solemnly, as they are doing at present, will drag before the eyes of the public some incident in the private life of a great statesman, of a man who is a leader of political thought as he is a creator of political force, and invite the public to discuss the incident, to exercise authority in the matter, to give their views, and not merely to give their views, but to carry them into action, to dictate to the man upon all other points, to dictate to his party, to dictate to his country; in fact, to make themselves ridiculous, offensive, and harmful. The private lives of men and women should not be told to the public. The public have nothing to do with them at all. In France they manage these things better. There they do not allow the details of the trials that take place in the divorce courts to be published for the amusement or criticism of the public. All that the public are allowed to know is that the divorce has taken place and was granted on petition of one or other or both of the married parties concerned. In France, in fact, they limit the journalist, and allow the artist almost perfect freedom. Here we allow absolute freedom to the journalist, and entirely limit the artist. English public opinion, that is to say, tries to constrain and impede and warp the man who makes things that are beautiful in effect, and compels the journalist to retail things that are ugly, or disgusting, or revolting in fact, so that we have the most serious journalists in the world, and the most indecent newspapers. It is no exaggeration to talk of compulsion. There are possibly some journalists who take a real pleasure in publishing horrible things, or who, being poor, look to scandals as forming a sort of permanent basis for an income. But there are other journalists, I feel certain, men of education and cultivation, who really dislike publishing these things, who know that it is wrong to do so, and only do it because the unhealthy conditions under which their occupation is carried on oblige them to supply the public with what the public wants, and to compete with other journalists in making that supply as full and satisfying to the gross popular appetite as possible. It is a very degrading position for any body of educated men to be placed in, and I have no doubt that most of them feel it acutely.

The first thing I am interested by in this passage is how little has changed in the world of journalism; the second, how much of Wilde’s private life can be read between the lines. This essay was written in 1891; Wilde’s trials would not begin until 1895. But were the papers insinuating then about what Wilde might be getting up to in London? Were they speculating about the precise nature of his relationship with Alfred Douglas, whom he met in the summer of 1891? Does anyone know?

Talking Myself to Sleep at Night; or, In Which Marx Proves the Unexpected Cure for Insomnia

I have developed a severe case of insomnia. Every night I lie awake for hours at a time, staring at the shadowed ceiling, consumed by guilt for things I have not done, and consumed most of all by guilt at lying in a bed in Princeton. Daily I wonder why I’m here, why I let my privilege take me here, why most of all I am not doing more for the sick and the starving and the needy. I wonder why, now that I’m here, I’m not training to be a doctor or a human rights lawyer. I wonder why I’m not training to go to Washington. I bang my fists against the mattress and I curse myself and I loathe myself for caring more about and gaining more pleasure from reading Oscar Wilde than from trying, against all odds, to fix the things which appear on the front page of the newspaper of record of a country sliding inexorably into insanity.

But the thing is that I, too, will go insane if I try to contain a whole country in my head at once. I know my mind well. I know how tenuous health and sanity are. I know because I have spent nights staring at the ceiling and days in a haze of depression and anger.

I got a paper back the other day, the last paper I wrote for my political theory class, about Marx’s theory of alienation. I had never read Marx before taking this class, a distribution requirement I complained about all semester. But, well, then I read Marx, and about how much better our lives would be if we labored in accordance with our inclinations, if we could be farmers in the morning and fishers in the afternoon and critical critics in the evenings. I read about how we would have a relationship with the product of our labor—we would love what we do and do it for its own sake!—and I wish so desperately to any god or none that this were more than an unrealizable utopia.

But to fall asleep at night, to stop the tossing and turning and fists slamming down on mattress, I tell myself that utopia is realizable. I tell myself that utopia is a windmill worth tilting at. And I tell myself that even I—beneficiary of privilege though I may be—have the right to be a critical critic in the evening if it’s the labor most fulfilling to me. I tell myself what good is brought to the world by reading history. I tell myself what good is brought to the world by teaching history. I throw myself into my work and I try not to think too hard about what lies outside, always looming and threatening to send me another sleepless night.

Tonight the outside got in. Tonight I threw myself out of my bed to read the New York Times and sob. But tomorrow morning, however much sleep I’ve had, I’m going to get up and teach and learn. Maybe I’m wrong, and maybe we can’t build the world we wish to have until we take on the one we’ve got. But hey. It’s how I get to sleep. It’s how I wake up. It’s how I get on with another day as a critical critic.

From each according to her ability to each according to her needs.

QOTD (2010-01-21)

From Wilde, “The Soul of Man Under Socialism,” courtesy of a certain professor always apt with his 19th-century quotations:

And so he who would lead a Christlike life is he who is perfectly and absolutely himself. He may be a great poet, or a great man of science; or a young student at a University, or one who watches sheep upon a moor; or a maker of dramas, like Shakespeare, or a thinker about God, like Spinoza; or a child who plays in a garden, or a fisherman who throws his net into the sea. It does not matter what he is, as long as he realises the perfection of the soul that is within him.

Take that, Congress?

I’m going to go read the rest of the Wilde essay now, and think about, instead of our government’s inexorable slide into insanity, utopias that could or could not have been.

What Do We Do About Massachusetts?

We keep doing what’s right and believing in our core principles, and we demonstrate, using whatever disciplinary tools we have available to us, how and why it matters to think critically about the way we run our planet. We hope our teaching styles are arresting enough to grab the attention of our country(ies) of disaffected students, we continue to stand for liberty and justice for all, and then, quite simply, we pray, to any god or none, that our friends and neighbors stand for those things too.

We stand for art, for language, for beauty, for history, and we keep going as we have kept going through civil war, through economic hardship, through desperately cruel injustices and through the worst perversions of everything that the values of our country represent. We get up the morning after an election and we always keep teaching and learning and helping those less fortunate and promulgating the belief that no fellow human is truly evil, really.

And we take the long view, the one that holds that the course of human events is not changed by a single election, but by the concerted actions of committed individuals over a long period of time. I am learning to be a historian. And so taking the long view is what I am learning to do. I have never been one for policy proposals or politicking, but I am much given to high-minded rhetoric. High-minded rhetoric has encouraged people before, and so maybe it’s worth trying now. If my rhetoric, empty though it may be, carries any weight with you, dear reader, I urge you to keep voting your conscience, but not to despair when elections reflect values so very antithetical to liberty and justice for all. Keep doing your jobs, keep putting queer shoulders to wheels (I know I do) and keep struggling in Sisyphean labor in the name of art and love—and keep preparing the lesson plans you will someday use to teach the next generation to do the same.