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The point, of course, is to make yourself alive — to feel the force of being in your sinew and your spirit, to tremble with the beauty and the terror of it all, to breathe lungfuls of life that gasp you awake from the trance of near-living induced by the system of waste and want we call civilization. Inside the system, these opportunities for raw aliveness are not easily found — they must be sought, seized, and then surrendered to. At four-thirty in the afternoon of June 17th, 1914, a month before the outbreak of WWI and five years before… read article
When I was five, not long after the night I sat on my father’s shoulders among the thousands of people on the yellow brick plaza in front of the Bulgarian Parliament singing protest songs to take down the Communist dictatorship, my parents got us a hamster. I would say got me a hamster, but they were still in their twenties and delighted in him just as much — a handsome caramel fellow with a confident curiosity about his tiny world. Resentful that I had to answer to a name I had not chosen, I refused to perpetrate the same injustice… read article
“The eternal problem of the human being is how to structure his waking hours,” the Canadian psychiatrist Eric Berne observed in his 1964 classic Games People Play. Four centuries earlier, Galileo had both combated and complicated the problem by inventing timekeeping and with it, in a deep sense, the modern world. The first clocks were a revolution, a revelation, a civilizing force. The young saw them as a form of rebellion against their provincial, blinkered elders. One teenager wrote: When mankind invented how to measure time, they invented a notion of prodigious utility for the commons; although time in itself… read article
At the bottom of the abyss between us is the hard fact that to be a person, a particular person, is so profoundly different from what any other person can suppose. This is why one of the hardest learnings in life is that you cannot love — or scold, or coax, or palter — anyone out of their personal suffering or into their personal potential, cannot shepherd anyone else’s becoming. We may live our lives in parallel, but at the most fundamental level we experience aliveness alone, in the solitary chamber of the self, our experience a Möbius strip of… read article
The necessities of survival make our lives livable, but everything that makes them worth living partakes of the art of the unnecessary: beauty (the cave was no warmer or safer for our paintings, and what about the bowerbird?), love (how easily we could propagate our genes without it), music (we may have never milked it from mathematics, and the universe would have cohered just the same). Play is one of those things. We might make do without it, but we wouldn’t create — it is no accident that Einstein attributed his best ideas to his practice of “combinatory play,” that… read article
More in literature
Intensely Human, No 4: The Envoy of Mr Cogito
A literary salon discussion about autonomous governance.
The post Facts of the Case appeared first on The American Scholar.
I’ve just learned that the English poet Clive Wilmer died on March 13 at age eighty. I knew him first as a friend and champion of Edgar Bowers, Thom Gunn and Dick Davis, a co-translator of the Hungarian poet Miklós Radnóti, a serious reader of John Ruskin and a fine poet in his own right. He contacted me by email in 2011 to endorse my impression that Ruskin was a sort of proto-blogger, especially in Fors Clavigera. In 1986, Wilmer had edited Ruskin’s Unto This Last and Other Writings for Penguin Classics, and from 2009 until his death, Wilmer was master of the Guild of St George, a charity “for arts, craft and the rural economy” founded by Ruskin in 1871. Wilmer wrote to me: “He is, as you have noticed, one of my guiding stars.” Ruskin shows up regularly in Wilmer’s poetry. From a three-poem sequence, “The Infinite Variety,” comes “Minerals from the Collection of John Ruskin”: “The boy geologist who clove the rocks Here on display grew up to be the great Philosopher of colour into form And, in the products of just workmanship, Discerned the paradigm of the just state. “It was the Lord’s design he made apparent— These bands, and blocks of azure, umber, gilt, Set in their flexing contours, solid flow That has composed itself in its own frame: Red garnet neighbouring mica, silver white; A slice of agate like an inland sea . . .” Cool urgency in language coupled with acuity of vision is rare. I see it is Ruskin and Wilmer. In my dealings with him, Wilmer had a grateful, celebrative spirit, without overdoing it. He didn’t seem like a complainer, begging for attention, nursing a grievance. He sent me a copy of New and Selected Poems (Carcanet, 2012). I remember telling him his last name reminded me of the first name of the gunsel in Dashiell Hammett’s novel and John Huston’s film adaptation of The Maltese Falcon. It was news to him and he was delighted. Wilmer takes his epigraph to New and Selected Poems from Ruskin’s 1849 volume The Seven Lamps of Architecture: “When we build, let us think that we build forever. Let it not be for present delight nor for present use alone. Let it be such work as our descendants will thank us for; and let us think, as we lay stone on stone, that a time is to come when those stones will be held sacred because our hands have touched them, and that men will say, as they look upon the labor and wrought substance of them, ‘See! This our father did for us.’” This suggests Wilmer’s approach to poetry – an aversion to “planned obsolescence.” His poems acknowledge tradition with nearly every word he chooses, without being slavishly imitative. He titles a poem “To George Herbert”: “Time and again I turn to you, to poems In which you turn from vanity to God Time and again, as I at the line’s turn Turn through the blank space that modulates – And so resolves – the something that you say.” Wilmer’s placement of “the line’s turn” is witty and humble, as is “turn / Turn,” in which some of us hear a wayward allusion to Ecclesiastes. The word “conversation” has lately been debased, turned into a feel-good token, but Wilmer, like any good writer, carries on a conversation with the good writers who preceded him. “The something that you say”: All is vanity, not excluding pretensions to originality. The historian Victor Davis Hanson wrote in an essay, “So Why Read Anymore?”: “Nothing that we experience has not happened before; the truly ignorant miss that, hypnotized by sophisticated technology into believing that human nature has been reinvented in their own image.” Wilmer titles another poem “Shakespeare” (“In Memoriam: E.E.I.”): “I must have been just eight – it was 1953 – When in some parlour of my mind he pulled a chair out Like a book from a packed shelf, then sat down and got going. Fifty-eight years have passed and he hasn’t finished talking Nor I listening. My father was already dead, My mother’s now been dead for thirty years. Who else Have I got to know like him, learnt more from, loved more freely?”
