From the Archives: The Dark Knight

I never claimed that this blog would necessarily remain up to date, or culturally relevant. With this caveat, and after watching The Dark Knight this afternoon, I remembered my attempt to reawaken "The Hound of Heaven" from its sleep last summer, with an initial review and than some thoughts upon the film; almost a year later, I am posting them again, with a few fresh thoughts.

The Review

So this movie came out this weekend, maybe you’ve heard of it. I was worried it might get lost in the rush to see Space Chimps, but it seems like the low-key advertising and cult fan base managed to pull it off at the last minute.

That’s all nonsense, of course; The Dark Knight, Christopher Nolan’s follow-up to his well-received 2005 reimagining, Batman Begins, opened on a modest 4,366 screens (all-time record), generating $18.5 million from its midnight showings alone (all-time record), $67.85 million on its opening day (all-time record), and, it is projected, $155.3 million over the opening weekend (all-time record). These aren’t even the only records it broke (Nikki Finke at Deadline Hollywood tracks the others), but they’re the most significant.

Now, based on the fact that apparently everyone in the developed world saw this film over the weekend, I was going to lift my “no severe spoilers” policy for the duration of this review. However, it is very much the case that the high turn-out for The Dark Knight saw days’ worth of showings sold out in advance, the result being that many still haven’t had a chance to see it. I’ll keep it tight-lipped for the moment, but I will say this: if you worried that the film’s numerous trailers and promotional materials essentially gave away the whole thing, you couldn’t be more wrong. It’s over two-and-a-half hours long, for one, and incredibly rich, for another, and you will be surprised by much. The trailers might even be described as a touch misleading on some points, actually, so you can look forward to such reversals as well.

So: The Dark Knight picks up right where Batman Begins left off (whatever the animated “prequel,” Gotham Knight, might insist), with the hideous new criminal known only as the Joker (Heath Ledger) just hitting the scene. The first six minutes of the film, in which the Joker robs a bank, could have been released on their own – and in fact were, with IMAX showings of I Am Legend earlier this summer – and been an artistic triumph in their own right. It’s great stuff, and more than enough to justify the comparisons to Michael Mann’s Heat that are being thrown around. From these auspicious beginnings things get rolling at once; Batman (Christian Bale) has taken his fight to the mob with promising (if uneven) results, inspiring copycat vigilantes wearing uniforms similar to his own, while Gotham’s new District Attorney, Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart), has taken the advantages Batman has provided and run with them, putting real pressure on organized crime in the city for the first time in decades. The ganglords, infuriated by this two-front assault on their supremacy, reluctantly turn to the Joker, a man they hate and fear, to fulfill a lofty promise of killing Batman and throwing the city back into the sort of chaos they can exploit.

Unfortunately for all involved, a dead Batman is the last thing the Joker wants. While he is right in insisting that Batman is the new and unstoppable factor in the city’s turn against the mob, Batman is too important to the Joker for him to kill. “You complete me,” he declares to the caped crusader during an intense interrogation; he is the order that makes the Joker’s particular brand of mayhem possible and, well, fun.

And so it all goes to hell. Although the Joker insists that his whole purpose in life is to disrupt the plans and schemes of others, showing their ultimate futility in the face of the higher chaos, his own plans and schemes are intricate beyond reckoning. He turns the city against Batman. He orchestrates the dramatic and shocking downfall of Harvey Dent (in a manner quite different from established canon, though possibly somewhat better for it). He ruins the lives of many, assassinates Gotham’s police commissioner (paving the way for the promotion of long-suffering James Gordon [Gary Oldman]), destroys a hospital, thwarts the mob, attempts to kill the mayor, and drives the whole city into a state of scrabbling, self-consuming panic. “All this,” he gloats, “with a handful of bullets and some barrels of gasoline.” Ra’s al-Ghul, with his elaborate plots involving ancient shadow organizations and microwave guns, should hang his head in shame.

It’s a long film, as I said before, and there’s lots more plot that could be discussed, but these are the basics and I wouldn’t want to spoil it too far. Just know that yes, there are a great many excellent car chases and fights and explosions and acts of both dire infamy and unspeakable courage – but those aren’t the things you’re going to be talking about once the credits start to roll.

You’ll instead be talking about the acting, probably, and any sane viewer would start with Heath Ledger. It’s incredible to me (and in any other review I’d probably complain) that, in considering the quality of performances to be found in a movie featuring the likes of Gary Oldman, Morgan Freeman (as Bruce Wayne’s long-time gadget man, Lucius Fox) and Michael Caine (loyal Wayne butler Alfred), I’m forced to push all three to the back burner in favor of an actor who wasn’t even alive when at least one of those three was in his prime. He’s not alive now either, of course; Ledger passed away quite unexpectedly in January of an accidental overdose of prescription medication. I firmly believe that his work for his role as the Joker contributed to his death (and certainly to his need for sleeping pills), and for that I am very sad indeed. But the show must go on, as they say, and this is the performance he chose to give.

And what a performance. There aren’t really words to describe it, actually; at no point does the viewer feel moved to observe, “my, but Mr. Ledger’s acting very well.” He’s too invisible for that. The character barely looks like him, for one, and so completely has he surrendered himself to the role that he more or less vanishes into it. He moves like a skeptical serpent, coiling around people as he threatens them, jerking his head and licking his lips far too often. His voice is a cross between Jimmy Cagney and Marlon Brando, with occasional shades of something not easily placed. Every line is delivered with a sort of unsettling calm, even when the stakes are high, but the one time the Joker loses his temper (you’ll know it when you hear it), the voice can only be described as that which Hell itself would use if it were given a throat and tongue. This was a legendary performance. If he’s not recognized with at least a nomination for “best supporting actor” at the upcoming Academy Awards, there is no justice at all in the halls of Hollywood.

Everyone else is great, too. Christian Bale’s Batman is appropriately terrifying (although his fake, growling baritone is sometimes not well-suited to the lines he has to deliver), but his Bruce Wayne is even better. Bruce has finally been able to master the rogueish playboy routine that is his first line of defence against discovery, and so what was at times awkward in Batman Begins is here delivered to unstinting and often hilarious effect. A newspaper’s smug declaration of “Drunken Billionaire Burns Down Mansion” in the previous film was great enough, but it’s outdone in this one by a headline involving ballet.

Aaron Eckhart gives what might be the best turn of his career as Harvey Dent/Two-Face, which is greatly pleasing to me because I’ve never really cared much for his work. Bruce Wayne’s old flame Rachel Dawes is this time around played by Maggie Gyllenhaal (replacing Katie Holmes--thank God!), and she is used to far greater effect in this film than in the last. The hopeless love triangle that develops between her, Harvey and Bruce will have disastrous consequences for many, and Gyllenhaal carries her responsibilities well.

The production values are excellent all across the board. By grounding his vision of the Batman story in what could loosely be described as “the real world,” there is less need for recourse to extensive computer-generated imagery, although of course it is still used at numerous points. The point is that the action doesn’t rely on it, as would be the case in something like Spider-Man or Superman, and it’s used rather to accentuate things that are already there. A good deal of the film was also shot using special IMAX cameras, giving a great deal of depth and magnitude to certain scenes (you’ll notice it in some of the cityscape shots; particularly during a brief and breathtaking trip to Hong Kong). On a regular screen it’s amazing enough, but on a real IMAX screen it would be nothing short of appalling.

The only real complaint I can offer is the same as it was for Batman Begins: Christopher Nolan does not seem to be able to shoot fights worth a damn. The angles and focus are certainly improved in comparison to the last film, but there are still too many cuts and bad perspectives to really see everything that’s said to be going on. It’s by no means incomprehensible, but it could have been a bit better. This is a small complaint, but albeit, still a complaint.

Before I wrap this up, there’s an important feature of the Joker’s character that needs to be discussed. Many reviewers have been highly impressed with the steady-handed way in which the Joker’s irrational evil is presented. I might take it even further. Films of this sort typically have villains in them, it’s true. Sometimes they’re even monstrously evil villains. But no superhero film I’ve ever seen before (and precious few films in general) have actually had Evil itself as a character. There have been evil characters before, naturally, but mere criminals – even arch-criminals – are still motivated by a desire for the good in one way or the other. They want prosperity, or security, or what they believe to be a sort of justice, but their brush with evil makes them pursue these things through illicit means like deception, theft or murder. They are certainly sinners, but they are not Sin.

For the Joker is not an evil man; he is Evil itself, illogical, unmotivated, unpredictable, and (seemingly) unstoppable. He cares nothing for his own safety or enrichment. All he wants, if he can be said to want anything, is to seek out goodness and order, no matter where they are, and destroy them completely. The spine-chilling soliloquies he delivers are quite masterfully wrought, in this regard. The whole interrogation scene around the middle of the film is great, but his entirely accurate taunt as Batman is beating him senseless has a sort of staggering depth to it: “You’ve got nothing – nothing – you can threaten me with. Nothing you can do with all of your strength!” This is what Despair and Futility say when they meet Hope and Purpose.

The Dark Knight captures all of this perfectly; whereas Batman Begins was about a man “becoming a concept” in the creation of the symbol that is Batman, in this case we have something more terrible still: a concept becoming a man. The Joker’s lack of origins (and his lies about same) make this quite compelling, and his constant, serpent-like contortions and rhetorical eloquence lend him a menace that hearkens back to a Being that our general parents once had the misfortune to meet face to face, however briefly. His clothes show no sign of having been made in a conventional way (”clothes are custom,” Lt. Gordon muses; “no tags, no labels”), for such would require far more organization and planning and general order than he would allow. The film’s marvelous score (by Hans Zimmer and James Newton Howard) has no “Joker’s Theme” that plays when he’s around; it is instead just an awful, stomach-churning chord, drawn out uncomfortably long. Any actually melodic music would need too much co-operation and artistic sympathy, and the Joker can brook neither.

The Joker is the Abyss given a body and a tongue, and he is no longer content merely to stare back.

This isn’t all, of course; the whole film is something of a moral rollercoaster, and in the end I doubt if we’re given any easy answers. If I suspected for a moment that we are meant to feel that there simply are no answers I would be highly disappointed with Christopher Nolan and all involved, but, as it happens, I do not. It is rather an invitation to reflection and thought; an appeal to the intellect as well as to the moral senses. The most powerful manifestation of this is a “social experiment” perpetrated by the Joker on two crowded ferries trying to flee the city, the results of which are both unexpected and heartening. There’s a turn during that crisis involving a particularly menacing criminal on one of the ferries that manages to ratchet up the tension unbearably even while standing up to and more or less exposing the audience’s hypocrisies and assumptions. This is masterful craft.

Ten Things I Noticed About The Dark Knight

Mini Review: Dandelion Wine

Dandelion Wine (1957)
Ray Bradbury (William Morrow, 2006)
281 p. First reading.

Bradbury's book is a superb evocation of childhood, with its surprises, unguessed wonders, and adventures. It is the summer of 1928, and young Douglas Spaulding, twelve years old, resident of Green Hill, Illinois, has discovered that he is alive, and is determined to live this summer with his eyes, ears, and heart wide open. His story is told through a series of short episodes, interweaved with glimpses into the lives of other residents of his small town.

What I admired most about the book was Bradbury’s success at capturing the special qualities of childhood: the immediacy of experience, the sense of the world full of possibility, the tireless play through long summer days, the hot nights under stars, the sheer alertness of the mind and senses. I was reminded of Chesterton’s observation, from his autobiography, that childhood is “like a hundred windows opened on all sides of the head.” Bradbury has thrown those windows open and let the summer air, filled with the warmness of clover breath and the buzzing of bees, blow through his pages.

There is more to the book than summer idylls. There are some dark corners here and there, in this town as in any other. Douglas not only discovers that he is alive, but also that he will one day die. But this only makes each day more precious, and Douglas more alert and alive, treasuring up memories like summer’s yield of dandelion wine: “The words were summer on the tongue. The wine was summer caught and stoppered.”

My thanks to Jill for recommending this book to me. She also informs me that there is a sequel, entitled Farewell Summer.

The Dark Side of Deconstructionism

I just watched The Dark Knight for the first time since seeing it last summer at the theater, and got to thinking that Heath Ledger's Joker is something of a deconstructionist, albeit a fiendish one. His villainy is characterized by placing people in situations that expose the fragility of their plans, self-knowledge, and especially their systems of morality. The Joker takes pleasure in getting people to break their own rules, act against their constructed ideas of themselves, and betray their principles. He calls himself an agent of chaos; Dante would call him a sower of discord.

Whereas the playful father of deconstruction, Jacques Derrida, turned social constructs topsy-turvy so as to open them to a little thing called justice, the playful Joker is motivated by chaos itself, pleasure from inducing panic, and perhaps a twisted sense of fairness. He holds tryouts for his "team" by spontaneously placing a weapon among three candidates. Late in the film, he gives passengers on two ferries the opportunity to live if only they choose to blow up the other ferry. He threatens to destroy one hospital in a city of many unless someone in the city murders a person who clearly doesn't deserve death. He actualizes the dilemma posed by Dostoevsky's Grand Inquisitor.

The Joker says of himself: "I'm a dog chasing cars. I wouldn't know what to do if I caught one. I just do things. I'm a wrench in the gears. I hate plans." Of course, some of the most intricate plans in the story are his; the Joker betrays even his own rules concerning how he should operate.

Kill Me Kangaroo Down

Wow, this story must have the tree huggers terribly conflicted. Kangaroos or the darter snail? It looks like the kangaroos win...in the conservationists’ hearts. Maybe it’s because kangaroos don’t have flatulence...or something to that effect. Unfortunately for the hoppers, they don’t win in the sights of the Australian army:

"Australia’s army has started shooting 6,000 kangaroos to thin their population on an army training ground near the capital, an official said Friday, outraging conservationists who have vowed to protest.

The killings are intended to protect endangered plants and insects that share the grassy habitat with the kangaroos. A much smaller slaughter of 400 kangaroos on another Defense Department site in Canberra last year was disrupted by protesters."

Doesn’t Australia have any wealthy rednecks? You’d think they could raffle off licenses to kill 100 kangaroos for a hefty sum, thereby saving their army the expense and making a profit.

I’m curious, incidentally, about how the kangaroo population got so large. I saw Crocodile Dundee, so I know for a fact that Australian rednecks routinely go about killing them.

From my Highlighter: A Twisted Man, but Smart

D. H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature. My version: Penguin, 1977.

In his Student’s Guide to U.S. History, Wilfred M. McClay assembled a list of 26 books and called them “An American Canon.” I was acquainted with most of them (The Federalist, Moby Dick, etc.), but four were new to me, including D.H. Lawrence’s Studies in Classic American Literature. “What,” I wondered, “does that British pornographer have to say about American literature?”

For a while now, I’ve subscribed to an important corollary of the principle of connaturality: distorted living creates distorted thinking. If a person’s life is ruled by passion, his thinking will be distorted by passion. It’s no coincidence that sexually-illicit heterosexuals are more likely to support homosexual marriage. For the sexually illicit, sex is king...or at least a queen (and maybe a bishop, if you’re Episcopalian). They don’t think clearly about sex because they’re ruled by sex. People think college professors make students into liberals. Maybe, but the students’ distorted living plays a heavy role, too.

So I didn’t think the Chatterley dude would have a whole lot to say about the United States, especially since he was from Britain.

I was wrong. His book is strong, filled with wise and novel (and funny . . . bonus) observations, like this: “But to try to know any living being is to try to suck the life out of that being. . . It is the temptation of a vampire fiend.” He says some stupid things, too, but he makes many observations about American life that rank with de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, Chesterton’s What I Saw in America, and Santayana’s Character and Opinion in the United States.

Sample:

"When America set out to destroy Kings and Lords and Masters, and the whole paraphernalia of European superiority, it pushed a pin right through its own body, and on that pin it still flaps and buzzes and twists in misery. The pin of democratic equality. Freedom.

There’ll never be any life in America till you pull the pin out and admit natural inequality. Natural superiority, natural inferiority. Till such time, Americans just buzz around like various sorts of propellers, pinned down by their freedom and equality." p. 49.

Political equality, yes. Divine equality, yes. Social, intellectual, physical equality, no.

Yet in America, all things—pursuits and interests, opinions and choices—are deemed equal and deserving of respect. The results are often grotesque (NASCAR nation comes immediately to mind or fans of the Georgia Bulldogs).

Lawrence isn’t beyond the metaphysical, even when he expresses it in the biological:

"The central law of all organic life is that each organism is intrinsically isolate and single in itself.

The moment is isolation breaks down . . . death sets in.

This is true of every individual organism, from man to amoeba.

But the secondary law of all organic life is that each organism only lives through contact with other matter, assimilation, and contact with other life, which means assimilation of new vibrations, non-material. Each individual organism is vivified by intimate contact with fellow organisms: up to a certain point." p. 71.

In order to have contact with another, we must break down a little, we must lessen our isolation. But if we break down too much, I think Lawrence is saying, we die.

Death results from termination of isolation, yes, but the termination of isolation is necessary for ultimate communion, which, it seems to me, is the logical extension of what Lawrence is saying: A breakdown of isolation is necessary for important communion with others to take place. Likewise, a complete breakdown of isolation is necessary for final communion with The Other to take place.

To be continued...

An Unlikely Existentialist

Coming soon.

From the Archives

Looking through my archives, I found a post for the second run of this blog--that was about two years ago and lasted two weeks. I think I was a little hungover when I wrote it. Good luck:

If you hear a purported absolute truth and it doesn’t involve a paradox, you can assume you hear heresy.

The tradition of Western philosophy to find an absolute source of knowledge-Descartes’ I think therefore I am, Kanti’s a priori knowledge,Bentham’s Utilitarianism, Comte’s positivism—eventually crashed in the twentieth century with Husserl and the rise of phenomenology and existentialism. Those philosophies tend to be evasive, skating between objectivism and subjectivism, favoring terms like “intersubjectivity” and “tactile,” terms that give play to the full field of human experience: terms that therefore respect the paradox of existence. The phenomenological tradition doesn’t flinch to say that the mind understands because of the body, or that there is no such thing as objective knowledge, or fiction reveals fact.

Foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds. Holmes, I think. And he’s right, of course. Consistent application of paradoxes means inconsistency.

What doesn’t strike me as immoral at one moment, may strike me as immoral the next. The objective norms involved don’t change and as far as I can discern, my thinking (the subjective element) on the matter hasn’t changed, either. So what has changed? Could be my spiritual state, my disposition: am I feeling more holy or profane? I’m not sure there’s a paradox here, but at least a mystery: I may not want to be too objective when dealing with objective morality.

There is objective morality. Some might say, “Such an assertion doesn’t involve a paradox and therefore, by your own number one rule, it cannot be true.” But the unraveling of the statement does involve a paradox. My inability to deal objectively with objective morality, for instance, is a paradox.

The Emerald City Welcomes Chesteron

The Chesterton Conference sounds really good this year...and those dates are ideal for me...Seattle, Washington, on the other hand, is not (regarding plane ticket prices). I wonder if I may get funding from the school? Hmmm. I'm on it!

Hooray Beer!

My dislike for the taste of beer has changed thanks to Dos Equis, and so, in celebration of this newly acquired like for the brewed beverage, I present a belated Mother's Day blogging on beer.

Odd Beer Names:

Old Speckled Hen, Shaftebury 420 Brilliant Lager, Hell for Certain. Those are three of the ten odd beer names, with nice bottle pics, that you can find here. The people who put it together have a juvenile sense of humor, but it’s still worth checking out. “Moose drool” and "Flying dog in heat wheat" are my favorites.

Wiki "Beer", and here are just a few of the facts you’ll learn:
Beer is the world’s oldest and most widely consumed alcoholic beverage and the third most popular drink overall after water and tea....

Some of humanity’s earliest known writings refer to the production and distribution of beer: the Code of Hammurabi included laws regulating beer and beer parlours, and “The Hymn to Ninkasi,” a prayer to the Mesopotamian goddess of beer, served as both a prayer and as a method of remembering the recipe for beer in a culture with few literate people....

Less widely used starch sources [for brewing] include millet, sorghum and cassava root in Africa, potato in Brazil, and agave in Mexico, among others....

Regions have water with different mineral components; as a result, different regions were originally better suited to making certain types of beer, thus giving them a regional character. For example, Dublin has hard water well suited to making stout, such as Guinness; while Pilzen has soft water well suited to making pale lager, such as Pilsner Urquell. The waters of Burton in England contain gypsum, which benefits making pale ale to such a degree that brewers of pale ales will add gypsum to the local water in a process known as Burtonisation...

The most common method of categorising beer is by the behaviour of the yeast used in the fermentation process. In this method, beers using a fast-acting yeast which leaves behind residual sugars are termed “ales”, while beers using a slower-acting yeast, fermented at lower temperatures, which removes most of the sugars, leaving a clean, dry beer, are termed “lagers”...

Beer ranges from less than 3% alcohol by volume (abv) to almost 30% abv...

The temperature of a beer has an influence on a drinker’s experience; warmer temperatures reveal the range of flavours in a beer; however, cooler temperatures are more refreshing.

Mini Reviews

1.
Once More Around the Block/Joseph Epstein

If you haven’t read a collection of Joseph Epstein essays, you’re unenlightened or you’ve been deprived or you have a life outside of literary pursuits. Hopefully, the latter, but if you fear it’s because you fall into either of the first two categories, buy a collection of essays now. I have seven such books, and I like them all. Once More Around the Block is my favorite, but I also highly recommend The Middle of My Tether and Familiar Territory. Epstein is erudite, humorous, and a top-flight writer. Anecdotes fly out of his pen faster than insults from Don Rickles.

Quick example: In an essay (link to part of essay) about NYC, he notes that Jan Morris of Rolling Stone wrote in the late 1970s/early 1980s that people think New York reached its zenith during the 1930s and 1940s and was decrepit now, but Epstein then rattles off four other writers who thought New York had peaked decades earlier (when the writers were young) but was now finished (when the writers were older): Edith Wharton (NYC special in 1880s, but finished by 1906), Theodore Dreiser (good in 1920s but not later), F. Scott Fitzgerald (good in 1920s; finished by 1932), Saul Bellow (good in 1940s, bad by 1970s).

I guess there’s a chance Epstein found all five of those examples in one spot, but I doubt it. Having read well over a thousand pages of his prose, I’m confident he culled those from his literary memory and reading notes. A very impressive individual, yes.

Total Pages of Text: 308. My Progress: Finished. Rating: 10. Index, Bibliography, Footnotes: None.

2. Meltdown/Thomas E. Woods

This is a primer, and a much-needed one. If you think government public works can get us out of our economic problems, read this book. If you think the greed of the free market (as opposed to the greed of the government-subsidized financial sector) got us into this problem, read this book. If you don’t understand why the Panic of ‘29 turned into The Great Depression, read this book. If you want to understand that (today, overlooked) school of economic thought known as “Austrian,” the only school to see this coming, read this book. If you have friends that think Obama can fix this mess, or even friends who think it’s his fault, buy them copies of this book. Highly recommended for someone just wading into these waters.

Total Pages of Text: 163. My Progress: 110. Rating: 8. Index: A. Bibliography: None, but plenty of reference materials in the footnotes.

3. The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression/Amity Shlaes

Shows how the prideful Hoover bungled the Panic of 1929, not by doing nothing, but by doing something. Also shows the leftist beginnings of The New Deal and how it prolonged The Great Depression. My hunch: “must reading” as another progressive administration prepares to wrestle with a big economic downturn.

Total Pages of Text: 383. My Progress: Page 223. My Current Rating: 8. Index: A-. Bibliography: Excellent. Footnotes: None.

4. Crisis and Leviathan: Critical Episodes in the Growth of American Government/Robert Higgs

War is a capitalist tool, said the Marxists. War is a big government tool, says Higgs. I think they’re both right to a degree, but Higgs ultimately wins the debate. From “crisis” working conditions at the turn of the century (think Sinclair’s Jungle) to poverty in the 1960s, Higgs shows how the Beltway has emphasized emergency and urgency in hopes of expanding Washington’s reach. Thick book, packed with facts and notes; it wasn’t issued by Oxford University Press because it’s light reading.

Total Pages of Text: 262. My Progress: Finished. Final Rating: 10. Index: B+. Bibliography: Excellent. Footnotes: Excellent (end of book).

*I might continue these mini-reviews as a feature for the blog; for now, I am undecided about how often updates might be. I also think it is more helpful than simply posting a reading list.

“Total Pages of Text” refers to the book’s total pages, less footnotes, bibliography, appendix, and index. “My Progress” refers to the number of pages read so far. “My Current Rating” is based on a scale of 1 to 10; after I finish the book, I will give it a “Final Rating.” The “Index” rates the book’s index on a grading scale: A to F. I assume the “Bibliography” and “Footnotes” references are self-explanatory.

Catacomb Me

One of the coolest stories of the year: laser cameras are opening up the miles of catacombs under Rome.

Soccer: A Jeremiad

Allow me put forth three points, which is more points than most fans will see in a week of games--and more points than most soccer players have scored since their pee-wee days.

1) Any sport that limits you to using your feet, with the occasional bang of the head, has something very wrong with it. Indeed, soccer is a liberal’s dream of tragedy: It creates an egalitarian playing field by rigorously enforcing a uniform disability. Anthropologists commonly define man according to his use of hands. We have the thumb, an opposable digit that God gave us to distinguish us from animals that walk on all fours. The thumb lets us do things like throw baseballs and fold our hands in prayer. We can even talk with our hands. Have you ever seen a deaf person trying to talk with their feet? When you are really angry and acting like an animal, you kick with your feet. Only fools punch a wall with their hands. The Iraqi who threw his shoes at President Bush was following his primordial instincts. Showing someone your feet, or sticking your shoes in someone’s face, is the ultimate sign of disrespect. Do kids ever say, “Trick or Treat, smell my hands”? Did Jesus wash his disciples’ hands at the Last Supper? No, hands are divine (they are one of the body parts most frequently attributed to God), while feet are in need of redemption. In all the portraits of God’s wrath, never once is he pictured as wanting to step on us or kick us; he does not stoop that low.

2) Sporting should be about breaking kids down before you start building them up. Take baseball, for example. Baseball was the most popular sport for so long precisely because it was so demanding. Even its language was intimidating, with bases, bats, strikes, and outs. Striding up to the plate gave the batter a chance to act like he was starring in a Western movie, and tapping the bat to the plate gave one their first experience with inventing self-indulgent personal rituals. The boy chosen to be the pitcher was inevitably the first kid on the team to reach puberty, and he threw a hard ball. Thus, you had to face the fear of disfigurement as well as the statistical probability of striking out.

3) Everyone knows that soccer is a foreign invasion, but few people know exactly what is wrong with that. More than having to do with its origin, soccer is a European sport because it is all about death and despair. Americans would never invent a sport where the better you get the less you score. Even the way most games end, in sudden death, suggests something of an old-fashioned duel. How could anyone enjoy a game where so much energy results in so little advantage, and which typically ends with a penalty kick out, as if it is the audience that needs to be put out of its misery. Shootouts are such an anticlimax to the game and are so unpredictable that the teams might as well flip a coin to see who wins—indeed, they might as well flip the coin before the game, and not play at all.

The real tragedy is that soccer is a foreign invasion, but it is not a plot to overthrow America. For those inclined toward paranoia, it would be easy to blame soccer’s success on the political left, which, after all, worked for years to bring European decadence and despair to America. The left tried to make existentialism, Marxism, post-structuralism, and deconstructionism fashionable in order to weaken the clarity, pragmatism, and drive of American culture. What the left could not accomplish through these intellectual fads, one might suspect, they are trying to accomplish through the sport of soccer.

I'm only joking. On May 27, two of the best teams ever, Manchester United and Barcelona, will collide at the Champions League Final in Rome:

A Day in the Life of the Metropolitan Orchestra

One of my favorite elements of the more recent film adaptation of The Phantom of the Opera was how it delved into the backstage world of Parisian theatre in the 1870s. If you’ve ever wondered just what happens behind the scenes of an opera company today, especially one as grand as the Metropolitan, check out Judith H. Dobrzynski’s article in the Wall Street Journal. A sample:

"If you have never understood why an old saying calls opera “the most expensive human endeavor, with the possible exception of war,” a day at the Metropolitan Opera explains it. The divas, maestro, managers and orchestra are just part of the equation. So much else goes into the productions, made more complicated by the Met’s tradition of staging operas in repertory. The Met is often a 24-hour operation. Make that a 24/6 operation, and occasionally 24/7.

In the past 24-hour cycle, the night gang had “struck”—that is, broken down—the “Don Giovanni” set, holding it in-house for its next performance, so that by 8 this morning, when the day crew arrived, it was gone. They set up “Götterdämmerung,” and they’ll take it down, allowing assembly of “Il Trovatore.”

And in this highly complicated logistical puzzle, what’s happening on the main stage—which isn’t a monolith, by the way, but rather a series of “lifts,” each strip six- to eight-feet-wide, that rise and decline hydraulically, as needed, for effect—is only a fraction of what’s happening in the house. Elsewhere—in halls, studios and an underground stage—other rehearsals are taking place, though only a few use scenery and usually not much. Upstairs, in “shops” built around the stage well (which rises nine stories), employees are making costumes, wigs, scenery and other operatic necessities. And don’t forget white-collar functions such as finance and marketing. Everyone hears what’s happening on the main stage via a PA system, because everyone needs to know."

Laughter is sacred

Chesterton wrote a poem expressing the same idea found at the end of Orthodoxy!

Laughter is sacred, secret unalloyed.
The dark irrational gaiety of things
The boyish valour of the world that swings
The stars exultant in a sickening void.

They say he never laughed, whose anguish deep
Redeemed us on the mountain of the Skull
Who over Salem, neither being dull
Nor cowardly, was man enough to weep.

Grief grows like grass: nor need he, though he can
With sudden pity make a pompous strife
Death is so plain upon the face of life
Tears may be plain upon the face of man.

But mirth is sacred: when from all his own
He sundered, going up a mount to pray
Under the terrible stars in stern array
Upon the lonely peak he laughed alone.

Fish on Universities, and Whether A True University Is Possible Anymore

Below is an essay by Professor Stanley Fish on the future of classic university education. By "classic" I mean the university education as a humane formation. What is generally called a university education today has in fact become something much less: it's a job training program. I don't think that that's snobbishness saying so. I don't think it's a holdover of some old cultural ideal that amounts no more today than some conservative impulse on my part (groomed by the ISI). I believe it to be a simple fact of intent. There is a point to educating toward an economic outcome. But there is also a point toward education toward a philosophical and humanist one, particularly one in the Christian humanist mode of what university education had been. To simply mandate the new form, for the powerful to simply create workers for their economy? That's a kind of conquest that violates the spirit and intent of America--but that opens up a topic for another day.

Still, I think there are a few avenues around the bleak diagnosis Fish offers here. Some of us simply do the true mode of education no matter the shape and intent of the university system in which we find ourselves. We seek out the right teachers, we ask the right questions, we do the work. There are also a few schools, most of them newly created, that try to explicitly address this trend, offering themselves as an alternative to the dominant university paradigm.

I have found that most of these schools are Catholic, drawing on historical components of Catholic education, and I've been interested to read about them and even converse with some of their students through the web. But a lot of them import quite a bit of conservative culture or what's called conservative or traditionalist Catholicism into their program, which I don't think are necessarily components of that classical form of education.

Still, it's interesting to see what kinds of ideological trends are frequently part of creating such schools. It is particularly astonishing in the face of how "politically Left" university educators tend to lean that education should have become so utilitarian. I wonder whether the "New Left", 1960s-70s ideology of unqualified "freedom" with regard to everything--including "liberation" from the claims of any truths beyond individual desire or preference--have rendered the most academic movers and shakers unable to resist, or even recognize, an all-consuming pragmatism or utilitarianism in university education. Anyway, these are the kinds of things I think about sometimes, maybe to the detriment of my educational health, but Fish does make some provoke one to think, particularly those thinking they might want to enter the realm of teaching one day at a university (that's me...I think :/)

* * * * *

The Last Professor
Stanley Fish

In previous columns and in a recent book I have argued that higher education, properly understood, is distinguished by the absence of a direct and designed relationship between its activities and measurable effects in the world.

This is a very old idea that has received periodic re-formulations. Here is a statement by the philosopher Michael Oakeshott that may stand as a representative example: “There is an important difference between learning which is concerned with the degree of understanding necessary to practice a skill, and learning which is expressly focused upon an enterprise of understanding and explaining.”

Understanding and explaining what? The answer is understanding and explaining anything as long as the exercise is not performed with the purpose of intervening in the social and political crises of the moment, as long, that is, as the activity is not regarded as instrumental – valued for its contribution to something more important than itself.

This view of higher education as an enterprise characterized by a determined inutility has often been challenged, and the debates between its proponents and those who argue for a more engaged university experience are lively and apparently perennial. The question such debates avoid is whether the Oakeshottian ideal (celebrated before him by Aristotle, Kant and Max Weber, among others) can really flourish in today’s educational landscape. It may be fun to argue its merits (as I have done), but that argument may be merely academic – in the pejorative sense of the word – if it has no support in the real world from which it rhetorically distances itself. In today’s climate, does it have a chance?

In a new book, “The Last Professors: The Corporate University and the Fate of the Humanities,” Frank Donoghue (as it happens, a former student of mine) asks that question and answers “No.”

Donoghue begins by challenging the oft-repeated declaration that liberal arts education in general and the humanities in particular face a crisis, a word that suggests an interruption of a normal state of affairs and the possibility of restoring the natural order of things.

“Such a vision of restored stability,” says Donoghue, “is a delusion” because the conditions to which many seek a return – healthy humanities departments populated by tenure-track professors who discuss books with adoring students in a cloistered setting – have largely vanished. Except in a few private wealthy universities (functioning almost as museums), the splendid and supported irrelevance of humanist inquiry for its own sake is already a thing of the past. In “ two or three generations,” Donoghue predicts, “humanists . . . will become an insignificant percentage of the country’s university instructional workforce.”

How has this happened? According to Donoghue, it’s been happening for a long time, at least since 1891, when Andrew Carnegie congratulated the graduates of the Pierce College of Business for being “ fully occupied in obtaining a knowledge of shorthand and typewriting” rather than wasting time “upon dead languages.”

Industrialist Richard Teller Crane was even more pointed in his 1911 dismissal of what humanists call the “life of the mind.” No one who has “a taste for literature has the right to be happy” because “the only men entitled to happiness . . . are those who are useful.”

The opposition between this view and the view held by the heirs of Matthew Arnold’s conviction that poetry will save us could not be more stark. But Donoghue counsels us not to think that the two visions are locked in a struggle whose outcome is uncertain. One vision, rooted in an “ethic of productivity” and efficiency, has, he tells us, already won the day; and the proof is that in the very colleges and universities where the life of the mind is routinely celebrated, the material conditions of the workplace are configured by the business model that scorns it.

The best evidence for this is the shrinking number of tenured and tenure-track faculty and the corresponding rise of adjuncts, part-timers more akin to itinerant workers than to embedded professionals.

Humanities professors like to think that this is a temporary imbalance and talk about ways of redressing it, but Donoghue insists that this development, planned by no one but now well under way, cannot be reversed. Universities under increasing financial pressure, he explains, do not “hire the most experienced teachers, but rather the cheapest teachers.” Tenured and tenure-track teachers now make up only 35 percent of the pedagogical workforce and “this number is steadily falling.”

Once adjuncts are hired to deal with an expanding student body (and the student body is always expanding), budgetary planners find it difficult to dispense with the savings they have come to rely on; and “as a result, an adjunct workforce, however imperceptible its origins . . . has now mushroomed into a significant fact of academic life.”

What is happening in traditional universities where the ethos of the liberal arts is still given lip service is the forthright policy of for-profit universities, which make no pretense of valuing what used to be called the “higher learning.” John Sperling, founder of the group that gave us Phoenix University, is refreshingly blunt: “Coming here is not a rite of passage. We are not trying to develop value systems or go in for that ‘expand their minds’” nonsense.

The for-profit university is the logical end of a shift from a model of education centered in an individual professor who delivers insight and inspiration to a model that begins and ends with the imperative to deliver the information and skills necessary to gain employment.

In this latter model , the mode of delivery – a disc, a computer screen, a video hook-up – doesn’t matter so long as delivery occurs. Insofar as there are real-life faculty in the picture, their credentials and publications (if they have any) are beside the point, for they are just “delivery people.”

Sperling understands the difficulty of achieving accreditation for his institution as a proxy “for cultural battles between defenders of 800 years of educational (and largely religious) traditions, and innovation that was based on the ideas of the marketplace – transparency, efficiency, productivity and accountability.”

Those ideas have now triumphed (Carnegie and Crane are victorious), and this means, Donoghue concludes, “that all fields deemed impractical, such as philosophy, art history, and literature, will henceforth face a constant danger of being deemed unnecessary.” And as a corollary “professors will come to be seen by everyone (not just those outside the academy) as unaffordable anomalies.”

In his preface, Donoghue tells us that he will “offer nothing in the way of uplifting solutions to the problems [he] describes.” In the end, however, he can’t resist recommending something and he advises humanists to acquire “a thorough familiarity with how the university works,” for “only by studying the institutional histories of scholarly research, of tenure, of academic status, and . . . of the ever-changing college curriculum, can we prepare ourselves for the future.”

But – and this is to his credit – he doesn’t hold out the slightest hope that this future we may come to understand will have a place in it for us.

People sometimes believe that they were born too late or too early. After reading Donoghue’s book, I feel that I have timed it just right, for it seems that I have had a career that would not have been available to me had I entered the world 50 years later. Just lucky, I guess.

Work that Beak

The news has been chock-full of exciting and interesting items lately. Today we learn that Harvard researchers, after careful study of Youtube video clips of Snowball the Cockatoo, have concluded that we humans are not the only species capable of rhythmic movement. (Indeed, this precious gift does not even extend to all members of our own species, as anyone will know who has ever listened to a roomful of white people clapping along with a band.)

This all might have been obvious after a moment’s reflection, I should have thought, upon the many rhythmic patterns and complexities of birdsong, but the scientists must be more thorough than we laypersons, I suppose. At any rate, it appears the blessing of natural rhythm is shared by “14 types of parrot species and one elephant”. (I am not sure what a “type of species” is, but that must be a very proud elephant, and the envy of his pride...or whatever an elephant family is called.)

The story also informs us that one “Alex, an African grey parrot”, particularly enjoys dancing to drum tracks, but this veers, I think, dangerously close to invidious stereotyping, so I won't dwell on it.

You can see Snowball cutting a rug (well, actually the back of a chair) here, and read the story here.

To Read and to Live (Part Deux)

Continued

Using the study of literature as a means for altering the political landscape involves no small amount of hubris. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., editor of the Norton Anthology of Afro-American Literature and a leading critic of the traditional literary canon states the problem as well as any opponent might do:

"The recent turn towards politics and history in literary studies has turned the analysis of texts into a marionette theater of the political, to which we bring all the passions of our real-world commitments. And that’s why it is sometimes necessary to remind ourselves of the distance from the classroom to the streets. Academic critics write essays, “readings” of literature, where the bad guys (you know, racism or patriarchy) lose, where the forces of oppression are subverted by the boundless powers of irony and allegory that no prison can contain, and we glow with hard-won triumph. We pay homage to the marginalized and the demonized, and it feels almost as if we’ve righted an actual injustice."

In other words, a Marxist or feminist “reading” of a literary work is still just a reading: it may be prompted by some political cause or some righteous doctrine, but in the end it tends to be only academic business as usual.

Nor is this state of affairs new. Most literary theories are proclaimed by their proponents to be--and at the same time are decried by their opponents for being--“revolutionary,” but the typical college classroom bears none of the battle scars conjured by the vocabulary of revolution. Case-in-point: see deconstruction, whose first appearance was either hailed or bewailed as a sign of the eschaton. But it didn’t work out that way.

Terry Eagleton, a British Marxist critic, skewered deconstruction’s radical pretensions by noting that “there is little admirable in an authority...which can savour the delights of textual agnosticism precisely because it is institutionally secure, and perhaps likely to reinforce that security the more flamboyantly it parades its blindness. Others may not know, but to know that nobody knows is the most privileged knowledge conceivable, well worth trading for a handful of critical certainties.”

Thus, Eagleton concludes, “Deconstruction is able to outflank every existing knowledge to absolutely no effect.... It cancels all the way through and leaves everything just as it was.” Now, the politically committed professor or student does everything he can to avoid this ethereal irrelevance--after all, as Marx said and as modern academics seem never to tire of repeating, the point is not to understand the world but to change it. But if Gates is right, then the work of the political ideologues misses that point in very much the same way as the deconstructionists do.

This is not only because a reading is just a reading, and a classroom just a classroom--as opposed to the “real world,” or as Gates would have it, “the streets.” Much political criticism, proclaiming itself to be the living repudiation of formal or structural analyses of texts, in fact mimics such formalism exactly. For despite its often formidable deployment of social and historical knowledge, political criticism tends to put that knowledge in the service of a dominant binary opposition, that between Oppressor and Oppressed, and then seeks to show what side a given text takes.

In this way it resembles both Russian formalism and French structuralism, which sought to identify the component parts of a text (usually seeking matching pairs: High/Low, Light/Dark, Helper/Opponent) and then analyze their relations--except that contemporary criticism is much more conscious of the hierarchical tendency that such pairs tend to have. So the same literary critics who proclaim themselves revolutionaries spend a good portion of their time arguing about whether Jane Austen’s fiction serves as an ideological prop for the repressive patriarchy of Regency England (in which case she stands condemned with the Oppressors) or slyly and surreptitiously subverts that tyrannical order (in which case she may properly speak for the Oppressed).

Of course, genuine oppression does go on in the world, and the road that leads you to subtle arguments about how, say, slaves in the American South in the 1830s were somehow complicit in their own oppression, while the slave-owners were in a way victims themselves, is a dangerous road indeed. But the opposition between Oppressor and Oppressed is not, as so many literary critics seem to think, a fulcrum upon which the whole world of discourse can be lifted.

A specific example may help clarify this point. The first novel of the Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart (1958), is regularly cited as a great protest against colonialism and cultural imperialism. It is indeed that, and yet it is at the same time a profound critique of the features of Achebe’s own Ibo culture which made that culture both ripe for conquest and susceptible to the arguments of Christian missionaries.

Achebe says quite openly that one of the reasons Christianity succeeded among many of his people (including his own father) is that it called attention to the fundamental injustice of some Ibo traditions: for instance, excluding some people from the community as osu (ritually unclean outcastes), or leaving twins to die in the forest because they were thought to be evil. This kind of social criticism from within his culture is an important feature of Achebe’s novel, but it is almost always neglected by commentators because its complexity doesn’t fit their critical categories. Achebe’s book, while never relativistic or politically ambivalent, simply cannot be broken down into a neat, blunt opposition between the Oppressors and the Oppressed.

Nor is the problem with these categories merely that they are simplistic. What is far more damaging about most political criticism is the way it can conceive of human action only in socio-cultural terms--it cannot recognize personal moral agency. The Oppressor/Oppressed dichotomy will be appealing only to people who cannot conceive of human action except in the limited terminology of groups and classes. Such thinking constitutes politics without ethics, and politics without ethics can at best give a woefully incomplete account of the hows and whys of human action.

In other words, what chiefly afflicts current political criticism is a widespread and uncritical acceptance of social constructionism: the belief that human identity is solely the product of social, historical, and cultural forces and therefore the notion of the human “person” or “subject” must be abandoned or at least deconstructed. As Richard Rorty puts it, with his typical disarming clarity and directness, “Socialization goes all the way down.” (The same deconstruction of the person can of course be based on racial and sexual distinctions; and while arguments that depend on race and gender are not precisely identical to those of social constructionism, their logic is quite similar.) Thus many critics use a strictly political vocabulary because for them that has become the only vocabulary available; they have no ethical vocabulary, i.e., a vocabulary of moral agency, because they don’t believe in moral agents. Rorty himself has tried to articulate some kind of ethics for social constructionism, but with very poor, sometimes ludicrous, results; and even the effort is unusual.

Without going into a lengthy critique of social constructionism, we find two things worth noting. First, there is the question of cultural anthropology, from which much of the impetus for social constructionism derives. Maurice Bloch, himself a cultural anthropologist, has pointed out (in Ritual, History, and Power) that the members of his profession have a deep personal and professional investment in finding what makes cultures different, and no investment at all in finding what makes them alike. There is, then, a natural tendency for the anthropological literature--without being either dishonest or intentionally misleading--to suggest the fundamental diversity of cultures while at the same time obscuring their common beliefs, habits, and concerns. And academics are all too ready to welcome uncritically any research which generates distinctions that can be turned into books and essays. It is remarkable how few academics, when confronted with the sweeping assertions of a Foucault or a Lyotard, ask the simple question, “Why should I believe that?”

Second, the belief in a universal human nature has been a powerful force for good in the last two centuries. It is difficult to imagine that Frederick Douglass’ and Harriet Tubman’s arguments for the abolition of slavery and the equality of blacks under the law of the United States would ever have made much headway without their compelling appeals to a human nature shared by people regardless of skin color; and one could say the same about the thoroughly humanistic feminist arguments made by, say, Mary Wollstonecraft and Margaret Fuller. Those who want to discard such convictions now, in the belief that they have lost their usefulness--and this group includes not just Rorty but also many feminists and "Afrocentrists"--should remember that for Douglass, Tubman, Wollstonecraft and Fuller “human nature” and “human dignity” were not mere concepts to be “used,” but rather foundational beliefs forged in the crucible of hard and painful experience.

Inspiration

Prior to publication of To Kill A Mockingbird in 1960, Harper Lee moved to New York, took menial jobs to support herself, and all in all, worked on her manuscript for about eight years. After putting it into the hands of an editor, she re-wrote for an additional couple of years. That’s ten years of writing and re-writing: enough struggle to frustrate anyone... I mean can you even imagine?!

One of the most well-known stories about Ms. Lee and her book comes from the early days of the editing process. One night in the winter of 1958, as she sat in her New York apartment surrounded by drifts of paper which mostly were drafts of the same material, she’d suddenly had enough. Flinging open a window, she tossed her manuscript out into the wind, and watched years of work tumble down into the snow-filled streets. I’ve searched, but I can’t find any report of what Harper Lee said as she flung her life’s work out that window, but I suspect it was neither well-crafted nor particularly literary. A phrase like, “Goddammit!” is what comes to mind.

Whether Lee intended to destroy To Kill a Mockingbird we’ll never know. Fortunately, she called her editor at Lippincott immediately, and Tay Hohoff sent her outside to gather up the pages. The cold air and exercise probably did her good, and the gathered pages, which came together quite nicely in the end, have done all of us good through the years.

Hearing the story, I was reminded of some wonderful passages in Flannery O’Connor’s letters, collected and edited by Sally Fitzgerald and published under the title The Habit of Being. Writing to Ms. Fitzgerald about her novel Wise Blood, she says, “Enclosed is Opus Nauseous No. 1. I had to read it over after it came from the typist’s and that was like spending the day eating a horse blanket. It seems mighty sorry to me but better than it was before.”

Later, there were references to Opus Nauseous No. 2, her novel entitled The Violent Bear It Away. In a letter to Cecil Dawkins, dated 17 July 1959 she celebrates in her typically understated way: “ Well, my novel is finished and on its way courtesy the US Postal Service to the publisher. Catharine Carver’s final verdict was that it is the best thing I’ve done. The most I am willing to say is that it has taken more doing than anything else I’ve done.”

And, in a September, 1959 letter to Maryat Lee she adds, “Been working on that book for seven years with time off occasionally to write a story. The relief of finishing it was extreme, but I haven’t spit up or anything…”

It’s often said that the opposite of love isn’t hatred, but apathy. If Harper Lee had allowed her manuscript to disappear in her apartment beneath drifts of junk mail, bills, and old National Geographic magazines, that would have been one thing. If Flannery O’Connor had said, “Well, I believe three years is long enough. We’ll just call this one done and stick it in the mail”, that would have been another. But both authors were bound to their vision of the truth and the integrity of their work by varying degrees of love, disdain, revulsion and amazement. If they were given to dramatic gestures and sardonic humor from time to time--well, so be it. In the end, their gritty, obsessive, and completely unsentimental view of their life’s work allowed them to persevere.

I know this. After a week of surviving off of three hours of sleep a night, when the coffee’s boiled down and the process of putting words to page is like putting my parent's cat outside during a thunderstorm, I want nothing to do with insipid paragraphs about the dignity of the writer’s vocation. Let me contemplate Flannery O’Connor eating a horseblanket, or Nelle Harper Lee crawling around in the snow on all fours, grabbing her manuscript pages.

Now, that’s inspiration.

The Man who Dreamed of Faeryland

This poem by Yeats is a masterpiece of the "parallel" style. Four stanzas of repeated syntax, words, and images, with rhyme and meter as well. It's as tightly patterned as Celtic knot-work.

The Man Who Dreamed Of Faeryland
W.B. Yeats

He stood among a crowd at Dromahair;
His heart hung all upon a silken dress,
And he had known at last some tenderness,
Before earth took him to her stony care;
But when a man poured fish into a pile,
It seemed they raised their little silver heads,
And sang what gold morning or evening sheds
Upon a woven world-forgotten isle
Where people love beside the ravelled seas;
That Time can never mar a lover's vows
Under that woven changeless roof of boughs:
The singing shook him out of his new ease.

He wandered by the sands of Lissadell;
His mind ran all on money cares and fears,
And he had known at last some prudent years
Before they heaped his grave under the hill;
But while he passed before a plashy place,
A lug-worm with its grey and muddy mouth
Sang that somewhere to north or west or south
There dwelt a gay, exulting, gentle race
Under the golden or the silver skies;
That if a dancer stayed his hungry foot
It seemed the sun and moon were in the fruit:
And at that singing he was no more wise.

He mused beside the well of Scanavin,
He mused upon his mockers: without fail
His sudden vengeance were a country tale,
When earthy night had drunk his body in;
But one small knot-grass growing by the pool
Sang where -- unnecessary cruel voice --
Old silence bids its chosen race rejoice,
Whatever ravelled waters rise and fall
Or stormy silver fret the gold of day,
And midnight there enfold them like a fleece
And lover there by lover be at peace.
The tale drove his fine angry mood away.

He slept under the hill of Lugnagall;
And might have known at last unhaunted sleep
Under that cold and vapour-turbaned steep,
Now that the earth had taken man and all:
Did not the worms that spired about his bones
proclaim with that unwearied, reedy cry
That God has laid His fingers on the sky,
That from those fingers glittering summer runs
Upon the dancer by the dreamless wave.
Why should those lovers that no lovers miss
Dream, until God burn Nature with a kiss?
The man has found no comfort in the grave.

Yeats wrote this in 1891, when he was 26 years old. I wonder if Tolkien ever read it? It reminds me of Tolkien, anyway--the "gay, exulting, gentle race" on their "woven world-forgotten isle"; the golden and silver light that could be from the Two Trees of Valinor. The man in the poem is afflicted by something like Tolkien's "longing for elves." Every time he tries to get back to his mortal affairs--love, money, revenge, and finally death-- he is baffled by a dream of immortality, first elvish and finally heavenly.

What goes into a "perfect" line?

Sometimes you come across a single line of poetry that is so striking that it has a life of its own. It would still be powerful even if it were ripped from its context, blowing around in the Sahara on a scrap of papyrus. If you like poetry, you have a lot of them drifting through your mind:

The force that through the green fuse drives the flower

From silken Samarcand to cedar'd Lebanon

I knew a woman lovely in her bones

Inexplicable splendor of Ionian white and gold

After finishing a paper (one more to go!) I began to think about the rather old and murky question of what makes a line "perfect." Well, I probably thought about it way longer than I should have. It was easy to pick out lines that I thought were perfect, and less easy to say why they were perfect. First off, I decided that perfect is not the same thing as best. Some "perfect" lines I like better than others, but each one seems to inhabit its own little world. After looking closely at some of them, I put together some characteristics of the "perfect line":

1. It has to be complete. The root sense of "perfect" is "finished" (Latin, perfectus), as in "the perfect tense." There can't be bits of syntax intruding from the lines before or after. Look at this line:

Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding

It comes from a great poem ("The Windhover"), but it is not a perfect line. As a part of the whole, it is flawless; but it can never stand alone. Though a perfect line doesn't need to be a complete sentence. It isn't often a subordinate clause, but very often it's part of a clause: "Or stormy silver fret the gold of day"-- Yeats. Usually the perfect line is either a main clause ("The wintry haw is burning out of season"--Heaney) or a single image--that is, a noun with all its pomps and accouterments, but without the slightest hint of a verb. And no need for one. These single image lines seem framed by a contemplative eye, and they don't have to justify their existence:

A rose-red city, half as old as time

A bracelet of bright hair about the bone

These things are sufficient in their own way. They can summon an image in your mind without any help from the rest of the poem. And such images!

2. It has to be strange. A perfect line stands out vividly from the other lines, like a hologram. It is unique; it pops off the page. The idea must be strange, or the words used must be strange. Look at the last two lines I gave: "rose-red" is an unusual foil for "city," and bracelets are made of many things, but usually not of hair. "Half as old as time"--none of the words are unusual, but the idea is strange. The first line is strange in both ways: its first half uses strange diction; its second half uses a strange concept. The second line, one of John Donne's, takes three pairs of words, each perfectly normal, and then mixes them up. "Bright" and "bracelet"--connected by alliteration and association. "Bright" and "hair"--a commonplace. "Hair" and "bone"--definitely on the same page here. But combine them, and see how the bright beginning slopes down and becomes increasingly macabre, while the entire line retains an overlay of brightness, even at the gruesome ending...

3. It has to be familiar. Mere strangeness isn't enough. What I'm trying to get at is the idea of balance. The line has to strike a golden mean between... well, a lot of things - some of them obvious, many of them elusive. It should feel right somehow. It should have a bit of the primitive, a bit of the artless, to balance its strangeness. It should make you a bit homesick. Look at the Seamus Heaney line again: The wintry haw is burning out of season. It feels like a nursery rhyme or a song. I think of Tolkien: "In Western lands beneath the sun / The flowers may rise in spring..." or this:

When winter first begins to bite
And stones crack in the frosty night -
When pools are black and trees are bare,
Tis evil in the wild to fare.

The line feels like other simple lines that we've enjoyed before, but it stands apart from them with its elegant rhythm and highly tuned language.

4. It's usually iambic pentameter. If it's in English, that is. Why is this? Because I.P. is so widely used. Because iambic tetrameter doesn't finish a thought in one line so often. Because of that balance thing: there's something about those five feet that sounds complete. A four-foot line feels like it wants to keep on going. But here are some that aren't iambic pentameter:

She walks in beauty like the night

Our hearts’ charity’s hearth’s fire, our thoughts’ chivalry’s throng’s Lord.

Now, a whole poem composed of perfect lines is not the ideal. It would be over-intense, as well as disjointed. There is this poem by Theodore Roethke that has an unusual number of perfect lines, and by the last stanza every line is syntactically complete and only vaguely connected to the other lines:

Let seed be grass, and grass turn into hay:
I'm martyr to a motion not my own;
What's freedom for? To know eternity.
I swear she cast a shadow white as stone.
But who would count eternity in days?
These old bones live to learn her wanton ways:
(I measure time by how a body sways.)

Lovely lines, but the lack of cohesion is slightly irritating.

In the end, of course, it's personal opinion that deems a line "perfect." The same line can give one person a charge and leave another cold. I happen to like these:

As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies dráw fláme;

Low-latched in leaf-light housel his too huge godhead.

Her fond yellow hornlight wound to the west, ' her wild hollow hoarlight hung to the height

I have measured out my life with coffee spoons

That dolphin-torn, that gong-tormented sea.

Truth and beauty buried be.

And smell renews the salt savour of the sandy earth