(no subject)
The next best thing to reading something wonderful is reading something truly awful - so awful it seems to crystallise everything you want to do in terms of what it isn't. I recently came across this little gem of a poem, by Jack Gilbert. I hate it.
Sorrow everywhere. Slaughter everywhere. If babies
are not starving someplace, they are starving
somewhere else. With flies in their nostrils.
But we enjoy our lives because that's what God wants.
Quite a leap of logic there, Jack. Have you got any evidence for that assumption, any logical arguments at all? Oh wait:
Otherwise the mornings before summer dawn would not
be made so fine. The Bengal tiger would not
be fashioned so miraculously well.
The Bengal tiger is fashioned no better than any number of other species. We just happened to have killed most of this one. What are you saying, that it's OK to have famine and mass extinction if it makes our own comfortable lives somehow more intense?
The poor women
at the fountain are laughing together between
the suffering they have known and the awfulness
in their future, smiling and laughing while somebody
in the village is very sick. There is laughter
every day in the terrible streets of Calcutta,
and the women laugh in the cages of Bombay.
Oh well, if they can laugh now and again I guess we can stop worrying about them. Jack, I bow to your superior knowledge of women's issues in India.
If we deny our happiness, resist our satisfaction,
we lessen the importance of their deprivation.
An attractive idea, certainly. But it is you that tries to lessen their deprivation, with your descriptions of jolly poor people, and beautifully endangered animals.
We must risk delight. We can do without pleasure,
but not delight. Not enjoyment.
A meaningless attempt to engineer some profound difference in meaning between these words. Is it even possible to be delighted without feeling pleasure?
We must have
the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless
furnace of this world. To make injustice the only
measure of our attention is to praise the Devil.
Jack, stop freaking out! If there is a Devil, he would certainly be delighted by your argument that all the things going wrong in the world are actually OK and we should just be stubborn and concentrate on our own happiness. I know you feel guilty about your privileged position when millions of people are starving, but you should accept that guilt and not try to rationalise it away.
If the locomotive of the Lord runs us down,
we should give thanks that the end had magnitude.
We must admit there will be music despite everything.
There are words, there is grammar, but there is no meaning here that I can see.
We stand at the prow again of a small ship
anchored late at night in the tiny port
looking over to the sleeping island: the waterfront
is three shuttered cafés and one naked light burning.
A weirdly specific metaphor. Go on...
To hear the faint sound of oars in the silence as a rowboat
comes slowly out and then goes back is truly worth
all the years of sorrow that are to come.
Do you really, really believe that, Jack? Do you not think that if we just accepted things that were unjust and awful we would still be stuck with slavery and homophobia and smallpox? You know, you're not the first person to worry about how there can be a god if there's so much pain and sufefring around. But your conclusions are a recipe for apathy and self-congratulation. No one's denying people's right to be happy. But to base your arguments for happiness on other people's suffering is a bit sick, isn't it? It certainly seems very easy to tell people that poverty and privation are A-OK when you've grown up in Pittsburgh and spent the rest of your life living off wealthy admirers.
This isn't a poem, Jack. It's just literary and moral masturbation.