The Poet's Voice.

I was up early this Saturday morning, as I am so often, and so often against my will. A furry alarm-clock noisily stirred--she was like an ignored roomie banging dishes in the kitchen or sighing loudly and purposefully to get your attention. Then finally, she galloped up a flight and nosed me into action.

Of course, I'd rather have stood in bed, as the old fight manager Joe Jacobs was alleged to have said, but Sparkle had other designs on my time. Ignoring a two-year-old golden retriever can be likened to ignoring a tornado.

So, she got me up, her cold nose pushing me into life. I dressed standing up, including putting on my socks and pants, a concession to trying to get out of the bedroom without waking my sleeping spouse. In literally seconds, I was downstairs, getting coffee and kibble for each of us, as is our habit.

I know very few people these days who aren't dour due to the state of the world and our country. As a well-read amateur historian (who's read more than most-professional historians) it's easy for me to see the crash of a new Dark Age descending like a club on a sleeping seal's head. The signs are everywhere and seem to be proliferating like zits on a teenager's face directly after Halloween.

I've saved this editorial from the Times for almost 38 years. Worry, it states, is always in fashion.

Clip 'n Save.

So, of course, is seeing the world in a Manichean way. That is as a titanic struggle between light and darkness, or black and white, or good and evil. With no gradations.

For most of my lifetime and for centuries before, historians--paid ones--carved out a swath of centuries they called the Dark Ages. In Thomas Hobbes' words, "life was nasty, brutish and short."

Today, that appraisal of the Dark Ages has been revisited and revised. They weren't wholly dark. There was thinking, experimentation, love, poetry, art, laughter and more. To rewrite Hobbes, "life was nasty, brutish and short. And better than the alternative."

This morning, I got an email from the Princeton University Press--one of the world's great, small publishing houses. It gave me a link to over seventy-pages of new books of life, intellect and scholarship. Of esoteric interests, of philosophy, inquiry, thought. The very stuff of human efflorescence. All at sale prices.

I got through about a dozen of the seventy-pages and picked out these volumes. The first few for me. The next for my marine-biologist younger daughter.

All this to say, no matter the gloom of the news and the rampant rise of concentrated wealth, fascism and neo-feudalism--not to mention all the other maladies that seem to lurk around every corner, there are books like these being published. And while I know very few people have the same avid attitude that I have toward reading and learning, there must be legions. This sale wasn't made for me alone. I don't think.

In other words, there is life amid what seems like death. There is beauty and friendship and help and heart. Of course there is the opposite--too much of the opposite. 

But our job as humans--one of our jobs--and this is coming from me, a lifelong pessimist, is to find that hope. 

I'm no poet, just a copywriter trying to scratch out a few more years of making a living in a world that seems to be rapidly dimming. But my inflation-wracked two-cents says this: It pays to read this bit from Faulkner's Nobel Prize "Banquet Speech" every six months or so. Or every time you turn on the news. Or every time the dog wakes you after too little sleep. It pays to read this. 

And find someone or something and say, 'that ain't too bad.' 

Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it. There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only the question: When will I be blown up? Because of this, the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat.

He must learn them again. He must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid; and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed – love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice. Until he does so, he labors under a curse. He writes not of love but of lust, of defeats in which nobody loses anything of value, of victories without hope and, worst of all, without pity or compassion. His griefs grieve on no universal bones, leaving no scars. He writes not of the heart but of the glands.

Until he relearns these things, he will write as though he stood among and watched the end of man. I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure: that when the last dingdong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking.

I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet’s, the writer’s, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet’s voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.

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I'm no poet.
Just a pessimist looking under every rock for a scamper of hope hiding in the darkness like a crab.