Andrew Sullivan's Blog, page 170
August 28, 2014
“It Really Doesn’t Matter Whether Or Not You Agree With The Israeli Government’s Policies”, Ctd
I want to thank the Dish readers who responded to my recent post on anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism. Yes, even the furious ones. You’ve helped clarify my thoughts on the topic. Below, I respond to several (overlapping) dissents. One reader writes:
Regarding Phoebe’s post “It really doesn’t matter whether or not you agree with the Israeli government’s policies,” I think she and others are misreading the NYT’s letter to the editor, or at least I (and I’m sure the many others to whom this letter is not “jumping out”) read it very differently. I do not read the reference to “patrons” to mean Jews living outside Israel. I read “patrons” to mean countries (obviously, most specifically in this instance the United States). The term “patron” is routinely used in the context of foreign affairs (and in the NYT) to describe one country that provides some kind of support (financial, military, etc.) to another country or entity. This is particularly true in the context of the Israeli-Palestinian/Hamas/Hezbollah conflict. The United States is routinely described as a patron of Israel, and Iran and Syria are routinely described as patrons of Hamas and Hezbollah. Given the context it is far less likely that the writer intended “patrons” to mean Jews or some “nice little loophole” than that the writer was simply using common vernacular to refer to the countries who aid and support Israel and who most certainly do have influence over the Israeli government.
These angles of the issue should really be addressed in a post like this on the Dish. While there should not be any connection between anti-semitism against Jews (whether in the U.S., Europe, or anywhere) and the Israeli government’s policies, it is a simple fact that there is a connection. Does Phoebe contend that there is not a connection between Israel’s policies and anti-semitism? (which, again, is plainly a different question from whether there should be a connection). And, if there is a connection then what exactly is objectionable in the writer’s paragraph about Israel’s patrons if “patrons” is read to mean the United States and other Western governments, as that term is widely used in foreign affairs?
I’ll address the second paragraph later, but first, the first: I agree that “patrons” is ambiguous, and that it’s entirely possible that Bruce Shipman meant countries (or just the US), not global Jewry. Indeed, the most charitable explanation I can come up with, reading, rereading, and rereading the letter some more, is that, by “patrons,” he meant the US government. If that was what he meant, though, he might have said so, and not relied on highly sophisticated readers catching the foreign-policy jargon. There would have been a clear way to indicate exactly which parties he was holding accountable, and he opted against. What reads to me, and to some other Jews, as a dog whistle doesn’t read that way to all. That’s… the trouble with dog whistles. Either you hear it or you don’t. As it stands, he used roundabout language that leaves very much open the possibility that he means Jews. After all, as another reader points out, many Jews do patronize Israel:
I find Ms. Bovy’s argument a little hard to follow. American Jews have a very strong connection to Israel, both financial and political. I have numerous friends and colleagues who are “secular” Jews. They aren’t particularly religious, but the older the get, the more often they go to synagogue. They make their kids do the Bar mitzvah thing. And they travel to Israel on vacation. For the most part they are politically liberal. But when it comes to Israeli policy, they are right wing nuts. If I say anything – anything – negative about Israel, they freak out. Anti-Semitism. You can’t even have a conversation about the Middle East in their presence.
I must admit that I found part of this response similarly hard to follow. Is there something sinister, or even surprising, about “‘secular’ Jews” expressing some religiosity? But I will set that aside, and turn to the “freak out” portion of the paragraph. I can’t speak to this reader’s personal experience with otherwise impeccably progressive friends who start railing on about Judea and Samaria at a moment’s notice. There are plenty of people who are fully liberal or conservative but for the one area that affects them personally; surely that category wouldn’t exclude Jews.
I can, however, offer some thoughts from… the other end of such conversations. I’ve been in situations, in the US and elsewhere, where I’m the token Jew, asked to account for what my kind are doing over there in Israel. In cases like this, it’s easy to feel on the defensive, and to come across as more rah-rah Israel than one might if not feeling cornered on the basis of a personal identity that frankly isn’t opt-out (born Jewish, always Jewish, in the eyes of society), or if discussing with other Jews.
The most vigorous dissent, however, comes from a third reader:
Phoebe Malz Bovy owes Rev. Bruce Shipman an apology for her latest post. Her dishonesty lies in her simply substituting one term for another, making a joke about doing so, and proceeding as though that substitution is legitimate. Shipman did not name Jews as the target of his remarks, and in fact “Israel’s patrons abroad” includes essentially every national politician in America, the vast majority of them gentiles, to say nothing of an enormous number of mainstream gentiles living in the United States and elsewhere. If we’re simply allowed to substitute one word for another out of rhetorical convenience, then we’ll very quickly find ourselves accusing everyone with whom we disagree of the worst bigotry.
Bovy’s post– in which she does not use the word “Palestinians,” which is typical of her erasure of that inconveniently living people– is typical of her work, which seeks to wave half-heartedly at the notion that there might be some such thing as legitimate criticism of Israel and its brutal, racist occupation, and then turns around and calls every actual instance of such criticism anti-Semitic. Which is particularly untoward, given that so much of that criticism, in the United States, is carried out by anti-Zionist Jews, a large and growing movement of liberals and leftists who are rightfully and naturally disgusted by the conduct of Israel.
Nor is there any acknowledgment of who, exactly, is the threatened party in greater Palestine. This is a reality that Ms. Bovy has to grapple with: Israel is among the safest countries on earth. By any rational estimation whatsoever. In fact, Israel– with its immensely powerful military, its nuclear arsenal, and the unwavering patronage of the United States– is among the least existentially threatened countries in the region. Any dispassionate consideration of its military, diplomatic, and economic security leads us to conclude that it is a stable and secure nation. The same cannot be said of the Palestinians, a refugee people, lost without a state, at constant risk of death from the Israeli government that occupies its land. As Rev. Shipman said: the only legitimate, moral solution is the recognition of the Palestinian people as fully human and thus fully deserving of human and democratic rights. It is Israel’s refusal to grant that recognition that is to blame for Israel’s increasing isolation, and that refusal which threatens its soul.
Two things, one small, one more big-picture. The two are related. The small – the personal – is that I’d have to dispute this claim of “erasure” of Palestinian suffering, and would direct this reader to the same guest-post of mine I link to in the post in question.
The second is that no, I don’t think it’s “erasure” to respond to stories of anti-Semitism – by which I mean unambiguous things like synagogue vandalism, attacks on Jews who aren’t even in Israel – without mentioning Palestinians. Now, to only notice anti-Semitism and to ignore Palestinian suffering (and every other global tragedy) would be to ignore the broad picture of what’s going on in the world. To those who note that anti-Semitism is not the greatest threat to mankind at this particular point in history… I agree! Bigotry against a group one happens to be a part of is, however, bound to stand out. That’s true for Jews as it is for other groups – it’s the universality of parochialism.
But back to Shipman’s letter. To bring up the questionable or even outright wrong things done by one group of Jews (namely those who have power in Israel at the moment) whenever bigotry against all Jews comes up is to… sorry, but yes, it is to cross the line into anti-Semitism. The thing is, I’m not entirely sure what Shipman’s specific criticisms of Israel entail; for all I know they’re ones I – an opponent of the settlements – would share. It’s not only – for more, see David Schraub – “anti-Zionist Jews” who have such criticisms. To be a “Zionist” isn’t necessarily to be in favor of the current Israeli administration’s policies. For me, it just means thinking there ought to continue to be a Jewish state in some part of the area where there currently is one.
What I found troubling in Shipman’s letter was not that he expressed criticism of Israel, but the context in which he did so. After agreeing that there is “growing anti-Semitism in Europe and beyond,” he turned immediately to the aspects of Israeli policy that may have inspired this “trend”, and not… to the people targeting Jews. In doing so, he treats anti-Semitism as a legitimate form of protest.
Shipman made two leaps: first, that anti-Jewish acts outside Israel are merely expressions of outrage at the treatment of Palestinians in Gaza, and second, that this explanation should be not merely understood (as one seeks to understand the roots of everything that happens) but addressed. Shipman is saying, effectively, that European anti-Semites are making demands regarding Israel policy, are protesting by attacking Jews, and that we should give in to those demands (as if there even are articulated demands when a synagogue is defaced). That’s where justification enters into it.
The problem with criticizing Israeli policy in that context wasn’t that this policy is sound. It should be criticized! The trouble here is that nothing any country – including but not limited to Israel – does can be used to justify acts of hatred against those who share the ethno-religious background in question. There are many good reasons to keep trying to achieve peace in Gaza and to bring about Palestinian statehood. Today’s anti-Semites’ tendency to give Israel policy as a pretext for Jew-bashing? Not one of them.
Ultimately, I think arguments like Shipman’s are worrying to many Jews, but are also not any great favor to Palestinians. Dignifying anti-Semitism as pro-Palestinian advocacy only serves to unfairly delegitimize the Palestinian cause, and only contributes to Palestinian suffering.
Teaching A Fish To Walk
Carl Zimmer unpacks a fascinating new study on bichirs (a type fish that “mostly live in lakes and rivers” but “will sometimes crawl across dry land with their fins”):
McGill scientists wondered what would happen if they forced the fish to grow up out of the water. To find out, they reared eight bichirs in a terrarium with a pebble-strewn floor. To prevent the bichirs from drying out, the scientists installed a mister to keep their skin moist. The fish grew for eight months, clambering around their terrarium instead of swimming.
Then the scientists examined these fish out of water. They found that eight months on dry land (or at least moist land) had wreaked profound changes to the bichirs.
For one thing, they now walked differently. Overall, they were more efficient. In each step, they planted their fins on the ground for less time, and they took shorter strides. Instead of flapping their fins out to each side, they placed their fins under their bodies. Their fins slipped less when they pushed off of them. They made smaller movements with their tails to go the same distance as a bichir raised underwater. Aquatic bichirs walk on land with an irregular gait. The terrestrial bichirs, on the other hand, walked more gracefully, planting their fins in the same spot relative to their bodies time after time.
Noah Baker adds that, beyond the fishes’ new walking style. “their bone structure and musculature changed to be more suited to a walking lifestyle”:
The results provide evidence for developmental plasticity, in which organisms alter their anatomy and behaviour in response to environmental change. The team suggests that this process, as demonstrated by the bichir, could have given the earliest tetrapod ancestors the ability to venture onto land. In doing so, claims [lead author Emily] Standen, they would have become exposed to the selective pressures of a terrestrial environment, thereby speeding up the evolutionary transformation from fins for swimming into limbs for walking.
Is The Islamic State A State?
D.B. revisits the question of whether ISIS can really live up to its self-proclaimed “statehood“:
IS’s mission is to create its own caliphate, but until now many of its sources of revenue have depended on its host states. … IS has not proven adept at running anything other than the most basic functions of a state in the past—dispensing justice and, in most cases, providing bread, the staple food. In 2013 in Raqqa it attempted to take over the opposition’s civilian-run local council, which had continued to pay road sweepers and keep ambulances on the road. Locals say it soon handed back control after it failed to deliver, angering residents. The IS model of stealing from and feeding off the Syrian and Iraqi states has worked well so far. But it will become much more difficult for IS to rule its territory if the Damascus and Baghdad governments stop being so helpful.
That’s why a massive humanitarian aid effort is a big part of Zalmay Khalilzad’s suggested action plan for how to defeat ISIS:
The humanitarian catastrophe resulting from the conflicts in Iraq and Syria requires a massive response. This is essential strategically. Friendly countries who host large number of refugees, such as Jordan and the Kurdish region of Iraq are at risk of destabilization. For displaced Sunni Arabs, poor refugee conditions can lead to radicalization and opportunities for IS to recruit them. If we allow IS to exploit this opportunity, the threat could expand exponentially. Moreover, IS is seeking to establish itself as a quasistate, providing humanitarian aid and services in areas it controls. The international community and its local partners must compete for the hearts and minds among refugees and communities seeking protection from or willing to align against IS. This competition will be waged in part in the provision of humanitarian relief and basic services. It is a competition that we must win.
Looking at the varying maps of ISIS’s sphere of influence, such as the one above from the Institute for the Study of War, Kathy Gilsinan asks whether the group really controls all of the territory in which it operates, and whether that matters:
Crucially, while those control zones don’t amount to 35,000 square miles worth of territory, they do encompass major population centers, which tend to be concentrated along major roads. “The aims of the ‘Caliphate’ explicitly include population control, and ISIS has continued to prioritize the acquisition of populated geography,” [ISW Syria analyst Jennifer] Cafarella writes. So the key elements of the Islamic ‘State’ are its network of population centers, oil resources, and military infrastructure, connected by roads. With its territorial expansion, then, ISIS is something more than an al-Qaeda-like terrorist organization enjoying safe haven in a defined geographic area. Syria and Iraq are not sheltering the group as the Taliban did for al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. In some respects, ISIS bears more of a resemblance to the Taliban, which similarly terrorized civilians but, unlike al-Qaeda, held clear, albeit incomplete, sway over a defined territory.
Literary “Self-Segregation”
Jess Row ponders why “most white writers, like most white Americans, particularly those over 30, still feel a profound psychic distance between themselves and black people”:
[T]he defining experiences for people my age (that is, Generations X and Y) fall in the tumultous years between 1988 and 1992—the years of Tawana Brawley, Howard Beach, the Central Park Five, and the L.A. Riots—when a furious debate over canonicity and inclusion raged in the academy, when Louis Farrakhan and Al Sharpton came to prominence, Malcolm X superseded MLK, when Ice Cube talked about killing blue-eyed devils, and t-shirts everywhere said “It’s a Black thing…you wouldn’t understand.”
That era seems like ancient history now, but it has everything to do with why American fiction and poetry remain relentlessly segregated spaces, even though many of our greatest and most visible artists are artists of color. For many white Americans, the takeaway message of that complicated time, consciously or sub- or un-, was like a second, post-Civil-Rights response to “The White Negro”: that for a white person to try to say anything meaningful about race, or racism, was not only ridiculous, but shameful, and also somehow dangerous.
Row concludes by addressing a likely counterargument: So what if white writers ignore race?
It’s a valid question, and one I’ve asked myself many times: if the world is full of artists of color talking about race, why do I need to get in on that action? If there’s this vibrant, rich, visceral, scary conversation already underway, who cares if white writers choose not to participate? The best answer I can give, the only honest answer a writer can give, is a selfish one: it’s interesting to me. It’s good material: the tension, the friction, the rich possibilities of embarrassing oneself for a good cause. (As the white rapper Sage Francis says of himself, “Poorly developed, yet highly advanced / the black music intertwined with the white man’s line dance.”) It’s about writing honestly and going deeper into life, yes, but it’s also just a source of happiness. You could even take a cue from Talib Kweli and call it “the beautiful struggle.” For me, it’s been a relief, too: to realize that this bitter earth is the one place we all have standing.
Women In Wartime
Karen Abbot discusses women’s experiences in the Civil War South:
In the sudden absence of husbands, fathers, brothers and beaus, white Southern women discovered a newfound freedom — one that simultaneously granted them more power in relationships and increased their likelihood of heartbreak. Gone were the traditions of antebellum courtships, where family connections and wealth were paramount and a closed circle of friends and neighbors scrutinized potential mates, a process that could last for years. The war’s disruptions forced elite Southern parents to loosen rules regarding chaperoning and coquetry, which one prominent lecturer called “an artful mixture of hypocrisy, fraud, treachery and falsehood” that risked tarnishing a girl’s reputation. The girls themselves relinquished the anticipation, instilled since birth, that they would one day assume their positions as wives, mothers and slave mistresses, that their lives would be steeped in every privilege and comfort. The war ultimately challenged not only long-held traditions of courtship and marriage, but the expectation that one might wed at all.
Turning ahead several decades, Niamh Gallagher reviews Elisabeth Shipton’s Female Tommies, which chronicles women’s role in World War I:
Significantly, Shipton’s work suggests that the war may have marked a watershed for women after all, at least for those engaged in the military. She argues that “the place to look for the lasting effects of the militarisation of women in the First World War is not 1919 but twenty years further on, in 1939”. For example, the famous Bletchley Park Wrens (members of the Women’s Royal Naval Service) who participated in decoding the secret communications of the Axis during the Second World War had their origins in the Hushwaacs, a section of the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps formed in 1917 in the wake of persistent efforts by British “female Tommies” to force the War Office to form an official women’s military corps.
A century after the Great War began, and at a time when the changing roles of women in the armed forces are a focus of media attention and public debate, Female Tommies is a valuable resource for those keen to learn about individuals who helped to lay the foundations for women’s frontline participation in wars of the 20th and 21st centuries.
August 27, 2014
Reading Your Way Through Life: Still More Readers Respond
Reading all the reader responses to my question about the books, poems, and stories that have meant the most to you has been such a rewarding experience. My reading list certainly has grown even more unmanageable. What I’ve appreciated the most, in addition to the gratitude for books on display, are the anecdotes that have accompanied many of your suggestions. Not only can a story or poem be a consolation, but they remain connected to what we were going through when we read them – and perhaps even shaped how we perceived and understood what was happening. Thank you all for sharing. Here’s more of your responses, with this reader reminding us of a recent classic:
I nominate David Foster Wallace’s Kenyon commencement address. Though a commencement speech, I encountered it as essay. I’ve been rather amazed at how it has stuck with me. “This is water. This is water,” has become a personal mantra, a constant reminder to practice mindfulness.
Another:
I’m late to the thread (as usual!), but I’ll throw on the pile anyway – Theses on the Philosophy of History by Walter Benjamin. Its theme, and the famous passage that reflects it, is undoubtedly dark, but in a way I have always found liberating rather than depressing:
A Klee painting named Angelus Novus shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.
At a time when I was always looking for an answer, a solution, a neat narrative to tie everything together – I read this book and realized that I could (obviously) be wrong, that there are no answers, no fix, no solution to magically make things whole, to return to whatever came before. Understanding that that’s not possible helped me, in its own way, face forward.
By the way, I didn’t actually see Angelus Novus until years later, in Jerusalem. To say it wasn’t what I was expecting would be putting it mildly.
Another reader writes:
Matthew Sitman wrote that he read when feeling lonely. When C. S. Lewis was asked why he read, he replied, “I read to know that I am not alone.”
My favorites are poems, especially by Robert Frost and William Butler Yeats. One of which is this one by Yeats, written when he was a young man:
“When You Are Old”
When you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;
How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;
And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.
Another praises this poem:
I heard David Whyte recite “Lost,” by David Wagoner, 12 years ago, and it has been my favorite ever since. It’s about how the elders of the tribe instructed children to act if they ever got lost in the woods. It’s really a lesson on what to do whenever you feel lost.
“Lost”
Stand still. The trees ahead and bushes beside you
Are not lost. Wherever you are is called Here,
And you must treat it as a powerful stranger,
Must ask permission to know it and be known.
The forest breathes. Listen. It answers,
I have made this place around you.
If you leave it, you may come back again, saying Here.
No two trees are the same to Raven.
No two branches are the same to Wren.
If what a tree or a bush does is lost on you,
You are surely lost. Stand still. The forest knows
Where you are. You must let it find you.
Here’s another poetry selection:
I guess I am a shallow sort, but I love this little ditty by Walker Gibson:
“Advice To Travelers”
A burro once, sent by express,
His shipping ticket on his bridle,
Ate up his name and his address,
And in some warehouse, standing idle,
He waited till he like to died.
The moral hardly needs the showing:
Don’t keep things locked up deep inside –
Say who you are and where you’re going.
Another describes Luc Sante’s phenomenal short story “The Unknown Soldier” as “a source of strange comfort.” An excerpt:
I stood yelling as he stabbed me again and again. I shot up the bag as soon as I got home, but thought it smelled funny when I cooked it. I was asleep in the park when these kids came by. I crawled out the window and felt sick looking down, so I just threw myself out and looked up as I fell. I thought I could get warm by burning some newspaper in a soup pot. I went to pieces very slowly and was happy when it finally stopped. I thought the train was going way too fast, but I kept on reading. I let this guy pick me up at the party, and sometime later we went off in his car. I felt real sick, but the nurse thought I was kidding. I jumped over to the other fire escape, but my foot slipped. I thought I had time to cross the street. I thought the floor would support my weight. I thought nobody could touch me. I never knew what hit me.
They put me in a bag. They nailed me up in a box. They walked me down Mulberry Street followed by altar boys and four priests under a canopy and everybody in the neighborhood singing the “Libera Me Domine.” They collected me in pieces all through the park. They laid me in state under the rotunda for three days. They engraved my name on the pediment. They drew my collar up to my chin to hide the hole in my neck. They laughed about me over baked meats and rye whiskey. They didn’t know who I was when they fished me out and still don’t know six months later. They held my body for ransom and collected, but by that time they had burned it. They never found me. They threw me in the cement mixer. They heaped all of us into a trench and stuck a monument on top. They cut me up at the medical school. They weighed down my ankles and tossed me in the drink. They named a dormitory after me. They gave speeches claiming I was some kind of tin saint. They hauled me away in the ashman’s cart. They put me on a boat and took me to an island. They tried to keep my mother from throwing herself in after me. They bought me my first suit and dressed me up in it. They marched to City Hall holding candles and shouting my name. They forgot all about me and took down my picture.
So give my eyes to the eye bank, give my blood to the blood bank. Make my hair into switches, put my teeth into rattles, sell my heart to the junkman. Give my spleen to the mayor. Hook my lungs to an engine. Stretch my guts down the avenue. Stick my head on a pike, plug my spine to the third rail, throw my liver and lights to the winner. Grind my nails up with sage and camphor and sell it under the counter. Set my hands in the window as a reminder. Take my name from me and make it a verb. Think of me when you run out of money. Remember me when you fall on the sidewalk. Mention me when they ask you what happened. I am everywhere under your feet.
Another:
I am a bit surprised no one has yet submitted Li Bai (also Li Po) and Du Fu (also Tu Fu), two of the most famous of the Chinese T’ang Dynasty poets. Perhaps I find their work consoling as their poems of distant friends and exile speak to my own state of mind (living far away from friends and family and the familiar for work).
Much like the poets and novelists of the 20th century, they wrote in a time of violent political and social chaos (the An Lushan Rebellion in the mid-eighth century) that divided friends, devastated the country, and drove writers and poets into exile. Their best work meditates on friendship, exile, poetry, the pleasures of drink, loss, and the mutability of things, while cultivating a deep reverence for nature as a source of beauty, even order, in a chaotic and unpredictable world. It’s not surprising that their poems, in translation, were deeply admired by many of the 20th century’s greatest poets, from H.D. to Pound to Rexroth to Carruth.
Two from Li Bai:
“Taking Leave of a Friend”
Here at the city wall
green mountains to the north
white water winding east
we part
one tumbleweed
ten thousand miles to go
high clouds
wandering thoughts
sunset
old friendship
you wave, moving off
your horse
whinnies
twice
(trans. David Young)
“Seeing That White-Haired Old Man Legend Describes in Country Grasses”
After wine, I go out into the fields,
wander open country – singing
asking myself how green grass
could be a white-haired old man
But looking into a bright mirror,
I see him in my failing hair too.
Blossom scent seems to scold me.
I let grief go, and face east winds.
(trans. David Hinton)
And two from his friend, Du Fu:
“For Li Po”
The cloud floats off
the way the sun went
the traveler doesn’t come back
three nights in a row
I dreamed of you, old friend
so real I could have touched you!
you left in a hurry
I’ll bet
you’re having a bad journey
storms come up fast
on those rivers and lakes
don’t fall out of your boat!
leaving, framed in the doorway
you scratched your snowy head
I knew you didn’t want to go
bureaucrats
fatten in the capital
while a poet goes cold and hungry
if there is justice in heaven
what sent you out
to banishment?
ages to come
will warm themselves
at your verses
but it’s
a cold, silent world
you left behind
(trans. David Young)
“Watching Fireflies”
Fireflies from the Enchanted Mountains
come through the screen this autumn night
and settle on my shirt
my lute and my books grow cold
outside, above the eaves
they are hard to tell from the stars
they sail over the well
each reflecting a mate
in the garden they pass chrysanthemums
flares of color agains the dark
white-haired and sad
I try to read their code
wanting a prediction:
will I be here next year
to watch them?
(trans. David Young)
I’ve been really enjoying the thread and all the readers’ submissions and the reminder of the consolations of literature. There are so many other authors I would submit if I had them ready to hand: Ovid, Montaigne, Bulgakov, Anne Carson, and on and on…
Another readers writes:
I’d like to add “Barter” by Sara Teasdale to the thread. I have known it since high school (more than 50 years ago) and the last stanza especially has stayed with me.
“Barter”
Life has loveliness to sell,
All beautiful and splendid things,
Blue waves whitened on a cliff,
Soaring fire that sways and sings,
And children’s faces looking up
Holding wonder like a cup.
Life has loveliness to sell,
Music like a curve of gold,
Scent of pine trees in the rain,
Eyes that love you, arms that hold,
And for your spirit’s still delight,
Holy thoughts that star the night.
Spend all you have for loveliness,
Buy it and never count the cost;
For one white singing hour of peace
Count many a year of strife well lost,
And for a breath of ecstasy
Give all you have been, or could be.
Another:
This is from Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet (#7) – a high-school graduation present from my mother which I’ve had the pleasure of sharing with those fumbling in the darkness:
And you should not let yourself be confused in your solitude by the fact that there is some thing in you that wants to move out of it. This very wish, if you use it calmly and prudently and like a tool, will help you spread out your solitude over a great distance. Most people have (with the help of conventions) turned their solutions toward what is easy and toward the easiest side of the easy; but it is clear that we must trust in what is difficult; everything alive trusts in it, everything, in Nature grows and defends itself any way it can and is spontaneously itself, tries to be itself at all costs and against all opposition. We know little, but that we must trust in what is difficult is a certainty that will never abandon us; it is good to be solitary, for solitude is difficult; that something is difficult must be one more reason for us to do it.
It is also good to love: because love is difficult. For one human being to love another human being: that is perhaps the most difficult task that has been entrusted to us, the ultimate task, the final test and proof, the work for which all other work is merely preparation. That is why young people, who are beginners in everything, are not yet capable of love: it is something they must learn. With their whole being, with all their forces, gathered around their solitary, anxious, upward-beating heart, they must learn to love. But learning-time is always a long, secluded time, and therefore loving, for a long time ahead and far on into life, is: solitude, a heightened and deepened kind of aloneness for the person who loves. Loving does not at first mean merging, surrendering, and uniting with another person (for what would a union be of two people who are unclarified, unfinished, and still incoherent?), it is a high inducement for the individual to ripen, to become something in himself, to become world, to become world in himself for the sake of another person; it is a great, demanding claim on him, something that chooses him and calls him to vast distances. Only in this sense, as the task of working on themselves (“to hearken and to hammer day and night”), may young people use the love that is given to them. Merging and surrendering and every kind of communion is not for them (who must still, for a long, long time, save and gather themselves); it is the ultimate, is perhaps that for which human lives are as yet barely large enough.”
And one more:
I don’t really have anything long-winded or insightful to say about this excerpt from Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell. The book is incredible, but it’s a heavy read that I’ve only read it twice. The passage below, however, I read several times a year. In particular, I tend to read it when a good friend of mine “bumps” it, which is usually when he senses that I’m becoming too cynical about life or the world. I always read it slowly at first, the fever-fast in the second voice (you’ll see). And then I stop just before the last line… and, somehow, afterward it feels like I just went to church. And I try to do something, however small, about all the gun violence in Chicago.
My recent adventures have made me quite the philosopher, especially at night, when I hear naught but the stream grinding boulders into pebbles through an unhurried eternity. My thoughts flow thus. Scholars discern motions in history & formulate these motions into rules that govern the rises & falls of civilizations. My belief runs contrary, however. To wit: history admits no rules; only outcomes.
What precipitates outcomes? Vicious acts & virtuous acts.
What precipitates acts? Belief.
Belief is both prize & battlefield, within the mind & in the mind’s mirror, the world. If we believe humanity is a ladder of tribes, a colosseum of confrontation, exploitation & bestiality, such a humanity is surely brought into being, & history’s Horroxes, Boerhaaves & Gooses shall prevail. You & I, the moneyed, the privileged, the fortunate, shall not fare so badly in this world, provided our luck holds. What of it if our consciences itch? Why undermine the dominance of our race, our gunships, our heritage & our legacy? Why fight the ‘natural’ (oh, weaselly word!) order of things?
Why? Because of this: – one fine day, a purely predatory world shall consume itself. Yes, the devil shall take the hindmost until the foremost is the hindmost. In an individual, selfishness uglifies the soul; for the human species, selfishness is extinction.
Is this the entropy written within our nature?
If we believe that humanity may transcend tooth & claw, if we believe divers races & creeds can share this world as peaceably as the orphans share their candlenut tree, if we believe leaders must be just, violence muzzled, power accountable & the riches of the Earth & its Oceans shared equitably, such a world will come to pass. I am not deceived. It is the hardest of worlds to make real. Tortuous advances won over generations can be lost by a single stroke of a myopic president’s pen or a vainglorious general’s sword.
A life spent shaping a world I want Jackson to inherit, not one I fear Jackson shall inherit, this strikes me as a life worth the living. Upon my return to San Francisco, I shall pledge myself to the Abolitionist cause, because I owe my life to a self-freed slave & because I must begin somewhere.
I hear my father-in-law’s response. ‘Oho, fine, Whiggish sentiments, Adam. But don’t tell me about justice! Ride to Tennessee on an ass & convince the red-necks that they are merely white-washed negroes & their negroes are black-washed Whites! Sail to the Old World, tell ‘em their imperial slaves’ rights are as inalienable as the Queen of Belgium’s! Oh, you’ll grow hoarse, poor & grey in caucuses! You’ll be spat on, shot at, lynched, pacified with medals, spurned by backwoodsmen! Crucified! Naive, dreaming Adam. He who would do battle with the many-headed hydra of human nature must pay a world of pain & his family must pay it along with him! & only as you gasp your dying breath shall you understand, your life amounted to no more than one drop in a limitless ocean!’
Yet what is any ocean but a multitude of drops?
Find the entire thread here.
Tax Scam, AKA Business as Usual
Tim Dickinson is out with a superb piece of reporting in Rolling Stone today–a long investigation that picks up where yesterday’s headlines about Burger King and Tim Horton’s (and last month’s about Walgreens) left off. It turns out that these corporate “inversions” are huge business, and part of a trend that dates back at least to the Clinton administration where corporations have bent tax law to make sure their profits stay overseas and beyond the reach of the IRS. The numbers are staggering:
More than $2 trillion in U.S.-based multinational profits currently sit in offshore accounts, representing, by credible estimates, in excess of $500 billion in unpaid taxes. If that money were deposited in federal coffers tomorrow, it would wipe out the deficit for 2014. And every year that Congress dithers on a crackdown, America is forfeiting an approximate $90 billion in revenue.
The offshoring is a complete fiction. The money often comes from US sales, and even though it’s technically in Lichtenstein or the Jersey Islands or Ireland,
these untaxed profits are not stranded. “There’s this false notion that these funds are locked in a strongbox somewhere,” says Edward Kleinbard, a former chief of staff for Congress’ Joint Committee on Taxation. In reality, these untaxed foreign profits are often banked, by the offshore subsidiaries themselves, in Manhattan – where they’re used to invest in stocks and U.S. Treasury bonds. “The money,” says Kleinbard, “is already back in the U.S. economy.”
It’s worth reading the entire piece, especially for the unsurprising but infuriating denouement: lawmakers, even the ones rhetorically at odds with these practices (i.e., Democrats) are actually facilitating the whole process. This is the kind of comprehensive reporting we see too little of.
Andrew Sullivan's Blog
- Andrew Sullivan's profile
- 153 followers
