After the Solstice

Addendum #46

After the solstice, the progress toward darkness (but the light remains), the fall into darkness (but the light remains), the march to darkness (but the light remains) – all feeble but honorable metaphors tinged with human wonder and resignation – after the lingering on the front porch with the last light of the longest day and then, in the stillness, receiving the darkness, after this, my mind turns, as if inevitably, to Dylan Thomas, a poet who had such a profound sense of the physical world, almost too profound a sense, at least as far as daily living was concerned, but who got it – the enormity of the being we are privileged to experience – as much as any poet who ever wrote. Among the gifts of his work is the perception that the planet (and for that matter the universe) has its own life and that we are very much guests here. We can, however, claim our emotions and that is what Thomas did in poem after poem, so that when I first heard a recording of him reading his poetry, I felt a thrill that ran quick and deep, a sense of a voice encompassing yet freeing the energy of rhythmic words, a sonic gesture thrown into the void yet received by any who cared to listen. Once I heard him, I listened again and have not stopped listening.

Around the same time I was sitting on the porch, my nation’s military was bombing Iran. This was of course a virtuous action because my nation only indulges in virtuous military actions. More than any cultural thrust, bombs and missiles have been the genius of modern times since they have given nations that are vexed with one another the ability to inflict death and damage with seeming ease. Those on the ground, which, after all, is where people live, are not in the picture, particularly civilians who have been murdered en masse for many decades in many different scenarios. Once upon a time, the president of the nation was supposed to ask Congress for a declaration of war but since the nation is at war all the time and since the bombs are just a command away and no one in the nation is directly experiencing war, it seems a bother and a fine point to ask Congress and, no doubt for the current occupant of the presidential office, an insult to his boundless ego. And as the war in Vietnam showed, the nation can fight a lengthy war without any such declaration beyond something trumped up (a pun that will not go away) like the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution that resolved nothing but made all concerned (or almost all concerned) feel that something legitimizing had occurred, as if that mattered somehow when the rhetorical impetus that had accrued throughout the Cold War gave more than enough impetus to the struggle against the demon of communism as represented by someone who actually was an ally of the United States during World War II. But scenarios turn, if not on a dime, at least on the knife’s edge of sanctimony and what passes for Realpolitik, a deadly combination if there ever was one.

Dylan Thomas, who, as a boy, probably read “Ozymandias” with its “colossal wreck,” did not give a hoot about politics or the fate of nation states. His allegiances were to the English language (though with a Welsh inflection) and the life force. Actually, in his hands those two made one. The inclination of poetry was to make each word as forceful as possible thus embodying the momentum of the life force as it tied heart beat to heart beat, breath to breath. Rhythmically, Thomas was a devotee of meter but that was only the beginning of what he called “my craft and sullen art.” He craved the feel of momentum and worked it up in poem after poem, a careering, almost reckless momentum that testified to his passion and that would not be thwarted. Part of his very considerable art lay in that “almost,” for he kept a very tight grip on his lines, marshaled them carefully and was, in his headstrong, hold-nothing-back way, a veritable martinet of words. Though he used his share of Christian imagery, a pagan intensity won through, a fierce connection to “bird beast and flower,” a celebration of evanescence that cast aside the hereafter. And a delight, a rooted, hallooing delight.

Analyses of the bombings will go on for days and weeks, as will the official declarations (to say nothing of bragging) about the success of the bombings and, should the need arise, more bombings. The bottom line – the bane of nuclear weapons – will go unmentioned because the nation with those weapons that bombed the nation that is trying to make those weapons need not apologize for having those weapons because those weapons are part of the nation’s greatness, a catastrophe the nation, along with other nations, carries around in its back pocket. Though there have been moments where a few leaders spoke about these weapons, by and large, fear and loathing (also known as security and patriotism) have been free to show their overbearing faces, the rationale being not much more than a schoolyard fight in which one side does not trust the other side. It seems unlikely, to put it kindly, that the spiritual impulse to ban the weapons (to say nothing of preservation of life on Earth) will come from nationalist politics that makes a self-righteous virtue of whatever tribal (and economic) expediency is at hand.

Thomas recognized the bombs and the people the bombs killed. I think of “Among Those Killed in the Dawn Raid Was a Man Aged a Hundred,” which begins “When the morning was waking over the war / He put on his clothes and stepped out and he died, / The locks yawned loose and a blast blew them wide, / He dropped where he loved on the burst pavement stone / And the funeral grains of the slaughtered floor.” The “morning” comes first in his poem. As with the solstice, the planet has its ways. What humans do is their sorry business.