StormHaven

MILOSZ'S BALANCING ACT

Last week, with Heaney, we talked a lot about balance, about balancing politics with art, and seemed to be in agreement that Heaney accomplished such a balance. In that respect (not in terms of chronology), Czeslaw Milosz out-Heaneys-Heaney. I also commented last week that by describing specific “political” events or tragedies, can be a way of dealing with that specific tragedy but also with more “universal” tragedy, and Milosz accomplishes that as well. Becoming so engaged with his collection that I did not want to, nor could I, put it down, I was emotionally exhausted by the time I finished Milosz. Part of his ability to write “universally” (for lack of a better word) is his collapsing of time and space. Of course we can call this technique “postmodern” or something of the sort, but it’s much more than that (though there are also a few mentions of binaries being inadequate/constructed/etc.- particularly along the lines of gender; I’m thinking of “Table I” and another that I can’t lay my finger on just now). It is not surprising that someone who witnessed firsthand just how dangerously fluid political and geographic barriers can be (of “fictitious States” (“Fear-Dream”), and “Countries and cities that must remain without name, for how can I explain/ why and how many times they changed their banners and emblems?” (“Capri”)) would be able to transcend such (or similar) barriers in his. Nor is it surprising that someone who a) lived such a long life, but more importantly, b) saw the shifting of spatial boundaries occur so rapidly over such a short period of time due to the “forces of history” would be taken with the idea that the past is always present and that the present is always a part of the future. A sort of cyclical view of history and time so that the same sorts of tragedies repeat themselves in different places at different times. Words like “anywhere” and “nowhere” pepper Milosz’s poems as do confessions of not being able to remember precisely what year/month/day something happened (and of course it doesn’t really matter when exactly or where exactly). The most obvious illustration of this theme is “City Without a Name” in which he remembers a place from his youth but is in California (“the feast of Insubstantiality./ Under a gathering of clouds anywhere,”and “not remembering whether it happened in this or that autumn;” “there is no earlier and no later; the seasons of the year and of the day are simultaneous”) Such a view, as I’ve described it, sounds rather depressing, but I don’t get the sense that Milosz held a completely cynical or pessimistic view of humanity; there seems to be an underlying sense of hope, a faith that things can and will get better (and of course, he lived to see it, at least partially accomplished). One of Milosz’s earlier poems, “Campo Dei Fiori,” exemplifies this: at first we recoil from people going about their business while a man is publically burned (“Before the flames had died/ the taverns were full again,/ baskets of olives and lemons/ again on the vendors’ shoulders”), but towards the end of the poem, when Milosz/the speaker, “I,” responds to the event, his impulse is to be “a voice” for the forgotten (“our tongue becomes for them”– a line which absurdly reminds me of Zora Neale Hurston) with the hope that immortalizing the tragedy will perhaps prevent it from happening again (“on a new Campo dei Fiori/ rage will kin dle at a poet’s word”). The idea that words can change the world for the better recurs throughout Milosz’s collection, particularly in poems such as “Incantation” (which in his intro to the collection, Heaney seems quite taken with, especially the line about poetry being an “ally in the service of the good”). The idea that language or poetry “puts what should be above things as they are” and is also able to open “the congealed fist of the past” pervades Milosz’s writing, though in other poems, it is less explicit. (Something we may want to discuss is the tension or difference between his view of art’s purpose and the Communist regime’s view– I take it from Milosz’s obituary in the New York Times that he was dissatisfied with the latter, so I think we should ask what the difference is between art that changes the world and art as explicit propaganda.) Living long enough to see a positive change (and geographically escaping it for a time), however, seems to have produced a strong sense of grief and guilt– for example, “To Raja  Rao,” he confesses that all of the moving about leaves him not only feeling displaced (“on the border of schizophrenia”) but also with “guilt and shame” (This seems not unlike Heaney’s guilt, though Milosz seems to be more intense, nearly obsessive until the last bit of the collection). Such  guilt and grief often manifests through memorializations of folks who were not as fortunate as Milosz, who were not able to escape the political turmoil or who did not desire to. Remembering these folks, trying to immortalize them and their pain in his writing, is the impetus (or one of them) for believing that the past is always present. Again, in “City without a Name,” Milosz/the speaker keeps wondering why the places/people of his youth “keep offering itself” to him, and argues that h e must remember, must write about them, “because except for me no one else knows that they ever/ lived”). There seems to be an inability to escape memory, and this is what produces a sense of haunting (I’m thinking of “Yellow Bicycle,” “Mister Hanusevich,” “Kazia,” “Classmate,”and of “Six Lectures in Verse” which bares, I think, striking similarities to Heaney’s “Station Island”). At times this memorializing seems similar to Heaney’s appreciation for where he came from, but at others, Milosz exudes a sense of being haunted by the past, by his role, or lack of one, in it, so that the writing of people/places/events becomes cathartic– an outlet for his personal demons (which I think is probably what makes reading his poetry for a sustained period of time emotionally exhausting). Another similarity to Seamus is Milosz’s relationship with language, or language (which one you choose to use) as political. It is, I think, significant that Milosz wrote his poems (even while at Berkeley) in Polish, though he had the ability to write in what, like 6 or 7 different languages? His dedication to Polish comes up several times (in “Capri” he blesses the rivers, but pronounces their “names in the way my mother pro-/ nounced them”), but certainly in what seems to be an ode of sorts to language, “My Faithful Mother Tongue,” in which it becomes god-like, with Milosz/the speaker offering “little bowls of colors” to it even when he is “a scholar in a distant country” (and his refrain of “without you, who am I”– again, not unlike Seamus, Milosz sees language not only as political but as part of his personal identity). I’m going to stop gushing now, and gushing I’m afraid I have been, but I must confess (and this is probably painfully obvious) that I found this collection one of the most moving we’ve read this semester.

TIME, GODS, ASCENSION: ELIOT LEAVES THE WORLD

Regarding T.S. Eliot, I'm assuming that we agree on one point, that Eliot essentially wrote a single poem, a very long and evolving poem, that began with "Prufrock" and concluded with Four Quartets. Another way of making the same point:  Eliot had his subject matters, and they were presented and developed in an orderly fashion, and as a result, Eliot's poetic career is imminently "readable," patently interpretable.  It's as if he set himself a group of problems to explore as a young man, devoted his mid-career to exploring them, and having drawn satisfactory conclusions regarding these problems by 1942, when "Burnt Norton" was published and when Eliot still had nearly a quarter-century to live, he ceased writing poetry.  Problem solved.  Case closed.  Poems done.

I've always admired that about him, the way he used poetry to define and complete a task, and I think it's a defining quality of a superior mind.  Eliot never wrote out of habit, it seems to me, nor did he write because he was in a lyrical mood and wished to give vent to his lyricism.  No, Eliot wrote to solve solvable problems, and so the end of poetry was in sight for him as soon as he wrote his first line.

Eliot's defining problems are gathered together in Four Quartets, as if for a final assault.  It's a mighty poem, in my estimation, because it records the struggle required to achieve real clarity on a number of difficult issues.  Eliot is interested in the Christian notion of time, how it fuses time past, present, and future, at the moment of the incarnation, and how, properly conceived, "all time is eternally present," as he says, which is to say, every instant of our lives, again, properly conceived, is a moment of the incarnation. 

Except of course that Eliot was heavily influenced by Indian philosophy, particularly by the Indian practice of figuring forth psychological states as visualized deities:  "I don't know much about gods," Eliot writes, "but I think the river / Is a strong brown god."  Eliot learned from Indian philosophy a kind of lyrical dialecticism, a way of representing poetically the idea that it's difficult to speak of eternity without understanding, implying, and finally accepting the temporal in our lives, the ebb and flow over which we have no control.  To resolve this issue, Eliot ultimately returned to Christianity, a much worked-over Christianity, and found solace, as I read him, in a kind of salvation as figured forth in Christ's life.  Eliot's Christianity in some senses is a conservative Christianity, but in others highly synthetic and unorthodox.

Which leads us to the questions that we might discuss in class.  To what degree do we find Eliot's religious resolutions to be suitable to the contemporary world?  As you probably know, Eliot's stock has dropped somewhat since the heyday of the 40s and 50s.  But I wonder why it has dropped, precisely.  Of course he's conservative politically and artistically, and we tend to fancy ourselves very liberal.  But I think there's more to it than that. 

Eliot has a very distinct vision of art and its purpose, which is, to my eye, visible in his poetry from time to time.  How would you characterize it?  How does it structure his verse?  What are its social implications?  And how does Four Quartets that vision?  What are the poem's essential subjects, and do they engage us today?  Why or why not?  The back cover of my edition has Stephen Spender proclaiming the arrival of "ideas" in Eliot's verse, and what a bracing and much-needed innovation that is.  Agree?  Disagree?

How would you assess Eliot's accomplishment?