Marriage, by Marianne Moore

Marriage is something that is under attack as an institution. Many wish to enlarge its borders, so that gays can be married. Others want multiple partners. Sharia Law allows for a man to have many wives. Exactly what's fair, should be carefully considered.

Fairness is something that everybody wants, but no two can agree on what it means. If I give a cookie to my 3 eldest children, and half a cookie to the youngest, she screams. She screams even though she is two years old, and I haven't taught her about fairness. Fairness is inborn.

If you can have it, then I can have it. That's the argument. Another argument about fairness is that someone has earned something. If one works fifteen hour days with diligence and honesty, and another lies around shooting needles in their arm, do they both deserve the same salary? Should all have the same amount, in spite of work ethic? Marriage isn't exactly something that you work at, or deserve, or is it? The more beautiful among us have more opportunities. The more intelligent, and the wealthier, have more options. But even severely handicapped people can get married.

In marriage, it has traditionally been something that could only take place between a man and a woman. Parental consent was once a requirement, as was the blessing of the church. Many churches now allow gay marriage, and even gay ordination, something that was unthinkable only thirty years back.

The Lutheran split over gay ordination, will presumably also reflect a split over gay marriage. Marriage to the Missouri Synod means babies, and family. ELCA places an emphasis on love, irrespective of how that love is expressed whether it's via oral sex, or anal sex.

Melancthon wrote, "the union of male and female belongs to the order of natural laws. Since the natural law is immutable, the right to contract marriage must always remain" (cited in Law and Protestantism, p. 241).

Many now claim that gayness is also natural, as is pluralistic sex, or wanting to have sex with animals. (In Fairness, this last example is in the wings, but has yet to say its name, or to be voted on by the good people of the ELCA. That is to say, that people who are living outside of marriage in relationship with a rhinocerous have yet to be ordained.)

Since the so-called Sexual Revolution of the 1960s, the strictures surrounding who can have sex with whom are increasingly under assault. The recent case of Roman Polanski's alleged rape and sodomy of a 13-year old girl (a woman now 45) has been sanctioned by the likes of Woody Allen (himself the father of his bride) and other members of Hollywood. One of the Papas of the Mamas and the Papas, or was it one of the Mamas, had a relationship with her own Papa (I haven't sorted this one out yet) for a period exceeding ten years. It's too boring to bother to sort out the details. It strikes some of us as evil, but others as love. All definitions are subject to ongoing revision.

So what should one think about this and fairness? Is one to say no to a proposition of a young man and a giraffe, and to deny the two of them happiness in a civil court?

Should only the possible creation of children be considered, in a state in which some cannot have children, even though they are a man and a woman in love?

"Mutual procreation and nurturance of children" was once considered the norm for marriage (Law and Protestantism, p. 253). But there were always some outsiders. William Burroughs married a woman named Joan and shot apples off her head in the sixties in lieu of having children. Eventually they did have a son, who was born as a drug addict, and later died after his second or third kidney transplant. Joan died after William shot her in the head, having missed the apple. They loved to tell about the game, and William felt remorse.

The apple perhaps reminds us of Adam and Eve, and that marriage is the only superlapsarian institution (existing before the Fall). Some couples marry later in life, or are unable to have children, but their marriages are not annulled. Is that fair? Marriage in Lutheran societies was always a civil affair, and part of the earthly kingdom (there is no marriage or giving of women in marriage in heaven, Jesus said). Therefore the earthly rulers, the civil courts, were to decide what it meant. The Lutheran Church never had formal legal control over marriage.

Marianne Moore never married, and as far as we know, never kissed or dated. She wasn't bad looking, but was busy fussing about with her career, and spent a great deal of time with her mother, who had divorced in Marianne's early childhood (the father was insane, I seem to recall). After Moore's mother's death, she asked the man who made the headstone to leave room for a possible man on the tombstone, in case she married. I haven't seen the headstone. Moore is buried in a cemetery at Gettysburg, alongside her mother. I would like to visit it, but haven't yet arranged a chunk of time to do that.

"Marriage" is Moore's longest poem. It's rather abstract, and consists of a collage of quotes strung together by brief commentary. It was written for a friend's marriage. Some scholars think she's mocking the institution. I don't think so. Others believe that she was gay. I don't think so, although one of her best friends was gay: W.H. Auden, and she had a long correspondence with a gay lesbian poet. But we don't know if she ever seriously considered "hooking up," as it's now put, with either of them, or with some man. We don't know if she was ever busted scoping a man's abs.

Marriage is one of those institutions in which beauty and law come together, and link the secular with the heavenly. But what is it? It seems increasingly to be open to interpretation. Here are some of Moore's divagations (in the Complete Poems, this is one of the most heavily annotated poems, since so many of the quotes are from rather recondite sources). What the poem means has been as widely interpreted as what marriage itself means. And I myself don't really know. It's a mystery to me.


MARRIAGE, by Marianne Moore

This institution,
perhaps one should say enterprise
out of respect for which
one says one need not change one's mind
about a thing one has believed in,
requiring public promises
of one's intention
to fulfil a private obligation:
I wonder what Adam and Eve
think of it by this time,
this fire-gilt steel
alive with goldenness;
how bright it shows -
"of circular traditions and impostures,
committing many spoils,"
requiring all one's criminal ingenuity
to avoid!
Psychology which explains everything
explains nothing,
and we are still in doubt.
Eve: beautiful woman -
I have seen her
when she was so handsome
she gave me a start,
able to write simultaneously
in three languages -
English, German, and French -
and talk in the meantime;
equally positive in demanding a commotion
and in stipulating quiet:
"I should like to be alone";
to which the visitor replies,
"I should like to be alone;
why not be alone together?"
Below the incandescent fruit,
the strange experience of beauty;
its existance is too much;
it tears one to pieces
and each fresh wave of consciousness
is poison.
"See her, see her in this common world,"
the central flaw
in that first crystal-fine experiment,
this amalgamation which can never be more
than an interesting impossibility,
describing it
as "that strange paradise
unlike flesh, stones,
gold or stately buildings,
the choicest piece of my life:
the heart rising
in its estate of peace
as a boat rises
with the rising of the water";
constrained in speaking of the serpent -
shed snakeskin in the history of politeness
not to be returned to again -
that invaluable accident
exonerating Adam.
And he has beauty also;
it's distressing - the O thou
to whom from whom,
without whom nothing - Adam;
"something feline,
something colubrine" - how true!
a crouching mythological monster
in that Persian miniature of emerald mines,
raw silk - ivory white, snow white, oyster white, and six others -
that paddock full of leopards and giraffes -
long lemon-yellow bodies
sown with trapezoids of blue.
Alive with words, vibrating like a cymbal
touched before it has been struck,
he has prophesied correctly -
the industrious waterfall,
"the speedy stream
which violently bears all before it,
at one time as silent as the air
and now as powerful as the wind."
"Treading chasms
on the uncertain footing of a spear,"
forgetting that there is in woman
a quality of mind
which as an instinctive manifestation
is unsafe,
he goes on speaking
in a formal customary strain,
of "past states, the present state,
seals, promises,
the evil one suffered,
the good one enjoys,
hell, heaven,
everything convenient
to promote one's joy."
In him a state of mind
perceives what it was not
intended that he should;
"he experiences a solemn joy
in seeing that he has become an idol."
Plagued by the nightingale
in the new leaves,
with its silence -
not its silence but its silences,
he says of it:
"It clothes me with a shirt of fire."
"He dares not clap his hands
to make it go on
lest it should fly off;
if he does nothing, it will sleep;
if he cries out, it will not understand."
Unnerved by the nightingale
and dazzled by the apple,
impelled by "the illusion of a fire
effectual to extinguish fire,"
compared with which
the shining of the earth
is but deformity - a fire
"as high as deep
as bright as broad
as long as life itself,"
he stumbles over marriage,
"a very trivial object indeed"
to have destroyed the attitude
in which he stood -
the ease of the philosopher
unfathered by a woman.
Unhelpful Hymen!
a kind of overgrown cupid
reduced to insignificance
by the mechanical advertising
parading as involuntary comment,
by that experiment of Adam's
with ways out but no way in -
the ritual of marriage,
augmenting all its lavishness;
its fiddlehead ferns,
lotus flowers, opuntias, white dromedaries,
its hippopotamus -
nose and mouth combined
in one magnificent hopper -
its snake and the potent apple.
He tells us
that "for love that will
gaze an eagle blind,
that is with Hercules
climbing the trees
in the garden of the Hesperides,
from forty-five to seventy
is the best age,"
commending it
as a fine art, as an experiment,
a duty or as merely recreation.
One must not call him ruffian
nor friction a calamity -
the fight to be affectionate:
"no truth can be fully known
until it has been tried
by the tooth of disputation."
The blue panther with black eyes,
the basalt panther with blue eyes,
entirely graceful -
one must give them the path -
the black obsidian Diana
who "darkeneth her countenance
as a bear doth,"
the spiked hand
that has an affection for one
and proves it to the bone,
impatient to assure you
that impatience is a mark of independence,
not of bondage.
"Married people often look that way" -
"seldom and cold, up and down,
mixed and malarial
with a good day and a bad."
We Occidentals are so unemotional,
self lost, the irony preserved
in "the Ahasuerus tête-à-tête banquet"
with its small orchids like snake's tongues,
with its "good monster, lead the way,"
with little laughter
and munificence of humor
in that quixotic atmosphere of frankness
in which "four o'clock does not exist,
but at five o'clock
the ladies in their imperious humility
are ready to receive you";
in which experience attests
that men have power
and sometimes one is made to feel it.
He says, "What monarch would not blush
to have a wife
with hair like a shaving brush?"
The fact of woman
is "not the sound of the flute
but very poison."
She says, "Men are monopolists
of 'stars, garters, buttons
and other shining baubles' -
unfit to be the guardians
of another person's happiness."
He says, "These mummies
must be handled carefully -
'the crumbs from a lion's meal,
a couple of shins and the bit of an ear';
turn to the letter M
and you will find
that ' a wife is a coffin,'
that severe object
with the pleasing geometry
stipulating space not people,
refusing to be buried
and uniquely disappointing,
revengefully wrought in the attitude
of an adoring child
to a distinguished parent."
She says, "This butterfly,
this waterfly, this nomad
that has 'proposed
to settle on my hand for life' -
What can one do with it?
There must have been more time
in Shakespeare's day
to sit and watch a play.
You know so many artists who are fools."
He says, "You know so many fools
who are not artists."
The fact forgot
that "some have merely rights
while some have obligatioins,"
he loves himself so much,
he can permit himself
no rival in that love.
She loves herself so much,
she cannot see herself enough -
a statuette of ivory on ivory,
the logical last touch
to an expansive splendor
earned as wages for work done:
one is not rich but poor
when one can always seem so right.
What can one do for them -
these savages
condemned to disaffect
all those who are not visionaries
alert to undertake the silly task
of making people noble?
This model of petrine fidelity
who "leaves her peaceful husband
only because she has seen enough of him" -
that orator reminding you,
"I am yours to command."
"Everything to do with love is a mystery;
it is more than a day's work
to investigate this science."
Ones sees that it is rare -
that striking grasp of opposites
opposed each to the other, not to unity,
which in cycloid inclusivenenss
has dwarfed the demonstration
of Columbus with the egg -
a triumph of simplicity -
that charitive Euroclydon
of frightening disinterestedness
which the world hates,
admitting:

"I am such a cow,
if I had a sorrow
I should feel it a long time;
I am not one of those
who have a great sorrow
in the morning
and a great joy at noon";

which says: "I have encountered it
among those unpretentious
proteges of wisdom,
where seeming to parade
as the debater and the Roman,
the statesmenship
of an archaic Daniel Webster
persists to their simplicity of temper
as the essence of the matter:

'Liberty and union
now and forever';
the Book on the writing table;
the hand in the breast pocket."

This is Moore's longest poem. The words, "liberty and union, now and forever," appear on a Daniel Webster statue's pedestal found in Central Park. Webster lived from 1782-1852.

Is Your Town Ninevah?

Is Your Town Ninevah?

Why so desolate?
in phantasmagoria about fishes,
what disgusts you? Could
not all personal upheaval in
the name of freedom, be tabooed?

It is Ninevah
and are you Jonah
in the sweltering east wind of your wishes?
I, myself, have stood
there by the aquarium, looking
At the Statue of Liberty.

This Marianne Moore poem references several things. One is Jonah, who is sent by God to evangelize in Ninevah, which is across the river from the town of Mosul, in Iraq. Ninevah was the capital of the Assyrian empire (Assyrian?) which was almost like a Nazi empire for the Jews. Their art consisted of paintings of headless and chopped up Jews. An unpleasant place, but that's where Jonah was chosen to go. He went the other direction, but ended up having to do what God told him to do. And he ended up creating a bastion of Christians which persists until this day (half a million Christians in or near Mosul right up until the beginning of the war).

The last line of the poem references the aquarium that once stood in Battery Park (knocked down by Robert Moses in a fit of pique).

Liberty isn't license, I think she says some place.

I don't know to whom the poem is addressed. She seems to ask us whether our life is in tune with God's wishes for us, and whether it isn't a bit like being tossed to the Assyrians, and having to make do. Are you out evangelizing? I sort of am, but via the internet, which is cheating. Hiding in the belly of the whale. Is that a metaphor for something? At least he gave himself up on the ship, when the waters were calling for him. Maybe the reason America is all screwed up is that someone's not really listening to what she's supposed to be doing.

Does Poetry Require a MORAL Dimension?

In Aristotle's Poetics, he argues that:

"Character is that which reveals moral purpose, showing what kinds of things a man chooses or avoids" (13).

Furthermore, Aristotle argues that a theme that is "morally hurtful," is to be avoided (58).

But this doesn't necessarily mean that we can't, for instance, "represent degraded women," (59), because "all action is not to be condemned -- any more than all dancing -- but only that of bad performers" (59). I think this means that merely moral objections are not sufficient to can a performance. The work can be aesthetically excellent even if it is representing bad activities such as lewd dancing.

Finally, he argues that good art is that which appeals to the "better sort of audience" (58).

That audience is better on moral terms, or more accustomed to thinking about what constitutes better art?

Or is it not both?

Curtis Faville keeps tweaking me for backing morally substantive art at the expense of aesthetics.

The two have always been intertwined since art is a kind of philosophy at least in Aristotle, if not in Plato. For Plato art is agit-prop for a Spartan state.

Or in Stalinism, art is social realist agit-prop for a Marxist state.

Surrealism wasn't agit-prop, but mined the forbidden aspects of the unconscious in order to create voluptuous emotion in order to create "convulsive beauty" (final page of Breton's novel, Nadja).

Lutheran Surrealism argues for a voluptuous emotion and "convulsive beauty" that is guided by a Lutheran sense of propriety. We argue furthermore that this is one of the delights of Marianne Moore, who is canonical in our terms, as she does not display the "depravity of character" (58) that ruins the verses of Allen Ginsberg (especially in the later poems, where his character is rotten clear through).

All quotes are from Aristotle's Poetics, Dover Thrift Edition, 1997.

Fence Post In Delhi

The fence post on Orchard Street in Delhi is one of the last remnants
of the orchard that once stood there.

This fence post has somehow had a tree grow up around it. The post is rusted metal, and has at its top what used to be a place to attach the gate.

The orchard was cleared out to make room for a cemetery (behind the photographer).

Last Christmas when I bought my Canon Power Shot 570, this was the first photo I took. Behind the fence post is a car lot for what was once a Chrysler Dealership (in the cream colored building). That place was in business for decades, but was driven out of business by Chrysler last winter when the company suddenly demanded more rent. Now that whole building is empty, except for a tiny repair shop that occupies less than a twentieth of the floorspace.

I always like to see the tree with the fence post stuck in it. It might be at least 40 years old? I was afraid that they'd chop the tree down when the car dealership was sold, and wanted to document the unusual sight before they did. However, it is still there. Every day I go by it on my bicycle. I don't know how many people notice it. A mathematician who has lived directly across the street for forty years told me he had never noticed it when I pointed it out to him, and asked him if it had been there when he moved in.

NO SWAN SO FINE

Written in 1932, Moore's poem is based on two news clippings. One is about the water at Versailles from 1931, and the other about a candelabra that had belonged to someone named Lord Balfour, who had been the Prime Minister of England, and had urged the League of Nations to provide a homeland for the Jewish people.

NO SWAN SO FINE

"No water so still as the

dead fountains of Versailles." No swan,

with swart blind look askance

and gondoliering legs, so fine

as the chinz china one with fawn-

brown eyes and toothed gold

collar on to show whose bird it was.

Lodged in the Louis Fifteenth

candelabrum-tree of cockscomb-

tinted buttons, dahlias,

sea-urchins, and everlastings,

it perches on the branching foam

of polished sculptured

flowers--at ease and tall. The king is dead.

One way to read the poem may be to go historical and to drag in the Versailles Treaty which imposed fantastic reparations on Germany.

Who is the king that is dead in the last line. Was it Louis XV? Or was it a more newly dead king? George VI? Edward VIII?

Is it possible she's just saying that the monarchies are now dead? And with them, the glory of their candelabras, to be replaced by democracies?

Th aristocracies stole from the peasants to make a very fine life for a few, and are thus morally bankrupt, and no longer legitimate? In their place would come the new kleptocracies of the communist rabble, which would kill the kings, and replace them with their vehement parties that redistributed what there was to go around, largely to themselves and their close henchmen (see N. Korean palaces owned by Kim Jong-Il).

The left still complains about the kleptocracies of the rich. But the kleptocracies of the poor are equally repugnant, stealing the beautiful things of those who had worked hard for them, and redistributing them.

Meanwhile, the waters (life?) of Versailles are dead. Versailles's a museum piece.

Were the modernists against museum pieces? Were they against fine art? Certainly Moore wasn't. But she must have had some kind of ambivalence toward such extravagance. The poem appeared in what was going to be the last number of Poetry Magazine. So it may have been a "swan song" for the journal -- several critics suggest.

The swan was owned by royalty. Art was owned by the wealthy. As a Protestant, she might have had problems with that. She might not! As a Calvinist, she isn't even supposed to be making art. Perhaps she thinks of it as an extravagance, but then there is the woman who poured costly perfume on Christ's feet, and he didn't seem to mind.

The new communist art had to illustrate social problems and was owned by the state.

The older art was meant to brag about the pleasures of ownership, and the fantastic wealth of the royalty.

What on the third hand is this art doing? I don't think anyone knows.

ENSOR EXHIBIT

The Museum of Modern Art staged a James Ensor exhibit which ends today.


I had only known Ensor as the painter of "Christ's Entry into Brussels in 1889," and even that was a hint of something, rather than a full-fledged experience with the painting.


Yesterday, my friend Gary Mayer and I went down to MOMA to see the exhibit with our kids, Lola and Ava (in fifth grade together).


Ensor's famous painting was not there, but there were about 200 other pieces. Ensor had great style and form, but apparently rarely left the small city of Ostend, where he lived with his mother and extended family, on the coast of Belgium.


I am not going to be able to catalogue the exhibit, or to say what we saw in any of the other exhibits. It was too much! Even to talk about the one painting, and the preliminary drawings for it, are too much!


We got down to NYC in about 2 and a half hours, and back in about the same time. My friend Gary didn't know this route, and was astonished at the savings in time (about an hour each way).


Suffice it to say that Christ's Entry into Brussels in 1889 shows a commercial society in which MUSTARD is at least as important as Christ (in terms of space allotted in the painting), and one in which commercial and political values crowd out spiritual values. And yet, the notion of Christ still gives weight and value to those other things, jostling them.

Demons and angels (many rubicund and comical ones, too), competed with images of Napoleon at Waterloo, and self-portraits of Ensor wearing a flowery Flemish hat, were some images from the other canvasses.

My friend Gary Mayer -- a painter of some importance whose work has been cited in Art in America and many other vehicles -- enjoyed his visit. I did, too. Mayer can't paint full time as he did as a young man, and now that he's got a family works and works at other jobs. So this was a rare visit to a big museum.

I think he saw Ensor differently than I did. What I got out of the show is not what you're supposed to get. Most of the books argue that Ensor was not a Christian, but that he saw Christ as some kind of image of an embattled and misunderstood figure, much like himself (Christ has Ensor's features). I think however that he saw Christ as the center of all human value, but within a world that is completely foreign to the values he had come to herald. Having been crucified, I think that Christ then realized this world wasn't ready for his values, and so he said he would be right back.

Since then, people have been waiting. And theologians, like the producers of mustards and kings, and people at Carnival, are still not really ready. But if he comes, then all kinds of commercial concerns will sponsor him, such as Colman's Mustard. And many political movements will try to align themselves. So if he was to come again in Brussels in 1888, or in Delhi, in 2009, we still wouldn't be quite ready, but would still try to cash in. I think that's the joke of the painting, but it's a joke played with as much wry humor as could be mustard.

Ensor's style was Great Master level when he was 20 years old. That too is part of the joke, because the painting is painted very crudely.

And mustard SEEDS are part of the joke. But Ensor was a sublime joker, and his jokes are immensely private.

It was a weird show by a weird painter. For me the big question was: how Christian was he? Or what exactly did Christ mean to him? Jesus is in a number of the paintings, and seems to be used as a figure of high value. But putting an exact price on that value is what's hard, and I assume that every critic will have their own price that they want put on Christ's forehead, thru which in turn they can value or otherwise comprehend the paintings. Just because one of us might decide that Christ is either of infinite value, or of no value, doesn't mean that that's where Ensor placed the value. And I assume that stock prices for all figures in Ensor's life rise and fall, as they do for most. It doesn't mean that the paintings are incomprehensible, but it does make them difficult to evaluate.

What did the soup cans mean to Warhol? He claims he liked the stuff, and that he had it every day for lunch. But that doesn't mean it's not also a critique.

And yet also in itself a commercial gambit.

How do we approach Ensor and his paintings?

Warily.

Melchior Vulpius, by Marianne Moore

It is often thought that Moore hid her Presby side. I can't understand this because it seems to be overtly present in every poem she writes. Maybe her readers believe that she must be a secularist like them, since they are not used to poets that aren't secular militants. I admit that her poetry is rarely as overtly Protestant as in her poem, Melchior Vulpius, which appears on p. 302 of The Poems of Marianne Moore. Vulpius, for those who don't know, was a Lutheran hymn writer who lived from 1560-1615. He wrote EXCLUSIVELY Lutheran hymns -- about 400 of them, and composed the music for them. I've never heard a single one, at least so far as I know (unless one of them is in the Lutheran green hymnal, and I've sung it without my knowledge!).

Melchior Vulpius



c. 1560-1615



a contrapuntalist

composer of chorales

and wedding-hymns to Latin words

but best of all an anthem:

"God be praised for conquering faith

which feareth neither pain nor death."



We have to trust this art --

this mastery which none

can understand. Yet someone has

acquired it and is able to

direct it. Mouse-skin-bellows'-breath

expanding into rapture saith



'Hallelujah.' Almost

utmost absolutist

and fugue-ist, Amen; slowly building

from miniature thunder,

crescendos antidoting death --

love's signature cementing faith.



I think the poem is quite clear. Moore's poems are generally affirmations. (She lived at a time when the adage, "If you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything," was still prominent -- it was a world before the ugliness of dissing someone became the dominant paradigm, especially in musical circles such as Rap. Moore would have found it unpleasant, as would Melchior Vulpius. There's a funny anecdote in the biography in which she met a person she didn't like too well, and afterwords was asked how she liked the person. "Well, he had shined his shoes very well," she said. She almost always affirmed. This poem is an affirmation of how well she likes Melchior Vulpius. She likes his anthem, which says that God should be praised for the faith that allows us to conquer death. The music apparently builds from crescendos "slowly building from miniature thunder."

Critics and theologians are beginning to see Moore as a Protestant poet. For the longest time the most ridiculous things were being written about how she was a socialist, and a feminist, hated marriage, and was a closet lesbian, and so on and so forth. The biography by Charles Molesworth put paid to most of that nonsense. She is a solid Presbyterian. She never wandered from her faith (most poets have a crazy period in their youth, but she didn't). She was always going to church, and always enjoyed it immensely.

There's a nice article about it here:

http://theologytoday.ptsem.edu/apr1984/v41-1-article3.htm

Marianne Moore was not nasty, nor was she abstractly obtuse. She threw her pitches right through the center of the plate, and every one was a burning fastball. Some of them break and/or curve, but she never beans the batter. She's full of affirmations, and plain-spoken strength. To my mind she's quite Puritan, but she's not otherworldly. She's in this world, but not of it.

Google-ability

Most facts today are googleable. I would like to say that I invented the term. It came to me, at least, from no outside source. However, I just googled it, and the term itself is googleable. There are 10,000 hits for it.

A new entrant in the internet knowledge sweeps is Bing.com. It's the Microsoft competition's attempt to carve out a niche in the market. When I put in my name they give me more hits, but the hits are not quite as accurate. You also find odd things. Someone put up a video called Kirby Olson is Gay, which is meant to make fun of me, I guess. It just has a dark shadowy individual bobbing back and forth.

And if you search through images, you get different ones. It's a handy new resource, but I don't like the term, Bing-a-ble. But maybe in time, I will.

Can you Bing that?

Are some facts going to be Bing-a-ble, and others, Google-a-ble? Will each have its strengths? It remains to be seen.

Since school started I haven't been using the net quite as often. I do maintenance on my blog and visit a few other blogs, but I don't have time for deep research as I did over the summer. At one point this summer I read through portions of the Obamacare bill. Now I understand that there are three or four other versions floating about. I haven't got time to search for it, or to read three 1100-page documents, or to compare the versions.

It strikes me as a game of three-card monte. Which is which? It would be nice if someone competent and objective could boil the bill down to ten pages. But I don't trust anyone's spin. The Constitution of the US isn't 1100 pages in length. Particular phrases in the Constitution such as the commerce clause cause all kinds of headaches, and they were at least trying to be precise. I think on the other hand the current administration likes to be as vague as possible, so as to allow for all kinds of wiggle room. Are we losing the ability to be concise, or are we trying to sneak in provisions under a welter of obtuse verbiage?

When I ask my colleagues what is the health plan about? Are you for it? They have no idea. My students have no idea. No one seems to really know what's in the bill, or which bill is even THE BILL. The whole thing is vague. And I thank the tea parties for at least standing up and demanding clarity and accountability.

I thank the young videographers for going after ACORN and knocking out their 8 billion dollar monopoly on vote garnering and much else. What a coup!

Meanwhile, the government just called another monopoly. This time I think it was on student loans.

Cars, banks, student loans, healthcare. Gobble, gobble, gobble. The first bird is the eagle, not the turkey. We must be vigilant, someone said. "The price of freedom is eternal vigilance" -- I think it was Jefferson. I should google who said it, but don't have the time.

The More Moore the Merrier

Pale Morning Moon, Dark Blue Black Sea

green cypresses all black against

the sun's noon fire, liberty is

noble food. To divide

it makes it more; more of it, not

outstanding -- futile word. When insight

is not farsight, when grace would be

outstanding without having been

indwelling, there is reason to have sighed.

Boll-i-var, Bow - lee - var, I don't

know what you call it but I know

he set them free. For the

strengthenings of liberty, thought

of in our minds, done with our fingers,

hoped for in our lives, we're asking,

save us from the captivity

of surfeit; save us from complacency.

Life must stop stifling life with life.

It must. Alas that we must put

an end to death by death.

We're begging: we are begging for

news to the prisoner that he may

come out of his dungeon at last.

He's seen destruction and would see

deliverance. Turn sighing into breath.

The Poems of Marianne Moore, p. 248

Written about the same time as "Keeping Their World Large," "Pale Morning Moon, Dark Blue Black Sea," enlarges our understanding of the former poem by showing yet another facet to her thinking. This time she references Simon Bolivar, the freedom fighter of South America who opened up S. American nations to democracy. (This poem doesn't appear in Complete Poems, but is in the more capacious volume, edited by Grace Schulman, Viking Press, 2003.)

To be complacent about the children of Afghanistan, and the young women of Afghanistan, is more or less like being complacent about the young girl who was captured by psychopath Garrido, and forced to be his sex slave for two decades while living in a tent in his California backyard.

I can't understand how this can be done. Some people just look the other way, and are content to think, it's too much trouble to care about little kids around the world. Let them rot in captivity. Let them live in their dungeons.

Forget about delivering the slaves of the American South. Let their slavemasters live in fat peace, liberty is nothing. But Moore says instead that "liberty/ is noble food."

It's as important as food, and possibly more important. Communists don't understand it, any more than they understand economics. Liberty is costly. Not only in raw dollars. "Alas that we must put/ an end to death by death."

Communists mourn the death of Saddam Hussein and his evil sons!

The dove is also a hawk, depending on one's viewpoint.

Peace can only come through war.

"Save us from the captivity of surfeit," so that we can have the "strengthenings of liberty."

Can the prisoners of other systems be released now please?

People are trapped in their systems. But many would like to come out of their dungeons. Not just the concentration camps of Poland and Germany, but the brothels of India, the prison-house of Myanmar, the lunatic asylum of North Korea, the basketcase of Zimbabwe, the torture tunnels of contemporary Vietnam.

Let them breathe.

By the way, the reason that lobsters like the very cold waters off Maine is that there is more oxygen in very cold waters. Trout and most other fish prefer very cold water. More oxygen. Breathing is important. Liberty as breath. "Dark Blue Black Sea."

Image above: she dressed herself as an American Revolutionary War Hero. I assume the tri-cornered cap is similar to that of George Washington?

"Firearms are second only to the Constitution in importance; they are the peoples' liberty's teeth." -- George Washington

OBAMA NOT STUPID

Yesterday morning's paper had an article that compared President Bush with President Obama, trying desperately to cast the comparison in Obama's favor.

"Bush pledged to 'rid the world of evil,' and framed the worst act of terrorism on American soil with a black-and-white clarity that belied the complex challenges that lay ahead."

"Obama, more discriminating in his speech, has struggled to craft a clear message as he faces difficult decisions about how best to protest Americans and amid growing doubts about his ability to do so."

These two sentences made full back-to-back paragraphs, and were published anonymously through the Associated Press article published in the Oneonta Daily Star under the title, "This 9/11, Obama Has Bullhorn on Terror."

I smirked as I read them.

The reason that Bush could be clear is that he was working out of a clear set of ideas. He's a Lockean, and he knows this. For Locke, any government that is not protective of the life, health, liberty and property of its citizenship is an unlawful government. Hussein's government clearly fit that description, as did the government of the Taliban. Locke argued that legitimate governments had the right to challenge and remove illegitimate governments. Bush and Blair acted on that prescription, knowing the basis of their ideas, and how it legitimated their actions.

The problem for Obama is that he doesn't have a clear set of ideas. He is a Marxist, but he isn't aware of this. He sat for twenty years in a Marxist church, but it never dawned on him that it was a Marxist church. He has surrounded himself with Marxists, and tells us that in college he sought out Marxist professors. His mentor in Hawaii, the poet Frank something whose name I forget, was a Marxist ideologue. Obama is deeply imbued with Marxism, but he doesn't really know this, or at least acknowledge this. If he were to get somewhere, as in AA, he could at least begin to confess to himself and to the American people that he is a Marxist.

If he were to acknowledge it, he would have to acknowledge it publicly, but because his ideas are anathema in the American public sphere, he has to hide his cards. But even he doesn't know where his cards came from. This is one of the problems of the universities right now. They speak in favor of Marxist ideas, but those ideas are anathema in the public sphere. We just fought a fifty-year cold war against those ideas, and won. Now, they are coming back via our very own university systems. However, no one can go forth and cite Marx as a legitimator of their ideas. Technically, it's legal to be a Marxist, but no one can really get traction with that philosophy in the public sphere for fear of being shouted down, and delegitimated.

Obama could proclaim himself a Marxist, but if he did his ideas would immediately be nixed by the vast majority of the public.

If Obama was aware that most of the notions of multiculturalism were worked out by Marxists of various stripes, he would perhaps abandon his own ideas. But then he would have no way forward.

His problem with being unable to "craft a clear message," is that he doesn't know where his ideas came from. Bush, on the other hand, knew where his ideas came from, and could talk about them in public, and receive public sanction for them everywhere but in the vociferous far left.

The far left is Marxist. The far left voted for Obama because they clearly perceived that he was also a Marxist. They've also hoodwinked a good proportion of the youth vote, and the minority community vote.

However, those ideas won't be accepted in America even in much of those communities if they were known for what they were. And so Obama -- a very smart man -- is crossed up and has no firm ground to stand upon, no common set of ideas to motivate the electorate.

He has a few notions that share common ground with Christianity -- compassion for the poor -- for instance, and he uses those to go forward. But even those ideas are strongly flavored by his Marxist background, and by his Saul Alinsky tactics of stealth and manipulation. He cannot speak openly, or clearly, about his true intentions. He cannot even look in the mirror and own up to his own intentions.

"Empathy," is a word he throws around. This is a Christian concept to some degree, and so it has resonance within the Christian community. But it's really a Marxist concept coming out of liberation theology. He used it to legitimate his choice of justice Sotomayor, and he used it to describe what was wrong with Al Qaeda when they flew civilian airplanes full of innocent women and children into the twin towers.

But is it enough of a principle with which to guide a government? The president is the head of the military. Empathy might be something by which he can get his trillion dollars for a new health care bureaucracy overrun and overseen by his confederates in ACORN.

But will it actually make America more well? Will it genuinely make American better? Or will it just be another step of a stumbling presidency hamstrung by its lack of an ideology, and its lack of an ability to understand its own communist direction?

I sense not so much that President Obama is a liar so much as he's confused, and unfit to lead because his thinking is so unlike the basic foundations of our country. He thinks he is now the leader of a big state, and has carte blanche, like Plato wanted for his philosopher-king, or like Marx wanted for the role of the communist party, or like Stalin had, or like what Hitler possessed. But the American presidency was created by men who were afraid of bigwigs and didn't want the presidency to have the power of a king, or a nobleman, or a psychotic dictator. They surrounded the presidency with checks and balances. Annoying to have others speak, when you are the One, but our government is not made to be led by just one.

William Lee Miller wrote in his intellectual biography that James Madison wrote in his notes during the Constitutional Convention, "The truth was that all men having power ought to be distrusted to a certain degree." Miller comments, "Every person should submit his or her will, each group should submit its will, to the criticism and restraint of others, other wills, other interests, other conceptions of the common good" -- from James Madison and the Founding, p. 92, U. of Virginia Press, 1992.

Hannah Arendt among others argues that the European states provided for a bigwig, and a strongman, in many cases. America, on the other hand, did not. Obama is extremely impatient with this. He wants to have total power. He thinks he knows what's good for America, and thinks we should be more like Europe. He does not however have the capacity to remake the country. He doesn't even have the intellectual capacity to understand who he is, or how he came to be that way. He doesn't even know that he's a communist. Perhaps by the end of this first term in office, he will at least know that much. But I doubt it. Obama is an intelligent and confident man, but he's surrounded himself with idiots, and ideologues, and yes-men, many of whom come out of an alien Marxist tradition that will forever be anathema to the American Dream as it was crafted by Madison out of John Locke's treatises on government.

9/11

Eight years later much has been accomplished. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have changed those countries into multi-party Democratic systems in which education is a guaranteed right.

The tyranny of the Taliban has been lifted.

The tyranny of Saddam Hussein has been destroyed.

Around the world under W. a sense that freedom was on the march.

With Reagan years before global communism was stopped. At Christmas 1989 the communist empire collapsed, releasing its stranglehold on the East Bloc, and instantiating new parties from Tallinn to Bucharest.

Today the one-party systems of Islam are under attack. Women have gotten the right to vote, and to read.

Meanwhile, the new president H. has pulled back from some of these promises, and instead threatens to push a bureaucratic Moloch on to its citizens, furthering the abortion cynicism, and possibly extending the age of abortion to three years, or even later, with his stealth care death-panels.

The nation is nearly out of money, with two presidents in a row believing they had been handed a credit card with infinite credit.

The credit is being granted by communist China, which thus affirms its grip on Tibet, on Myanmar, North Korea, Zimbabwe and the Sudan, further spreading the terror of one-party states, and further destroying freedom of speech and religion within its growing boundaries.

As we extend rights into Iraq and Afghanistan, wrongs multiply in the regions that the communists still control.

At home, few realize the benefits of multi-party democracy. In the universities, the tightening of the one-party Democrats continues with an 18 to 1 advantage of Democrats over Republicans in most universities and colleges. Speech codes further tighten what can and cannot be said.

Left blogs continue to censor conservative and centrist speech.

And yet, the spirit of James Madison is not dead. It still lives on in this blog!

Moore and the Protestant Ethic

I May, I Might, I Must


If you will tell me why the fen
appears impassable, I then
will tell you why I think that I
can get across it if I try.

-- Marianne Moore


Some of Moore's lyrics are clearer than others. This one is about as clear as can be. It's about work ethic, and indomitable striving. It appears in the 1959 collection, O To Be A Dragon.

It's as far from the layabout notions of the Beatniks as possible, and as far as the waiting for the bailout from the government as possible. It's an ethos of heartland can-do, against the notion that the government owes me a living, so I can write my poems about breaking as many commandments as possible in one day.

Moore's favorite book in the Bible was Job. She liked his perseverance.

Her poems are never just chicken-scratch that could mean anything, but they are rarely as bold and as clear as this one. But underneath all the others, is this same sense of a work ethic, and that a good life is one that is fought for, in which one's abilities are put to extreme tests (impossible tests), and yet, the heroic attitude is one that one nevertheless will survive.

Moore would never have agreed that a poem is just an elegant surface without content, or that it's a bunch of signifiers without significance.

In her poem "Keeping Their World Large," written during the intensity of the roll-back of Nazi power on the Italian peninsula, opens with references to Italian-Americans, and to their home-country, which had become a killing ground.

I should like to see that country's tiles, bedrooms,
some patios
and ancient wells: Rinaldo
Caramonica's the cobbler's, Frank Sblendorio's
and Dominick Angelastro's country --
the grocer's, the iceman's, the dancer's, the
beautiful Miss Damiano's; wisdom's

and all angels' Italy, this Christmas Day
this Christmas year.
A noiseless piano, an
innocent war, the heart that can act against itself. Here,
each unlike and all alike, could
so many, stumbling, falling, multiplied
till bodies lay as ground to walk on --

'If Christ and the apostles died in vain,
I'll die in vain with them'
against this way of victory.
That forest of white crosses!
My eyes won't close to it.

All laid like animals for sacrifice --
like Isaac on the mount,
were their own sacrifice.

Marching to death, marching to life?
'Keeping their world large,'
whose spirits and whose bodies
all too literally were our shield,
are still our shield.

They fought the enemy,
we fight fat living and self-pity.
Shine, o shine,
unfalsifying sun, on this sick scene.

pp. 145-146

It's rare for Moore to not be more playful about what she means. In this case, she opens her poem with a reference to a letter from Reverend Gilkey that appeared in the New York Times on June 7, 1944. "All too literally, their flesh and their spirit are our shield" New York Times, June 7, 1944, it reads at the top of the poem.

D-Day was June 6, 1944.

The battle up the Italian peninsula had begun in September 1943, and was still ongoing through the winter and spring of 1944. The ferocious battle for Monte Cassino (a Catholic monastery that the Nazis had infested with artillery and machine-gun booby traps) was still very much a concern.

Moore writes that the fallen bodies were so thick that they "lay as ground to walk on."

Gilkey was a Naval Chaplain who served in World War II with Moore's brother, John Warner Moore.

What exactly does she mean by the title, "Keeping Their World Large" which she quotes from somewhere without attribution? Is it part of Gilkey's letter?

What does it mean to be part of a larger world, a world where freedom and human rights are taken for granted, and where soldiers freely give their lives, "their own sacrifice" to the notion of this larger world? The narrow world that the Nazis had bequeathed to the conquered territories -- a world without any rights, or any freedoms, probably no worse than what is given to those who live under Kim Jong-Il or the dictators in Myanmar, or the sickening small world to which the American left consigned the people of Vietnam. What does it mean to fight for humane principles such as freedom of speech and religion, and to show that there is something greater than mere life?

Coots in Cahoots

I suspect that many of us at LS are well on the way to being "old coots," which the Urban Dictionary defines thusly:

1. Any of several dark-gray aquatic birds of the genus Fulica of North America and Europe, having a black head and neck, lobed toes, and a white bill.

2. Informal. An eccentric or crotchety person, especially an eccentric old man.

I think women should also be able to be defined as coots. But I don't know why a duck becomes the image of an eccentric and crotchety gentleman or gentlewoman. Certainly all the men and women I would want to know would become old coots.

Is there something specific about the behavior of a coot that makes it an image of a slightly Edward Lear-esque personnage?

Should we each begin to pen a limerick with a drawing of ourselves for our headstones?

NB: One of the better observations I once came across when I was reading the critical literature on Edward Lear is that almost all the characters in the drawings have their toes pointed as if in a ballet.

THE STUDENT, by Marianne Moore

This poem by Moore is on pp. 101-102 of the Complete Poems, but appears to have been written earlier than 1941 when it was published (the notes indicate that the quotes are mainly from the same period as the first two poems we've read. I think this poem fleshes out the notion of the student AS hero, or the scholar AS hero -- lines in the bottom of 6th and beginning of 7th stanza are from Emerson (another possible hero for our list?). The syllabic trend is continued. Generally in English poets use meter or free-verse. But in some other languages such as Japanese and Welsh, syllabics are preferred.

The notes that Moore makes on this poem in the back of CP are fairly extensive (no notes on the first two poems). She cites Einstein, Emerson, and Edmund Burke, among others. Without further ado:

Marianne Moore (1887-1972)


THE STUDENT

"In America", began
the lecturer, "everyone must have a
degree. The French do not think that
all can have it, they don't say everyone
must go to college." We
incline to feel, here,
that although it may be unnecessary

to know fifteen languages,
one degree is not too much. With us, a
school -like the singing tree of which
the leaves were mouths that sang in concert-
is both a tree of knowledge
and of liberty-,
seen in the unanimity of college

mottoes, lux et veritas,
Christo et ecclesiae, sapiet
felici. It may be that we
have not knowledge, just opinions, that we
are undergraduates,
not students; we know
we have been told with smiles, by expatriates


of whom we had asked "When will
your experiment be finished?" "Science
is never finished." Secluded
from domestic strife, Jack Bookworm led a
college life, says Goldsmith;
and here also as
in France or Oxford, study is beset with

dangers -with bookworms, mildews,
and complaisancies. But someone in New
England has known enough to say
that the student is patience personified,
a variety
of hero, "patient
of neglect and of reproach" -who can "hold by

himself". You can't beat hens to
make them lay. Wolf's wool is the best of wool,
but it cannot be sheared, because
the wolf will not comply. With knowledge as
with wolves' surliness,the student studies
voluntarily, refusing to be less
than individual. He


"gives his opinion and then rests upon it";
he renders service when there is
no reward, and is too reclusive for
some things to seem to touch
him; not because he
has no feeling but because he has so much.


("The Student", in "What Are Years", 1941.)

NOTE: The bit about Wolf's Wool is from Burke, the bit about science never being finished, is from Einstein, in response to a question from a student.

Van Jones: Obama's Green Czar

Fox News has been doing specials on Obama's 40-odd Czars: special advisors to the president who were never vetted by Congress or by any other outside agency.

One such Czar is a guy named Van Jones who has spent years in Maoist organizations, and has said that there should be a revolutionary take-over of the U.S. government.

Oddly, no one outside of Fox News has taken on the story at all. No mention in U.S. News or the New York Times, but Fox News has almost single-handedly made the issue front and center in the minds of many Americans.

Van Jones doesn't strike me as that odd. He has a Marxist framework for understanding green issues. This has been true in the left for at least as long as I can remember. Thirty years -- going back to Evergreen State College, where I attended in the 70s. Even Manson -- who is a bit of a green leftist -- has an organization that cares about whales.

As these ideas finally leave the colleges and universities and begin to leak their toxic poisons into the mainstream, it's going to be fun to see how they are received. It's like a reservoir of hatred for America has been welling up in the colleges and universities for decades until it almost appears to be a given that America is a racist pollution factory that has to be completely taken apart and reassembled using a socialist, environmentally friendly consciousness in which polar bear and ladybugs have seats in the Congress, and radical interpreters who can speak polar bear and ladybug translating for them.

I find it amusing. Fox has predicted that the president will disavow green czar Van Jones by Monday morning. I would be amazed if that were the case. And yet, even Democrats have wondered how this guy Van Jones -- who's been in and out of prisons -- and says he was radicalized by Marxists in prison -- is in such a high position in government.

If you're going to wonder that -- then you should also wonder about the president himself, who has also been involved in such groups, and has more or less the same mentality as the rest of them. These are his friends. They are his homies. He feels comfortable with this crowd.

Apparently, this guy Van Jones got 10 or 11 billion out of the stimulus bill for one of his radical agencies. Once the center-left press begins to acknowledge or deal with these issues, a dialogue will open, and perhaps some of the claims will be peeled back. At this point, however, it looks like exactly what I had most feared. There have now been dozens of stories on Fox about Van Jones, and millions of people are scratching their heads. But he's exactly like hundreds of thousands of other radical pinheads throughout academia. I'm so used to their ideas that at this point, I barely flinch. As America finally begins to become aware of what's been going on in academia, will there be a congressional investigation? Will Lockean ideals hold out against the Marxist system that many now believe is the only chance for racial and gender justice?

http://vodpod.com/watch/2141251-glenn-beck-on-van-jones-obama-communism-black-nationalism-the-ad-boycott

The Hero, by Marianne Moore

Marianne Moore's "The Hero:"

Where there is personal liking we go.
Where the ground is sour; where there are
weeds of beanstalk height, snakes' hypodermic teeth, or
the wind brings the 'scarebabe voice'
from the neglected yew set with
the semi-precious cat's eyes of the owl --
awake, asleep, 'raised ears extended to fine points', and so
on -- love won't grow.

We do not like some things, and the hero
doesn't; deviating head-stones
and uncertainty; going where one does not wish
to go; suffering and not
saying so; standing and listening where something
is hiding. The hero shrinks
as what it is flies out on muffled wings, with twin yellow
eyes -- to and fro --

with quavering water-whistle note, low,
high, in basso-falsetto chirps
until the skin creeps.
Jacob when a-dying, asked
Joseph: Who are these? and blessed
both sons, the younger most, vexing Joseph. And
Joseph was vexing to some.
Cincinnatus was; Regulus; and some of our fellow
men have been, though devout,

like Pilgrim having to go slow
to find his roll; tired but hopeful --
hope not being hope
until all ground from hope has
vanished; and lenient, looking
upon a fellow creature's error with the
feelings of a mother -- a
woman or a cat. The decorous frock-coated Negro
by the grotto

answers the fearless sightseeing hobo
who asks the man she's with, what's this,
what's that, where's Martha
buried, 'Gen-ral Washington
there; his lady, here'; speaking
as if in a play -- not seeing her; with a
sense of human dignity
and reverence for mystery, standing like the shadow
of the willow.

Moses would not be grandson to Pharaoh.
It is not what I eat that is
my natural meat,
the hero says. He's not out
seeing a sight but the rock
crystal thing to see -- the startling El Greco
brimming with inner light -- that
covets nothing that it has let go. This then you may know
as the hero.

This poem comes second in the Complete Poems of Marianne Moore, and in some way completes some of the questions that Stu and others have posed wrt the notion of The Hero announced in her first poem. I think it is not quite as good a poem as the first one, but it has interesting features. In addition to the syllabic structure, there is also a peculiar rhyming pattern in it. The first and eighth and ninth line in each stanza rhyme, and all these rhyme with the others, ending in -o, or in an -o sound.

The second through the seventh line in each stanza are indented, but I can't replicate that in Blogger.

The third, fourth, fifth and sixth stanzas give us some particular heroes -- Joseph, Pilgrim, a frock-coated Negro who apparently works to give tourists an indication of where the Washingtons are buried, and Moses as well as El Greco.

"He's not out seeing a sight" as a tourist might, but rather he is "brimming with inner light" and is somehow self-sufficient, with a "reverence for mystery," which she compares to the "shadow of the willow" -- so even things like trees' shadows might be heroic.

But she also indicates that a hero might be vexing -- like Joseph, or perhaps like many of our other heroes -- Ahab, certainly, but also Joshua Chamberlain. Even Jesus was a bit vexing, esp. to the authorities in Jerusalem. Authority, and counter-authority, and the question of which one is right -- can a mere vote decide? Can a small majority decide that someone is better than another, or that one is worthy of ordination?

There are several kinds of authority in the poem -- military and political (Washington), artistic (El Greco), fatherly (Jacob), Moses as well as Pharaoh. Probably most of us would sneer at the Pharaoh's pretentions to authority -- he was a tyrant, and hadn't been elected, and proved himself to be a fool who destroyed Egypt by defying a God who was greater than him.

The beanstalk myth is referred to in line two. Jack who climbed up is a kind of hero -- even though he broke a commandment when he filched the gold, and the singing lyre, from the Giant.

An owl in stanza two is somehow heroic.

I have no idea what she means by the "scarebabe" voice in line 5.

She does like to play tricks with the readers' minds, and isn't about to let it all fall into place quite easily, but on the other hand, I think she is affirming something here. She is affirming "inner light" over touristic browsing, and certainly placing Joseph over Pharaoh, and Moses over Pharaoh.

In sharper contrasts, here we have El Greco against Durer in the first poem. Which one she'd place higher is anybody's guess. I put Durer higher, but I couldn't explain exactly why. More accurate draughtmanship, I think, is part of it.

I put Moore above Ezra Pound. More Christian, is part of it, and has a better scale of values. I think she's the best of the modernists. More of a humorist, in my view, is part of it -- which to my mind is better than most of T.S. Eliot -- who never allows much humor in except in the Cats sequence, which is weak as poetry (although she never sinks as low as to try to ape the vaudevillians, as does EE Cummings).