The soul of a people

If by some chance you've been following my maundering prose and have missed it these several weeks past, I apologize. I was going through one of those phases when the fact that I really don't know anything rose up and bit me. What, then, is the point of blathering away on the internet, a place that makes me think of Yeats' line about the 'bee-loud glade.' Is there anything more to it than the buzzing of bees, an inbred, introspective noise signifying nothing? After all, and here are the big questions, will anything we do or think matter a billion years from now, does anything we think or do matter in another galaxy, or even on our nearest inhabitable planetary neighbor? How about our non-human cohabitors on this earth. Does a Beethoven symphony mean anything to a garden snail?
According to certain shapers of modern opinion it doesn't. This is the lesson humanity has ultimately (wrongly, I think) gleaned from Galileo, a lesson that is expressed very succinctly in the phrase 'dead white males..' Because if there is no significance to the thoughts, beliefs or actions we leave behind, then life consists solely of the me and the now. That's it. But if that's the case why do we humans, all humans, have the nagging compulsion to bequeath a legacy to future generations? Even those who reject the contributions of those nefarious dead white males seem passionately committed to propagating that belief- but not children, who often turn out to be men. Personally, as a future dead white male, I am not so much offended by that bit of spitefulness as saddened by the paltry, dreary mentality that utters it.
Not only do we humans want our achievements to persevere after the death of the body, we also yearn to endow the products of our industry with beauty and grace be it as exalted as the Great Pyramid or as humble as a doily on the back of an easy chair. We are tireless composers of tunes and verses, we polish our cars, we clad our bodies with fashion statements, we populate our northern domiciles with captured tropical plants. The list of things we do to beautify ourselves and our surroundings is endless. And are we the only species that cares about beauty? Peacocks would beg to differ. Without a suitably colourful tail poor bachelor peacock hasn't a ghost of a chance with the discerning peahen. Darwinists twist themselves into pretzels trying vainly to fit such phenomena into their scheme of randomicity and determinism.
Scientists, philosophers and theologians argue endlessly over these issues trying to fit them into some grand scheme of things. I applaud these efforts, but when I need rescuing from the doldrums of insoluble questions I like to turn to music or poetry. Somehow the poets and composers perceive the big picture directly, not without the intellect, but the intellect illuminated by an interior kind of light without which Plato's light of pure reason is a pale and wan little candle sputtering in the dark. Sometimes I think reason operates in much the same way as natural selection. It doesn't create anything new, but it weeds out bad ideas and sorts things out into their proper places.
I've been struggling in the last few years with certain texts, especially the Semitic Bible and the Greek thinkers, both of which have molded our civilization beyond any reckoning. But we of the northern European races had a vital cultural life before the Roman law, legions and road-builders spread the cross and Plato into Gaul and Britain. There is something about the poor remnants of that older heritage which thrills me in ways that the new-fangled stuff doesn't. Introduced to us a mere 2000 years ago, the desert patriarchs and the Aegean poleis in many ways still seem as foreign and alien as ever. Indelible images abound in the few remaining muddled Celtic and Germanic texts which hint at a lost literature of vast proportions. Hard now to fit them with any context, our lives so much different now, and so all the more remarkable how striking those images are, even when translated into a language that didn't even exist when they were current.
Take for example the picture painted in "Pwyll Lord of Dyved" of the King, Pwyll, at a feast. (found in the Welsh Mabinogion) After the meal he decides to get away from the festivities and go for a walk to Gorsedd Arberth (a mound, possibly identified with Glastonbury) where he sits down with his retinue. He is in no way discouraged when he is informed that anyone who sits on the gorsedd will either be badly beaten or he will witness a Wonder. Spared the beating, the Wonder takes the form of a young woman clad in gold silk riding by on the road below. Curious about who this apparition might be, Pwyll orders a lackey to run after her and ask who she is. But although the lady is only traveling at a leisurely trot, and the lackey runs as fast as he can, she recedes further and further into the mist. The next night Pwyll comes back, bringing a lackey with a fast horse. Yet as fast as the lackey rides after her when she reappears, he cannot catch her in spite of her leisurely pace. The next night Pwyll decides to take on the job himself, bringing his fastest horse. And yet as fast as he rides, it is not enough. He cannot catch up with her. As the distance widens, he calls out to her: Lady, for the sake of the man you love the best, stop for me! I will gladly, she replied and it would have been better for your horse if you had asked me that sooner. I am doing my errands and I am glad to see you. I welcome you, said Pwyll, for it seemed to him that the beauty of every woman and girl he had ever seen was as nothing compared to the beauty of Rhiannon.
As the story progresses we become aware that Pwyll has entered another world. It may be he was originally sacrificed, as the prechristian celtic rituals were quite bloodthirsty, if the descriptions of Roman witnesses are to be believed. But I can't help comparing the Welsh vision of the other world with the sad view of Hades as depicted by Homer.
By comparison to the dreaminess of the Welsh stories, the Scandinavian counterparts seem blunter, coarser, more fatalistic. Heroism is a matter of stoic endurance, a defiance of death and suffering, but for all that, life is preferable. Hjalmar and his brother defeated twelve Goths in an island duel, but in the end:

"My armour is split, I have sixteen wounds,
I cannot see, my sight is darkened,
My heart was pierced by Angantyr's sword,
The steel-edge, steeped in venom.

"The farms I posessed were five in all,
But no joy have I known from these,
Bereft of life, I must lie down,
Sword-wounded on Samsey's shore.

The Norse poems are also more concerned with everyday practical matters. In one of Gudrun's songs she is forced by family pressure and international diplomacy to marry Atli the Hun. Gifted with the ability to foresee the tragic outcome, as the daughter of one king and the widow of another she may not escape her duty. On her way from her home she crosses the continent to meet her new husband:

The brave ones mounted the backs of horses,
But the Gaulish women in wagons rode,
Seven days were carried through cold land,
Seven more sailed on the waves,
Rode seven more through mountain country.


(From Norse Poems, as rendered by W.H. Auden and Paul B. Taylor, Faber and Faber, 1983)
There is much in the Norse literature that is vivid and sharp. You can be reading along and then all of a sudden you can see in your mind's eye the scene portrayed as if you had witnessed it yourself. But rarely is there humour, or the imagery of love and beauty one finds in the celtic sources.

'The burial of the poet, dead for love' contains these sentiments: My bright shaped girl, with the brow like the lily, under your web of golden hair, I have loved you with a strong and enduring love... (From a Celtic Miscellany, Penguin Classics, 1971)
Gory scenes of battle are common in these stories, but there always seems to be at least a hint of mirth. A man's end is not so much a matter of inescapable fate as it is of his own foolish actions, and as often as not resembles a pratfall more than anything else. But what I love best about the celtic stories is the irrepressible sense of wonder they all convey. The world, whether this one or the other one, not so easily distinguished from each other, and the boundaries easily traversed, are marvels to be wondered at. Life in either realm has more to it than mere accumulation of goods- though the celts were well-known in the ancient world for their love of gold. In the story called Branwen, daughter of Llyr, Bran a champion of the Isle of the Mighty leads a host to an invasion of Ireland. They win the battle, but Bran, like Achilles before Troy, is fatally wounded in the foot. Homer fails to see the humour and very grimly lectures us on the topic of eternal fame vs a long but ordinary life. Before Bran dies he tells his men to cut off his head, take it to London and bury it facing France. But on the way they may stop for seven years of feasting in Harddlech, "...with the birds of Rhiannon singing for you, and my head will be as good a companion as it ever was. After that you will spend eighty years at Gwales in Penvro, and as long as you do not open the door to the Bristol Channel on the side facing Cornwall you may stay there and the head will not decay." The men do as he instructs but even the bravest warriors will get bored after eighty years of carousing. "One day Heilyn, son of Gwynn said, 'Shame on my beard if I do not open this door to see if what is said about it is true.'" As soon as he did he and all his companions "...became as conscious of every loss they had suffered, of every friend and relative they had lost, of every ill that had ever befallen them, as if it had just happened."
Strange. As I read this passage I'm reminded of the story of Adam and Eve. A door of knowledge instead of a tree of knowledge, but still an act of will that loses them paradise, and sends them down into a world of sorrows. But how much differently it is played out, without the moralizing and the punitiveness.
Of course there are similarities among the literary outputs of these different peoples, the Hebrews, the Hellenes, the Norse, the British, but at the same time there are clear distinctions, and the distinctions are important...vitally important. The misnamed multicultural crowd advocates a flattening of distinctions and would have us believe everyone is the same. But we are not. Multicultural theorists, most of whom are of North European descent, are not lovers of any culture, and in particular seem to hate their own. That's why they are so determined to suppress public symbols like crosses and Christmas trees. They are really statists who want to substitute the state in place of family, country, homeland, history. And what is this state they so assiduously serve? They have turned into an army of mice nibbling away at the store of wealth amassed in the chambers built by their ancestors, not comprehending the damage they do. There is an adage which says if you don't love yourself you can't love anybody else. I'm not sure if that's true when applied to an individual, but when applied to a heritage, I'm certain that if you don't love your own you can't possibly love another's. This is what they have in common with Islamists. But the Islamists are more fully aware that they are on a mission to destroy what they see.
But can the soul of a people really be destroyed? Or maybe it's the genius of place that accounts for the retention of characteristics by a people which predate a massive transformation of culture and language. For instance, the Persians. Islamic, yes, but Semitic definitely not. And how much of that literature we call Celtic originated from a preCeltic substratum in Britain? Very hard to know for sure, or at least to prove in a scientific sense. But when I respond in my heart the way I do to these ancient stories I believe it. My ancestry is American (in the broad sense) for hundreds of years and yet I still think I belong to certain parts of the Old Country in ways I don't belong in the Americas. Highly irrational.

Precocious Jennifer

St Patrick's Day is coming up and sadly it's become just another excuse to get drunk. I was working one Bobby Burns Day and that's been turned into a bit of a party night, too. The bright looking attractive young couple I picked up at the student cluster housing was not going to waste the opportunity and told me they wanted to go to The Irish Times, a downtown pub well liked by the upwardly mobile in our town. Scotch, Irish, whatever.
"So you're celebrating Bobby Burns Day," I said, and made a few jokes about haggis and single malt. Then I opined that Scotland deserved praise for having their national day named after a poet.
"Oh," said the sweet young thing. "Was Bobby Burns a poet?"
I was a little stunned that, having graduated with sufficiently high marks from a Canadian high school to be enrolled in a Canadian University, she had never heard of the poetry of Robert Burns. So I recited a few lines of one famous poem that goes:
Wee sliket, cowerin, timorous beastie
Oh what a panic's in thy breestie...
I had memorized most of it for the occassion, and she was rather intrigued with the part about man's dominion breaking Nature's social union, seeing it as 'ahead of its time.' But they soon tired of the conversation and asked me if I had any tunes.
A few nights later I drove three generations of ladies into town from the airport, grandmother, about my age, daughter about 35 and granddaughter. Jennifer was one of those preternaturally bright children with the vocabulary of a well educated adult, enunciation as clear as if she had a diction coach, and well able to converse with her elders. Wanting badly to get in on the conversation with such a little elf I was very happy when she asked me if I was a cab driver.
"No." I said.
Her elders tittered a little at the pleasantry but Jennifer thought very seriously for a few minutes. I could almost hear the gears and sprockets turning and meshing inside her pretty little skull. "Yes you are," she said accusingly. She had got it. It was a little variation on the liar's paradox and there was no way she was going to let it get by her without resolving it. So I said "Yes, I am a cab driver. I was lying when I said I wasn't a cab driver."
This, of course made things even worse from a logical point of view.
You have to be careful with children because they take things too seriously. They don't really understand jokes, especially sarcasm. For example I was taken once to a baseball game as a boy in my home town. We had a baseball team called the Edmonton Eskimos. Innocently, I asked who they were playing against. "The Brooklyn Dodgers," I was told. I knew who the Brookly Dodgers were. They were in the world series on the radio. I knew the names of the players, had seen their faces on bubble gum cards. So when the Eskimos beat them I thought we must have one of the best teams in the world. It was years before I realized that it was a joke.
Anyway, I changed the subject, and remembering that she had just turned six offered to recite her a poem by A.A. Milne. It goes:
When I was One
I had just begun
When I was Two
I was nearly new
When I was Three
I was hardly me
When I was Four
I was not much more
When I was Five
I was just alive
But now I'm six
And I'm clever as clever
And I think I will be six
Forever and ever.

She asked me to repeat it a few times until she had almost memorized it but by that time we were at the hotel. Just before she got out I turned around to look at her and found her eyes boring into mine. I couldn't help thinking of those stories in Irish folklore where the fairies exchange one of their children for one of ours.
But the main thing I thought about was something I have thought about many times before. How is it that a young child who is naturally curious with the enchanting world he has been born into comes out on the other end of twelve years of school knowing nothing, interested in nothing, culturally impoverished? Energetic and bright at five, dull and listless at fifteen.
Maybe puberty is to blame, maybe it's a difficult test no matter what. The need to be cool, to be stylish, to meet the approval of the right crowd, to suddenly be ruled by your crotch. Or maybe something is wrong with sending children to a school away from home where they are taught by teachers who do not have any intrinsic love for the material they are teaching. But maybe poetry, word games, puzzles that tickle the mind, when intoduced to a young child can help as sort of prophylactic against raging hormones and indifferent teaching.
What made me think of all this was a nice little volume of nonsense verse I found in Chapters, our downtown big box bookstore. Put out by Everyman's Library, it is nicely bound, printed on good quality paper, and has a well-chosen selection of witty and clever verse of a kind that children would enjoy having read to them. Unfortunately, Chapters takes a dim view of people like me taking notes from the books they want to sell. "This is a bookstore, not a library." I was told by the security person. Fair enough, I have nothing against a store making a profit. So here are a few things from my own bookshelves that I think children might like.

It's hard to believe that the composer of the Wasteland could pen lines like these:

I have a Gumbie cat in mind her name is Jennyanydots
Her coat is of the tabby kind with tiger stripes and leopard spots

but further on the opening cuteness transforms itself:
She is deeply concerned with the ways of the mice
Their behavior's not good and their manners not nice

Yes, Jennyanydots may be cute and cuddly, but she is also a merciless killer. T.S. Eliot didn't pander to the modern urge to make everything nice. Never forget that children are savages, too.

Edward Lear, born in 1812, wrote a lot of nonsense verse for children. In his alphabet book,
Z was once a piece of zinc
Tinky
Winky
Blinky
Tinky
Tinkly winkly
Piece of zinc.

Ogden Nash, born in 1902:
I would live all my life in nonchalance and insouciance
Were it not for making a living which is rather a nouciance

There's lots of it. Infectious humour, love of language, quirky ways of looking at things. Maybe a few doses of good, light poetry would painlessly inoculate a child against the inevitable banalities of looming adulthood.
It was during adolescence that I discovered poetry, specifically e.e. cummings. Nice of him to do away with capitals, punctuation and such frivolities, I thought. And the subject matter was nice and racy and they provided lines for me to use in attempted seductions. A pretty girl who naked is is worth a million statues, he wrote. I liked that line very much. Nowadays I find his cheap cynicism and his Marxist politics tiresome. But as life goes on our outlook changes and ripens. How mysterious is the great power lurking in words that some of our fellow humans are able to discover.