I first heard these lines, below, from W. H. Auden's "Sept. 1, 1939" after 9/11.*
I was thinking my post yesterday was a bit overblown, but at times of crisis, when the world crumbles around us, we might well become impassioned and produce overwrought messages, like Auden's here.
The bit about points of light/exchanging messages sounds like online social media.
Reading the whole poem again this morning, it is frighteningly fitting, with its psychopathic god and dictators talking elderly rubbish... And now--wow--these lines jump out at me:
This doesn't distinguish between Just and Unjust messages... but here's a "Heat map of Internet connected devices", 2014. Via.
Seems a good time to recommend again what is maybe my favorite short story:
"When Sysadmins Ruled the World", (2007), by Cory Doctorow.
It's about some well-meaning people in one of the environmentally protected, underground Internet server farms who survive when a virus (or something) knocks out most of humanity.
Eventually they emerge.
Heartening, frightening, all too possible...
You can read it here:
craphound.com/overclocked/Cory_Doctorow_-_Overclocked_-_When_Sysadmins_Ruled_the_Earth.html
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* From a Baltimore Sun article by Micheal Collier, Sept. 16, 2001:
"A poem from September 1939 reaches out to September 2001"
I was thinking my post yesterday was a bit overblown, but at times of crisis, when the world crumbles around us, we might well become impassioned and produce overwrought messages, like Auden's here.
The bit about points of light/exchanging messages sounds like online social media.
Defenceless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.
Reading the whole poem again this morning, it is frighteningly fitting, with its psychopathic god and dictators talking elderly rubbish... And now--wow--these lines jump out at me:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or police;
We must love one another or die.
This doesn't distinguish between Just and Unjust messages... but here's a "Heat map of Internet connected devices", 2014. Via.
Seems a good time to recommend again what is maybe my favorite short story:
"When Sysadmins Ruled the World", (2007), by Cory Doctorow.
It's about some well-meaning people in one of the environmentally protected, underground Internet server farms who survive when a virus (or something) knocks out most of humanity.
Eventually they emerge.
Heartening, frightening, all too possible...
You can read it here:
craphound.com/overclocked/Cory_Doctorow_-_Overclocked_-_When_Sysadmins_Ruled_the_Earth.html
Doctorow quotes Woody
Guthrie's wonderful copyright:
“This song is Copyrighted in U.S., under Seal of Copyright #154085, for a period of 28 years, and anybody caught singin it without our permission, will be mighty good friends of ourn, cause we don’t give a dern.
Publish it. Write it. Sing it. Swing to it. Yodel it.
We wrote it, that’s all we wanted to do.”
____________________________________________
* From a Baltimore Sun article by Micheal Collier, Sept. 16, 2001:
"A poem from September 1939 reaches out to September 2001"
As I watched the New York World Trade Center towers explode and crumble last Tuesday morning, lines from "September 1, 1939," by British poet W.H. Auden (1907-1973), involuntarily returned to me:
Into this neutral air
Where blind skyscrapers use
Their full height to proclaim
The strength of Collective Man ...
But who can live for long
In an euphoric dream ...
Have been thinking overnight about your post yesterday. Not overblown. Right on the button.
ReplyDeleteI went for years to a psychologist whose life story I took pains to not explore because I knew if I did I would never be able to express another complaint. Finally he retired and in our last session I asked him for more details, having only gotten passing glimmers up to then. He told me about being a child in Hungary, traveling around with his father, a tobacco wholesaler; then the Holocaust, where all his relatives were lost and he survived the forced-labor camp at Mauthausen. Thence, via some charity, to the States and a college education, marriage, family, a good life [listening to well-off, well-educated women complain, and apparently enjoying it].
I was understandably abashed and muttered something about the triviality of my complaints, and he responded with a version of everyone's pain is equally valid. But it was clear to me that while that may be true, mine was genuinely Pain Lite. Sadly perhaps, the knowledge did not change my life very much.
So yes, I hope that this is a defining moment for America and the world, and we will have a change of vision. You may be exactly correctly positioned to take part in that--young enough to still have a big stake in what happens next, and old enough to have a store of experience and learning to draw on. Perhaps this time is exactly what you have been preparing for all your life.
I don't have any new vision thoughts; I'm a pessimist who can always find the downside. But your thoughts do inspire me and I want you to keep on the path you find yourself on. (Accompanied by a small army of girlettes.)
Just want to add s footnote: the LBJ “daisy” commercial uses a slightly altered version of Auden’s “ We must love one another or die.”
ReplyDeleteLove your neighbor enough to wear a mask.
What an interesting map. There are many fewer devices in areas where I would expect more, like Russia and China. For a place with apparently relatively few devices, Russia certainly gets its fingers into a lot of our online life!
ReplyDeleteThat poem is very touching and insightful. I hope we're not in a similarly fraught place in history, with darker days to come, as we were in 1939. But who knows.
I will check out the Doctorow story! Sounds fantastic!
SALLY: I don't have much time to respond right now--just want to say a super quick THANK YOU!!!
ReplyDeleteThis is a huge topic in my life--the lives of others, right? the pain of others.
Will reply later!
MICHAEL: I've seen the Daisy ad before but never connected it with Auden. Wild.
ReplyDeleteI wondered if GHW Bush's thousand points of light are related too, but I couldnt' find that that phrase came from Auden. A commonly co-arising ideas/phrase?
STEVE: I think the map is not scientific and accurate. Also outdated. But gets the point across.
I totally hope we're not on the verge of a long descent!!!
SALLY: Finally getting back to your thoughtful comment. Thank you for that.
ReplyDeleteMy wake up call about other people's pain came when I was twenty-one or so, and I went to see Elie Wiesel give a talk as the guest of a well-off, Presbyterian congregation downtown. (Vice-President Mondale's church)
During the Q&A afterward, a wealthy-looking woman (sculpted blonde hair, Hermes scarf around her neck) stood up and said that her son was terrified of nuclear destruction (this was Reagan's 1980s), and she didn't know what to say to him.
Did Wiesel have any advice?
In my mind, I scoffed at her.
What a silly rich lady, I thought, to ask this man who has reeeeally suffered such a trifling question.
Wiesel's response humbled me forever.
His face sank, and he looked like he was going to cry.
He addressed her as a parent of a boy himself.
It is the most terrible burden, he said, to be a parent and have to watch helplessly as our children suffer. What can we say to them?
He didn't know either, the answer to that question, he could only share her distress.
I was ashamed of myself, for judging her pain as lesser.
I certainly do scoff at certain worries!
Especially if they're mine.
But since seeing Wiesel respond with feeling,
I have always *tried* to see people's UNDERLYING pain.
These neighbors talking about their seemingly silly and self-indulgent concerns... they're touching on something profound --perhaps unwittingly, and not exactly poetically-- but it's an existential pain we all share when we realize the ground is not stable.
That awareness could be an opening that leads to something helpful or good, who am I to say?
Or it could be an opening they stuff with merchandise---swimming suits and inflatable rafts...
If I were a therapist working with distressed well-off people, I would be so thrilled if my work helped anyone to tolerate instability, and thus, perhaps, to help others.
My favorite movie scene, I've mentioned before, is when the toys in Toy Story 3 (I think) are in a fiery incinerator.
There is noting they can do to stop the track taking them into the fire.
They simply turn to one another, reach out, and hold hands.