Preface, Disclosure and Update, July 14, 2024
I wrote most of the little essay that follows (see below) only two days ago. It’s a bit of nonsense penned tongue-in-cheek with a dollop of irony. Satirical humor is my way of having fun, but also of coping — good naturedly, I hope — with disquiet, unease, insecurity, exasperation and anguish. By a fluke of circumstance, I happened to witness on live media most of the events of January 6, 2021, in real time. It’s a bell that can’t be unrung, and a sight that can’t be unseen. The essay gestures towards this truth, but tries to be entertaining. Since writing it, by a similar fluke of circumstance, I also saw in real time yesterday, July 13, 2024, an attempt on the life of former President Donald Trump. Thank goodness he has survived a close call, injured but not seriously, according to reports. Public figures should never have to confront this danger. My lifetime has seen the shootings of JFK, RFK, MLK, John Lennon and Jo Cox; and the non-fatal shootings of George Wallace, Ronald Reagan, Gabby Giffords and Steve Scalise. Now Donald Trump. The would-be assassin’s rifle was scarcely silent yesterday before some supporters of Mr. Trump started hurling accusations of complicity in the crime at his political adversaries — notably President Biden. Such conduct is reckless and malign. Is there no way out of it?
Essay
I glimpsed the phrase “prophetic dreams” recently and for a nanosecond my brain processed it as “poetic dreams.” Chuckling ruefully I suddenly came into a realization: dropping the second, fourth and fifth consonants turns “prophesy” into “poesy, “prophetic” into “poetic” and “prophet” into “poet.” Damn! Things were adding up! The numbers 2, 4 and 5 make 11. Instinctively, I consulted Google to find that numerology associates 11 with deep connection to the universe, which I pursue through grammar. It’s worth noting that “prophesy” is the verb and rhymes with “ossify,” while “prophecy” is the noun and rhymes with “obloquy.”
To prophesy is commonly considered to foretell the future. True enough. In ancient times leaders consulted oracles — the oracular and prophetical are closely allied — to help them with the if’s and when’s of taking momentous action, such as destroying a neighboring kingdom or poisoning an antagonist. A famous oracle was in Delphi. When she opined, her pronouncement resembled a riddle, which is how prophecy and poesy are in cahoots. The Delphic advice would be on the obscure side, could cut various ways, didn’t lend itself to pinning down, and was articulated vividly. Paramountly, it could never be proved with hindsight to have been wrong. Wrong, after all, is what a poem is ever not. Classical literature is full of hilarious tales of disasters incurred because the advisee zigged when he should have zagged, and the oracle could safely say, “I told you so.”
What’s less well known is that prophesying is also used to recount the past. For example, prophecy tells us that on day 6 of the month of Janus, year two thousand and twenty-one, a fellowship of citizens gathered outside and inside our nation’s capitol building in order to testify to their engagement with, and fealty to, the sacred rites of lawmaking there enshrined. The citizens strolled its marble corridors admiring busts of founding fathers, intoning hymns of praise, and proffering sunny greetings to busy solons and their staffs. Thereafter they departed happily to resume their industrious labors on family farms and in thriving small businesses. It was a thing to remember, and the afterglow which Delphic telling lends the event illustrates how prophecy, devoutly realized, colludes with poesy to yield transformative visions.
(c) 2024 JMN — EthicalDative. All rights reserved
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Raise Your Hand If You’re Up for a ‘Variety of Irreconcilable Points of View’
Rooky move: I responded to the first page of Meghan O’Rourke’s essay “On Ambivalence: To Be, but to Be How?” (Poetry, June 2024) before I had finished reading it. I caught the wave generated for me by her allusions to parataxis and epistemology (terms I don’t control) and surfed it in my post titled “Raise Your Hand If You Know What ‘Paratactic’ Means.”
I had deleted the following sentence from my draft of that post: “Poetry helps me come to terms with not needing to know.” At the time, it seemed to oversay what I’d already implied. Further along in O’Rourke’s essay, however, she mentions Keats’s “negative capability,” which Keats describes as
… when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason —.
Yes! I thought. That’s what I meant by coming to terms with not needing to know! Picture the thrill of my imagining having retroactively foreshadowed Keats!
O’Rourke writes this:
Great artists allow for uncertainty and ambivalence… Shakespeare was Shakespeare, Keats argues, because of the way his plays staged, and enacted, a variety of irreconcilable points of view. This, rather than poetry that has “a palpable design upon us” [Keats’s phrase] is what true art is.
Keats’s phrases keep being terrific. (Who knew!) A text which has “a palpable design upon” the reader stalks one with a pre-owned frisson it wants to evangelize, rather than casting upon the waters keen verbs and auxiliaries that may spirit one to an illumination precisely at one’s own coordinates.
(c) 2024 JMN — EthicalDative. All rights reserved