Saturday evening post - content (of sorts)

I am a bad blogger, but here's a little bit of content with more to come. I suppose that's better than nothing.

By the way, today I saw one of the most amazing sights I've seen in Kansas so far. Hope to take a picture of it tomorrow and post it here, if it's still there. Not sure what it is: religious intervention? reaction piece by a university student? I don't know, but I'll post a picture as soon as a can.

Made notes on this poem by T.R. Hummer this afternoon and then started writing about it. Here's the poem and some opening thoughts on the poem and what will become some ideas I've been kicking around on political poetry in general which may arrive here in installments depending on what's happening this week.


The End of History
4/23/94

An ordinary apocalyptic morning

in the America’s—no earthquakes, no asteroids,

Just the benevolent shadow of a broken promise

of rain. The adze of Pacific wind

Hones cumulus clouds to nothing. Or does it

work the other way? And all the newspapers

In the supermarket agree: RICHARD NIXON DEAD.

The gears of identity turn slow,

But the mesh is implacable. Gone under

the bonewheel, that spectacular ego, sucked

Down the augers of the absolute. I am choosing

the best asparagus, I am buying olive oil,

And somewhere the Plasticine face, disturbed

by a permanent stubble, is growing

Even more inhuman. Yes, he was a private citizen,

yes husband and father, yes nothing more

Than carbon, oxygen, hydrogen. But against

the overblown blue screen of memory

Napalm flares up on every channel. Bombs

go off in the vacuum tubes of Saigon.

It is a spring afternoon in liberal Oregon,

where skinheads shoot stained glass

Out of the facades of synagogues.

I am writing a check, I am pushing my cart

In a contemplative way through the parking lot.

I remember that twisted little figure

Beside Mao’s ghost in the shadow of the Wall.

Eisenhower. Kissinger. Hiss. I will not give in

To the fragmentary, I tell myself at the stoplight.

I will make my language whole. I prepare

A simple pot roast, I scrub the toilet clean.

Friends come by for dinner, stepchildren

Of clarity, hunted down by the obscure.

By midnight, I am almost asleep, almost ready

To dream again of our common disaster,

the ratchets of expediency tightening I-beams,

Stroke, stroke, stroke, in the spine, the brain, the heart.

Time to reinvent humanity, I am thinking,

Time to retool the scrotum and the womb.

Liar, what do I know, and when

Do I know it? It will be the monotonous

nightmare again, a thunderhead with the profile

Of a weasel breaking up—or, stalled in the market air

above us all, one crow blacklisting the wind.

T.R. Hummer
from Useless Virtues




One is immediately gripped by the self-assurance and reflective poise Hummer employs in his dismissal of the all too typical disastrous, Biblical endings we are all so familiar with by now. One is reminded of Eliot’s projection in “The Hollow Men” where the world ends “not with a bang, but a whimper.” Here, though, is an end-of-time depicted without the blockbuster fanfare of natural cataclysms one is so accustomed to watching, those explosions and extinctions forecasted by Hollywood’s summertime big screen events. Hummer envisions an ending that is not as much pathetic as it is commonplace: “An ordinary apocalyptic morning / in the America’s—no earthquakes, no asteroids.” For my money, the suggestion of the End as purely mundane is much more disheartening than Eliot’s vision of a feeble pitiful world whining as it dwindles and fades. In Hummer’s vision, the end arrives just like any other day. In fact, every new day that arrives is itself just another ending. Awful.