CxD #254: College Kids are Not OK; 📚'23 #24: ⭐️⭐️⭐️½ A Sport and a Pastime; "Poetry makes nothing happen"
1. Fire Philosophy is officially cooking. If you consider your own life a work of Art which can be cultivated like a painter cultivates her canvas, then please join us on the journey. Who knows what we’ll discover together.
2. In the second introductory conversation for Fire Philosophy —scheduled for release later this week — I make reference to a stanza from this magnificent poem, and its claim that “poetry makes nothing happen.” How is it that domains like jazz, poetry, philosophy make nothing happen — with and without square quotes — and yet are simultaneously some of the highest forms of beauty and art and human ingenuity? What does it mean to “make something happen”? What are we practicing when we practice making things happen? What are we forgetting when results and ends and nouns are privileged over the verbs that make them?
In Memory of W. B. Yeats
~W.H. Auden
Far from his illness
The wolves ran on through the evergreen forests,
The peasant river was untempted by the fashionable quays;
By mourning tongues
The death of the poet was kept from his poems.
But for him it was his last afternoon as himself,
An afternoon of nurses and rumours;
The provinces of his body revolted,
The squares of his mind were empty,
Silence invaded the suburbs,
The current of his feeling failed; he became his admirers.
Now he is scattered among a hundred cities
And wholly given over to unfamiliar affections,
To find his happiness in another kind of wood
And be punished under a foreign code of conscience.
The words of a dead man
Are modified in the guts of the living.
But in the importance and noise of to-morrow
When the brokers are roaring like beasts on the floor of the bourse,
And the poor have the sufferings to which they are fairly accustomed
And each in the cell of himself is almost convinced of his freedom
A few thousand will think of this day
As one thinks of a day when one did something slightly unusual.
What instruments we have agree
The day of his death was a dark cold day.
II
You were silly like us; your gift survived it all:
The parish of rich women, physical decay,
Yourself. Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.
Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still,
For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
In the valley of its making where executives
Would never want to tamper, flows on south
From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,
A way of happening, a mouth.
III
Earth, receive an honoured guest:
William Yeats is laid to rest.
Let the Irish vessel lie
Emptied of its poetry.
In the nightmare of the dark
All the dogs of Europe bark,
And the living nations wait,
Each sequestered in its hate;
Intellectual disgrace
Stares from every human face,
And the seas of pity lie
Locked and frozen in each eye.
Follow, poet, follow right
To the bottom of the night,
With your unconstraining voice
Still persuade us to rejoice;
With the farming of a verse
Make a vineyard of the curse,
Sing of human unsuccess
In a rapture of distress;
In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountain start,
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.
3. William Deresiewicz — one of my favorite essayists at work today on issues of education and culture and their intersections — speaks about the difference between loneliness and solitude and the ways our educational system, as currently and predominantly structured, is helping to raise “excellent sheep” rather than free-thinking adults willing to think for themselves. Start at the 3:35 mark. 🎯
📚'23 #24: ⭐️⭐️⭐️½ A Sport and a Pastime
Ah, yes. This is what it was like to be twenty years old, guided by the desires of the body and unafraid to follow them. For better, and for worse. Those of us in the later decades of life might judge the callousness of the bodies, obdurate in their desires; but nostalgia and memory can be profound healers after the body has had its day. Change is all.
What an excellent post today. Thanks Krzys!