After revolution, where does epic take us?
№ 4 | 26 November 2021
Does transformation occur during and because of a revolution of some kind, or does the change that matters occur in response to the revolutionary event itself? ⁂
Wie wenn am Feiertage
for Dr Hanno Scheuch
Photo by GreenForce Staffing on Unsplash
When on festive days the farmer goes forth
from the hot night, and finds the land cooled
by lightning – plunged into the trough to froth
and burst into wine – so do poets pool
the language like cloud, and drop like a flash
to make the words bubble to a white rule
other than the current’s – not a heron’s slash
after slow contemplation, nor kingfisher’s
dive inside without even a splash.
For the farmer is the well-wisher
of the storm on its track, is confident
that the bolt will close on the fissure.
Day breaks, light no longer intermittent,
disclosing the fruit of love in the field –
by our limbs and mouths, to be attendants
at the feast – not an offering yielded
in thanks for time so renewed and complete,
we dare not imagine another wield
the day. We must. What guest takes our best seat?
¤ Woodford Halse, UK, 9 November 2021
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Commentary on ‘Wie wenn am Feiertage’
Epic is a narrative that refers to profound change in public space. Its narrative is usually an excerpt from a field of events, usually remembered as a cycle. Epic is a rare accomplishment for a country, unless perhaps India or Greece, but even there few are recoded, actively remembered or drawn upon. Revolution however, that great disruptor of affairs, can be right under our noses, or above our heads in a storm. Nor need it be violent or sanguinary.
The ‘Landmann’ in Hölderlin’s great poem ‘Wie wenn am Feiertage’, and the farmer in my poem in tribute to it, welcomes the passing storm. It is a natural if unpredictable contribution to an ecology and economy and culture of the community. The poem above, though, attempts to capture the pressure and tension of the storm cloud, and the effect of rupture. Violence is intimated through the piscatory birds, yet the transformation in the poem is not the result of aggression, interspecies or otherwise. It is the result of surplus, expressed through wine, and the trampling of grapes, and festivals which often take place in mid-October in Germany and Austria. It is the result of the pressure of abundance.
Both Hölderlin and I in our different ways, for I am not translating him here, make it clear that the agrarian community captures for itself the sense of the locus uberrimus. It is the business of poetry to recover that abundant life, through the species of bread and wine. Germany, Austria and New Zealand are wine-growing countries.
Are we still going to insist that ‘Virgil is not New Zealand’? For nothing shows a connection more with Virgil than Holderlin’s ‘Hymn’, as he called it, and my defiant poem. Virgil was a revolutionary. He was a partisan in a revolutionary party, centred on the person of Octavian, and instituted in the principate. He was loyal, yet insisted on his right to warn and critique. Perhaps he despaired in the end. Hermann Broch argued this in his ‘Death of Virgil’ which features so much in Canto III of ‘Crete 1941’.
Epic is not status quo. It is not fuddy-duddy. Something alters for good or is revealed to have done so. Achilles weeps with Priam. Odysseus seems to have recovered his family and household, although nothing will be the same. Aeneas is an exile who will never personally benefit from his historical role. The Divine Comedy is a labour of metanoia, while Paradise Lost is a study in revolution, conquest and depravity.
‘Crete 1941’ continues this tradition of humanising revolution and the experience of war, and not surrendering to inhumanity. Where there is exorcism, intercession and blessing in such verse, there is Virgil. ⁂
Crete 1941 launch
Launching Crete 1941 in Wellington. L–R: Trevor J Moeke, Rt Hon Trevor Mallard MP, Bernard Cadogan (on screen)
Crete 1941 was launched on Thursday 25 November. From his home in the UK, Bernard Cadogan was in conversation with Rt Hon Trevor Mallard MP. The book was dedicated with a karakia from Trevor J Moeke and there was a good crowd in Wellington’s Unity Books, at a distance from each other, while others watched online.
Crete 1941 is available through good bookshops everywhere, and can be purchased online in paperback and digital formats. ⁂
After Rilke’s ninth elegy
for Sir Bill English
Why be human – why bud as a laurel –
cast off as a laurel – slightly darker
than the other greenery – closed to floral
fate – yet wanting to bloom as the marker
of all that can be. Angel or hero –
you sit in the town with the harkening
poets, except laptop and biro
are praised, not the ropemaker and potter,
else lads in earnest not far off Nero.
Language is resented by trainspotters,
who hate noise on the bridge when they record,
than the one they want. House, bridge, gate totter –
tower too – but look at that font hoarding
the flow, yet forwarding it on beyond hold.
To have been truly and not just scored
in a game is something we have been sold.
That must be let go of – just as the source
was buried beneath gentians and slight mould
on rocks. Let go – mountain spring – find your force.
¤ Woodford Halse, UK, 19 November 2021
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Commentary on ‘After Rilke’s ninth elegy’
Of course our true circumstances are much more constrained than the consummate visions of pastoral verse, true though we know them to be, from instances of happiness and abundance in our lives. The great Austrian poet, Rainer Maria Rilke considered these constraints and possible freedom and release in these fields of contingency I have referred to. He seems to have an emphasis on space, on how it is inhabited and dwelt in.
Everything was Hölderlin for Heidegger, when it was more shameful to be ignorant of Rilke, to paraphrase Juvenal. Social life and communities are just as present in Rilke elegies, as his transformations of space. I suggest a connection between the angel observing the ropemaker and potter in his ninth elegy, and the hero among the poets watching the wrestlers in Hölderlin’s ‘Am Quell der Donau’.
Politics, government and public life are several things: a career, a profession and an ‘industry’. Rilke’s generation spoke of laurels and honours, service and excellence, and endured the catastrophe of the first world war. Our generation has motivational guidance and gurus and mentors for corporate performance. We are assured that we can be all we can be through a career of strenuous agon and striving.
To New Zealanders, the connection with sports performance is self-evident. New Zealand is a country in which even Diogenes rolls his rub up and down the street, as the alarms bells ring for a siege. Maybe I did this when I worked at Parliament and the division bells rang.
Poetry too faced the same addiction to self. How much verse these days is a gun salute to identities, a litany of subjectivities and solipsisms. ‘Crete 1941’ is a Te Deum of joyful trampling on evil. This involves forgetting the self, and letting go of it. Just as the farmer in ‘Wie wenn am Feiertage’ loses himself in the storm, so is the secret for women and men in public life to find their own force and gather their own strength, out of their own wellhead, impetus or elan, whatever mission called them forth in the first place. And the river forgets itself all the more as it is living out itself, altering as the waters accumulate, and changing into another body of water altogether. It is not about stagnation and surface reflection of the foliage.
A life course involves change, sometimes revolutionary change. Properly ecstatic moments are not mystical raptures or moments of excitement, but occasions of self-forgetting from which we only recover ourselves later. These may arise from career challenges, the demands of relationships and family life, or recoveries from illness or surgery. There is a tension between the individual and collective in our polities and societies. This tension determines the orientation and character of nation states and competing powers at this time. Revolution, crises in international relations, global depressions and pandemics place demands on the individual and collectivities alike.
On poetry too. It has to respond, and not live enshrined in The Buribunks, Carl Schmitt’s 1919 spoof. Schmitt is a thinker to handle with care. He was Hitler’s Kronjurist, but any acquaintance with Oxford reading rooms assure us that earnest scholars of the left study him with profit and comment on him, even though the appropriate emojis may be skulls, poison bottles and radiation signs. Buribanks institutes were cloisters where writers were imagined as indulging subjectivities. Select persons would be funded to write their diaries vicariously. That would not be an appropriate response to challenging times, rather an escape or fugue, no matter how much we disapprove of Schmitt’s alternatives.
Photo by Grianghraf on Unsplash
We may say that the river or current in the above poem, is a suspension of judgement, such as the Pyrrhonists cultivated. Pyrrho of Elis accompanied Alexander of Macedon’s expedition to India. He seems to have learned a lot from dialogues with the ascetic philosophers of the Punjab and Indus. He was not such a skeptic as to argue that nothing could be known at all, but his practice and discipline was of suspension of judgement on phenomena and sensations. Incarnation may be the case as Platonists, Hindus and Buddhists argued, it might not be the case. The mind would find tranquility by not being bothered one way or the other. Identities he would argue may be so, might not be so, or no longer so. They are only constructs. Peace lay in non-commitment to such propositions.
There are problems with such an attitude. What is the basis for ethical conduct, for altruism and compassion? Being a Pyrrhonist turned into an elaborate game of dialectics, when the school was represented by Aenesidemus or Sextus Empiricus. Nonetheless we do have to abandon introspection and doubt, let go and take responsibility for a course of action, regardless of whether our identities are complete, our educations are adequate, our skills are adequate, our ethics are formed. Otherwise we are not free at all, but premade by moulds of culture and identity.
These attributes are only properly understood in retrospect – properly in the sense of what is proper to oneself – and poetry is a preeminent recapitulation of our succeeding and failing efforts in demanding times. ⁂
Pyrrho of Elis
for Despina and Ramsey Margolis
The scandal of Israel is the Cross.
The scandal of ancient Greece was madness.
India is immolation. The loss
of Kalanos caused not so much sadness
as amazement to Alexander
and the Greeks – left with a burnt carcass
and desecrated Iran. The thunder
of India held Pyrrho of Elis,
who swam all rivers from the Ganga
to the Alfeios. Thunderbolt phallus
and mind are suspended in judgement.
Ambivalence was not a zealous
path for school that conquered adherents.
See if you can live suspended in flame
and not rush forth like an insurgent.
Holding off the bolt was a kind of game.
It landed on Hölderlin and Nietzsche –
Overthrow of Cross, Madness and Fire – the aim
achieved, in the still pyres of those teachers.
¤ Woodford Halse, UK, 24 November 2021
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