Carl Sandburg, "Threes"

Threes

I was a boy when I heard three red words
a thousand Frenchmen died in the streets
for: Liberty, Equality, Fraternity--I asked
... why men die for words.

I was older; men with mustaches, sideburns,
lilacs, told me the high golden words are:
Mother, Home, and Heaven--other older men with
face decorations said: God, Duty, Immortality
--they sang these threes slow from deep lungs.

Years ticked off their say-so on the great clocks
of doom and damnation, soup, and nuts: meteors flashed
their say-so: and out of great Russia came three
dusky syllables workmen took guns and went out to die
for: Bread, Peace, Land.

And I met a marine of the U.S.A., a leatherneck with a girl on his knee
for a memory in ports circling the earth and he said: Tell me how to say
three things and I always get by--gimme a plate of ham and eggs--how
much--and--do you love me, kid?

[Sandburg's brilliance is evident here in his celebration of the here-and-now of sensuous existence, shorn of the abstractions and shibboleths which too often marred the work of the Romantic poets. Sandburg suggests that ordinary Americans live by a different code, a survivalist ethic of work, wanderlust, and simple pleasures. The dusky syllables of ideology have no place in their world.]

Elegy for the organ grinder

City corners have not been the same since the disappearance of the organ grinder, cranking his music box for pedestrians. When the organ grinder receded into history in the early 20th century, cities lost an enchanting, mystical sound. It was like the calliope of a carousel, the sound of children on painted wooden horses turning around and around. How curious to imagine that this music man was once a common fixture of the urban landscape.

The Keyhole

The closet in which Rupert was hiding for the past thirty minutes was unbearably small. Between crouching and kneeling on the hardwood floor, his arthritic legs were failing. Above him, shirt sleeves and jacket ends draped his shoulders with an air of condemnation, disembodied spirits posing with their captive. A beam of light streaming through the keyhole had settled on Rupert’s bald head.

A man and a woman quickly entered the room, and just as abruptly shut the door behind them. The sudden rush of air slightly rattled the closet door in front of Rupert's face. He looked through the little keyhole, his wrinkled eye bathed in a pale glow. He tried to quell his worried breath, which rose and sank in a shrill wheeze, while his eyelashes nervously fluttered, and a thin line of sweat trailed down his nose. The man in the room spoke coolly, knowingly, as though he could strike the woman without laying a finger on her. She was trying feebly to pacify him.

“Tell me a bedtime story, mother,” he said.

“If I had only known the trouble it would cause you, I wouldn't have mentioned it. But come to reason, please. He’s your father’s brother.”

“He is? Why didn’t anybody tell me?” he mocked.

The figures appeared and disappeared from the vista of the keyhole. They were slowly circling the room from opposite ends. When they were out of view, Rupert carefully adjusted his position. He could bend on one knee only for a short length of time before the pain became intolerable. He hoped they would leave soon. It was a bad idea, he thought. There were much better ways of obtaining information. When he looked again, he saw only the woman, framed in the keyhole’s little silhouette. Her son, whom she watched in terror, now paced along the unseen wall.

Neither one spoke. There was an interminable silence. The woman eyed her son carefully and nervously smoothed the folds of her dress. A lion tamer trapped in the beast’s cage might have shown as much restraint. Rupert now feared the possibility of a sudden, violent action. The woman will be torn abruptly from his view, he thought, killed or battered.

While still pacing, the man began to speak, but no longer in the voice of an offended child. He spoke rather with a feigned, calculating calm, as if he had summed up everything and was now pronouncing a verdict.  

“Tell me, mother, do you blush?”

“What?”  

“A whore in league with her lover, a husband’s mysterious death, a son deprived of his father. Enough reason to turn crimson?”

“What is this? What do you mean by all this?”

The man withheld his answer for a moment, as if by suspending it, he was making it monstrous. He then uttered in a menacing tone, “Murder. That’s what I mean. Foul murder.”

At this moment, Rupert banged the door with a hollow rap while switching knees. At once the hurried tap of footsteps was heard. His heart sank. The saliva in his mouth thinned, then dried almost instantly. When he peered again, timorously, through the keyhole, he saw only the man now, facing the closet door with a menacing leer.

“My, my, mother, I think there's a mouse in your closet.”     

Off the Beaten Path, On the Road

The Beat Generation of the 1950s, a precursor of the volatile counterculture of the following decade, seethed at America’s postwar prosperity and the repressive conditions of containment. It emerged, as Malcolm Bradbury points out, in an “affluent, conformist America where the individual seems superfluous, the outsider rages, the dominant culture seems oppressive and hostile.” Unwilling to conform, the Beats – of whom the core members were Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and William S. Burroughs—sought their own values and pursued their own vision in jazz clubs, in experimental art, through alcohol, drugs, liberated sexuality, and the ecstasies of Buddhism and Jewish and Christian mysticism. Insofar as it was a struggle against repressive norms, the Beat-life was an on-going quest, a journey to find a new mode of being in the remote corners of human existence. As John Tytell writes, “The Beat Movement was a crystallization of a sweeping discontent with American ‘virtues’ of progress and power. What began with an exploration of the bowels and entrails of the city – criminality, drugs, mental hospitals – evolved into an expression of the visionary sensibility.”

That sensibility first entered the American mainstream with Jack Kerouac’s novel, On the Road. Published in 1957, this semi-autobiography became a manifesto for the new generation of dispossessed American youths starved for personal freedom. Without plot, or any other literary restraint, On the Road describes the nomadic life of two characters, Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty, as they crisscross the American continent over a period of two years (from 1947 to 1949), visiting major cities, having love affairs, working odd jobs, experimenting with drugs, frequenting jazz clubs – and always on the go. “We were all delighted,” the narrator Sal declares, “we all realized we were leaving confusion and nonsense behind and performing our one and noble function of the time, [to] move. And we moved!” The theme of mobility is paramount in the text, but unlike other quest narratives, whose heroes strive towards a defined goal, On the Road is irreducible to any end other than the experience of aimless travel and discovery. For this reason it poses an interpretive dilemma, which seeks to answer the question: is On the Road simply an ode to a narcissistic culture, or does it offer an uncommon solution to societal repression?

Franz Kafka, A Hunger Artist

There is a central paradox in all of Franz Kafka's tales that is never resolved or even fully explained. One consequence of that paradox is the impossibility of reducing Kafka to any single interpretation. The same has been said of the allegorical quality of the Bible. Many lenses have been used, but neither one appears sufficient.

"A Hunger Artist" is one such tale. The central figure, a public performer, has locked himself in a cage and fasts for weeks on end, practicing an art of starvation that beguiles and disturbs his spectators. Eventually, admiration and sympathy are mixed with general suspicion of the authenticity of the act, and guards are dispatched to ensure the hunger artist is not secretly feeding himself. What's more, his promoter insists on a forty-day fasting limit, believing that public interest could not be stretched or capitalized on any further. That distrust and cynicism irritates the hunger artist, and when his art finally outlasts its fame, he employs himself in a circus.

He is confined to a shadowy corner of the circus, surrounded by animals in cages. Crowds of spectators pass, noisily and indifferently, and the hunger artist, who had hoped to exceed his own powers, grows more and more depressed by his surroundings. But he continues to fast, losing count of the days. When an overseer looks into his cage one day and finds him near death, the hunger artist begs forgiveness for his act. In response to the inspectors' feigned admiration, he replies, "But you shouldn't admire it." He says he fasted only because "I couldn't find the food I liked. If I had found it, believe me, I should have made no fuss and stuffed myself like you or anyone else." He dies shortly after.

There's the paradox. And the only attempt at resolving it is vague--once the hunger artist's body is removed, a panther is placed in the cage. "And the joy of life streamed with such ardent passion from his throat that for onlookers it was not easy to stand the shock of it. But they braced themselves, crowded around the cage, and did not want ever to move away."

For all its critics' assertions of the artist's solitude and alientation in modern society, "A Hunger Artist" escapes interpretation. It has an incompleteness that is typical of Kafka's other stories, as though refusing totality (or affecting a failure to achieve total understanding). Why are the hunger artist's final words so banal? Is he mocking the onlookers? Is he mocking life and the artist's struggle within it? Are we meant to understand? Kafka was making a statement, about art, interpretation, modernity, truth. The hunger artist was making a statement, too, but nobody could know for certain what it was.

Who's Afraid of the Enlightenment?

For the German social critics, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, the Enlightenment of the 17th and 18th centuries advanced freedom at the cost of freedom. While the triumph of reason and rationality emancipated the individual from superstition, religion, and prejudice, it laid the ground for another kind of domination. In their essay, "The Dialectic of Enlightenment," Adorno and Horkheimer argued that, in subordinating the natural world to man's will, modern science and technology tended to convert reason into an instrument of domination, of which the Nazi death camps were a glaring testimonial. The empowerment of reason, in effect, was irrational. Reason for reason's sake, the condition for true freedom, was incompatible with modernity's hyper-capitalist, advanced industrial order.

Many post-war intellectuals in the arts and humanities were skeptical, not so much about science, but of scientism. They saw traditional forms of human community eroding, individuality and self-determination suppressed by technology. Urban centers in industrialized nations were particularly vulnerable. Accordingly, critiques of modern science often invoked the conformism and standardization which scientific progress supposedly entailed. The human being, for these thinkers, was becoming machine-like. His victory over nature was also a victory over his natural self; in its place, man developed a formalized morality, susceptible to external control and manipulation. As Adorno and Horkheimer theorized, this was indeed the negative legacy of the European Enlightenment.

Mr. Cogito Thinks of Returning to His Hometown

If I returned there
I surely wouldn't find
a single shadow from my house
or the trees from my childhood
or the cross with the iron plate
the bench where I whispered spells
chestnuts and blood
or anything which is ours

everything which survived
is a stone disc
with a chalk circle
I stand in the center
on one foot
a moment before jumping

I can't grow
although the years pass
and up above roar
the planets and wars

I stand in the center
unmoving like a monument
on one foot
before jumping into finality

the chalk circle reddens
just like old blood
mounds grow all around
ash
to the shoulder
to the mouth

--Zbigniew Herbert (trans. by blogger)