Once upon a time in Key West, after I recited a couple of my poems at a poetry reading in Sippin’ Internet cafe, a black woman I recently met and told about the gathering walked over to me and said, “You a shokka poet.”
I look forward to reading Erik Rittenberry’s daily posts at his Poetic Outlaws Substack newsletter, because they set me to ruminating and sometimes to writing. Here’s his offering today, about some shokkas no longer among the living, followed by where my thoughts went with it.
Civilisation is hooped together, brought
Under a rule, under the semblance of peace
By manifold illusion; but man's life is thought,
And he, despite his terror, cannot cease
Ravening through century after century,
Ravening, raging, and uprooting that he may come
Into the desolation of reality…— W. B. Yeats
Frank Kermode (1919 – 2010) was a prominent English literary critic known for his profound contributions to the field of literary theory and criticism.
In his thought-provoking book, The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction, Kermode takes on the idea that fiction often reflects deep-seated cultural and philosophical concerns about time, apocalypse, and the ultimate meaning of life. He discusses how literary works from different periods respond to these themes, and how endings in narratives help to provide a sense of understanding and resolution.
In the words of one NY Times critic, “Kermode argues that our apocalyptic views of disorder, of crisis, and perpetual transition in the contemporary world are contemporary ways of making sense of the world, of giving it an intelligible order.”
Below is a passage from his work in which he discusses “the end of a century” and how Yeats, whom he deems an apocalyptic poet, saw the impending horror, trepidation, and decadence that inevitably takes hold during a time of rapid transition. It’s how we try to give some “order and design” to the past, present, and future.
In the words of William Blake: “…the Last Judgement begins, and its Vision is Seen by the Imaginative Eye of Every one according to the situation he holds.”
It’s all so relevant still today. I hope you enjoy it.
You sometimes hear people say, with a certain pride in their clerical resistance to the myth, that the nineteenth century really ended not in 1900 but in 1914. But there are different ways of measuring an epoch. 1914 has obvious qualifications; but if you wanted to defend the neater, more mythical date, you could do very well.
In 1900 Nietzsche died; Freud published The Interpretation of Dreams; 1900 was the date of Husserl Logic, and of Russell's Critical Exposition of the Philosophy of Leibniz. With an exquisite sense of timing Planck published his quantum hypothesis in the very last days of the century, December 1900.
Thus, within a few months, were published works which transformed or transvalued spirituality, the relation of language to knowing, and the very locus of human uncertainty, henceforth to be thought of not as an imperfection of the human apparatus but part of the nature of things, a condition of what we may know.
1900, like 1400 and 1600 and 1000, has the look of a year that ends a saeculum.
The mood of fin de siècle ["end of century”] is confronted by a harsh historical finis saeculi. There is something satisfying about it, some confirmation of the rightness of the patterns we impose. But as Focillon observed, the anxiety reflected by the fin de siècle is perpetual, and people don't wait for centuries to end before they express it. Any date can be justified on some calculation or other.
And of course we have it now, the sense of an ending. It has not diminished, and is as endemic to what we call modernism as apocalyptic utopianism is to political revolution. When we live in the mood of end-dominated crisis, certain now-familiar patterns of assumption become evident.
Yeats will help me to illustrate them.
For Yeats, an age would end in 1927; the year passed without apocalypse, as end-years do; but this is hardly material. 'When I was writing A Vision,' he said, 'I had constantly the word "terror" impressed upon me, and once the old Stoic prophecy of earthquake, fire and flood at the end of an age, but this I did not take literally.'
Yeats is certainly an apocalyptic poet, but he does not take it literally, and this, I think, is characteristic of the attitude not only of modern poets but of the modern literary public to the apocalyptic elements. All the same, like us, he believed them in some fashion, and associated apocalypse with war.
At the turning point of time he filled his poems with images of decadence, and praised war because he saw in it, ignorantly we may think, the means of renewal. “The danger is that there will be no war... Love war because of its horror, that belief may be changed, civilization renewed.”
He saw his time as a time of transition, the last moment before a new annunciation, a new gyre. There was horror to come: 'thunder of feet, tumult of images.' But out of a desolate reality would come renewal.
In short, we can find in Yeats all the elements of the apocalyptic paradigm that concern us.
Sloan BashinskyI have great respect for Yeats, Blake and other harbinger poets of old, whom I doubt could have possibly imagined what lay ahead in Europe, Russia, America, Japan, China, etc.
Since I’m an American, and since I was born and grew up in a rich white conservative family in the upscale white Mountain Brook AKA Tiny Kingdom southern suburb of Birmingham, and since I spent a lot of time in Birmingham churches and talking with Alabama Christians, and since today I have ongoing interaction with the religious and political right and left in Birmingham, and elsewhere because of the Internet, I think I can say with some chance of certainty that the harbinger poets of old have nothing helpful for what has become of America.
As a poet, I think I can say with some chance of certainty that the poets today should be shrieking about what has become of America, even though it might not have any effect, and even if it brings them physical harm, loss of friends, loss of gainful work, etc.
When I lived in Key West, I attended monthly Key West Poetry Guild meetings where local and visiting poets recited or read their own poetry. We were not allowed to read other poets’ poetry, unless it was a special occasion, say a poet had died. Occasionally a poet recited or read a poem with religious or political tone. Otherwise, the poems were personal, existential.
After President Barack Obama accepted the Nobel Prize for Peace while continuing to fight the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq started by his predecessor, the 2nd President George Bush, my bowel shut down. It took me a month to figure out what that was about. I had been told in my sleep after Obama received the Democratic nomination in 2008 that he had the potential to be the AntiChrist. Now I understood what he had been told, and at the next Poetry Guild meeting I read a really violent poem I had written about Obama accepting the Nobel Prize for Peace while waging two wars started by his predecessor. I saw nothing in the audience’s eyes or demeanor that indicated any sympathy or agreement with the poem, but my bowel released. When I told other people about that, with a couple of exceptions, it was as if I had not even spoken.
Three nights before 9/11, a very familiar voice asked me in my sleep, “Will you make a prayer for a Divine Intervention for all of humanity?” I woke up and wondered what that was about, and then I made the prayer and went back to sleep. On 9/11, my concern was the 2nd President Bush would start a Vietnam-like war that America could not win. It did not occur to me that he might start two such wars. As I walked out of the Key West post office about a week later, the owner of the voice that had asked me to make the prayer said to me, “America needs to get out of the Middle East altogether and let Israel and Islam fight it out, or work it out, and in that way learn, which, if either, are God’s chosen people.” When I told other people about that, with a couple of exceptions, it was as if I had not even spoken.
I ran ten times for local public office when I lived in Key West and on Little Torch Key, 2003-2018, mayor, county commission and school board. Thankfully, I never came close to being elected. I detested politics, but I was dragooned by something much bigger than me to do it, if I knew what was good for me. I said nobody who wanted to be elected should be allowed to run for public office; citizens should draft candidates via the write-in process. At candidate forums and in media interviews, I was the out of the box candidate. I was the status quo’s adversary.
So, back to the future. Two old white men, one my age, 81, the other about 3 years younger, want to be President of the United States of America. In my view, neither man is fit to be president. In two nights, they will debate on CNN, and their mics will be muted when it is not their time to speak, because the younger of them did not let the older talk much when they debated the first time in 2020. I blamed that on FOX News’s anchor Chris Wallace, who did not man up and get Donald Trump’s mic turned off when it was not time for him to speak during that debate.
Here’s my take on the Trump and Biden factions.
The Trump faction reminds me of Adolph Hitler and his National Socialist Party leading up to World War II. The Biden faction reminds me of the mythical Fukawi tribe, who are forever getting lost and gathering together and sitting down and holding hands and closing their eyes and chanting, “Where in the fuck are we? Where in fuck are we?”
I voted for Joe Biden in 2020, because he did not remind me of Adolph Hitler and pre-World War II Germany. Before 2020, I had not voted for a Republican or a Democrat candidate. I will not vote for Biden this year, because he has aided and abetted Israel committing massive war crimes in Gaza. This old lawyer, who clerked for a US District Judge in Birmingham, who presided over every criminal prosecution in north Alabama, is no fan of Hamas. I say its leaders, and Israel’s leaders, and Joe Biden should be prosecuted for war crimes together.
I like taking time off by hanging out at Poetic Outlaws, where truth, beauty and love still show up, which seldom happens on CNN or FOX News, but I wonder if what America needs today is a massive march of Poetic Outlaws into every nook and cranny, and perhaps the place to begin is the same route taken by Trump’s Ayran army on January 6, 2021. If anyone doubts it was Aryan, google photos of the Charlottesville Confederate Monuments removal protest, MAGA rallies, and the January 6 coup attempt.
Patris
Patris’s Substack
Absenting yourself in a time of real crisis seems an abdication of moral responsibility. We are all guilty of war crimes, wherever we were born in the United States. No country is exempt, other than those fighting against the depredations of the Nazis and the Japanese dehumanization violence.
Consider what another presidency of the Hitler admirer could mean. This is not a time to sit home.
Sloan Bashinsky
Sloan’s Newsletter
I see now that I should have included in at the end of my diatribe, that when the poetic outlaws march to the national Capitol, they also shriek that Joe Biden is a war criminal, and he and the members of Congress who voted more money and weapons to Israel, along with the leaders of Hamas and Israel, should be hanged for war crimes.
Yesterday, New York’s very left member of the US House of Representatives Jamaal Bowman, a Hamas apologist, was routed in New York’s Democratic primary by a centrist Democrat who sided with Israel. I say Bowman’s mistake was not that he condemned Israel’s leaders and President Biden and Congress, but that he did not condemn Hamas’s leader’s, too. Bowman would have lost either way, but the way he went about it, he lost in God’s Courtroom, as well.
The October 7 attack was obvious bait to provoke Israel to do precisely what it did in Gaza, and to provoke President Biden and the US Congress to give Israel the money and weapons it needed to do it, and to provoke many Americans to cheer Israel on.
A German theologian Deitrich Bonhoeffer wrote The Cost of Discipleship, in which he compared what he called “cheap grace” to the real thing. Bonhoeffer is attributed with saying, “Silence in the face ot evil itself is evil, God will not hold us guiltless.” He joined like-minded German men who tried to kill Hitler. They got caught and that was the end of them.
You know very well, Patris, that I do not stay home. You know very well that I put my life and limb in the crosshairs of the American right and left day after day, week after week. I do it on Facebook, at my and other people’s Substacks, and at my google blogspots and The Redneck Mystic Lawyer for President Podcast, which were banned in Russia, Belarus, India, Islamic countries, India and Red China. And in Australia, because I kept taking the widely read Australian Substack columnist Caitlin Johnstone to task for giving Hamas a free pass.
Joe Biden disenfranchised me when he did not cut Israel loose but instead gave Israel what it needed to level Gaza. It’s that simple. Yes, we all are war criminals. But you and I do not have the means to stop President Biden and Congress from sending Israel money and weapons to obliterate Gaza.
Patris’s Substack
I respect you because I respect the fact you are principled. My fear is that you might tip the balance to a man as close to evil than you believe Biden to be by virtue of his support of an ally in a region rife with a united hatred of them. Netanyahu is not representative of the majority of Israelis any more than Trump is representative of the majority of decent and moral
Americans. I urge you to see this but will respect you regardless.
Sloan Bashinsky
Sloan’s Newsletter
This is really difficult for me, Patris, because I confess to hoping Biden is elected in November, if he and Trump both are still candidates, and I suppose that says everything, doesn’t it?
Not for a heartbeat do I think Biden is anywhere close to the threat to America, or to the world, that is Trump and his base, which are about the same size in numbers as Biden’s base. I imagine maybe 40 percent of Americans, I am one, wish neither of the two men were on the ballot.
You are correct about the hatred of Israel in Palestine and in much of Islam, and even in a large segment of America. I do not hate Israel, but there is no way I can like it after seeing what it has done in Gaza, and Joe Biden still provides Israel money and weapons to continue with it, which makes him Israel’s accomplice.
I think if Trump had been president on October 7, 2023, the attack would have occurred and the outcome would have been the same, and Trump would be Israel’s accomplice in mass murder and maiming and displacement and starvation of unarmed civilians.
Hamas doesn’t care what happens to the unarmed civilians in Gaza. It only cares about trying to bring down Israel and its benefactor America, and the October 7 raid was designed to provoke Israel and America to do what they did, and Joe Biden didn’t have the good sense to see that and decline to participate.
Instead, he allowed Israel to raid the warehouses in Israel where large amount of US Military munitions were stored for the American military’s future use, and he kept sending money and weapons from America to Israel. Biden knew if he did not do that, he would for sure lose to Trump in November.
I asked God to take a life for a life, my life for Trump’s life.
I asked God to take my life for Trump and Biden’s lives.
I asked God to take my life for Trump, Biden and RFK Jr’s lives.
I admitted to God that my offer was selfish, because I wish every day that this is my last day on this world. But I’m still here, so God doesn’t want me yet.
And I sure as hell don’t want my children and their families living in a country with Donald Trump and his base in charge of it. So, I suppose that says it all, doesn’t it?
Thank you for helping me get to the nasty awful truth, but I just don’t seen how I can vote for someone who is guilty of mass murder and maiming and displacement and starvation of unarmed civilians, which Trump is not.
sloanbashinsky@yahoo.com
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