If, as I think, we must have an Erewhonian revolution, it will stem as much from ’Pataphysics as from Samuel Butler. We are decidedly not moving toward Fuller’s utopia; we are moving toward a disaster that we can’t even imagine. We have been trapped in the logic of the revolutions of the Age of Reason. If you want peace, make war. We must have an arms buildup to have the strength to negotiate an arms reduction. And so on.
Because I don’t like theories and don’t have the wisdom to design a revolution that I can incite you to start, I am going to fall back on reality. Let us go back to the people who had their revolution over cups of tea at the king’s palace in Copenhagen. The Danes. They were once a people so terrifying that the English Book of Common Prayer asks God to protect us from them. In those days they were Vikings and it was wise to ask God to be protected from them. Then they heard the gospel preached and mended their ways a little. They thought Christianity sounded pretty good, but only up to a point. They didn’t like the part about having only one wife. A prudent church obliged them with the lex danicum, which allowed the Danes only to be polygamous Christians. They also wanted, as long as the church was passing out favors, to be baptized in warm water. That concession was given them also. Thereafter the Danes have followed what seems to me to be an exemplary path toward being successful and happy human beings. They have the highest standard of living in the world as measured by money and comfort. They are universally envied, except by Germany, which thinks them pushy and a touch immoral.
Danish history is a series of revolutions nicely balanced in an evolutionary frame. In the Age of Reason they had a charming writer and thinker named Ludwig Holberg. Denmark is a small country with few people, so Holberg had to be their all-purpose humanist: their importer of the Renaissance (a little late), the founder of their national theater, the inventor of many genres of literature, as well as a man of the church and government. So the Danes became model humanists after the pattern of Montaigne and Erasmus. Then came N. F. S. Grundtvig, who was a man of church and government also. He made them all literate, peasant and bourgeois alike, and wrote a thousand hymns and collected their folklore. Then came Søren Kierkegaard, who told them they were fat satisfied pigs and no sort of Christians at all, despite their exemplary Lutheran piety. So they all became philosophers and good Christians (limiting themselves somewhere along the way to one wife apiece). Then they had to hear the account of their shortcomings from Georg Brandes, who said they lacked sparkle and verve — Brandes was the first, anywhere, to lecture on Nietzsche. The conservatives were horrified by these lectures and fired him as a professor. Never mind: various people who did like his lectures passed the hat and made up his salary so that he was back in his classroom in no time. What we call modern Denmark — the country where everybody on one day under the Nazi occupation wore the yellow star of David, the king included, in compliance with the German order that all Jews identify themselves — is the creation of Brandes and his brother Edvard. “We are all Jews,” they said. Just as today one can see a blond, blue-eyed Dane wearing a button saying that he is a black South African.
The process goes on. They sound like Erewhonians of the most dangerous sort. They sunbathe naked in their parks. They have decriminalized every affection they can think of. They have absolute freedom of the press. In Denmark you can, if you choose, beget your next baby in the middle of the street; the traffic is very gentle and polite and there would be no other objection.
But to observe them from an American point of view is confusing. Children can see a film about twelve-year-olds experimenting with sexual play but they cannot see Disney’s Snow White, which is banned for its violence and spookiness. At the same referendum on which the Danes voted to legalize pornography they also voted to keep a state church, the Lutheran Evangelical. How, we ask, can they have so much freedom, with more to come, and be so quiet, well-run, charming, and clean a country?
They have TV and they read a hundred more books than we do. They speak at least three languages from the cradle up and yet adore their own language and have a rich and extensive literature in it.
Having legalized what we call pornography, they then lost all interest in it except for some rather spicy comic books that, I suppose, are educational in the long run. Illiteracy, poverty, and prejudice are unknown.
Their smallness can account for some of this — all excellence is local and specific to a culture. Their history, which is one of being lucky in their prophets and of a national propensity to heed their prophets, is another explanation. But I would like to argue that at the center of their success (and I do not mean to praise them while slighting Canada, Switzerland, Norway, Sweden, or other foci of civilization such as quattrocento Florence or fifth-century Athens or Tokyo) is a matter of culture, of good breeding family by family, and that this is the result of a long historical process. There are two kinds of geniuses: those whom God drops anywhere — a Mark Twain in Florida, Missouri — and those who are the products of their culture. An Isak Dinesen or a Jens Peter Jacobsen appeared in Danish culture as palm trees grow in the Seychelles; they are native to it; the seeds were there. And that is how the Danish constitutional monarchy happened in reason and civility rather than with a million deaths and the ravagement of the country.
England and her American colonies were as civilized as Denmark, yet we resorted to musket and bayonet for our revolution.
I think we need a revolution, here, now. I want us to be a free, happy, wise people. But how this is to be achieved I do not know. I do know that the real revolution must be a ripeness of evolution. What scares me is that for the past fifty years we have been moving backward while we have dreamed, or fooled ourselves, that we were moving forward. Every one of our cities became more dangerous to live in; we all became little more than consumers and taxpayers as far as our government was concerned. Rascality in government has become the norm rather than the exception. Wars have gotten longer, more demoralizing, more devastating and irrational.
Perhaps there is a process here that we do not understand — though it looks awfully as if we have begun to accept rot for ripeness, illusion for reality, credulity for skepticism, stupidity for intelligence.
Because I have no rational revolution to offer you, I suggest, for the fun of it, that you try the Erewhonian. Take back your body from its possession by the automobile; take back your imagination from the TV set; take back your wealth from Congress’s bottomless pit and maniac spending; take back your skills as homemakers from the manufacturers; take back your minds from the arguments from necessity and the merchants of fear and prejudice. Take back peace from perpetual war. Take back your lives; they are yours.
POEMS
The Medusa
is Juno of the Ribbons in gelatin,
little more, as Lyman said to Agassiz,
than organized water, Hegel’s brain
in a lace shawl, knit moonlight,
its dome of liquid glass
sealed by invisible sutures,
its spore sacs disguised as eyes
alternate with eyes, testicle eye,
testicle eye, petalwise radiant,
six sexes flowering in six eyes
fringed with pleats thin as wine
down the side of a glass
stitched to the dome with cobweb.
Its confetti of forty legs
hang below, mylar orchid roots,
a silverpoint page of da Vinci
on the purl and meander of rivers
that eddy, curl in countercurl,
like Isabella d’Este’s hair.
This anatomy of water
with its crystal bowl of a hat
hung with sexual eyes and optical sexes
is named Medusa by the masters
of naming, Arethusa and Ariadne,
ladies whose fate was in mazes.
It is the Portuguese Man of War,
the sea nettle, the stinging jellyfish.
Builders with baskets of atoms
&n
bsp; in the seven days, sticking the protozoa
together, called these humps of slime
bearded with transparent fern
The Electric Lady, Quintessential Venus,
Jezebel in Panoply, Hera of the Tassels.
This gracefullest sphere ringed
and dressed in Isolde hair,
crawfish-shy, improbably intricate,
and by any virtuoso craftsman’s word
impossible, is fifty pounds of water
and four ounces of flesh,
is an electricity of convolute frills,
and is transparent. You may see
through it what’s behind, a fish
rippled as in a mirror with a warp,
or coral squeezed and stretched
by this lens of fat water. To
copulate it rolls cogwheel fashion
around another which in turn
is rolling around another, eye
looking into eye, seeder into socket.
It is an hermaphrodite and can
if the press is great mate with six
at once and has been known,
to shoot from among its fellows
two feet into the air.
It hatches not baby Circes but
anemones, carnivorous flowers,
pomegranates of the ocean which
like their Titan parents are
Venus and Mercury blended.
Headless, they are not beings
but the seeds of beings,
parent, egg, and infant in one,
bones of water, flesh of film.
Their progeny is the ghost octopus
with legs of smoke, the dozen-crotched-
and-eyed Medusa Cyanea,
fire in azure, quick to sting,
a ferociousness of light
in the cold dark of the seas.
The Resurrection in Cookham Churchyard
The Cookham dead began to rise
When God with April in his eyes
Ended in O its midst the night.
To dogwood flowered hard and white,
To rain and violets overhead,
Sharp music lifted up the dead,
In cuckoo song and silence born,
A silver brilliant hunting horn.
Through opened grass Sir Jonas Moore
Swims upward to the chapel door.
Broken earth in her ancient hands,
Here Sarah Tubb the prophet stands.
In pleated light and diamond bone
Comes Petronella Elphinstone.
Sir Edward Coke in rotten lace
Sits up with wonder on his face.
Michael Ventris surfaces near
The round and pious Edward Lear.
Thoda Pigbone with the stick-pin
Finery she was buried in,
All cackle, warts, and raddled gums,
From troubled earth triumphant comes.
Karl Marx so white, so rich of beard,
By Richard Porson stands upreared.
The drummers of Tobruk climb out,
The Buglers at the Dunkird rout.
Leander Hosmer, dressed in red
Among the Macedonian dead,
Bassoon, the Regimental Band,
The angel’s resurrecting hand,
Fire, grace, and water in a wave,
Accepts and rises from his grave.
Bright wakened eyes to starlight turn
And tongues in flaming splendor burn,
Till spirit sheer in breath and light
Stands naked to his naked sight,
The miller, husbandman, and wheat,
God, God the eater and to eat,
The thresher who with stormy hand
Shall winnow time from being and,
Apocalypse within his fist,
Mill the outlasting eucharist.
In but his beard and all this sins,
From fiery mouth to spindle shins,
John Ruskin, resurrected, stood,
Resumed the gallop of his blood,
Resumed his stare, and all but spoke
When marigold and sifting smoke
His flesh became, and fell, and where
The vineyard of his ribs was bare
Sat Jerusalem in his breast
That seemed Siena from the west,
But Venice east and Sparta south,
And north, on Thames beyond Thame mouth,
O crystal fold of years and shires,
Grey Oxford with her silver spires.
Came now through lilac drenched with rain
An armature of cellophane,
Frail Thomas Peacock wrapped in light.
And Stanley Spencer rose upright,
Who, naked as a swimmer, stood
As best his sleepy body could
Beside his tombstone while his wise
And deep and dark untroubled eyes
Watched the startled, exultant dead
Take flesh of fire in flesh’s stead.
Henry Purcell and Edward Horn
In dancing, dashing light reborn,
Thomas and Henry Vaughan who go
In hair as white as Finnmark snow,
And Edith Sitwell lift her hand
To Henry Fillmore’s saraband,
And, whistling to the banjo, prance
Stan Laurel in the harvest dance,
And print the dew with silver tracks
Sir Arnold Edward Trevor Bax.
Split lichened antique stone and stout
Sir Thomas Urquhart floated out,
And came, where granite heaved and gave,
Proteus Steinmetz from his grave.
In spiral sheen from eyes to toes
Thin Christina Rossetti rose,
Botticellian and long her hair
Astream unbound on kind green air.
Here rose through parted columbine
The solemn Ludwig Wittgenstein,
And lettered, ivied marble tore
To offer Søren Kierkegaard.
Tall Pumpelly the traveller woke,
Through mullein and mole burrow broke,
Through clay Hugh Miller shyly rose,
Through water can and garden hose,
Dandelions and field shrew’s house,
Johannes Brahms and Octave Maus.
Here tossed his coffin lid aside
Black Roger Casement in such pride
He wore for flesh transparent flame
That shivered from his shattered frame.
His bones were water, then were air,
But Casement was still standing there.
This man of light and shadow burled
Was Alan Turing in the world,
This fire on holly after rain,
Admiral Sir Frederick Jane.
O harvest, harvest of such grace
From counterfolded time and space,
Christopher Smart, his brindle cat,
John Martin in his Roman hat,
Boole and Babbage and Bishop Hall
And Mrs. Heelis in her shawl.
Through throstle charm, from sundered ground,
The tall Charles Doughty upward bound,
And Hooke the witch on broken knees,
And, choired, the masters of the trees,
Camilla Bombois and Jacques Teyssot
And Baron Ensor of Ostend,
John Clare and in his hand that friend,
The only one he could abide,
Who, in his waistcoat when he died,
Went with him to God’s splendid house,
His Inniskillin pocket mouse.
And now the brilliant silence broke
And God among the risen spoke,
While bells in rounds, by angels rung,
With iron anthem shouting tongue
A hundred gransire triples roam,
Shake out, and call th
eir treble home.
That coat of hair Elijah wore
His windy radiant body bore,
And stole of stark archaic stitch
With birds and flowers worked and which
Had once belonged to Cretan Zeus,
And Isaac’s wild and brown burnous.
My synagogue at Chartres stands
Within the hollow of my hands,
Athene’s church and groves of slim.
Sillima is my seraphim,
Hauterives and Saint Apollinaire,
My painted chapel at Burghclere,
Assisi and Sofia’s dome.
Hadschra Maktuba was my home.
At Bethel and at Highgate I
Have burned within the willing eye,
In light as under Tobit’s vine
Or deep in Cana’s sudden wine,
In quartz and hollyhock and dark
Diktynna of the laurel bark
Or midnight moon upon the wheat
Where Ruth lay still at Boaz’ feet,
In leaves at Senlis flaming green,
The visions of my Séraphine,
Hosios Loukas where the light
Within my sanctum falls so white,
Clear and Attic, pure and cold
Upon mosaic blue and gold,
To quince and cypress am I known,
The very scorpions and the stone.
I put my living hands upon
Tetrahedrons Arachne spun,
For foretime here lovesick for there,
Jig, hey, of gnats in shaking air,
Made this mirror of grief and love,
Fine replica of what’s above.
I put my fingers down among
Foxfire anatomy and dung,
Unbind, and with immortal breath
Annihilate his magic death,
The double dream infolding man,
The golden world more troubled than
Dark rapture of the sullen dead.
Now, said He, shall I bake my bread.
I put my hands within and meet
Quincunx of seed and hands and feet.
Tassili cow, Basundi thighs,
What made I lovelier than eyes?
You painted me the antelope,
In lurs and pandores carved your hope.