All things are a flowing
Sage Heraclitus says;
But a tawdry cheapness
Shall outlast our days.
In the early 1950s when I was at Hamilton College, from which Ezra Pound graduated in 1905, his poems weren’t taught in our classes — even though his son, Omar Shakespear [sic] Pound, was my classmate. Ezra Pound was at the time imprisoned in St. Elizabeth’s Hospital for the Criminally Insane, for his pro-fascist and anti-Semitic radio broadcasts during World War II; so his poems were ipso facto politically incorrect. (Omar, who died in 2010, was a bearded pre-Beatnik poet and, like his father, a brilliant language student.)
When I finally did get to Ezra’s poems, I didn’t enjoy or understand most of them, but admired “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley,” whose lines like those above seem both true and prophetic: There’s something essentially chintzy about contemporary civilization (see TV, movies, advertising, architecture, U.S. 19); and at the same time, his “quote” is truer than he or Heraclitus (c. 500) imagined. All things really are “a flowing,” inside and out.
Naturally, I often think how close — elevation 11 feet — we live to the water (in our case, Big Bayou) and feel insecure. Seventy percent of the earth is covered by rising water — but 100 percent is being flooded by waves of various sorts. Watery waves are the least of our problems.
The desert lands of the Middle East are beset by waves of revolution, the European nations are bobbing in waves of financial turmoil. Tsunamis of tyranny and repression still boil up in various corners.
Sound waves, too: the ravings of Rush Limbaugh swirl in the air around us, crowding against Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” or Bach’s “Brandenburg Concertos,” all just a click away. Inundation seems to be the human condition; we’re always drowning in something. In our atmosphere, we have global warming, steadily raising Florida’s heat and sea levels. Inside, our electrons and particles rock like waves in every cell. Our sexual mores are being toppled by a rising tide of new ideas and attitudes. Is the family going under? Is marriage? Is the country? Is God?
The answers: Never; nix; nein; and Lord, no.
First of all, none of this is really new. Heraclitus’s dictum that “All is flux” is true, as is his famous observance that you “can’t step in the same river twice.” In that sense, you can’t step in the same church twice, either — and yet the Mississippi still winds down from Minnesota to the Gulf of Mexico, despite losing a few of its bends; and the little Community Church in Mountain Lakes, NJ, where Jeanne and I were married, still sits picturesquely on Briarwood Road welcoming its parishioners, though the benevolent Dr. Pancake is long gone. I taught his children 7th grade English at Mt. Lakes High School, and they wished the good reverend — their father — hadn’t changed their German name from “Pfannkuchen” to its English translation, “Pancake” — not a good change, because of the jokes that rained on them. Seventh grade can be tough (hmm… that doesn’t seem to change).
Most change is turtle-slow. But unless we do something, Florida’s going under, starting with its edges, where we live. Marriage is inevitably changing, too, probably sooner than our shoreline (human warming being faster than global warming). Our Community Church has added gays to its marriageable group — as well as its clergy — which will add to its longevity as well as diversity. God, too, is being redefined, but as long as the inborn human capacity to wonder at the world remains, God will be with us whether we’re atheists or not.
Some of these surges, like sexual equality for women; civil equality for gays; universal health coverage; and religious freedom protected by a secular government, would be smart to prepare for, because they’re coming, even if slowed by an occasional 5-4 vote in the Supreme Court, which also changes. Republicans, however, seem to be backing a contrary wave (I think of it as a riptide): the rabid expansion of fundamental religions, with its correspondent shrinking of women’s and gay rights. This may be winning in the Far and Near East, but not in America.
Despite Pound’s pessimism (below), we haven’t botched our civilization yet.
There died a myriad,
And of the best, among them
For an old bitch gone in the teeth,
For a botched civilization …
—Both quotes from “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley” (1920) by Ezra Pound (1885-1972)
This article appears in Apr 12-18, 2012.