The strength that yields to temptation

An Ideal Husband
_______________
Oscar Wilde
Act 2

Sir Robert Chiltern:
Weak? Oh, I am sick of hearing that phrase. Sick of using it about others. Weak? Do you really think, Arthur, that it is weakness that yields to temptation?  I tell you that there are terrible temptations that it requires strength, strength and courage, to yield to. To stake all one’s life on a single moment, to risk everything on one throw, whether the stake be power or pleasure, I care not—there is no weakness in that. There is a horrible, a terrible courage. I had that courage. 

_______________
Perhaps it isn't apropos to draw any connections between a Wildean comedy and a Shakespearean tragedy, but I think there is something of Macbeth in Sir Robert's sentiment: the nightmarish courage involved in yielding to a heinous and horrific temptation. The royal greatness Macbeth sought was not the greatness he ultimately achieved. It was his willingness to grasp the nettle, to embrace an impossible and appalling ambition, that finally thrust him into tragic greatness. Lady Macbeth was overcome by a spot of blood; Macbeth found the will to wade through a river of the stuff. For so many years that has been the image I've associated with Macbeth: a single, battered figure, trudging through thick water, soaked to the bone with the mortality of common men, tearing fear and fate and morality off his back—compelled by a strength and courage that is as implacable as the doom that reaches for him from behind. 

"And betimes I will, to the weird sisters:
More shall they speak; for now I am bent to know,
By the worst means, the worst. For mine own good,
All causes shall give way: I am in blood
Stepp'd in so far that, should I wade no more,
Returning were as tedious as go o'er..."
Macbeth, Act III, Scene IV

The common hero

Tragedy and the Common Man
_______________________
- Arthur Miller

In this age few tragedies are written. It has often been held that the lack is due to a paucity of heroes among us, or else that modern man has had the blood drawn out of his organs of belief by the skepticism of science, and the heroic attack on life cannot feed on an attitude of reserve and circumspection. For one reason or another, we are often held to be below tragedy - or tragedy above us. The inevitable conclusion is, of course, that the tragic mode is archaic, fit only for the very highly placed, the kings or the kingly, and where this admission is not made in so many words it is most often implied.

I believe that the common man is as apt a subject for tragedy in its highest sense as kings were. On the face of it this ought to be obvious in the light of modern psychiatry, which bases its analysis upon classific formulations, such as Oedipus and Orestes complexes, for instances, which were enacted by royal beings, but which apply to everyone in similar emotional situations.

More simply, when the question of tragedy in art is not at issue, we never hesitate to attribute to the well-placed and the exalted the very same mental processes as the lowly. And finally, if the exaltation of tragic action were truly a property of the high-bred character alone, it is inconceivable that the mass of mankind should cherish tragedy above all other forms, let alone be capable of understanding it.

As a general rule, to which there may be exceptions unknown to me, I think the tragic feeling is evoked in us when we are in the presence of a character who is ready to lay down his life, if need be, to secure one thing - his sense of personal dignity. From Orestes to Hamlet, Medea to Macbeth, the underlying struggle is that of the individual attempting to gain his "rightful" position in his society.

Sometimes he is one who has been displaced from it, sometimes one who seeks to attain it for the first time, but the fateful wound from which the inevitable events spiral is the wound of indignity and its dominant force is indignation. Tragedy, then, is the consequence of a man's total compulsion to evaluate himself justly.

Talking about life

"I think students go to my lectures and come away with an impression; they don't come away with a body of knowledge (even though that's my intention when I start off behind the lectern)! However, the moment my passionate momentum takes me out from behind it I know I'm finished with the solidly prepared lecture and off talking about life."

"You see, I found myself wondering about how we measure achievement in this school, in many schools. Grades? Scholarships? Universities? Level of degree? I've started asking students what they would rather have--a place in Columbia, or someone to love? Getting into Columbia is hard but so is finding someone to love. In fact, Shakespeare tells us that if you are clever it's even harder to find love. In 'Much Ado About Nothing', Benedick says to Beatrice, 'You and I are too wise to woo peaceably.'

I was delighted to find that this girl 'has a boyfriend'--it's no consolation prize; love is the greatest treasure anyone can find."

"Grades are after all just grades--we already know, don't we, who the really talented people are. 'And (...) has a boyfriend.'"

____________________

To the man who always left an impression--his impression--of life, love and literature, thank you for being a mooring rope for the crews of students too eager to set out to sea. For the reminder that when we forge ahead into the future with drive and ambition, we leave certain things behind.

The people waving from the shore, the ideas and dreams we grew up with, the budding love we left to be watered by the salty spray of our departure--these are the things we remember when we are all out at sea, set for distant shores and uncertain glory, but longing for nothing more than a cloak of loving arms and the humble palace of home.

Happy retirement, and safe journey on your own way home.

Trust

Trust lies somewhere in between love and fear. It is planted somewhere in the shadows, in the patches of ground we hope no one treads, watered with furtive glances and nervous sighs. We wait for the light but we hate its coming. But when the sun rises we will know: whether it is flower or fungi we have been sheltering from our gaze, or whether we have been gardening withered blossoms and a broken stalk. 

Trust cannot be recovered; it must be regrown. But not before we cry like mothers in the night, mourning dead babies. 

Don't you know that when you leave others to pick up the pieces, their fingers bleed for you?

Whether the wax weeps

In the endless, tumultuous battle between head and heart, I have learnt this summer that sometimes it's best not to take sides, not to trust in the sequences of logic nor the odd throb of intuition. But to let life take its course and sweep aside the indecisions of thought and feeling in the momentum of a moment, plowing through dream and delusion alike with the force of destiny. 

But I want to say also that I'm sorry for the carnage I left behind in all that thoughtlessness and unfeeling. And those candles I've tried to blow out, but where the flames have simply refused to die and continue trembling in my wake. I see the lights at night, dancing in the distance, and wonder whether the wax weeps. And I silently, selfishly hope they never dim. 

To you, and to me

To those who laugh at love and think it unreal, or impermanent, or unimportant, or fanciful, or powerless:

1 If I speak in the tongues of men or of angels, but do not have love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. 2 If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. 3 If I give all I possess to the poor and give over my body to hardship that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.

4 Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. 5 It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. 6 Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. 7 It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.

8 Love never fails. But where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be stilled; where there is knowledge, it will pass away. 9 For we know in part and we prophesy in part, 10 but when completeness comes, what is in part disappears. 11 When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put the ways of childhood behind me. 12 For now we see only a reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.

13 And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.

You shall love your crooked neighbour with your crooked heart

As I Walked Out One Evening
_________________________
W. H. Auden

As I walked out one evening,
Walking down Bristol Street,
The crowds upon the pavement
Were fields of harvest wheat.

And down by the brimming river
I heard a lover sing
Under an arch of the railway:
'Love has no ending.

'I'll love you, dear, I'll love you
Till China and Africa meet,
And the river jumps over the mountain
And the salmon sing in the street,

'I'll love you till the ocean
Is folded and hung up to dry
And the seven stars go squawking
Like geese about the sky.

'The years shall run like rabbits,
For in my arms I hold
The Flower of the Ages,
And the first love of the world.

'But all the clocks in the city
Began to whirr and chime:
'O let not Time deceive you,
You cannot conquer Time.

'In the burrows of the Nightmare
Where Justice naked is,
Time watches from the shadow
And coughs when you would kiss.

'In headaches and in worry
Vaguely life leaks away,
And Time will have his fancy
To-morrow or to-day.

'Into many a green valley
Drifts the appalling snow;
Time breaks the threaded dances
And the diver's brilliant bow.

'O plunge your hands in water,
Plunge them in up to the wrist;
Stare, stare in the basin
And wonder what you've missed.

'The glacier knocks in the cupboard,
The desert sighs in the bed,
And the crack in the tea-cup opens
A lane to the land of the dead.

'Where the beggars raffle the banknotes
And the Giant is enchanting to Jack,
And the Lily-white Boy is a Roarer,
And Jill goes down on her back.

'O look, look in the mirror,
O look in your distress:
Life remains a blessing
Although you cannot bless.

'O stand, stand at the window
As the tears scald and start;
You shall love your crooked neighbor
With your crooked heart.'

It was late, late in the evening,
The lovers they were gone;
The clocks had ceased their chiming,
And the deep river ran on.
_____________________


What cuts the deepest in the poem are the little ironies that Auden sprinkles from verse to verse, the easy incongruity that underlies and undermines life, natural as rhyme. The pallor of night in the evening sky, the trauma of a field chopped down for harvest, the hollowness of the lover’s declarations of eternal love as he stands framed by an arch that inevitably rises and falls from point to point, as do the trains on the railway which rush onward to a final destination. Ironies quickly lapse into absurdities in the lover’s speech, but Auden’s more subtle jokes never go away. The first love of the world—that of Adam and Eve, which ended in the first sin and the introduction of death into the world. 

Neither is the speech of the clocks free from Auden’s scorn. For the clocks do not heed their own warnings: the personification of Time as if it were something humanly comprehensible, the whirring and chiming of the clocks as if it were something to be broken down and brought under control. And in the end their deceit and self-importance are laid bare. When the evening darkens, when love and its songs have faded, when time passes without the chiding of the clocks, the only thing left unchanged is the river: brimming at the start of the poem and still running deep at the end, but insensitive to notions of first and last. It has neither spilled over nor dipped under, and I cannot be sure what Auden meant but perhaps the only thing certain is that the river does not brim with promise; none has been given and none should be expected. The waters run, and run deep, but they are silent.
 

A clasp in the dark

I write this to remember a moment shared, in a room now quietened by your absence. As usual it was the unwhole, throbbing sweetness of unasked questions that sounded with the greatest possibilities; a clasp in the dark. As usual, the words I spoke were the ones that mattered least to me, even in an evening of my own design, set to music of my own making. 

Fruition in love is a concatenation of circumstance, conviction and courage, and I think courage is the most important of all. I have lacked the daring. To take the leap when it was necessary, to hold one's heart in one's mouth: I refused, as usual, and could only watch as probabilities divorced themselves from possibilities and drifted mutely apart. 

I nevertheless have to thank you for such a moment as I have hardly felt in these three florid years. I have only courage sufficient to express myself in the silence of this writing. I told you that you were like another, but it was only another failed ploy of mine to say what I felt without telling the truth. I don't believe there is anyone else like you in the world. 

Upon the horizon

How much I would give for permanence, certainty and some absolutes. I live in the woeful in-betweens of expectation and aspiration, always striving and reaching, living with effort and on the strength of self-belief. As much as I have been forgotten I have forgotten myself. I cannot locate myself even in this place with a history so immense and a culture so amorphous, and home—home is a conclusion built upon premises I have not yet constructed, a destination clouded by the distance of ambition. In time to come I may not recognise it, nor may it welcome me any longer, and then we would pass each other by. Because home may be an island, but it is also shaped by the tide.  

Hidden lives

Her finely touched spirit had still its fine issues, though they were not widely visible. Her full nature, like that river of which Cyrus broke the strength, spent itself in channels which had no great name on the earth. But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.

Middlemarch

George Eliot

Free space

In the moments between the moments that we remember, when our eyes are cast to the sky and not set to purpose, we find a little of that peace and free will that was promised to us but that we often forget we have. The drawings scrawled across the clouds with our fingertips we leave dangling in the air, and seek instead letters stricken in stone, ground with steel and fire into the permanency of memories not our own. The free will we leave behind. In the moments of indecision, the brackets of blue sky between buildings, in the distance from thought to thought. Before the point of the spear, the quivering of its shaft, the arch of the arm or the release of strength: in the sterile stillness of free space where the violence of purpose is born.

Law like Love

Law, say the gardeners, is the sun,
Law is the one
All gardeners obey
Tomorrow, yesterday, today.

Law is the wisdom of the old,
The impotent grandfathers feebly scold;
The grandchildren put out a treble tongue,
Law is the senses of the young.

Law, says the priest with a priestly look,
Expounding to an unpriestly people,
Law is the words in my priestly book,
Law is my pulpit and my steeple.

Law, says the judge as he looks down his nose,
Speaking clearly and most severely,
Law is as I've told you before,
Law is as you know I suppose,
Law is but let me explain it once more,
Law is The Law.

Yet law-abiding scholars write:
Law is neither wrong nor right,
Law is only crimes
Punished by places and by times,
Law is the clothes men wear
Anytime, anywhere,
Law is Good morning and Good night.

Others say, Law is our Fate;
Others say, Law is our State;
Others say, others say
Law is no more,
Law has gone away.

And always the loud angry crowd,
Very angry and very loud,
Law is We,
And always the soft idiot softly Me.

If we, dear, know we know no more
Than they about the Law,
If I no more than you
Know what we should and should not do
Except that all agree
Gladly or miserably
That the Law is
And that all know this
If therefore thinking it absurd
To identify Law with some other word,
Unlike so many men
I cannot say Law is again,

No more than they can we suppress
The universal wish to guess
Or slip out of our own position
Into an unconcerned condition.
Although I can at least confine
Your vanity and mine
To stating timidly
A timid similarity,
We shall boast anyway:
Like love I say.

Like love we don't know where or why,
Live love we can't compel or fly,
Like love we often weep,
Like love we seldom keep.

_______________
W.H. Auden

The momentum of a moment

You know how glass shatters when it encounters a violence it has no hope of absorbing, how the shards twinkle when the surface erupts in horror as breaking point is reached, how they throw off a sudden confusion of coloured lights that is the trauma of becoming unwhole. It strikes from the darkness, this memory that is not mine but which hurls at my consciousness a force of emotion which must have been yours. It is a living source of hate which has accumulated only density and impermeability through the passage of years, a rock hardening under the weight of time, unable to forget itself into non-existence. It hurtles through the shadows and the the scenery of a past blackening in its wake, and it brings to the surface of my mind a force I cannot withstand. It breaches the back of the mirror with a momentum unchecked by your forgetfulness or my forgiveness, the brutal momentum of a moment that was yours and another's and not mine, and as I look into the mirror my reflection and the calm around me are thrown into motion, a thousand silvery shards throwing the face of my own fear back into my flesh. Perhaps the pain will drain itself out when the blood stops flowing. Perhaps I can wear my broken face into the happiness and the future we imagine. Perhaps not.

Switching sides

I wish I had something more to say but I've already used all the words I know; the problem with me not being a good speaker is that you're not a good listener. You don't have the patience to hear me attempt to attempt to articulate the haziness of my emotions in a vocabulary I am unfamiliar with. You don't have the understanding to see past the own distorted image you have of yourself. You move in a world inhabited only by your own fears and doubts and your warped, overblown sense of pride. When you battle against me you only end up fighting against yourself, because I am always on your side.

Can't you see it? Do not mistake me for one of your shadows and carve away at a dignity that has you as its soul and centre. I fight for you, why do you cut me down?

Liability

How long before long will we learn
that love is a cause and not a consequence
how soon, how often will we teach each other
that love is not a defence but an element of the crime.
How many times will you say I need to know
that love is a lie I don't need to believe in:
how love is your excuse, my justification.

How quickly will I come to admit to myself
that love lies not in the heat nor in the moment
nor the hand bringing down the knife
but in my guilty mind that compels the blade
to darken the night with my heart's bleeding
into a pool so dark I see your reflection:
you walking away, saved by your omission.

You had no duty to care: I had done all the assuming.

Looking forward

When the world my heart is rending
With its heaviest storm of care,
My glad thoughts to heaven ascending,
Find a refuge from despair.

Faith's bright vision shall sustain me
Till life's pilgrimage is past;
Fears may vex and troubles pain me,
I shall reach my home at last.

_______________
Charles H. Spurgeon

What you do not know

You are more important to me than you know it.
You are important in the way I know the morning will be clear, and it will be quiet;
in the way my feet find the ground.
You are important in the way my voice comes to me when I command it,
and in the way your laughter follows my joy.

You are important to me in the simplest of ways.
I do not find you in the clouds, nor the stars:
you are none of these
but the quiet endless arch
on which these lights and colours hang themselves.
You are the silence and the stillness
on which poetry speaks and music resounds.
You are the page on which no words need be written
for meaning to be spoken.

In this sort of comfort,
there is no meaning to be hidden
no strings still attached
nor feelings left unchecked.
In this sort of silence, and under this sort of sky,
I have no words left unshared.

Freedom

We are pendulums swinging across the arcs of our days; we give each other momentum and let each other fall. Sometimes we swing and we catch each other, and then we intertwine and loop dizzily in space, and we draw the circumference of each other's lives; we chase each other along the same orbit. But we always forget that when we finally find each other across the void of string and space, the momentum stops also; and then we disentangle, we swing away from each other and spin again in equal and opposite directions, no circle too large or too far away from the other, and then we are free agents once again. We are free to love and to hate, but we are free most of all. At the top of every arc we are free most of all.

My mistake

I could not bring myself to say it; I would not allow myself the possibility of failure, nor introduce the moment when I would no longer be master of myself. I could not say it; I could not ask the question gilded with hope and with doom, and in failing to ask it I had failed. For nothing else but your affirmation is failure, and failure is everything but the shape of those words forming, with precious slowness, like silver in the air, like the peal of a bell.

Heart's fire

There're certain things you can't bring to admit to yourself, certain memories that are ageless and changeless, locked away like a prisoner within a circle of heart's fire. These are the things that have sculpted you, formed you into the person you are; you see it in your hands, your eyes, the shape of the words that come from your lips. These are the things that dance like fingertips across your visions of the present: the twitch of recognition, of recognizance, of recollection that flickers across your face like the shadow of an osprey, like the shiver of water as memory blossoms slowly upon the pool of your consciousness.