The Garden of Verse: Matthew's Great Teaching on Charity and Hospitality, in an Age of Plastic

My poem on the difficult issue of living charitably and hospitably, as moral authorities such as the writers of the New Testament say we should, is appearing in the September issue of the online poetry journal, Verse-Virtual.

            The poem is titled "Food, Drink, Love" and responds to the often cited and beautifully phrased verse from the Book of Matthew in the New Testament. Here's the verse:

"For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me." Matthew 25:35

             I'll post the first four stanzas of my poem here:

Food, Drink, Love 
If I were one for food and drink,
I'd never stop to mull and think
But fill the pail up to the brim
And bid good cheer to her and him

Now I keep nought of drink and food
For a plastic card is just as good
Its heart lies on a printed sheet
Accept this page, it's good to eat

Somewhere, my lad, your face I've seen
Perchance about the cash machine,
An oasis and a landscape green
With dates and palms and hands so clean

I knew you, Matthew, long ago
Your hair was long, your speech was slow
One of love's tribe, an innocent
Whose glory now is long since spent

If I were giving food and drink
I'd never have the time to think
For urchins with their empty cup
Would line my door to fill it up

             To read the rest of this poem and other work by the 55 poets in this issue, see  http://www.verse-virtual.com/poems-and-articles.html

 

            The September 2017 issue of Verse-Virtual also includes one poem from my chapbook "Gardeners Do It With Their Hands Dirty," published in May.

            Here's the poem:

Waiting for the Perseids
 
No stars, but fire
And a guitar,
knock-knock-knocking on the soft diplomacy of clouds, visibility poor

A surge of smoke lunges like a ghost,
then twists back to the lake's black mirror
The weather worker builds a tapered temple of wood,
an offering,
draws flame from his hand

An instrument is procured for the master
The strings wind upward, songs
A few syllables hummed, rise to the diminished sky
From the dark below to the mottled cushion of the stars

The loon calls to the morning light
 

            That chapbook, my first book of poems, is available from Finishing Line Press at

https://www.finishinglinepress.com/product/gardeners-do-it-with-their-hands-dirty-by-robert-knox/

 

The Garden of Science: Climate is a Long-term Issue, Human Disaster a Short-Term Probability

            Don't look now, but it appears likely that the human race is doomed. Having read "The Uninhabitable Earth" an article by climate-change explainer David Wallace Wells in a July issue of New York magazine, I am now able to put everything in perspective.

            Start with this so-called 'late summer' weather. A little cool, isn't it? Not my idea of real summer weather. Down in the sixties much of the time over for the last two weeks. And now that we're into mellow September, still three more weeks of summer technically according to the standard astronomical divisions of the solar-calendar, and I'm already looking around for key essentials in my winter wardrobe.

            Despite my desire to wind the seasonal clock back to the middle (or even beginning) of July and take these last two months over again, the worry is not that we've enjoyed (or tolerated) a cool summer, but that most of the world can look forward to warmer winters.

            In other words, warm is not good.

            This is counter-intuitive.

            I want to sit in nature's garden, sip something cold, and stare at the plants. Watch the sky. Track the many seemingly pointless (to us at least), patternless zigs and zags of the birds. Listen to the trees think. An occasional light breeze keeps the annoying insects off. The valuable, and intriguing insects, such as the honey bees are very welcome. I get photos of them every summer hopping in and out of big fact echinacea blooms and brushing against tiny bluish protrusions from the tips of the wild mint that joins the late summer crush around here.

            On my personal calendar August cannot have too many days. Quietly blessed and blooming afternoons slip into the hush of forever like a quiet nap. But too precious to sleep through. The cricket and cicada soundtrack of the early-starting evening. Not the songbirds calling end of day, but the humming appendages of largely invisible insects slipping into our consciousness from their undetectable hideouts. As the poets of Africa remind us: The grass is singing.

            But I'm living in the past. August serenades? Whoops, gones-ville.

            Now it's time for September songs.

            But apparently I am lamenting the wrong losses.

            The bigger story is that, temperature-wise, we're going up, up, up. And faster, and sooner, than we think.

            Wells's "The Uninhabitable Earth" has been fairly described as analyzing "worst-case scenarios," i.e., what is likely to happen to human life on earth if we do do nothing dramatic to contain our current greenhouse-gas emissions trajectory -- and, perhaps, even if we do. The article answers the question: how bad could it get?  

            The answer: Bad.

            The issue for the continuance of human civilizatin, or mere survival of some fragment of the species, is the time-clock -- or time bomb -- that operates in the planetary system of which we are a mere jonny-come-lately.

            Here's my favorite quote, the fact I will try to remember, on taking the long-view of climate change on Planet Earth:

             The Earth has experienced five mass extinctions before the one we are living through now, each so complete a slate-wiping of the evolutionary record it functioned as a resetting of the planetary clock, and many climate scientists will tell you they are the best analog for the ecological future we are diving headlong into. Unless you are a teenager, you probably read in your high-school textbooks that these extinctions were the result of asteroids. In fact, all but the one that killed the dinosaurs were caused by climate change produced by greenhouse gas. The most notorious was 252 million years ago; it began when carbon warmed the planet by five degrees, accelerated when that warming triggered the release of methane in the Arctic, and ended with 97 percent of all life on Earth dead. We are currently adding carbon to the atmosphere at a considerably faster rate; by most estimates, at least ten times faster. The rate is accelerating.

            Earth abides; people not so much.

            I'm listening to Peter Kater's "River," a musical piece evoking continuity, as I read this piece over. Frankly, I need the solace.

            The part about how "carbon warmed the planet by five degrees (celsius)... and ended with 97 percent of all life on Earth dead" particularly got my attention.

            Because as Wells goes on to point out, a five degrees elevation -- in an accelerated time frame because human beings are supplying the big oomph to the 'natural' forces that control climate by sending temps up and down -- is well within the possibilities of our very own here and now 'rapid climate change' super-crisis.

            If we have been following the Paris climate change agreement story, even distantly, we may know that the goal of the international treaty is holding global warming to a 2 percent increase. Wells's article analyzes the consequences of 4 percent and 8 percent increases, arguing that climate scientists offer the general public only the most modest estimates of their current global warming projections because they don't want to freak people out -- or governments -- and frankly they don't want to face the backlash of climate-deniers.

            So, in fact, the idiot know-nothings who currently possess the White House and most of the US government are already succeeding in keeping the true picture of what climate scientists thing may be in store for us from the vast majority of non-scientists. Here is some of that truth:   

Now two degrees is our goal, per the Paris climate accords, and experts give us only slim odds of hitting it. The U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issues serial reports, often called the “gold standard” of climate research; the most recent one projects us to hit four degrees of warming by the beginning of the next century, should we stay the present course. But that’s just a median projection. The upper end of the probability curve runs as high as eight degrees — and the authors still haven’t figured out how to deal with permafrost melt...[The reports show] that temperature can shift as much as five degrees Celsius within thirteen years. The last time the planet was even four degrees warmer, Peter Brannen points out in The Ends of the World, his new history of the planet’s major extinction events, the oceans were hundreds of feet higher.

            Well there's another fact I may try to keep a grip on. Humankind may, relatively soon, be facing ocean levels "hundreds of feet higher." Yet in another part of his essay, Wells tells us that us rising sea level is merely one of many serious threats (such as "the end of food") humanity can expect to face.

            Here's where you can read the rest of this "worse than you think" analysis:

            http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/07/climate-change-earth-too-hot-for-humans.html

             I'll indulge in only one other scare-fact -- we're all familiar with 'scare-stories' (that's how certain 'media' manipulate consumers such as the little-brained thing in the White House). But here's another 'scare-fact' about climate:

             Climate-change skeptics point out that the planet has warmed and cooled many times before. But the climate window that has allowed for human life is very narrow, even by the standards of planetary history.

             That is to say, through most of Planet Earth's history, temperatures on Earth's surface have been too hot, or too cold, to allow for the presence of human beings dwelling here.

            In terrestrial terms we were always here on a short lease.

            Suddenly I find myself more interested in those seemingly wacko proposals to set up artificial living environments on other planets. The climate science projections Wells presents here are:   

 what Stephen Hawking had in mind when he said, this spring, that the species needs to colonize other planets in the next century to survive, and what drove Elon Musk, last month, to unveil his plans to build a Mars habitat in 40 to 100 years.

             Mars? Some other so far undiscovered off-planet 'home' for humanity to inhabit?

            Some other living space, that is, from which our descendants can remember us. Or try to forget.

If you're interested in hearing other voices on this subject, here's an article that takes issue with some of Wells's conclusions.

... https://climatefeedback.org/evaluation/scientists-explain-what-new-york-magazine-article-on-the-uninhabitable-earth-gets-wrong-david-wallace-wells/

And here's an article that says he got his worrying forecast right:

https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2017/7/11/15950966/climate-change-doom-journalism

The Garden of Time: Poetry in the Prose of Banville's "Blue Guitar"

             Superb prose poems crop up in the novels of John Banville.

            In "The Blue Guitar," published in 2015 but which I have just recently got around to reading, Banville's narrator, 

the central figure as is so often the case in Banville's fiction, shares an account of his relational missteps, betrayals and self-deceptions. In a novel in which the narrator's self-analysis -- and self-absorption -- is in reality the work's central concern,  

Banville brings us to a moment of no particular dramatic import in which said narrator reflects:

            I felt tired, immeasurably tired.... The wind keened to itself in a chink in the window frame, a distant, immemorial voice. When the time arrives for me to die I want it to happen as a stilled moment like that, a fermata in the world's melody, when everything comes to a pause, forgetting itself. How gently I should go then, dropping without a murmur into the void. 

            Focusing on the last sentence in this brief meditation we find a cogent response to one of the most famous, and oft-quoted, poems about facing death in modern times, namely (and you should all be shouting aloud where this observation is going by this point) Dylan Thomas's memorable poem about his father:

            "Do not go gentle into that good night."

            Thomas's poem fell, with considerable resonance, into the period of mid-century Western angst I am tempted to call "when everything was existential."

            The word 'existential' was used both to mean that everything that happened in life was meaningless and that any single moment, gesture, decision, or indecision in a human life was of singular, potentially turning-point importance. Absolutely everything: from deciding to join the French Resistance and risk a horrible death at the hands of the homicidal maniacs who have taken over your country, to the praiseworthy gesture of getting out of bed each morning to face another day in a life in which nothing could ever be known, understood, or valued with anything resembling certainty.

            Take a stance, Thomas's great poem urged:

            "Rage, rage, against the dying of the light."

            If the world had no meaning, if the universe might itself be the daydream of some cosmic cobra wrapped around the pachyderm upon which the spinning earth was mounted, if human life itself was a bad joke in which a poor player struts and frets his hour upon the stage before disappearing behind the eternal curtain -- as we must all inevitably do -- then did you not, poor Dylan Thomas's father, have cause enough to rail?

            But in the passage quoted above our hero -- Oliver?; Banville's narrator-protagonists seem to have forgettable names -- asserts that he would take the opposite tack, volunteering, as it were -- if only the universe would stop rumbling about and mumbling pointlessly to itself and achieve a moment of stillness -- to go "gently."

            He's a quitter, this brief soliloquy may suggest. Or a peace-maker. Or, perhaps, a peace-seeker. A figure of resignation, approaching some sort of wisdom, if only of the quietist sort. All he's asking is for the universe to -- 'pause' -- or hold a pause (that's the 'fermata') -- and he would step in to fill the silence with his own freely-accepted extinction.  

            Is this a spiritually advanced attitude? (I ask a second time). A Christian (or even Buddhist) resignation? The acceptance of higher power? The stoicism of the ancient philosophers?

            Is it a breakthrough of sorts for a character who has confessed his faults, both grand and petty, given up a successful career as an artist, and run away from the consequences of an affair with a friend's wife.         

            Or is it meant to be taken -- by the reader -- as yet another self-dramatizing pose. Not a frank self-confession of his life's failure, but a sort of self-ennoblement he wishes others to share.

            Banville's narrator, the lapsed painter, is a familiar type. Someone, generally male, who trades on the appearance of qualities he does not truly possess to get something he desires. So often that something is the favorable opinion of women.

            What sets this character apart from others of his type is that his narration has almost nothing good to say about himself. A central motif, introduced without particular emphasis, is that from boyhood he has been a unapologetic thief. Stolen items of no particular monetary value keep popping up in this story.

            When his partner in adultery, her marriage ruined and her infatuation replaced by the sad slap of reality, accuses him of stealing a book, the reader thinks, 'Oh no! Now he will be falsely accused of the sort of thing he actually did in his boyhood. Ironic!'

            But no -- incredibly -- he has stolen it! 

            We now see (if we haven't before) that 'stealing' in this book is a metaphor for our narrator's theft of another man's wife.

            I wondered whether we should also apply that metaphor to issue of the narrator's successful painting career. Are we to think that he may be 'stealing' from the work of others?

            But no I don't think so. All artists, all writers, necessarily 'steal.' Or borrow, to use a politer term, from the work of others; or 'allude' to creations such as the language of a great poem.

            That 'gently' in the earlier quoted passage about a welcoming of death is a clearly intended allusion to Thomas's canonical poem. Am I stealing, Banville may be asking us in this moment, from a poem many of us know about a subject all of us must someday consider? As readers of what I certainly found to be a beautiful passage in a troubling book, do we need to think about the issue of literary borrowing?

            Not really. At least I didn't. The passage is music. It's beautiful.

            That's the reason the unusual word 'fermeta' rings true in this passage. It's a word taken from music that means holding a pause or note.

            Banville's evocation of our experience of the 'the world,' our human existence, is a kind of music. And at the right moment his narrator is willing to surrender everything to it. Even himself.

            I pause here to point out that I have not even mentioned the act of borrowing contained in the novel's title. The phrase 'blue guitar' is famously associated with Picasso's painting  

"The Old Guitarist," painted during that 20th century artist's ever-popular "blue period." And it is also associated, again no doubt because of the influence of Picasso, with a famous 20th century poem by Wallace Stevens, titled "The Man With the Blue Guitar," in which the poet states (among other things): 

You do not play thing as they are

You play them on your blue guitar.

            I take back my earlier, hasty judgment that narrator-protagonist Oliver, a venial, self-centered, self-confessed evader of responsibility, has nothing good to say about himself. He has one thing. This passage is it.

They Had "A Connection to the Case": Sacco and Vanzetti at 90

            One of his ancestors was called to serve on the jury, a man told me. For one of those trials.

            He was at the gates when the getaway car went through, another man on another night told me of his family member's connection to the case. The words spoken with a rueful laugh. They didn't try to stop them. He told the police what he saw. So did a dozen other guys. "They all said different things."

            Her ancestor, a woman told me after my talk, was "a very well known doctor." At Harvard. "He was involved somehow in the case." She spoke quietly, as others filed out of the room. The name was McGrath.

            "The house was just down this way." He pointed to a part of West Bridgewater where an anarchist lived in 1920. Back then the 'house' was called Puffer's Place. Johnson's garage was still there too when he was growing up, the same person, a knowledgeable senior citizen, told me.Till some time in the Fifties, he thought. You could still see the sign: Johnson's Service Station.

            The woman stopped us as we came out of the Kingston senior center door. Is it over? she asked. She wanted to hear the author speak. I told her, happily, that I was the author. And, yes, the program was over, but I would gladly sell her a book if she had come to buy one. We spoke in the dark and I gave her my email address. Her family was connected to the case, she said. She gave me a name. Gardner. He worked for the Boston Globe too. He also worked for the defense committee, because they needed him when they began to get all that publicity. She told me who he was related to, and what he had done in the rest of his life after the case was over. I recognized the name, though his connection to the case was all I knew about him.

            A member of her family was one of the witnesses. I grew up on the street, she said. The case is special to me.

            I've always been interested in this subject, a man said. I've read about it.

            Anything about this case, another man said. I always want to come.

            I live in the shadow of the Plymouth Cordage Company. And look upon the chimney stack built by an ancestor of mine, daily.

            One of my husband's ancestors was a fish peddler too and told the story of meeting these men in North Plymouth, even on Christmas

            She said her grandmother never believed them. They said they were selling fish on Christmas. "But we never got any fish on Christmas," she said, so that's how she knew they were lying.

            He said they were terrorists. He said anarchists were responsible for bombings and killings all over the world. He said an anarchist even killed an American president. They killed the king of Italy. He said anarchists started World War I. Terrorists! How I could make them out to be victims?

            Later I looked for the name McGrath, which I recalled from my research, and found I was spelling it wrong. It was George Mcgrath. This is what I was trying to remember: The highly regarded medical examiner Dr. George B. Mcgrath performed the autopsy and said the four bullets fired into the body of payroll guard Berardelli were identical, hence fired from the same gun. This was a crucial point because the prosecution claimed that one of the bullets (called bullet number 3) was fired from a gun belonging to Sacco. The defense refuted this claim by pointing out that bullet 3 was a different kind of bullet from the other three, and therefore likely a substitution for the original bullet 3. Mcgrath repeated his testimony: the four bullets in the murdered man's body were of the same kind. This question is discussed at length in the book "Postmortem: New Evidence in the Case of Sacco and Vanzetti" (1985) by William Young and David E. Kaiser. "The custody of evidence was weak."  

            I never found Puffer's Place, where the anarchist Mario Buda was living and from which he fled the local police. Or the house and garage of mechanic Simon Johnson, where Buda had left his car and where Sacco and Vanzetti, joined by Buda and a fourth anarchist, journeyed to pick up Buda's car on the fateful night when they fell into the Bridgewater police trap and were arrested. Held over night. Charged in the morning. Put on trial a year later; convicted. Executed seven years later in one of history's most infamous and long-running criminal cases.

            I found her family name on the witness list for the defense.

            The ancestor who did not receive fish for Christmas perhaps did not order any, since numerous other North Plymouth residents testified in court to receiving eels on Christmas Eve, a crucial piece of Vanzetti's defense in his Plymouth trial.

              The jury -- no immigrants, no people of Italian descent, no intellectuals, and no one who admitted to reading books; no African-Americans, and of course no women -- deliberated for 10 minutes before bringing back a verdict of guilty. The foreman said later that he didn't know if they were guilty of this crime but commented, "We oughta hang the whole lot of them."

            President McKinley was in fact killed by a professed anarchist, born here of Polish parentage. The assassination of Archduke Ferdinand, the proximate cause of World War I, was carried out by Serbian nationalists. Whether you consider it terror or not, political assassination has always been the weapon of the disenfranchised and it almost always backfires. But Sacco and Vanzetti were not on trial for a bombing or an assassination, but for a gangland style robbery of a shoe factory workers' payroll with accompanying murders, an act they would have regarded with horror and which they did not commit.

            The Globe reporter Gardner Jackson was hired by the Sacco-Vanzetti Defense Committee in 1927 to manage publicity as the threat of execution grew near and the whole world was watching. After the executions Jackson gathered "The Letters of Sacco and Vanzetti" for publication in 1928, a lasting contribution to the case's history, since the collection still available today as a Penguin classic edition.