Author: stevekuusisto

Decadence is a peculiar subject. Simon Heffer’s book “The Age of Decadence: A History of Britain 1880-1914” starts with the frivolity of late Victorian England because pomp is always both catchy and tragic. The Empire is dying but no one knows it yet. We understand this is tragic and we’re lead to summon sufficient irony to ask what rough beast is coming in our time. Decadence is a two-for like a single price double header ticket.

If this was all there was we’d forget it but there’s the peculiar optimism of decadence which is its calamitous part.
(One remembers the Titanic’s first class passengers playing ice hockey on the fore-deck.) Early in Heffer’s book he describes Victoria’s “Diamond Jubilee” in 1897:

“When the Queen reached the Palace her vast European family awaited her, and showered her with diamonds. At dinner for the family, foreign potentates and ambassadors that evening – she sat between the ill-fated Archduke Franz Ferdinand and the Prince of Naples – she wore ‘a dress of which the whole front was embroidered in gold, which had been specially worked in India, diamonds in my cap, and a diamond necklace.’ 9 A band played in the ballroom while she was pushed around in her wheelchair – she could not stand for long – to greet her guests. So that the splendour could be taken to the people a force of 2,400 officers and men marched from the City of London on the Saturday before the Jubilee pageant, parading through the East End to Bethnal Green and Victoria Park and back. The event also ensured that the city’s lowest classes would be impressed by the power and glory of their nation, would identify with it, and have their patriotism stirred.”

This paragraph has everything we need to know about anticipatory decadence–mortar is shifting but no one must know. But “we know” and so a clear understanding of extravagant collapse depends on our own capacity for comic irony–from our place in the audience we can see the players heading toward their doom. We want to cry out: “don’t do it!”

I remember a friend from graduate school who scotch taped an article about Ronald Reagan’s inauguration on his refrigerator. The headline read: “They Came to Party” or something like that. Of course the Marxists got it wrong! Glitz is the opiate of the masses. The nation is collapsing but look at that parade! And one certainly remembers George H.W. Bush putting on a military review after the first Gulf War while the nation was in a steep economic recession. There he was in his bullet proof triangular review stand waving as the tanks rolled past, all the generals with their scrambled eggs smiling sheepishly. Nothing good comes of political decadence.

I also recall telling a friend in 1991 that the U.S. lost the Cold War because our true enemy wasn’t communism but domestic racism.

Heffer’s book is terrific. He shows how decadence can occupy a dying society’s imagination about the future and I found this passage especially revealing and chilling:

“The new century provoked great interest in futurology, with a sense of fear and hope about scientific developments, notably exploited in the fiction and essays of H. G. Wells. Concern for the future provoked interest in eugenics, and the idea that human perfection could be achieved by scientific means. And there were other speculations about things to come: the newly popular genre of science fiction imagined aliens arriving from another planet; the influx of foreigners from Europe, including Jewish victims of pogroms in Russia and political dissidents from other parts of the continent, created a more cosmopolitan London; and the idea developed of a German threat to Britain, potent among a nation more aware of its possible vulnerability after the less than straightforward success of the Second Boer War.”

Inasmuch as we’re living in the age of Eugenics 2.0 and the decaying discourses of the internet age bring forward lizard people in the pizza parlor one may fair shiver.

Typically I write blog posts early in the morning. Today I woke and brewed some coffee and walked out into the yard, my American suburban plot and stood under the old apple trees and I wept. (Picture a man in his sixties wearing only a bathrobe crying in a remote corner where it was likely no one could see him.)

My father died on Easter Sunday twenty one years ago and how I miss him. We must talk to the dead in quiet and shy ways and like everyone else I do. But the tears come without warning as they did today with the first sun on my face.

When I returned to the house I decided to put writing aside. I chose to sit and serve my father well with my silence.

Out of this silence come bells.

Such early bookish delights: Christopher Robin dragging his stuffed bear and bumpity bump. Later it was the best of times and the worst of times and bumpity bump.

I play Haydn on the stereo and feel warmth as if whiskey spreads through my torso.
The sea lies so still at dusk. If you have good eyes you can see the lights from ships.

When I say I prefer Keats to Shelley I must say why, at least to myself.
That’s the way with art. Shelley wasn’t much of a man. He was really Holden Caulfield.

The God of books is in the process of transforming me.
Look, some of the bookish creatures have gotten free.

This week PBS will air a three part documentary about Ernest Hemingway produced by Ken Burns. Much advance commentary exclaims how toxic, cruel, alcoholic, sexist, and racist old Papa was. None of this is news. It’s certainly not news that the man was a big deal.

So I’ll say it. I’ve traveled widely in American literary circles for most of my adult life and I’ve seen cruelty, vanity, racism, sexism, homophobia, alcoholism, and every kind of perfidy on display from coast to coast. Moreover diversity doesn’t offset the miserable character flaws of writers. I have observed women treating other women with raw contempt; people of every background making homophobic “jokes”; able bodied writers sneering at cripples; and yes, the toxic masculinity of Hemingway’s ghost drifting through writing workshops. I once saw the poet May Sarton humiliate a young woman for saying she liked the intersection of dance and poetry. I’ve seen male poets who were openly predatory toward young women. I’ve watched the moue of disgust on a novelist’s face when asked about the work of another writer–the vanity, lying and the striking of ugly attitudes is appalling. So yes, let’s “have at” Hemingway. He deserves a three way mirror.

As for me I’ll watch the series. I generally watch anything by Ken Burns. But I won’t imagine today’s writers are nicer people. I’ve been to too many college campuses and academic conferences.

I’m writing this on Easter. I’ve still got forgiveness muscles above my neck. People are harmed by a thousand things. They struggle ahead wounded and tired. I merely wish to note Hemingway’s flaws are widespread. Why? Because creative writing doesn’t make us better human beings. If this was true Hemingway wouldn’t be so relevant.

Here come the philosophers clomping up the stairs, hot-headed while praising dispassion. (If you had the proper spectacles you’d see their superegos resembling old undersea diving suits with iron helmets.)

**

Forget the comic books sonny.

**

Psychologists can’t decide if we have memories or not. You only think you remember being abused by your parents. But your parents are too mysterious for you to remember. Yes, your little brain is just a seed on the wind.

**

If I was as bitter as you I’d be a behaviorist too.

Old poem, inside anything–
Murdered kings in lightbulbs
(Robert Bly) standing room only
For the groundlings in mist
Or your private dead
In performance
Though the doctor
Can’t see it
Your mother setting fire
To furniture
The big house listing
Like the Titanic
And the turtle backed
Retina sparking
In Marconi’s hair
“Everything looks the same
As last year,” he says
Wiping his specs.

I am one of these
Half in love with now
Open like a flower
A flower that walks
And though I want to ask
If you understand
I think this slow walk
Under rain soaked
Apple trees is enough
Just so, feathers wet
Green, cold,
In a dark perfect circle.

Of course it goes on for days. Window shades roll up and down. Paint cracks along the moulding. Far from this room someone smokes a filterless cigarette. Some Rosie the Riveter or John Bunyan. And the pain pumps like a rubber bladder.

Blind people have headaches. Oh not all of them of course. We’re wildly different from one another. But hot rivets behind the eyeballs are common with many of us. It spreads across one’s face and skull like fire in dry grass.

If you’re one of the lucky blind who has a job you’re a figure of misapprehension by colleagues, often thought to be moody, perhaps unfriendly. Those blind people. He looks bitter all the time. Well, you try walking around, unable to see what’s in front of you while a prairie fire rages in your noggin.

I’ve laughed for years at the “let’s pretend we’re disabled for a day” exercises you see on college campuses. There’s always some poor soul wearing a blindfold and poking around with a cane. I want to whack them with a ball peen hammer and taser them just so they can get a better appreciation. The “not seeing” is just cake icing.

So I’m a blind spoonie counting out functional minutes and almost daily. Rarely do I have a happy 9-5 pain free teaspoon day.

Of headaches it can be said they’re more like a mist than a rainfall. Rain is for amateurs.

I want to be beautiful like the worm inside the thistle and I want a good, hard, unpolitical crying jag wherein I shall weep for life within the life.

I deliver a weather report. Today will be a high gravity world without adequate language for death and dying. Late in the afternoon someone will ring a bell.

Spring. Phooey. Sugar poems are written on all continents. Easy to glow rapturous about the outward things but it’s also the season of ghost maples. No one’s writing about them. Too hard I guess. Now that spring’s here I want to lie down on the wet leaves that spent winter under the snow. You can’t explain this to anybody. They’re all dancing around like Percy Shelley.

No. No. No. No. This is a Shelley free zone. If we must have a poet let it be Auden:

“Behind the corpse in the reservoir, behind the ghost on the links,
Behind the lady who dances and the man who madly drinks,
Under the look of fatigue, the attack of migraine and the sigh
There is always another story, there is more than meets the eye.”

Let us pretend to cheer, the work of all sowers and gardeners. There’s always another story and we can mostly keep it to ourselves.