Time’s Arrow: The Whig Version

For Joel Cutrara

The Truth was there already to be true.—Auden, "The History of Truth" (1958?)

It came to me just now, dreaming,

that time’s arrow points to both ways

not merely on the subatomic level.

"Infinite" doesn't mean extremely

big, but endless; galaxies fly apart

unceasingly; past and future exist,

and we thus may rectify our errors,

future upgrading as past's amended

with unending, infinite regrets—

sort of like a self-cleaning oven.

Only the present doesn't change.

Think of it as an imaginary number,

say, the square root of minus n.

“Distinguishing between past, present,

and future's an illusion,” Einstein says.

Somewhere, Petronius Arbiter,

not awaiting Nero’s fatal sentence,

opens his veins, but binds them up

again and gets some needed rest,

so that in death, forced on him,

he will at least look natural!

Grinning, he writes his tell-all will,

blowing the gaff on the imperial court.

Magda Goebbels murders her children,

since the Red Army draws near.

Uncle Bill drawls to his wife by

the Wabash, “I was just funning, dear!”

Upstart Crow jots on a piece of paper:

“More an antique Roman than a Dane?"

"Good night, sweet Yogi. Flights

of shortstops sing thee to thy rest!"

De historia stirpium: An Editing Life

Freddie Skinner, De Aar (1973)

The gods chose the victorious side, Cato the defeated one / Victrix causa deis placuit sed victa Catoni

—Lucan (Marcus Annaeus Lucanus), Pharsalia—On the Civil War (61–65 CE)

From South Africa and Greece a sometime refugee

metic, product of De Aar and Kimberley,

I sought a métier by the Bay.

A Beast in View—and a lightning

stroke of luck—won me a book column

in San Francisco magazine,

with its literary scene: lunching

at the Round Table or Vesuvio's

with the Jello King, if not with Evan

Connell (Son of the Morning Star),

until some over-funded millionaire,

who had no use for what I did, bought out

the magazine, and in the Chronicle,

Herb Caen noted my sudden sacking

with those notorious three dots of his . . .

“Publishing a poor third-rate piece of crap,”

spat the Times Literary Supplement 

(though not, of course, in quite so rude a tone),

“University of California Press

might at least have corrected its English—see (a),

(b), (c) . . .” or irritable words to that effect

(memory no longer serves). Emboldened by this unklnd

TLS assassination, I mailed off a clipping

of it to a UCP editor for whose

book—Albie Sachs’ Justice in South Africa—

I'd not long before gone to bat in The Nation,

praised honestly—though Albie was an “enemy,”

he a dad-blasted commie cadre of the SACP,

and I a member of the Liberal Party

and of the Citizen Group, maverick offshoot

of the Non-European Unity Movement (NEUM),

which, rejecting its pseudo/neo-Trotskyite program

called instead for unadorned nonracialism—

a “Brazilian solution,” one might perhaps say

(though Brazil’s also got problems, naturally).

Denouncing Apartheid’s categories as crap,

all we had to offer the voters was stone soup

—much as they’d have been well advised to opt for it,

more nourishing than the borscht they swallowed later:

Cheka cuisine dished up as Mandela’s . . .

But these decrepit hors d’oeuvres are old hat;

I cite them here but to adorn the whilom scene.

“I can do better than this for you,” my note read,

and Bill gave me a shot—as later Stanford did,

Johns Hopkins, and Chicago, too. In forty-four

years, a thousand books, or more, I’d say, at least!

from, first, Brady and Wimsatt’s Samuel Johnson:

Selected Poetry and Prose to, finally,

Jessie Fillerup’s Magician of Sound: Ravel

and the Aesthetics of Illusion. En route, I

blow my trumpet, The Great Herbal of Leonhart Fuchs:

De historia stirpium, my chef d'œuvre

(as it was an age before of Fuchs’).

For North Point Press I edited

Dostoyevsky’s Brothers Karamazov,

launching the Pevear–Volokhonsky translations . . .

My friends at those publishers dead or retired now,

their young replacements don’t know me from Old Adam.

(Alas, they’ve lost their fancy premises, what’s more

shunted off to Oakland, if not Redwood City).

Publishers “outsource” editing to India

now, and replete with cut price flaws one could have fixed,

new books come. It makes an editor want to scream!

How very badly people write these days, it seems.

This path, moreover, I had never planned to take:

I stumbled onto it that Monday in Berkeley

when California gave me lunch, and took me on

no questions asked! (Bill’s dead, of course, like so many

of those others.) In my youth, this financed our modest

way, London University and NYU for J,

buying me, rusticated, finally, this house,

which the books I wrote on my own would never do.

An editor out to pasture, nothing to edit,

I’ve become a poet again—if such indeed

I am, or ever was, or yet one day might be.

(T. Stearns Eliot submits you never know!)

Select Bibliography:

Dreyer, Peter. Against Racial Status and Social Segregation: Towards the Liquidation of Multi-Racialism and Non-Europeanism. Claremont, Cape Town: Citizen Group, 1958.

———. The Death Agony of Non-Europeanism. Claremont, Cape Town: Citizen Group, 1958.

———. A Beast in View. London: André Deutsch, 1969.

———. The Future of Treason. New York: Ballantine Books, 1973.

———. “The Banned History of Suppression.” Review of Justice in South Africa by Albie Sachs (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973). The Nation, July 19, 1975, 56–57. Albie Sachs was Justice of the Constitutional Court of South Africa from 1994 to 2009.

———. Martyrs and Fanatics: South Africa and Human Destiny. London: Secker & Warburg; New York: Simon & Schuster, 1980.

Books copyedited by Peter Dreyer mentioned in this poem:

Frank Brady and W. K. Wimsatt, Samuel Johnson: Selected Poetry and Prose (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977)

Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1990)

The Great Herbal of Leonhart Fuchs: De historia stirpium commentarii insignes [“Notable Commentaries on the History of Plants”], 1542, 2 vols.(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997–99)

Jessie Fillerup, Magician of Sound: Ravel and the Aesthetics of Illusion (Oakland: University of California Press, 2021)

Notes: Latin stirps, from which the adjective stirpium derives, has multiple meanings, including roots, race, scion, source, origin, or cause, but the primary one is “the stock or stem of a tree, or other plant, with the roots”—Cassell’s Latin Dictionary, s.v. stirps (stirpes, stirpis).

Herb Caen’s column in the San Francisco Chronicle was famed in that era for its “three-dot journalism,” condensing the news into a series of suspension points . . .

A note on the epigraph:

In 65 CE, when he was 25, the Roman poet Lucan, born in Corduba, Hispania Baetica (now Córdoba, Spain), was either executed or compelled to commit suicide by the emperor Nero, as were the philosopher Seneca and the satirist Petronius.

January–March 2025

Keeping Up Appearances

Thorns burn to a consistent ash, like man;

A splendid cleanser for the frying pan:

—Empson, “This Last Pain”

I thought to write a poem in French

to dress some fleeting fancy up.

Why French? Sheer vanity! What if I could?

Who would criticize such messing about?

"En sauvant les apparences," I dubbed it,

and these few lines came tumbling out—

not consciously solicited—from nowhere,

suiting our contumacious times:

La goutte qui fait déborder le vase

est un mal très nécessaire.

Cette goutte n’est pas aussi fou

qu’il en a l’air !*

What is this drop that overflows its jug,

that's thought a necessary ill—

a drop that's not as foolish as it seems?

(Is it the bare seed of which Paul discoursed

by the Peirene spring at Corinth—

of which Sisyphus himself was king?)†

All men who are not wise are mad

the Ancients thought—and, frankly, I agree.

Our language, though, has this staying power:

poetry rises to meet whatever hour.

Of matériel for our madness there's plenty;

one thought curbs it: knowing we must die.

Politicasters—like poetasters,

pissant hacks—pronounce heaven hell.

Their category error omits the leaven.

The drop will spill; the rest'll trundle on.

* "The drop that makes the vase spill over is a very necessary evil.

That drop is not as crazy as it might seem!"

† “And as for what you sow, you do not sow the body that is to be but a bare seed [γυμνὸν κόκκον].”—1 Cor. 15:37. In Greek mythology, Sisyphus was the first king of Corinth, founded around 900 BCE. The Peirene spring there was sacred to the Muses. Poets in ancient times drank from it for inspiration.

Saturday, March 1, 2025