How Not to Mistake Yourself for the World

Pieter van Laer, The Flagellants (Alte Pinakothek, Munich)

I had a dream in which this is all real,

where we rip off our masks and sing . . .

—Geoffrey Hill, "Improvisation on 'O Welt ich muss dich lassen'"*

Observe it closely. It’s out there, the "double or treble reality fused together into one line or a single word" (Hill surmises) Shakespeare saw.

You’re part of it, inside somewhere. Check your liminal ID!

Don't beat yourself up. (Although flagellants in the Middle Ages flogged themselves with whips and scourges, seeking the distinction in their hurt.)

Blood-tears? You don't need to go that far! "The only thing that matters is on this page."†

Gaze at the page—stare until you feel little drops of blood forming on your forehead.

Mop your brow; tuck your handkerchief into the breast pocket of your suit, with the maculate, incarmined tip visible, near to your heart—an aide-mémoire—as you stride over the lawn, dissonant interval! toward your destination:

O Welt, ich muss dich lassen.

* "Oh, World, I have to leave you."

Cantata by Bach, song attributed to the sixteenth-century composer Heinrich Isaac. Epigraph and Shakespeare's double or treble reality, Pindaric 16, both in Hill's collection Without Title (Yale University Press, 2007), 3, 50.

† A note to himself by Robert Caro, the heroic biographer of President Lyndon Johnson, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/rifling-through-archives-legendary-historian-robert-caro-180985956.

Friday, February 28, 2025

OMG

Eugène Delacroix. The Death of Sardanapalus. 1827. Musée du Louvre.

“This country has gotten bloated and fat and disgusting and incompetently run.” —President Donald Trump, press conference, February 24, 2025

Who was it said, Murder is suicide

with mistaken identity?

That’s what those school shooters

are all about—

Why Hitler sought to exterminate the Jews;

Why Stalin wiped out his former comrades with the NKVD;

Why Mao launched his Cultural Revolution;

Why Caligula wished all Rome had but a single neck

That he might hack off its head.

Sound familiar? I could go on:

Why hunters madly seek out game to kill;

Why sapients, unbeknown even to themselves,

advance the murder of their Mother Earth . . .

We identify our world with ourselves

—and vice versa:

The casual blasphemy of OMG.

Thursday, February 27, 2025

Housekeeping Night

When I consider how my light is spent,

Ere half my days, in this dark world and wide,

And that one Talent which is death to hide

Lodged with me useless . . .

—John Milton, Sonnet 19 (ca. 1652)

But who would credit that, that one talent

dug from the claggy Beauce and returned to it

with love, honour, suchlike bitter fruit.

—Geoffrey Hill, The Mystery of the Charity of Charles Péguy (1983)

Why should that talent be death to conceal

and compared fruit returned bitter

as love and honor? We once used to say:

“It’s no big deal!” Talent noted, love, honor

that much the sweeter when returned,

I must recuse—albeit no way a quitter—

treat love and honor as two simple rights

that do not necessarily need be earned.

Emerging into light, I never asked for honor

or love, but took them as my due

for being there—and quenching rage at you.

“Eighty percent of life is just showing up,” said

Woody Allen, but he would find it not enough

—much more is asked for on Housekeeping Night.

Note: The epigraphs to this sonnet are discussed in Eleanor Cook’s intriguing book Against Coercion: Games Poets Play (Stanford University Press, 1998), chapter 7, from which I borrow them. Disclosure: Professor Cook graciously acknowledges in it, inter alia, “my splendid copyeditor, Peter Dreyer, master of griffin history and much more” (vii).

Google attributes the aphorism "Eighty percent of success is showing up" to "Donkey Hotey" (https://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/06/10/showing-up/).