I didn’t have my copy Karl Barth’s Romans when I was quoting Hunsinger the other day, but I wanted to chase down some of Barth’s lines. Yesterday I did… at length:

But if thou do that which is evil, be afraid; for he beareth not the sword in vain: for he is a minister of God, an avenger for wrath to him that doeth evil. We are wont also to overlook far too easily that other warning—the warning against the doing of that which is evil. We must indeed be led to see that we continually overlook it. Every step we take in this world we take in the shadow of evil. Even the earnestness with which in the midst of evil we do good, even our patient, busy reforms which for many of us take the place of revolution, do not bring us out of the shadow of evil. Our whole visible behaviour is either an acceptance of the present order or a denial of it; and in both cases we do wrong. We can do right only in the ‘not-doing’ of our relationship to God. The warning with which we are now concerned merely emphasizes that our whole experience does thus move within the shadow of evil, and bids us not be wholly engulfed by it. In the shadow of the kingdom of death we must be afraid; for there we are encompassed by enemies and rivals, by jealous and dangerous friends, by men whose success is insecure and by those who gloat over the failure of others. There set-backs and periods of stagnation await us, obstacles and disappointments, failures and defeats, which come upon us unexpectedly one after another. There legal proceedings and quarrellings take place, confusions and all manner of tragic complications. On this board we make no move that is not met by some dangerous counter-move; no step that does not in some way have back at us; no possibility that does not contain its own impossibility. Whether we support or oppose the existing order, we stand on the same level with it, and are subjected to one condemnation. Occupying some position, positive or negative, on the plane of the existing order, we are bound to have to pay for the fact that all are relative. We attack or defend, we build or tear down, fight or are at peace, affirm or deny; but sooner or later we are compelled to halt before a last threatening danger and a last heavy punishment—the danger that, after all, we are men, and the punishment for being so. God does not yield before our encroachments and when do we not encroach upon His rights? The encroachments of revolution He meets with the sword of government; the encroachments of government with the sword of revolution. And in the fate of both we behold our own destiny—in fear and in pity. The wrath of God falls upon all of us. Upon each one in some way or other the sword is drawn; and it is not drawn in vain. Whether we attempt to build up some positive human thing or to demolish what others have erected, all our endeavors to justify ourselves are in one way or another shattered in pieces. We must now assert that all these endeavours of ours not merely cannot be successful, but ought not to be so.

Wherefore ye must needs be in subjection, not only because of the wrath, but also for conscience sake. To experience the wrath of God as wrath only would be eternal death. It is, however, our conscience that understands the ‘Halt’! of the drawn sword, and recognizes God in His wrath. Our conscience prevents us from supposing that the evil we encounter is merely obstruction and fate. It reminds us that we are evil; but it also recognizes in the sword that is drawn upon us the righteousness of the hand of God. Conscience sees in the evil that is done against us the minister of good. It interprets our judgement, not to our advantage, but to our salvation. It makes of the injury done to us, not our justification, but our hope. Conscience, therefore, does not allow us to rise up from the severity of our lives embittered and ready to revolt; rather, it pronounces the end of the grim cycle of evil unto evil. Conscience leads us out of the turmoil of human suffering back to our Primal Origin, back to God—Wherefore ye must needs be in subjection. Revolution provides the great opportunity of willing to do what God does. And yet, such an intention is impossible; for we have to understand that our ‘new’ is not THE ‘New.’ We have therefore to return to the source of our rebellion, to the apprehension of the evil in the existing order before there had issued from it revolutionary thought and action, before ever revolution was born. Our terror then was a guiltless terror, for we were then terrified with God at the misery of the creature. Then we knew also and this knowledge was our deepest, most assured knowledge the hope of the creation. Then was the ‘Moment’ when our most simple perception of the relation between God and man was identical with the doing that which is good. But this pure ‘Moment’ was no moment in time; and therefore being in subjection is also no temporal human action. And yet, to know that we have no Right, even when we are in the right, is a knowledge in time. It is this knowledge which reveals that we have a hope—the hope of the Coming World where Revolution and Order are one.

For this cause ye pay tribute also. A strange conclusion! Ye are actually acting more or less willingly.—Ye are paying taxes to the State. It is important, however, for you to know what ye are doing. Your action is, in fact, pregnant with ‘not-doing,’ with knowledge, with hope. They are God’s priests, attending continually upon this very thing. Are then he people in power, the Government Officials who represent the existing order—God’s priests? Yes, assuredly! precisely they! For their whole existence and authority, their whole strange being-justified-before-you, loudly proclaims the One—the unrighteousness of men and the Goal which is God’s World. Would ye, then, destroy this order which speaks so loudly of another wholly difterent order? Surely not—Render to all their dues; tribute to whom tribute is due; custom to whom custom; fear to whom fear; honour to whom honour. How trivial and uninteresting seems the command that men should—do what they are already doing! To our question concerning the right of the existing order and the right of revolution this may indeed seem an ‘unsatisfactory’ conclusion. Perhaps this is inevitable. Beyond all those interesting and important problems concerning what we ought to do lies the great negative possibility of God. Perhaps we are, in fact, unable to demonstrate on its behalf better than by doing—as men who know!—what we are already doing.

[…]

Owe no man anything save to love one another. No debts! Paraphrased, this means non-resistance! It means not to enter the field of evil and seek a decision by negation and demolition!* This is the significance of all those strange possibilities of ‘not-doing’ which we have described first as ‘Negative Possibilities’ and then, comprehensively, as the ‘Great Negative Possibility.’ Save—and here, making a breach in our own wall, we turn from the demonstration of ‘not-doing’ to demonstrative action, to ‘Positive Possibilities’—to love one another! To every man we should owe love. It is not permitted us to excuse ourselves for the absence of love by saying that, since we live in the shadowy region of evil, we can only bear witness to the Coming World by ‘not-doing’. Even in the world of shadows love must come into active prominence, for it does not stand under the law of evil. Love of one another ought to be undertaken as the protest against the course of this world, and it ought to continue without interruption. We remember that human conduct is positively ethical when it is not conformed to this world, when, within the framework of this world and in complete secrecy, it bears witness to the strangeness of God. We define love as the ‘GREAT Positive Possibility’ for the same reason as we had previously defined subjection as the ‘GREAT Negative Possibility’. We are not now thinking of a single act, but of the combination of all positive—that is to say, protesting—possibilities; we are thinking of a general ethical manner of behaving. We define love as the ‘Great POSITIVE Possibility,’ because in it there is brought to light the revolutionary aspect of all ethical behaviour, and because it is veritably concerned with the denial and breaking up of the existing order. It is love that places the reactionary also finally in the wrong, despite the wrongness of the revolutionary. Inasmuch as we love one another we cannot wish to uphold the present order as such, for by love we do the ‘new’ by which the ‘old’ is overthrown. And so, in speaking of the breach in the wall of the incomprehensible ‘not-doing’, we have to speak now of the much more incomprehensible action of love.

He that loveth the other hath fulfilled the law. In considering the relation between man and God, we have, at crucial moments, encountered the extremely enigmatic conception of love. It has been noteworthy that we have always encountered it lying beyond the possibility, the conceivable possibility, of any concrete or analysable experience of the relation between man and God, beyond, that is to say, Law and Religion, beyond all the demands which they are wont to make upon men’s minds and wills; we have encountered it, moreover, as the unobservable point where men’s highest endeavours are related to God, and therefore where they are immediately reversed. We have described the conception of love as that reality which, since it is contrasted with the ambiguity of our existence, cannot be defined in terms of an act of human will or thought, but only as the pre-supposition of all that is analysable and observable. We have described it, in fact, as the outpouring of the Spirit (v. 5), that is to say, as that reality by which men know God, lay hold of Him, and cling to Him, as the Unknown, Hidden God, as the final ‘ Yes’ in the final ‘No’ of all concrete, observable life. Love is the existential standing-before-God of men, their being touched by His freedom, whereby their personalities are established, whereby, we might perhaps say, they are ‘individuated’. Love is the still more excellent (incomprehensible) way (I Cor. xii. 31), the eternal meaning of our comprehensible ways, and the realization of their ‘highest places’. Love is therefore human religious impossibility—when it is apprehended as the possibility of God: in other words, love is the fulfilling of the law. But what can all this mean, when we remember that all these reflections of ours, as our reflections, are disturbed by their relation to the concrete world in which we live? Our conversations about God are always interrupted conversations; for He withdraws Himself from us and opposes Himself to us when we are confronted by the question, What shall we do? To this question we now answer—Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself (Lev. xix. 18), inasmuch as He that loveth the other hath fulfilled the law, does the truth, and is therefore proceeding along the more excellent way.

Thou shalt love thy NEIGHBOUR. In the concrete fact of the neighbour we encounter, finally and supremely, the ambiguity of our existence, since in the particularity of others we are reminded of our own particularity, of our own createdness, our own lost state, our own sin, and our own death. That men should be thus confronted by men is the riddle presented to us in the primitive constitution of nature. The solution to this riddle must also be the solution of those perpetually recurring interruptions of our conversations about God. Here a decision must be sought as to whether the impossible possibility of God—which lies beyond all human possibility—is or is not a mere phantom of metaphysics; whether, when we speak of the presupposition behind all things that are capable of analysis and description, when we speak of the outpouring of the Spirit in our hearts, we are or are not merely dreaming; whether our apprehension of the final ‘Yes’ in the final ‘No’ is or is not merely a wild guess; whether our knowledge of God is or is not simply the ‘renunciation of knowledge’ (Kierkegaard); whether the Unknown God has spoken to us in Jesus Christ; whether our being touched by the freedom of God, the establishing of our personalities, our proceeding along the still more excellent way, are existential events. The decision lies in our answer to the question—Do we, in the unknowable neighbour, apprehend and love the Unknown God? Do we, in the complete Otherness of the other—in whom the whole riddle of existence is summed up in such a manner as to require its solution in an action on our part—hear the voice of the One? We must, at this point, remember that our love of God takes place as an event when, in the ambiguity of our existence, a contrasted, unobservable ‘Thou’ presses upon us so insistently that we are confronted inevitably by the question, Who then am ‘I’? Nor do we forget that the answer to the problem of the opposing ‘Thou’ lies in the question concerning this ‘I’, since we cannot but recognize that our most questionable ‘I’ is one with the ‘Thou’ by which we are confronted. And moreover, as we have already seen, it is in the ambiguity of the neighbour who fell among thieves that we encounter primarily and supremely the ‘Thou’ which is both question and answer. If I hear in the neighbour only the voice of the other and not also the voice of the One—that is to say, if I do not detect in him both question AND answer,—then, quite certainly, the voice of the One is nowhere to be heard.

Nick Catoggio:, on Angela Paxton’s “get the whole team across the finish line” add:

What even is “the team” at this point?

Millions of Republicans joined the team years ago because they believed in free markets, limited government, and advancing America’s interests by encouraging Western liberal values abroad. The leadership of Team GOP no longer supports any of that. The president levies tariffs by whim, demands government stakes in private companies, wages unauthorized wars, sics law enforcement on his political enemies, and routinely behaves more aggressively toward traditional American allies than toward enemies. […]

Angela Paxton’s pitch is the political equivalent of Jerry Seinfeld’s famous bit about sports fandom being a matter of “rooting for laundry.” The entire roster might be replaced within a few seasons, he observed, but the fans’ loyalty persists because ultimately they’re cheering for the franchise—for its uniforms, i.e., laundry—more so than its individual personnel.

That’s a defensible attitude for a silly pastime. But apply it to politics and you get anti-anti-Trumpism, the belief that being governed by any Republican beats being governed by any Democrat because the Republican laundry is better, however filthy it may have become. […]

The “team” the president and both Paxtons are playing for isn’t actually the Republican Party. Partisanship is simply what they’re selling to immiserated right-wing suckers to try to goose their enthusiasm and get them to turn out this year, another “lesser of two evils” pitch from a political movement that’s morally incapable of offering anything else. […]

The team they’re playing for is postliberalism. Given how comprehensive Ken Paxton’s unfitness for office is, encompassing not just personal sins like philandering but all manner of abuses of his public office, the inescapable takeaway from Angela Paxton’s ad is that no amount of immorality committed by a right-wing candidate can ever disqualify him from wielding power. That’s an essential pillar of postliberal thought, essential to the core conviction that power must be wielded immorally to have any chance of defeating the left.

I am a happily “unaffiliated registered voter.” I left the GOP a decade ago without the slightest hesitation, but I have never been called a RINO (“Republican in name only”). I am constantly pushing back against things people say are really just problems for the “very online.” (The response to Charlie Kirk’s shooting was far worse in real life than it was online.) The spillover or cross-contamination or whatever is under-appreciated. I do maintain that the spell can be broken anytime. If you can get people away from the screens and algorithms and turbo-charged individualism, I think it could be broken very quickly. But that “if” has a broken back, two left feet, each in need of an ankle fusion, and hasn’t had a single vegetable or protein in its diet for over two decades. So let your heart be ready when it happens, but don’t hold your breath until the power goes out.

But the term RINO really is, I think, reserved for Online Speak and right wing camera virtue-signaling. Though it may have been implied, no one has ever called me a RINO. But I’ve called myself one! Honestly, I’m kinda bummed no one has called me that. I have never understood why it is anything other than a compliment. If it isn’t a compliment, then politics really is just Seinfeld’s laundry-sports — if not Seinfeld writ large, where nothing meaningful ever really happens.

I do not believe in the principle of voting for the lesser of two weevils — sorry: the lesser of two evils. I do believe in the freedom to make occasional exceptions. But the principle, which strangles the oxygen out of every voting booth in the country (by shoving pie in your face, or whatever) — nope, nope, nope. 

If I was going to vote for the lesser of two evils, I’d certainly vote Democrat. Why? Because I’m a RINO, that’s why. (A former RINO, anyway.) It’s because I am, among other things, a conservative, which is a principle and a mentality rather than a name glued over an amorphous tent. The fact that I find the Democratic Party to be the more conservative of the two parties is shocking given a long backward glance; less shocking given a 10-year glance.

Don’t think I don’t notice that other “if” — it may have more athleticism in it, but it is still an if. I don’t know yet how I’ll vote in Maine. I’d like to see every Republican seat up for reelection overturned, but generally speaking Susan Collins is about as straight a politician as you’re likely to find in this here world of ours, and I’m reluctant to kick over tables anywhere but in the houses of religious hypocrisy.

I’m not looking for a revolution and I don’t trust revolutionaries. If I voted for the Democratic ticket, it would be with a conservative-liberal impulse that wants to preserve a world worth witnessing to outside the pie-eating contest.

In spite of it all, I think that’s still a big IF.

George Hunsinger:

By the time he wrote his comments on Romans 13 in the second edition of Romans, Barth, like the anarchists, considered every existing order to be evil in itself. Although in the first edition he had greeted revolution with enthusiasm, he now regarded even an existing order established by revolution as merely the evil residue left over once social upheaval had subsided. Barth’s attitude toward the state has often been labeled as conservative. In fact, Barth’s intention was not that of legitimizing the existing order, but that of radically deabsolutizing it. Even his critique of the revolutionary—largely a critique of his earlier stance—was directed against bolshevist socialism from the standpoint of anarchist socialism. His political perspective was thus “anarchist” in the sense that he sought to criticize revolution from the left, to de-mystify the existing order, and to revolutionize the individual before changing conditions. Contrary to the way this section has customarily been read, the theology that Barth advances here has nothing to do with complacency. While recognizing the necessary limits of all political action, he wants to ensure that within any existing order, conditions will really be changed along socialist lines. Revolutionary hubris is no answer to this challenge. 

Barth was unlike the anarchists, however, in that his grounding for this position was fundamentally theological. The radical standard of his critique was derived, not from history, but from the kingdom of God. “It is only in relation to God that the evil of the existing order is really evil.” Whereas the anarchists had argued that historically the state was a necessary evil whose complete extinction would sooner or later be equally necessary, Barth argued instead that both its necessity and its eventual extinction were eschatological: The existing order must not be destroyed, but must be allowed to exist, as a negative parable to God’s kingdom. In this negative way, the evil existing order “reveals that we have a hope—the hope of the coming world where revolution and order are one.” “The real revolution comes from God and not from human revolt.”

In relation to this real revolution, political praxis can always be only a witness, never a realization. Hence Barth did not subscribe to anarchist tactics. Despite his occasional appeals to direct action, he did not indulge in the practical nihilism that repudiated parliamentary democracy while glorifying general strikes, spontaneous uprisings, and individual terror. His radical eschatology led logically to pragmatist political ethics. Like the social democrats, he was sometimes willing to support coalitions with nonsocialist or “bourgeois” parties—as in the case of the Weimar Republic. Like the left-wing socialists, he was at other times ready to cooperate with bolshevist parties—as in the case of the Committee for a Free Germany—and also to resort to the use of violence, if necessary, in order to achieve or defend a democratic order—as in the case of resistance to Nazism. 

But in all cases Barth insisted on a harsh theological realism and a sober lack of illusions: All political activity stands under the wrath of God, who meets “the encroachments of government . . . with the sword of revolution” and “the encroachments of revolution with the sword of government.” “Whether we attempt to build up some positive thing or demolish what others have accomplished, all our endeavors to justify ourselves are in one way or another shattered in pieces.” It is God who inspires revolutionary discontent, yet God alone who will bring about the true revolution of his kingdom.

A year or two ago, I picked up John Edward Huth’s The Lost Art of Finding Our Way at the local used bookstore. It was one of those books that was entirely unknown to me but just called my name as soon as I saw it. (Christopher Alexander’s A Timeless Way of Building was like that, too. I’ve since discovered that Alexander is quite and unsurprisingly well known, though why our local not-used bookstore always has a copy of his A Timesless Way and not his much more popular A Pattern Language is a mystery.) Then it became one of many books that stares at me from the shelf asking, “How about now?”

My ability to commit to any serious reading is lower right now than it has ever been by far, but we’ll see how it goes. 

Here’s Huth in the opening page:

Only a few years ago you would have sworn the commuter next to you was crazy. He talks into the air, as if to an imaginary friend, while playing with a tiny box he holds in front of his face. His whole world is a bubble two feet around his head. If, by a miracle, you get his attention and ask him questions, he can only answer by manipulating his tiny box. He checks the box and can tell you tomorrow’s weather, which way is north, and the name of that bright star in the sky. You hide the box, and he becomes helpless. You ask him, “Why is it warm in the summer and cold in the winter?” By way of explanation, the commuter gestures with his hands in front of his face. His left hand becomes the Sun and his right index finger becomes the Earth as it orbits his fist. He mumbles something about the Earth’s being closer to the Sun in the summer and farther away in the winter. His voice has a rising inflection that begs your affirmation.

Now let’s suppose it is three thousand years ago and you have transported yourself into a fisherman’s boat, far from land. He sings to himself as he hauls in a net from the sea. You ask him questions about the weather and the sky; he thinks you are crazy but humors you anyway. He confidently rattles off tomorrow’s weather, points north, and tells you a story about the bright star in the sky. He has no magic box to hide. You ask him, “Why is it warm in the summer and cold in the winter?” His outstretched arm traces an arc toward the sky, and he says that the Sun takes a high path in the summer, and the days are long; but in the winter the Sun has a low path, and the days are short. His voice has no hint of uncertainty.

Whom would you consider the more primitive of the two: the commuter or the fisherman? 

Of course I love this. It’s practically something of an old saw by now, but the book was published in 2013. He wasn’t waiting for The Cell Phone Studies to prove his point.

He also isn’t actually writing about cell phones (or: cell “phones”) and lower-than-primitive moderns, but about the cultural history of navigation, “weaving together astronomy, meteorology, oceanography, and ethnography,” to quote the back of the book.

But still, or better, this is some wonderfully antidotal shit. I don’t recall if I’ve ever said much about a little back-of-the-napkin theory of mine (I touched on it here), but I believe — or hope, at least — that the excitement of being out in the middle of nowhere — or even out in town! — without any device “connecting” you to some perceived hub of human activity or knowledge or safety, will be rediscovered as its own dopamine rich, morally and psychologically sound reward. No internet, no electricity; just your five senses in a body as a soul in the world.

Huth gives me hope that, as low as we have set the bar, it could still be true:

As information technology has grown, our ability to perceive and think independently without help from devices may be compromised to the point where we, not our forebears, are the primitive ones. Long before the advent of the Global Positioning System (GPS), our distant ancestors traveled vast distances using what seem to us to be primitive technologies. In many cases explanations for the effectiveness of their systems only arose in the twentieth century; some remain a mystery. Systems of navigation developed by different cultures may not have been based on an understanding of science as we conceive it today, but they made sense, and they worked. While the device-addicted commuter may seem oblivious to and clueless about his surroundings, his ancestors proved that humans can absorb exceedingly subtle environmental clues to find their way. […]

By piecing together our knowledge of cultures of navigation, we can begin to appreciate a kinship we all share in the very human art of way-finding. … I will try to convey these techniques to you in this book, but there is no substitute for leaving the bubble and experiencing the Sun, the stars, the wind, and the waves.

Much like the rediscoverable good leisure I talked about in the link above, it’s there — eminently, imminently, infinitely discoverable and waiting.

I mentioned not long ago that I have a collection of Wendell Berry’s Sabbath Poems that I have been reading for years. In fact, I’ve had it and been picking it up for about as long as I have been reading Berry. That is, I have no memory of knowing Wendell Berry prior to or apart from having these poems. 

And I have lately been stuck on page 201 of that copy of A Timbered Choir. The habit, common with me and poetry, is to open it and read again the last one I read before I turn the page. 

And I just don’t want to turn the page. 

Via Nicholas Kotar:

Here’s a short video from UNESCO. And here’s a “hand-painted, impressionistic animation” from Alisi Telengut.

Alasdair MacIntyre:

Our kinship to the dolphin and the chimpanzee cannot be discarded and this is a kinship not only with respect to the animality of the body, but also with respect to forms of life. The greatest students of animal behavior have exercised skills and sensibilities that resemble closely those of the gifted social or cultural anthropologist. […]

… And when a species, such as our own, is able through the use of language to become reflective about its reasons, it is not only the having of reasons that is now on occasion causally effective in guiding behavior, but the having of reasons for taking this set of considerations rather than that to be in this particular situation genuinely reason-affording that is causally effective.

J. R. R Tolkien:

Philology has been dethroned from the high place it once had in this court of inquiry. Max Müller’s view of mythology as a “disease of language” can be abandoned without regret. Mythology is not a disease at all, though it may like all human things become diseased. You might as well say that thinking is a disease of the mind. It would be more near the truth to say that languages, especially modern European languages, are a disease of mythology. But Language cannot, all the same, be dismissed. The incarnate mind, the tongue, and the tale are in our world coeval. The human mind, endowed with the powers of generalization and abstraction, sees not only green-grass, discriminating it from other things (and finding it fair to look upon), but sees that it is green as well as being grass. But how powerful, how stimulating to the very faculty that produced it, was the invention of the adjective: no spell or incantation in Faerie is more potent. And that is not surprising: such incantations might indeed be said to be only another view of adjectives, a part of speech in a mythical grammar. The mind that thought of light, heavy, grey, yellow, still, swift, also conceived of magic that would make heavy things light and able to fly, turn grey lead into yellow gold, and the still rock into a swift water. If it could do the one, it could do the other; it inevitably did both. When we can take green from grass, blue from heaven, and red from blood, we have already an enchanter’s power—upon one plane; and the desire to wield that power in the world external to our minds awakes. It does not follow that we shall use that power well upon any plane. We may put a deadly green upon a man’s face and produce a horror; we may make the rare and terrible blue moon to shine; or we may cause woods to spring with silver leaves and rams to wear fleeces of gold, and put hot fire into the belly of the cold worm. But in such “fantasy,” as it is called, new form is made; Faerie begins; Man becomes a sub-creator.

I’m rereading Tolkien’s lecture-essay On Fairy Stories, or trying to anyway since my printer is not hooked up and that means reading on a… device. I wrote a flurry of notes on Meador’s essay on AI yesterday. While there were things to genuinely praise, I found his use of Tolkien and Wendell Berry to be — well, I’m trying decide if it’s just wrong or if it is as grotesque as my initial reaction found it to be. Or maybe I’m just wrong. Gotsta think a bit.

John Berger (1984):

During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries most direct protests against social injustice were in prose. They were reasoned arguments written in the belief that, given time, people would come to see reason, and that, finally, history was on the side of reason. Today this is by no means clear. The outcome is by no means guaranteed. The suffering of the present and the past is unlikely to be redeemed by a future era of universal happiness. And evil is a constant ineradicable reality. All this means that the resolution—the coming to terms with the sense to be given to life—cannot be deferred. The future cannot be trusted. The moment of truth is now. And more and more it will be poetry, rather than prose, that receives this truth. Prose is far more trusting than poetry; poetry speaks to the immediate wound.

Not that Nadezhda can be topped — she can’t — but that is, I think, a pretty straightforward version of what William Carlos Williams meant:

                         It is difficult

to get the news from poems

            yet men die miserably every day

                         for lack

of what is found there.

I have mentioned before the personal significance of a quote from Charles Taylor:

We are deeply moved, but also puzzled and shaken. We struggle to articulate what we’ve been through. If we succeed in formulating it, however partially, we feel a release, as though the power of the experience was increased by having been focussed, articulated, and hence let fully be.

Here’s Berger, a couple pages after the quote above:

To break the silence of events, to speak of experience however bitter or lacerating, to put into words, is to discover the hope that these words may be heard, and that when heard, the events will be judged. This hope is of course at the origin of prayer, and prayer … was probably at the origin of speech itself. Of all uses of language, it is poetry that preserves most purely the memory of this origin.

The right words, as Mrs. Mandelstam put it, “gain strength in the very process of overcoming the obstacles, as they thrust up through the mounds of debris under which they are buried, emerging in fresh combinations to bring out whatever ideas are seeking expression.”

I’m not going anywhere with this right now; just thinking. Dickinson praised the truth-in-slant as a kindness, and it is that. But I do think a significant part of telling or hearing or seeing something slant is in the knowledge that you have no choice but to do so.

John Berger:

Even when working in the forest alone, one has an elusive sense of company. A flat field, a bare hillside, or the steppe are not the same. The trees constitute a presence. They maintain—each according to its species—an extraordinary balance between movement and stillness, between action and passivity. And in this balance, all the while being regulated, their presence is palpable. That they held up the roofs of houses for so long is not surprising. They offer company. But company of a discretion which is indistinguishable from indifference. They roofed not only houses but also courts, tax-collector’s offices, prisons, armouries.

Their presence, if it offers a kind of company, is earlier than justice or the notion of indifference. The company they offer is spatial, and it is a way of measuring, of counting. Long before any numerals or mathematics, when human language was first naming the world, trees offered their measures— of distance, of height, of diameter, of space. They were taller than anything else alive, their roots went deeper than any creature; they grazed the sky and sounded the underworld. From them was born the idea of the pillar, the column. Trees offered man the measure of his upright space, and in this offer—mysteriously still present today as I fill up the chain saw with petrol—there is the discreetest assurance in the world, that we have never been utterly alone.

Each pine at dusk
lodges the bird
of its voice
perpendicular and still
the forest
indifferent to history
tearless as stone
repeats
in tremulous excitement
the ancient story
of the sun going down

At the end of the day when they come out of the forest, their limbs scarcely any longer obedient to their instructions, carrying their chain saws and bottles, the unfiltered light and the panorama dazzle their eyes. Each time they are astounded and, somewhere in the heavy oppressive fatigue of their bodies, there is almost a smile, as if in response to a wink. After hours of the forest, what is winking at them is the space of the valleys below and the unimpeded sky. Each pursues his own path down the slope, led by the weakness of his knees or by his boots that feel their way through the grass without him. Each is going to his own rest. But they are all returning to the world, and its first gift is its space; later, its second gift will be a flat table and a bed. For the most fortunate the bed is shared.

Even after the great separation we shall return to you at the end of the day, out of the unimpeded sky, and you will recognize us by our fatigue and by the heaviness of our heads on your bodies, of which we had such need.