Prophecy
-- W. S. Merwin

At the end of the year the stars go out
the air stops breathing and the Sibyl sings
first she sings of the darkness she can see
she sings on until she comes to the age
without time and the dark she cannot see

no one hears then as she goes on singing
of all the white days that were brought to us one
by one that turned to colors around us

a light coming from far out in the eye
where it begins before she can see it

burns through the words that no one has believed

[Orion in December; Charles Burchfield, 1959]

"And now we look upon the earth and sky. This spread of naked rock and peaks and moonlight is like a world ready to be born, a world that waits. It seems to us it asks a sign from us, a spark, a first commandment. We cannot know what word we are to give, nor what great deed this earth expects to witness. We know it waits. It seems to say it has great gifts to lay before us, but it wishes a greater gift from us. We are to speak. We are to give its goal, its highest meaning to all this glowing space of rock and sky."

--from 'Anthem'; Ayn Rand

Song of Myself
--Walt Whitman

1
I celebrate myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.

I loafe and invite my soul,
I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.

My tongue, every atom of my blood, form’d from this soil, this air,
Born here of parents born here from parents the same, and their parents the same,
I, now thirty-seven years old in perfect health begin,
Hoping to cease not till death.

Creeds and schools in abeyance,
Retiring back a while sufficed at what they are, but never forgotten,
I harbor for good or bad, I permit to speak at every hazard,
Nature without check with original energy....

I look upon the history of men, which I have learned from the books, and I wonder. It was a long story, and the spirit which moved it was the spirit of man's freedom. But what is freedom? Freedom from what? There is nothing to take a man's freedom away from him, save other men. To be free, a man must be free of his brothers. That is freedom. This and nothing else.

--from Anthem, Ayn Rand

There are numerous ways to look at political theory. One is the obvious short view where you look at your current times, watch how the various policies and movements are moved through an established state, take note of what leadership rises and falls, etc. But there is also political theory that runs into the philosophic core of how we understand our relations with other people and ulitmately how we can understand our place in the social world.

With that said, lets think about freedom. Is freedom a right? No. It is our inherent state in the world. We are all born free. No one gives you freedom. You already have it. A right though is an approval by the state where you are allowed this. But then by converse definition, can also be taken away. To say the state allows the right to freedom also suggests that it has the right to take away freedom.

Unfortunately though, I think a common understanding of the state is that it is there to provide freedom, and therefore the actions of the state are the means to accomplish this. With further thought on the implications of such an understanding, a person can see where these means can actually start to become infringements, at least in some form or another. Largely because freedom is no longer understood at an individual, personal level-- which is the only place where it can exist-- and instead at the level of the group. Obviously, the state supports such an understanding of freedom because it legitimizes its own actions-- whether its banning abortion or forcing people to purchase health insurance.

However, if people instead understood that freedom is a quality of life we all naturally possess, not something that is granted or provided to us (including the guies of protection), how then would people comprehend the role of the state? Its a fine line distinction that at first only has subtle distinctions. But with further thought, at least to me, has huge implications towards what type of state a person would want to live within, if one at all.

While I haven't really read much of Ayn Rand, lurid pulp never came to mind when thinking about her books. But, looks like it was on the mind of some fetishistic bibliophile out there! Below is from the June 1953 issue of Famous Fantastic Mysteries.

Anthem was the first of Ayn Rand’s books to be published and is also the first that I have now read. Its written as a dystopian novella meant to critique the communist and socialist movements which were in place in Europe during the 1930's and the story will sound quite familiar. A totalitarian state has erased past history, has replaced all individual names with numbers (the narrator's ‘name' being Equality 7-2521), work is ordered rather than chosen, romantic relationships are replaced with forced mating, reading is unheard of and all challenges to the established collective result in severe punishment. Pretty close to Orwell’s 1984, as well as numerous other science fiction stories.

One spin though with Anthem is that no one has a sense of “I”. Instead, each person is known as a “we” in order to reflect constant identification with the collective. “I” did not wake up to go to work this morning. “We” woke up to go to work this morning. The whole concept of "I" is non-existent. This at first made the book a bit difficult as it is written in the form of secret journal. And I can understand why versions of this story didn’t include this aspect because it does disrupt the reading a bit. But it did help instill while reading the alternate mindset of the characters and the subsequent transformation of the narrator to an “I”. Should note that mirrors are also not allowed.

How the story proceeds should be fairly obvious, as you are aware from the first page that the journal was being written in secret, and there aren’t really any surprises as the narrative develops. But it was still an interesting book as it is one of the first of its kind and I find it impressive that it was published back in 1936 prior to World War II. However, after doing some research, looks like one other novel proceeded Anthem. Yevgeny Zamyatin wrote a book called We in 1921 and was in response to the Russian revolutions of 1905 and 1917. I would assume that are a number of books that then also influenced Zamyatin's.

[Black Place II]

"I've been absolutely terrified every moment of my life- and I've never let it keep me from doing a single thing I wanted to do."
--Georgia O'Keefe

From Maya Deren's "At Land" with music by Johnny Greenwood.

I have done it again.
One year in every ten
I manage it——

A sort of walking miracle, my skin
Bright as a Nazi lampshade,
My right foot

A paperweight,
My face a featureless, fine
Jew linen.

Peel off the napkin
O my enemy.
Do I terrify?——

The nose, the eye pits, the full set of teeth?
The sour breath
Will vanish in a day.

Soon, soon the flesh
The grave cave ate will be
At home on me

And I a smiling woman.
I am only thirty.
And like the cat I have nine times to die...

--from Lady Lazarus; Sylvia Plath

[Women's Head in Profile; Gerhard Richter, 1966]

While skimming through reviews of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, I found little that actually addressed the novel as something other than an intricate, page turning thriller. Fortunately, in a review that combined with the novel the Swedish film adaptation by Niels Arden Oplev, the New Yorker brought to light some of the more serious undercurrents:

Larsson was a reporter, like Blomkvist; he specialized in exposing the activities of the far right, and his fiction is concerned, to the brink of obsession, with cruelties of every stripe. The Swedish title of the book translates as “Men Who Hate Women,” and Lisbeth’s private history—which, unsurprisingly, was riven by familial abuse—is linked to the Vanger saga not by any causal logic but simply by a vague, insistent dread of the tyrannical.

Beneath the sadistic surface, there is a strange cultural masochism in Larsson, as in his compatriot Henning Mankell, whose collected works I once feasted on through a single winter, with the kind of gusto that only crime fiction can excite. It is as though both men want not merely to disassemble the reputation of their homeland as a model—the model—of benign social democracy but to dig backward in a bid to prove that the past, too, was not one of liberal health and justice but a sump of buried transgressions and moral disease. (When you fear for your socialist Eden, the first people you blame, on instinct, will be capitalist dynasts like the Vangers, safe in their havens of corruption.) There can be a twilit sadness to this failing of a myth, explored most beautifully in last year’s “Fishing in Utopia: Sweden and the Future That Disappeared,” by the British author Andrew Brown, who lived there in the nineteen-seventies; but “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo,” both on the page and onscreen, largely dispenses with the melancholic. The chilly shack where Lisbeth stays with Blomkvist is a comfortless parody of the blissful huts where Ingmar Bergman planted his lovers, in “Summer Interlude” and “Summer with Monika,” and Oplev scorns any hint of relaxation, preferring the stab of high drama: the moment that Blomkvist pinned up a row of photographs, showing the older generation of Vangers, I knew that half of them would turn out to have been Nazis. Was wartime Sweden really just a smaller Germany with added meatballs, or am I missing something?

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is going to be a bit of a departure from what I typically work with on this blog. I won’t get into whether or not it can be classified as ‘literature’, instead state the book doesn’t rely upon the more intuitive qualities which compose more artistic forms of writing. To exemplify, I can easily put it this way: the original Swedish title was Män som hatar kvinnor, translated as “Men Who Hate Women”. Nothing indirect or intuitive about that. Sounds like something that would be thought up by a person who has a very personal reason for writing a book- which Larsson did as he was a witness to a gang rape when he was 15 years old.

And the book is disturbing, but Larrson does (just barely) avoid exploiting his subject mater. The novel is undoubtedly written as a thriller mystery, and meant to be a page turner. Right there should be a red flag. And while each section begins with a brief statistic about the percentage of women in Sweden who have been victims to various forms of male predations, these are not really backed up or expended upon within the story. To the point where they seem to rely upon more shock value only; a lack of a strong connection between the statistics and the actual story that is being offered to the reader. Weak.

But while Larsson wove together his intricate and sickening plot, I think he was always very mindful towards how he would write about the more horrific aspects of his tale. During such moments, the writing turns journalistic and with an objective, ‘this is what was found’, tone. And this rather than trying to presume to know what it would feel like to be such a victim. Instead, Larsson turns away to focus upon the issues which surround the causes for sexual violence and raises questions towards how sexual violence is or is not dealt with at a social level.

We can’t forget that there is also the issue of how to end such a story. Since it’s a commercial mystery, bad guy loses and good guy wins. Is this inappropriately glossy? Of course it is. But we all know that it is our duty to separate the real life issues from the fiction. And that there is no such thing as bad guy losing, good guy winning. Horrific stories are not meant to have resolution. That’s why they are horrific. However, a book’s artistic approach can reframe a reader's understanding through such things as the aesthetic qualities, the way in which the matters are to be understood, how they are told, the intent behind the author, the context they are placed in, etc.

So while there is a good guy winning at the end of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, it’s the thoughtful issues imbedded in the text that provide the real resolution. I just wished Larsson would have taken the risk of decreasing the engagement of his plot to substantiate these more than he did. I have concerns that this “wildly suspensful...an intelligent, ingeniously plotted, utterly engrossing thriller” will, at times, not be read as anything more than that.

You will remember that leaping stream
where sweet aromas rose and trembled,
and sometimes a bird, wearing water
and slowness, its winter feathers.

You will remember those gifts from the earth:
indelible scents, gold clay,
weeds in the thicket and crazy roots,
magical thorns like swords.

You'll remember the bouquet you picked,
shadows and silent water,
bouquet like a foam-covered stone.

That time was like never, and like always.
So we go there, where nothing is waiting;
we find everything waiting there.

--Pablo Neruda

[Edvard Munch]

When one has lived a long time alone,
one wants to live again among men and women,
to return to that place where one’s ties with the human
broke, where the disquiet of death and now also
of history glimmers its firelight on faces,
where the gaze of the new baby meets the gaze
of the great granny, and where lovers speak,
on lips blowsy from kissing, that language
the same in each mouth, and like birds at daybreak
blether the song that is both earth’s and heaven’s,
until the sun rises, and they stand
in the daylight of being made one: kingdom come,
when one has lived a long time alone.

--Galway Kinnell

Like a lot of people, I first started reading poetry in anthologies. The only problem with that is you don't have the surrounding poems to help enrich the poems that are selected. Sort of like the difference between seeing one painting and an entire series. With that said, this first poem would have been written when Kinnell was in his mid 30's. The portion of the second, written to his daughter while an infant, in his mid 40's.

Poem of Night
--Galway Kinnell

1
I move my hand over
Slopes, falls, lumps of sight,
Lashes barely able to be touched,
Lips that gave way so easily
It's a shock to feel under them
The indifferent smile of bones.

Muffled a little, barely cloaked,
Zygoma, maxillary, turbinate.

2
I put my hand
On the side of your face,
You lean your head a little
Into my hand-- and so,
I know you're a dormouse
Taken up in winter sleep,
A lonely, stunned weight.

3
A cheekbone,
A curved piece of brow,
A pale eyelid
Float in the dark,
And now I make out
An eye, dark,
Wormed with far-off, unaccountable lights.

4
Hardly touching, I hold
What I can only think of
As some deepest of memories in my arms,
Not mine, but as if the life in me
Were slowly remembering what it is.

You lie here now in your physicalness,
This beautiful degree of reality.

5
And now the day, raft that breaks up, comes on.

I think of a few bones
Floating on a river at night,
The starlight blowing in place on the water,
The river leaning like a wave toward the emptiness.

And now from Little Sleep's-Head Sprouting Hair in the Moonlight:

5
If one day it happens
you find yourself with someone you love
in a cafe at one end
of the Pont Mirabeau, at the zinc bar
where wine finds its shapes in upward opening glasses,

and if you commit then, as we did, the error
of thinking,
one day all this will only be a memory,

learn to reach deeper
into the sorrows
to come-- to touch
the almost imaginary bones
under the face, to hear under the laughter
the wind crying across the black stones. Kiss
the mouth
that tells you, here,
here is the world. This mouth. This laughter. These temple bones.

The still undanced cadence of vanishing.