‘We have a cultural life’

 Ryan Ruby’s essay for Poetry Foundation on Frank O’Hara has many wonders. One that surprised me was a quotation from George Kennan, one of the architects of the containment doctrine, the notion that the United States and its allies should stop the spread communism in places like Korea and Vietnam. Here’s Kennan:

We have … to show the outside world both that we have a cultural life and that we care something about it. That we care enough about it, in fact, to give it encouragement and support here at home, and to see that it is enriched by acquaintance with similar activity elsewhere. If these impressions could only be conveyed with enough force and success to countries outside our border, I, for my part, would willingly trade the entire remaining inventory of political propaganda for the results that could be achieved by such means alone.

 

I think that instinct is right. If this country supported its artists and the arts, its cultural life, we’d live in a different world. We wouldn’t have to make up a propaganda for the gullible about making this country great again. We’d be making a richer, better cultural life, one that people in other parts of the world would notice.

We haven’t taken Kennan’s advice. We’ve made ourselves culturally poorer than we need to be, and our propaganda doesn’t begin to cover that fact.

• Ryan Ruby, “Infinite Waves: Frank O’Hara at 100”; Poetry Foundation, Aug. 24, 2006. It’s here:
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/1822640/infinite-waves

Come-outers

 Before there were hippies or even beatniks, there were come-outers. They hung out at Elizabeth Peabody’s bookshop of West Street in Boston in the 1830s.

The come-outers were people who had concluded that social institutions that were supposed to be moral beacons were colluding in an evil so awful they couldn’t be a part of these institutions. The churches of the day were accommodating to slavery.

The peculiar name of these protesters came from scripture:

 

Wherefore come out from among them, and be ye separate, saith the Lord, and touch not the unclean thing; and I will receive you.

 

I wish more people knew about the come-outers. I suspect we have some around today. I’ve run across some young people who are progressive in their politics but have come out of the Democratic Party, largely, but not exclusively, because of its stance on Israel and Gaza.

I suspect there are more of these contemporary come-outers than the pundits allow — enough, I’d guess, to account for the bewildering problems in conducting accurate polls in Georgia.

• Source: The quotation is from II Corinthians 6:17. The “come out from among them” is a quotation from Isaiah 52:11.

On turning 5

 I have never been able to explain what this online collection of notes is, but it appeared five years ago today. This head-scratching is my way of marking the day.

One of the early notes was about something that the poet Winfield Townley Scott had written:

 

I am trying to put down things I have thought — collecting them as well as I can remember … It is more fun than writing essays: arrangement, progression, transition, are hard for me to manage …

One reason for writing these notes: I love to read this sort of thing when somebody else writes it. Almost, I think, no matter who.

 

It seemed like an explanation to me then and still does. I just like notes.

• Source: The lines quoted are from A Dirty Hand: The Literary Notebooks of Winfield Townley Scott, University of Texas Press, 1969. The original note was “A bit more on noticing and collecting notes,” Sept. 15, 2021. It’s here:

https://hebertaylor.blogspot.com/search?q=Winfield+Scott

Thoreau's journal

 Curious about the impulse behind Thoreau’s famous journal, I looked up Henry Seidel Canby’s account. Canby said all the Concord intellectuals kept a journal. It was the standard means of self-improvement of the day. 

There was a naïve idea, which the young Thoreau swallowed whole and never got rid of, that the more freightage of quotations and abstracts from good books, and the more comment on what people ought to think, the more self-improvement. Self-expression for all of them, even Emerson, was the adequate expression of what they thought they ought to think.

 

To me, this is another version of yesterday’s note. We start with a notion of doing something good for ourselves — call it self-improvement or self-help or self-nurturing or wellbeing. The difficulty is hearing the still small voice within rather than the din coming from the chorus outside.

• Source: Henry Seidel Canby, Thoreau; Boston: Beacon Press, 1958, p. 78.

Wellbeing

 John Greenleaf Whittier, the poet and abolitionist, wrote about the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting in which the Society of Friends banned members from dealing in slaves. If you wanted to be counted among the Quakers, you had to get out of the enslavement business.

The year was 1758, more than a century before the larger society settled the question with the Civil War.

Whittier recorded the objections of those who knew that slavery was wrong but who had money tied up in the ugly business. There were all kinds of arguments — not about the wellbeing of individual people who were enslaved, but about the wellbeing and prosperity of society. Whittier wrote:

 

To this it was answered that the root of the evil would never be reached effectually until a searching inquiry was made into the circumstances and motives of such as held slaves.

 

I came to the story by reading a lecture by Ira De Augustine Reid, a sociologist who is known for being among the first Black professors at a predominantly white college before integration. He was hired by Haverford College in 1947.

He was a graduate of Morehouse in Atlanta and was hired by W.E.B. Du Bois to teach at Atlanta University. I imagine he was qualified to teach at any college in Georgia. His Ph.D. was from Columbia.

I’m repeating the story because when we talk of “wellbeing” we usually stop well short of “a searching inquiry … into the circumstances and motives of such as” do x. Such as those who are racist in their hiring practices.

I think states still do this kind of thing routinely. If you start “a searching inquiry … into the circumstances and motives of such” as charge more than 600 percent annual interest on payday loans, for example, you’ll hear a lot of arguments about the wellbeing of the business community, and how business interests must be free for burdensome regulations.

I think our society has a lousy record of balancing the wellbeing of individuals against the society’s powerful, wealthy and “respectable” interests.

• Source: Ira De A. Reid, “Peace and Tranquility: The Quaker Witnesses”; William Penn Lecture, delivered at Race Street Meeting House, Philadelphia, 1958. The lecture was published as a pamphlet. It’s here:

https://quaker.org/legacy/pamphlets/wpl1958.pdf

The quotation is on p. 20.

These woods were dark

 The woods south of Stone Mountain are always lovely and deep, but they are not always this dark. It was an overcast day in late summer. The canopy is dense.

As we entered the woods, it was as if we had entered a dark theater. It was hard to believe. I wished I had a light meter, just so I’d have an objective measurement.

We walked along, and our eyes adjusted. Then I saw a yellow flower on Oenothera biennis, which is called evening primrose because it blooms at dusk. Evening primrose has adapted to make use of nocturnal pollinators such as moths.

I understand almost nothing of how the failing light and falling temperatures at dusk trigger the sudden opening of the flowers.

But I realized that I did have a light meter, just not the usual kind.

The raw material of writing

 Louis L’Amour, who had sold 200 million books when he got around to writing an interesting memoir, said this about writing:

 

The raw material is not important. It is what the writer does with the material. … 

At least once a week I get a letter from someone who has material he wants me to shape into a story (wanting, of course, a piece of the action). But a writer builds a readership because those readers like what he does with a story, not because of the material.

 

It’s a way, I suppose, of looking at the craft of writing, although I don’t imagine that L’Amour would dominate the curriculum at most writing programs.

This way of thinking about writing is foreign to me. It’s taking me a while to think through it. The writers I most admire conduct some kind of experiment with their life — go to Walden Pond, for example, or try to escape the Jim Crow South — and write about the process of imagining a better way to live.

A writer like Thoreau or Richard Wright owns his material, maybe is his material. The material is important.

Writing is a broad subject. Sometimes we find ourselves talking apples and oranges.

• Source: Louis L’Amore, Education of a Wandering Man; New York: Bantam Books, 1989, p. 85.