The World-Weary Eyes

 

Here is another tragic heroine of modern poetry, our Sappho, Anne Sexton.  She died October 4, 1974, a suicide.

I think of the great Peter Gabriel song, “Mercy Street,” based on her poem.  It is a dreamscape of horror and melancholy.

Of what do we dream today?  What follows across the blue-black night sky?  Owls and peacocks, and multi-lateral corruption of the soul.  The night whispers the future, a story, one more to tell.

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This is the only thing that matters, this pen scratching across the page.  Others have written about this across the years, the fear, the danger, the loneliness.  Here, there is nothing new.  It’s just the banality of evil.  Why are we surprised that the world is corrupt and dark?  The world mirrors the human soul.  We are the things we build.

We dream of the goodness of human beings, but is that who we are?  We are a selfish animal.  How do we rise from this muck?  How do we climb out of the fetid hole?  It will take a man and woman to bear witness.  It will take bonding in action to create a better world.  Then this good virus has to spread; we must become infected with the divine spirit of Earth and sky, tree and bird.  We must feel the surge of the Earth.  Breathe.

There is a life mysticism, the coincidental confluence of divine light and air.  Look back into the persistence of memory.  There is the human story waiting for us to pick up words like autumn leaves.  Tell us, the world says; tell us again.

We take nothing for granted because evil is nothing if not resilient.  We are living through a reckoning of American life; we are poised on the precipice.  Do we fall into the abyss or experience a renaissance?

There is so much to read, so much to experience, so many stories to tell. 

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Anton Chekhov stares out from a photograph taken of him by his brother, slightly colorized.  Arresting.  Mesmerizing.  Note the world-weary eyes.  He is such an astute observer of human life, human foibles, human misery.  I cannot stop looking at those eyes.  All the Russian 19^th century novelists and playwrights offer stories that cut to the bone.

What is it about the 19^th century?  The world became aware of Man’s inhumanity, his propensity for violence, his bloody intentions, his avarice, and deceit.  It is as if the sin of Eden finally came to its ultimate, evil fruition, and was followed by the descent into bloody desecration in the great wars of mammoth machines and bombs and waves of bloodshed in the 20^th century.  Welcome to hell on Earth.

As a traveler, I would like to make it a regular stop on the time-line railroad to see that 19^th century world.  The morale of America must have been at the same level, or lower, than it is now.  The world must have been in just as much jeopardy.  The human animal must have been just as much of a threat.  Man has always been a threat.  In the 19^th century, he was redeemed, at least in part, by Emerson, Thoreau, the great poets and seers of an age.  We need such an age again.

History should be taught that way:  put on the virtual reality goggles and walk the streets of America; see Yosemite Valley as the Indigenous People did, before white men and industry tried to ransom it off into development hell.  Walk the Civil War battlefields then and now.  Compare.  Never again.

So much history takes place in a single area.  What if we could see it all at once, like some high-tech diorama.  Questions:  why is America such a violent place, and where does this violence originate?  William Blake would argue human violence and cruelty originate not in nature, but in the human brain.

The 19^th century feels like a watershed moment, a confluence of everything:  philosophy, reason, religion, nature, human endeavor, art, literature, and culture.  We cannot discount evil; human treachery is always with us.

Chekhov’s eyes tell us he knew this; he saw it.  That is what makes him so compelling to read.  He bore witness to an age, and his stories live.

Anne Sexton:  “In my dream, / drilling into the marrow / of my entire bone, / my real dream, / I’m walking up and down Beacon Hill / searching for a street sign— / namely MERCY STREET. / Not there.”