LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, THE ROLLING STONES:



i. Somewhere in the vast reaches of pop music knowledge that I acquired during high school, I have this factoid that I am unable to source: Mick Jagger once said his two favorite topics of conversation were comparative religion and political economy. I am not particularly of the belief Jagger would be much good at either ("so, Mick, what do you think of transnational private commercial arbitration?"). But imagine the various cool-guy rock-star answers to that question for as long as you can, but I doubt anyone would come up with that combination. That's just one of the paradoxes of the Rolling Stones: more than intelligent enough--they wrote a song based around Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita, for goodness' sake--but not going to beat their listeners over the head with it.

IS THERE A DIFFERENCE? A bit late for Nov. 11, but posed by the paper which I am in the process of completing. We like this one:

DULCE ET DECORUM EST

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind.

Gas! Gas! Quick, boys! – An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling,
And flound'ring like a man in fire or lime . . .
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est
Pro patria mori.

and mock this one:

Now, God be thanked Who has matched us with His hour,
And caught our youth, and wakened us from sleeping,
With hand made sure, clear eye, and sharpened power,
To turn, as swimmers into cleanness leaping,
Glad from a world grown old and cold and weary,
Leave the sick hearts that honour could not move,
And half-men, and their dirty songs and dreary,
And all the little emptiness of love!

Oh! we who have known shame, we have found release there,
Where there's no ill, no grief, but sleep has mending,
Nought broken save this body, lost but breath;
Nothing to shake the laughing heart's long peace there
But only agony, and that has ending;
And the worst friend and enemy is but Death.

(And I share this judgment). But I wonder if there is any reason for it aside from the fact that the politics of the first are good and sensible and the politics of the second are naive?

POLITICS AND RHETORIC: Reading an essay by Edward Mendelson on W.H. Auden's habits of revision, I was reminded of this:



The 'Daisy' ad is infamous, and for good reason. Mendelson pointed out, though, that LBJ is borrowing the most famous line from Auden's most famous poem: "We must love one another or die." This line caused Auden no end of trouble. It was pointed out to him that the choice was false: we all must die anyway, whether we have loved one another or not. He changed the line to 'We must love one another and die." That doesn't work, either. The line has rhetorical power, so much that one will only notice later, if at all, that it is false.

No change could save the line, or the stanza to which it functions as the close, or indeed the whole poem. "September 1, 1939" doesn't appear in any of Auden's later compilations (interestingly, it only is dropped beginning in 1965, though I can't find any indication as to whether the LBJ ad played a role).

ALL-TIME DESERT ISLAND TOP FIVE: Albums to listen to while driving on the highway:

5. The KLF Chill Out -The KLF (a palate cleanser: the key to surviving any road trip in excess of 8 hours)
4. A Weekend in the City -Bloc Party
3. In the Clear -Ivy (but only for city driving)
2. The Roots Come Alive -The Roots
1. Born to Run -Bruce Springsteen (duh)

REFORMATION DAY:

First, Auden:

With conscience cocked to listen for the thunder
He saw the Devil busy in the wind,
Over the chiming steeples and then under
The doors of nuns and doctors who had sinned.

What apparatus could stave off disaster
Or cut the brambles of man's error down?
Flesh was a silent dog that bites its master,
World a still pond in which its children drown.

The fuse of Judgment spluttered in his head:
"Lord, smoke these honeyed insects from their hives;
All Works, Great Men, Societies, are bad;
The Just shall live by Faith..." he cried in dread.

And men and women of the world were glad
Who never trembled in their useful lives.

From the 95 Theses:

56. The "treasures of the Church," out of which the pope. grants indulgences, are not sufficiently named or known among the people of Christ.

57. That they are not temporal treasures is certainly evident, for many of the vendors do not pour out such treasures so easily, but only gather them.

58. Nor are they the merits of Christ and the Saints, for even without the pope, these always work grace for the inner man, and the cross, death, and hell for the outward man.

59. St. Lawrence said that the treasures of the Church were the Church's poor, but he spoke according to the usage of the word in his own time.

60. Without rashness we say that the keys of the Church, given by Christ's merit, are that treasure;

61. For it is clear that for the remission of penalties and of reserved cases, the power of the pope is of itself sufficient.

62. The true treasure of the Church is the Most Holy Gospel of the glory and the grace of God.

63. But this treasure is naturally most odious, for it makes the first to be last.

64. On the other hand, the treasure of indulgences is naturally most acceptable, for it makes the last to be first.

65. Therefore the treasures of the Gospel are nets with which they formerly were wont to fish for men of riches.

66. The treasures of the indulgences are nets with which they now fish for the riches of men.

67. The indulgences which the preachers cry as the "greatest graces" are known to be truly such, in so far as they promote gain.

68. Yet they are in truth the very smallest graces compared with the grace of God and the piety of the Cross.

Also:

81. This unbridled preaching of pardons makes it no easy matter, even for learned men, to rescue the reverence due to the pope from slander, or even from the shrewd questionings of the laity.

82. To wit: -- "Why does not the pope empty purgatory, for the sake of holy love and of the dire need of the souls that are there, if he redeems an infinite number of souls for the sake of miserable money with which to build a Church? The former reasons would be most just; the latter is most trivial."

83. Again: -- "Why are mortuary and anniversary masses for the dead continued, and why does he not return or permit the withdrawal of the endowments founded on their behalf, since it is wrong to pray for the redeemed?"

84. Again: -- "What is this new piety of God and the pope, that for money they allow a man who is impious and their enemy to buy out of purgatory the pious soul of a friend of God, and do not rather, because of that pious and beloved soul's own need, free it for pure love's sake?"

85. Again: -- "Why are the penitential canons long since in actual fact and through disuse abrogated and dead, now satisfied by the granting of indulgences, as though they were still alive and in force?"

86. Again: -- "Why does not the pope, whose wealth is to-day greater than the riches of the richest, build just this one church of St. Peter with his own money, rather than with the money of poor believers?"

87. Again: -- "What is it that the pope remits, and what participation does he grant to those who, by perfect contrition, have a right to full remission and participation?"

88. Again: -- "What greater blessing could come to the Church than if the pope were to do a hundred times a day what he now does once, and bestow on every believer these remissions and participations?"

89. "Since the pope, by his pardons, seeks the salvation of souls rather than money, why does he suspend the indulgences and pardons granted heretofore, since these have equal efficacy?"

90. To repress these arguments and scruples of the laity by force alone, and not to resolve them by giving reasons, is to expose the Church and the pope to the ridicule of their enemies, and to make Christians unhappy.

PROPHECIES FULFILLED: Way back when I went through grad student orientation, my department chair predicted that we would one day reach a point at which we would say: "I will give this book one hour of my attention, max, and then move on to other things." I am currently in the midst of a big read-up to prepare for the next portion of my dissertation, and find myself saying things exactly like this. Score one for Mungowitz.

FOR CONSIDERATION SOMEDAY:

Resolved: Tradition is a theory of authority dressed up as a theory of history.