Editor’s note: David Moats, an author and journalist who lives in Salisbury, is a regular columnist for VTDigger. He is editorial page editor emeritus of the Rutland Herald, where he won the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for a series of editorials on Vermont’s civil union law.
[I]f a sense of disquiet, anxiety and foreboding is pervasive in the nation, how do we express it fully?
The sources of disquiet are many, some of them obvious, such as the conduct of the president, who has cast the presidency adrift on a sea of lies, belligerence and corruption. Another obvious source is the instability of nature — the fact that each season seems abnormally hot, cold, wet or dry, all because climate change has unmoored our expectations and shaken our faith that our home on Earth is safe.
Disquiet also arises from the shattered state of institutions we have relied on for generations. Political parties, newspapers, schools, police — all are crumbling or fragmenting or are facing challenges to their authority. Respect for authority has waned as economic pressures have weakened some institutions and revealed the failings of others.
It may be that this disquiet is particularly acute among the older generations, who have seen reliable pillars of society shaken and old authority figures fade into the past. This is an idea I posed to Huck Gutman in a recent conversation, in which I suggested that we may be guilty of “old-timerism.”
Gutman is a longtime professor of English at the University of Vermont who retired last year but who has continued to send out impassioned essays to a list of interested readers analyzing favorite poems.
Gutman’s sense of disquiet is acute, and he turns to poetry to address the unease he feels. That’s why he quoted for me some famous lines from William Butler Yeats’s poem “The Second Coming”:
“Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.”
Elaborating on these lines, Gutman wrote in an email: “‘Mere anarchy,’ and worse, fascism, is loosed upon the world.”
He continued: “Dangerous times, these. And there seems so little energized opposition: the Democratic Party is, in my view, too corporate, the press is fractured by the owners (including many in hedge funds who want to strip and flip) and decent moral reporters, and by a bonanza for both cable channels and the internet of the magnetism of Trump; the electorate chases shiny objects and not the deeper values of democracy and honesty and social justice.”
Poetry has the advantage of pushing us back from the daily rush of headlines and our instant reactions of repugnance and hope — reaction to the shiny objects furnished by daily events — to a longer, more considered view.
“I find modest recompense in poems, not because they take me away from the world, but because they sometimes reconnect me to a world which is still wondrous, however much we experience it as sordid and dirty,” Gutman said.
My own sense of disquiet has something to do with my perspective as a member of the baby boom generation, born in 1947, and brought up with the great moral crusade of World War II as a historical backdrop. The United States and its allies found the strength and determination to defeat nations who represented a mortal threat to the fundamental values of humanity and democracy. With that in mind, I recently read volume two of William Manchester’s biography of Winston Churchill, and I began to wonder: What if Hitler had not invaded Poland on Sept. 1, 1939? What if he had seized the Rhineland and Austria and stopped there, solidifying a regime based on the murder of Jews and others, but refraining from the invasion that would bring Britain and France into the war?
Hitler was possessed by demonic impulses that meant restraint was not in the cards, but it’s a fact that even in the summer of 1939 the Western nations were still looking for ways to get along with him. When Donald Trump asks plaintively why we can’t be friends with Vladimir Putin, he echoes those many pillars of the establishments of Britain and France, and isolationist Americans, who were looking for ways to accommodate Hitler, as he was preparing the noose for their necks. Entertaining the authoritarian leader of Hungary in the Oval Office, as Trump did recently, is in accord with the preferences of many leaders in Britain in 1939 who preferred an alliance with Hitler and Mussolini rather than with France and other democratic nations. Viktor Orban of Hungary is not Hitler, but Hitler before World War II was not yet fully Hitler; he was more akin to Orban and Putin and others who disdain democracy than some people would probably care to admit.
“The blood-dimmed tide” from Yeats’ poem came after the carnage of World War I and the violence of the Irish rebellion. Yeats died in 1939 so he did not see the horrors of World War II. And yet his perception of “mere anarchy loosed upon the world” is an apt description of much of the 20th century. During the ascendancy of the liberal democracies following the fall of the Soviet Union, we may have forgotten humanity’s potential for anarchy.
A recent encounter with another poem has underscored the importance of September 1939. At the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City the words of a poem by W.H. Auden are affixed to the wall of an exhibit of American art that is meant to show “Where We Are.”
The poem is titled “September 1, 1939,” the day when anarchy again was loosed upon the world, and it begins in a way that speaks to the present atmosphere of disquiet:
“I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade: …”
The poem explores the various ways that blindness, apathy and hypocrisy keep people huddled in a bar where “The lights must never go out,/The music must always play.”
Auden concludes this dark vision of a dark moment with a stanza holding out a form of hope that is all he is left with:
“Defenseless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.”
Some of the greatest writers of the mid-20th century, living through one of the greatest catastrophes of any century, were able to find “an affirming flame” despite the negation and despair around them (Albert Camus, Elie Wiesel and Viktor Frankl, to name three). Maybe it’s foolish optimism, but if our present moment resembles the anxious atmosphere of that dive on Fifty-second Street, that affirming flame is what we will need to carry on.
