The Death of a Soldier Life contracts and death is expected, As in a season of autumn. The soldier falls. He does not become a three-days personage, Imposing his separation, Calling for pomp. Death is absolute and without memorial, As in a season of autumn, When the wind stops, When the wind stops and, over the heavens, The clouds go, nevertheless, In their direction.
Wallace Stevens
Robert Duvall, Gregory Peck and Horton Foote
Foote died yesterday at the age of 92.
My favourite Horton Foote film is Tomorrow, an adaptation of a William Faulkner story starring Robert Duvall and made in 1971.
March 4 2009
Kelly McParland does an admirable job of summing up the testimony of RCMP officers at the Braidwood Inquiry:
Whatever conclusion is ultimately reached at the Braidwood inquiry into the death of Robert Dziekanski, one conclusion now seems inevitable: the original tale peddled by the RCMP about that day at Vancouver airport was overwhelmingly bogus.
The 40-year-old Mr. Dziekanski did not grab a killer stapler and wave it threateningly over his head, as the police claimed. He did not advance on four officers with threatening gestures. He did not stay on his feet after the first jolt of the Taser they fired at him. He did not have to be wrestled to the ground. He did not, it appears from the testimony of the officers who were there that day, represent any kind of threat at all. Continue reading
The Missing Wife
Wife and dog missing.
Reward for the dog.
—bumper sticker on a pickup truckThe wife and the dog planned their escape
months in advance, laid up biscuits and bones,
waited for the careless moment when he’d forget
to latch the gate, then hightailed it.They took shelter in the forest, camouflaged
the scent of their trail with leaves.
Free of him at last,
they peed with relief on a tree.Time passed. They came and went as they pleased,
chased sticks when they felt like chasing sticks,
dug holes in what they came to regard
as their own backyard. They unlearned
how to roll over and play dead.In spring the dog wandered off in pursuit
of a rabbit. Collared by a hunter and returned
to the master for $25, he lives
on a tight leash now.
He sleeps on the wife’s side of the bed,
whimpering, pressing his snout
into her pillow, breathing
the scent of her hair.And the wife? She’s moved deep into the heart
of the forest. She walks
on all fours, fetches for no man, performs
no tricks. She is content. Only sometimes
she gets lonely, remembers how he would nuzzle
her cheek and comfort her when she twitched
and thrashed in her sleep.
—from Eve’s Red Dress (Wind Publications, 2003)
first published in Two Rivers Review
From Annie Finch at harriet:
I propose that what those of us who think about poetry will find most deeply startling about this piece of photoshopping, inspired by the “Aretha’s hat” post-inauguration website, is neither its humor (everyone knows Dickinson had a great sense of humor), nor the chronological workout it puts us through, nor even the implications about Dickinson’s political views. What is most profoundly startling, most unprecedented, is that the photo situates Dickinson blatantly in relation to another woman’s ideas. And this is not how we normally think of Dickinson.
Dickinson, after all, famously claimed that “she never had a mother.” This remark, with its combination of defiance and wistfulness, surely applies to the literary and intellectual as well as to the familial realm. Dickinson passionately admired Barrett Browning and hung her picture on her wall—but this fact is not part of the Dickinson myth, nor does it affect the way in which her poems are usually read. To think of the Emily of this portrait as not only digging on Aretha, but publicly sporting her affiliation with the older woman, does violence to the usual idea of Dickinson as the perpetual daughter, the rootless wonder, the eternal anomaly, sprung Athena-like from the brow of patriarchal culture.
I have written elsewhere online and in print about Dickinson’s relation to the long-forgotten “poetesses” who were the literary source of much that seems to us odd and singular about her. As Dickinson’s letters attest, these are the poets that she, now considered without question one of our greatest poets, most often read, learned from, and rated herself against. Wouldn’t you expect that the work of these, her influences, would be combed over, studied, valued, if only for its influence on her? And yet it is, in general, not even physically available to us (in dusty, gold-carved volumes sold for their bindings) —and if we do encounter bits of it, they are not poems written in a tradition we have any idea how to approach, to read, but only caricatures set up in contradistinction to her. [more]
From Fanny Howe’s The Sparkling Stone:
I remember miles of bewildered children filtered towards some bricks in knitted caps and mittens. The snow was attaching itself to smoke stacks and branches, wires. Each one had a bone to pick with G-d. And meanwhile the cruelties made logs for cabins twelve to fifteen feet long and notched. These would store the children. Later the animals left their roomy forest, those animals whose paws dapple the snow. They are always going or have departed. I was called Paul.
Rising by plane from the Netherlands, we children turned gray over Luxemburg. Snow in the spruce trees below flaked into handbills and pamphlets. Even the cinema system took part in the campaign to color the world gray. In that war each baby weighed a boot and bricked up, during those years, the good men’s power dried up and their foreskin shriveled.
Trains were heading in all directions grinding over weeds on ice cold tracks. The wheels at 5am bore down with the force of seventy men on a muddy woman. Snow whirled airily against each brick entrance where humans tried to get warm from smoke and confetti. The litter in the trees was sometimes white and on the sides of streets it was thick and grey. The city was an oyster inside a pearl.
Can we avoid dying by making a plan for others to die ahead? Send them before us ruthlessly to scout out the territory? Or fill it? A hutch stuffed with woodcutters and chicken-killers was my birth place. I know it. I feel it . I remember it at the level of bone. Grass ate up through the foundations of barracks and community graves. In stone rectangular caves, potatoes were the food of starvation and baked in ovens with those who would eat them.
I did my research and found out that in May of that year there was rain in the ash trees. One interim peace agreement was complete while another country pulled its forces in and out of a hellish corridor. I felt like a toy doll while all this was going on. The radio warmed and cash registers rang in the season of The Dissembler. And images the size of my pink palms were lowered up and down before my eyes: St. Francis holding a lamp, a bleeding heart, and Joseph with the Child Jesus in the crook of his arm.
[more]
She just wishes it wasn’t in this way, for this reason:
… the Obama administration — in the case brought by two American lawyers and their charity-client claiming that their conversations were illegally intercepted by the Bush administration — has announced that it intends to try to appeal, yet again, in order to prevent the court from hearing the lawsuit. On Friday, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals rejected Obama’s request to stay the District Judge’s Order, which had held that it will review a classified document that the plaintiffs claim proves they were subjected to the illegal eavesdropping (thus conferring standing on the plaintiffs to challenge the legality of Bush’s NSA program), and also ordered the Obama administration to provide security clearances to the plaintiffs’ lawyers so that they could review the document as well. The Obama DOJ immediately announced they intend to try to appeal again — the third time, since Obama’s Inauguration, that the Obama DOJ will try to argue before a court that the case should not heard at all.
In the meantime, though, the Obama DOJ is now refusing to comply with the Judge’s order, actually arguing to the court that only the President can decide whether classified information can be used in a court proceeding, and that courts have no power to make such decisions. Here is the remarkable description of Obama’s actions by The San Francisco Chronicle‘s Bob Egelko:
Read the rest and sigh with me here … gotta hope like hell that Obama doesn’t win this one.
UPDATE: From Matt Browner Hamlin -
The similarities between the Obama administration’s response to the 9th Circuit Court’s ruling in the Al-Haramain case, requiring the government to turn over classified information and the legal views espoused under the Bush-Cheney administration by the likes of John Yoo and David Addington are simply stunning.
Read the whole thing here
To try to make use of the past- to try to place a framework upon it – is to look in the wrong direction for answers. As Plato observed, the truth lies upwards in the heavens. We are better off imagining our future and carving it out of the ether than trying to mould it out of the misleading physical realities of the past. We see our past, as we see all falsehoods, through a glass darkly. The past is obscured by our cultural context and our search for the answers we already expect to find. We cannot learn from humanity’s mistakes because we cannot comprehend them and because humanity is too stained by sin and ineptitude to be worth taking any lessons from. Why conceive of utopia through a reading of the grubby realities of the French, Russian or Velvet revolutions? Why bother factoring in to our projects of social change the petty problems of dead people – with their silly flights to Varennes, their refusals to sack Washington, their untimely deaths, their squalid assassinations, their plots and counterplots and hairbrained schemes that landed them in the thick of it again – all historical accidents that are worth a laugh or a tear and nothing much more? The past is no use to us at all and that is fine. It is still worth a visit. But the future must be imagined and created afresh – again and again until no mistakes are undertaken at all. That is when history will finally stop and we will stop wasting our time looking for our answers within it.
Tim Stanley, History and Its Uses
The Dziekansky Inquiry
If you’re a skier in distress,
We’ll overlook your SOS,
For Mounties just don’t want to know
When dying words are left in snow.
But when a man steps off a plane
And cries for help, our Mountie brain
Knows right away the proper course
Is swift and painful use of force.
Get lost in our arrival hall?
We’ll be there in no time at all
To help you see, when you’re upset,
That you’ve become a deadly threat.
Pick up a stapler in your hands,
Refuse to meet our firm demands,
Act strange in ways that raise our fear,
And Mounties answer loud and clear.
Sometimes we fail to get our man,
And things don’t work out quite to plan,
But next time, when you need our aid,
Stand still and show us you’re afraid.
Please understand, the Mounties strive
To help our suspects stay alive,
But if you won’t or can’t comply,
Don’t blame our tasers when you die.
