entertainment for a spring morning


ENTERTAINMENT FOR A SPRING MORNING

 

"The story does not really end, for as long as people are alive, there is no possible and definite conclusion to their troubles or hopes of dreams."

Vladimir Nabokov on Chekhov's "The Lady with the Dog"

 

Like the gross events in what we call world history, the Cold War (1947-1991) transcends itself to remain  a thorn of revelation.  It forces us to admit, however reluctantly, that human beings possess the will to dominate, torment, and eradicate one another.  This tendency has lived since human beings evolved from whatever on Earth. This penchant for cosmic evil is a permanent feature of humanity. It will last "for as long as people are alive." The Cold War did not end in 1991.

 

Pandemic is magnifying glass, telescope and electronic microscope, a tool for discovering what has always been the human condition with scant regard for the cumbersome categories of class, gender  and gender fluidity, race, ideologies,  nationality, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status.

 

Robert Frost had an inkling about the character of world history when he wrote the chilling poem "Design" (1936) and the blood-freezing poem "Once by the Pacific" (1928). Pandemic invites us to reconsider the very Western, very tragic depths of Frost's poetry.

 

As far as Cold War goes, we look more to George Orwell than to Frost if we run our fingers against the grain of typical Euro-American literary and intellectual histories.  Orwell's 1945 article "You and the Atomic Bomb" donated the phrase Cold War.  His novels Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-four (1949) and Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (1932) are politically  prophetic; they anchor memories of how things fell apart in Shakespeare's The Tempest and memories of how things persist in falling apart. The histories of Africa-descended people are confirmations.

 

Lives do matter everywhere on planet Earth as we spin like wretched souls in Dante's Inferno. Thorns of recognition allow us to bleed and bleed and bleed. The bamboo texts of Dao De Jing can give us no more consolation than The Epic of Son-Jara, The Epic of Gilgamesh,  and the King James version of the Bible.

I come this morning to the ironic, tentative conclusion that literature and writing in general conspire to nurture our misery.

 

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.            5/8/2021 8:04:19 AM

 

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