After the Flood

I have been treading deep waters, reading and writing about Spinoza and poets of the Holocaust, in particular Miklos Radnoti and Paul Celan. At the same time, parts of Houston are under deep water after rain that seemed equatorial, if not Biblical, as one local minister admonished. I saw a bayou Monday afternoon overflowing with raging brown water, though the sun by then was shining. Our neighborhood was spared but I thought of the opening lines of “The Dry Salvages,” a passage I always associate with Huck and Jim on the raft:

“I do not know much about gods; but I think that the river
Is a strong brown god – sullen, untamed and intractable,
Patient to some degree, at first recognized as a frontier;
Useful, untrustworthy, as a conveyor of commerce;
Then only a problem confronting the builder of bridges.”

For solace, for fresh air and clear skies, I turned to one of my favorite poems of the last decade or so, a poem that both renders and encourages wonder. It serves as a reminder that to always expect the worst is to be as foolish, lazy and ungrateful as to always expect the best. This is “Postscript,” by Seamus Heaney, the final poem in his 1996 volume The Spirit Level:

“And some time make the time to drive out west
Into County Clare, along the Flaggy Shore,
In September or October, when the wind
And the light are working off each other
So that the ocean on one side is wild
With foam and glitter, and inland among stones
The surface of a slate-grey lake is lit
By the earthed lightning of a flock of swans,
Their feathers roughed and ruffling, white on white,
Their fully grown headstrong-looking heads
Tucked or cresting or busy underwater.
Useless to think you’ll park and capture it
More thoroughly. You are neither here nor there,
A hurry through which known and strange things pass
As big soft buffetings come at the car sideways
And catch the heart off guard and blow it open.”

I love that poem, with its echoes of Yeats but with its roots sunk in the rocky Earth. It always reminds me of something Heaney said in 1995, in his Nobel lecture:

“….Yeats’s work does what the necessary poetry always does, which is to touch the base of our sympathetic nature while taking in at the same time the unsympathetic reality of the world to which that nature is constantly exposed.”

Apropos of nothing that I have just written, except that it makes me happy, my oldest son sent me a gift for Father’s Day and it arrived Monday. He burned for me on four CDs the complete “Basement Tapes,” recorded in 1967 by Bob Dylan and The Band. The essential guide to these sessions is Greil Marcus’ Invisible Republic, later retitled The Old, Weird America. As though that were not enough, my son also sent the complete “American Recordings” by Johnny Cash. These are some of the reasons I am proud to be an American – and a father. Thank you, Josh.