More than thirty years ago I heard Steven Millhauser read a story titled “An Alphabet of Women.” He assigned a woman’s name to each of the twenty-six letters. I remember an accelerating sense of hilarity and nothing else about the story. Millhauser has never published it, perhaps judging it too Oulipian or simply silly, though arbitrary pattern-making can be amusing if treated like a game and not taken too seriously. Take Tom Disch’s “Abecedary” (ABCDEFG HIJKLM NPOQRST UVWXYZ, Anvil Press, 1981), a poem likewise organized around the alphabet.
Disch must have
liked the idea because he did something similar in “Zewhyexary” (Yes, Let’s: New and Selected Poems,
1989). Here he reverses the alphabet, beginning with “Z is the Zenith from
which we decline” and ending with “B is bone. / A could be anything. A is
unknown.” This is not children’s verse. Here are the immediately preceding
lines that caught my eye and ear:
“H is your
Heart at the moment it breaks,
And G is the
Guile it initially takes
To pretend
to believe that it someday will heal.
F is the
strange Fascination we feel
For whatever’s
Evil–Yes, Evil is E–
And D is our
Dread at the sight of a C,
Which is
Corpse, as you've surely foreseen.”
Disch is right about the fascination of evil. He echoes a passage in another book I'm reading, Nicholas
Berdyaev’s The End of Our Time
(trans. Donald Atwater, Sheed & Ward, 1933):
“Morally, it
is wrong to suppose the source of evil is outside oneself, that one is a vessel
of holiness running over with virtue. Such a disposition is the best soil for a
hateful and cruel fanaticism. It is as wrong to impute every wickedness to
Jews, Freemasons, ‘intellectuals,’ as it is to blame all crimes on the
bourgeoisie, the nobility, and the powers that were. No; the root of evil is in
me as well, and I must take my share of the responsibility and the blame. That
was true before the revolution and it is true still.”
That’s from
Berdyaev’s chapter titled “The Russian Revolution.” Another Russian later echoed
him. Evil is often denied but impossible to ignore. He understands that utopia
can only be realized only through the Gulag, Babi Yar and the Katyn.
“Utopias,” he writes, “are more realisable than those ‘realist politics’ that are only the carefully calculated policies of office-holders, and towards utopias we are moving. But it is possible that a new age is already beginning, in which cultured and intelligent people will dream of ways to avoid ideal states and to get back to a society that is less ‘perfect’ and more free.”
2 comments:
I hope we are moving forward.
So good. I went ahead and ordered "Yes, Let's".
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