Where there is no precision, there is no love.
Editor’s Note: Art is precision. Where there is no precision, there is no love. I am helped by Roger Rosenblatt today. Where Roger says “writers” I wish to say—or add—speakers. I then think of Stafford speaking of “a remote important region in who all who talk” as that to which he makes his appeal within other persons. Other talkers. Good morning, talkers. Anyway, here’s Roger.
“No precision of thought or language. Limited freedom, especially for women. No respect for anyone, or anything, really. No love but self-love…Can writers survive, even thrive, in such an atmosphere? We’d better.”
"No love but self-love." In the past two weeks, I have been channeling poetry for understanding. I keep coming back to "September 1, 1939," written by a gay Christian poet (W.H. Auden) in a Manhattan bar where closeted gay men hung out. The poem, written shortly after the date in its title, is about the day Germany invaded Poland and war in Europe began.
Two stanzas of the poem speak to what Roger Rosenblatt observes:
Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play,
All the conventions conspire
To make this fort assume
The furniture of home;
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.
The windiest militant trash
Important Persons shout
Is not so crude as our wish:
What mad Nijinsky wrote
About Diaghilev
Is true of the normal heart;
For the error bred in the bone
Of each woman and each man
Craves what it cannot have,
Not universal love
But to be loved alone.
Maybe the devotion to self-love is universally true of the normal heart, but it is also America's great sin. No society as self-centered as ours can credibly claim to be a Christian nation.
And the great sin of "the Church" in America is the pervasive failure to call out the mortal sin of this self-centeredness. I use the word "mortal" because this failure to embrace the Judeo-Christian ethic has led to the physical death of many of our neighbors and the spiritual death of millions more--people who, thanks to the church's failure, are blithely unaware that they are even out of step with the way of Jesus.
And we can't survive without the writers.