Acts of Terror and Contrition: A Nuclear Fable - a novella about Israel

As a slight pause in my posts on modernism, here is the opening of my unpublished political novella about Israel. [Let me recommend in any case the writings of Grossman and Oz, for example In the Land of Israel (Harvest in Translation).]

“If anybody had ever struggled with a soul, I am the man. And I wasn’t arguing with a lunatic either. Believe me or not, his intelligence was perfectly clear—concentrated, it is true, upon himself with horrible intensity, yet clear; and therein was my only chance.” —Conrad’s Heart of Darkness

He had no future. He disdained it. He was a force. His thoughts caressed the images of ruin and destruction. He walked frail, insignificant, shabby, miserable—and terrible in the simplicity of his idea calling madness and despair to the regeneration of the world. —Conrad’s The Secret Agent

Part One:
Wednesday, September 26, 1990

Arie did not exercise his prerogative to leave early on these High Holiday evenings. Not that the autumn holidays signified to him; they were rituals honored more by silence than observation. And the Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait required his full attention. Two weeks ago, the American President threatened Saddam with war if he did not withdraw, and these first ten days of the New Year signaled only the inevitability of war.

It had been during these same high holy days nearly a decade ago that Beirut had exploded before his eyes. It was in these same days following Rosh Hashanah; he had been stationed there and seen the hundreds of bloodied bodies in Sabra and Chatila. The dead Palestinians had gravel stuck to their wet red faces, or sometimes they were torn to pieces, without heads or hands, or with their inner organs blown out. The Maronite soldiers would dodge into the doorways where Arie and a few fellow operatives were assigned to watch; the Christians would look blankly at the Jews, would look not for approval but for recognition.

Blood was appropriate to such New Year’s rites, the pagan mixed with the sacred. Shed blood was a sort of harvest and renewal and a harbinger. 5771—the New Year just dawning promised to be bloodier than ever. So the generic rituals were celebrated silently by Arie, without orthodox fanfare; they were a mere ornament. Always, for him, it was fact more than form that compelled attention, and his mind amassed fact after fact, always finding interest in their divergences from the expected. The fact that pictures taken by the spacecraft Magellan had yesterday revealed active volcanoes erupting amid the churning clouds of Venus’ surface. Or the fact that today the Russian Foreign Minister had for the first time adopted the words Americans were using to describe their global domination: the new world order: “An act of terrorism has been perpetuated against the emerging new world order.” Or there was the fact that six American Marine Corps OV-10D Bronco aircraft had arrived this morning in Saudi Arabia. Not Israel.

“Not Israel,” he said to two aides sitting on the black vinyl couch before his desk.

“Who needs those planes more than we?” Simon asked. He lit a cigarette, speaking as he dangled it between his fingers. He was a tall man with unsuccessfully combed dark hair.

“The Saudis need them more than we,” Rachel said. “America will mount its war against Iraq from Saudi Arabia. Not Israel. This morning the UN proclaimed the air embargo of Iraq. Tomorrow will come war—or if not tomorrow, next month. Soon.”

“We need Broncos and Eagles and Patriots all the more,” Simon spoke directly to the woman, with her neat short blonde hair and small sinewy hands. “We need them because Saddam says it is Israel who will pay with blood if the Security Council enforces the embargo against him. He declares holy war on us! When he sends his dozens of Scud missiles against us, we will need all the Patriot missiles we can get to intercept the bombs.”

“‘The fire will eat up half of Israel,’” Arie quoted ironically. “Can you tell me why always they say ‘fire’?”

The autumn sun glowed now above Jerusalem. The city stretched before Arie, who gazed out his office window. Together the three of them sat in the top story of a steel and glass building rooted in the ancient soil which David and Solomon had trod. A fortified lot with low reinforced walls circled the building like a mote; on the roof were shielded weapons to maintain the integrity of Arie’s fortress.

“What does fire mean?” Rachel asked, mocking and skeptical; she placed a hand on the classified report resting by her on the vinyl couch. “Ever since Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait and President Bush’s September 11th speech threatening war, Saddam has targeted Israel, and not only with words. Tarik Aziz said this morning, ‘We will attack Israel, and we will burn its cities to the ground. The whole region will not see light for decades. Neither the land of oil nor Israel will ever be the same.’ Iraq is threatening nuclear war against us.”

“It must not be,” Arie said quietly, with his habitual air of ironic distraction, as if he were no longer addressing his two aides: “There have been enough burnt offerings this century to fill the belly of the hungriest god.” He rose to have them leave so that in isolation he would sort through the facts and possibilities.

Rachel’s grey eyes stared at him as she and Simon stood. “Nobody could have foreseen how things are coming together,” she said.

Arie turned calmly to Simon: “We should have foreseen. Keep me informed about anything you notice out of the ordinary, any unexplained details. At once. No business as usual. Reach me at home later, at any time.”

The man and woman left to join the functionaries who filled Arie’s building. He had known the two of them in college during the sixties. Rachel had been a brilliant student, standing out also because she was blonde with thin arms and face and chest tanned mahogany from life on a kibbutz. An émigré in her early teens, she had escaped from the shrinking community of German-Jewish survivors in Frankfurt. Simon had been a young university friend born in Tel Aviv, a Sabra, sharp and supremely dedicated.

They were people Arie trusted, part of the cell he developed at Intelligence. As young men and women, together they had marched into battle in l967, and when he became head of Mossad Special Operations, he surrounded himself with them, assigning them key roles here and around the globe. Each was invaluable for his ruthless courage. Such courage was at the core for him, a solitary and spontaneous strength, apart from all common want or any need to be wanted.

He did not know what the roots of such courage were, but he honored it when it arose. And he found it in Simon and Rachel, in Ezra and Dan and a half dozen others, including his friends Issam and Baruch, who had been assassinated. Arie noted his dispassion at the thought of their deaths. It was a chasm of detachment into which he would march without hesitation. He sat back heavily in his leather chair. Perhaps he was getting soft. The force of his stout body had an immediate impact on his subordinates, yet he wondered if he were becoming fat, a complacent bureaucrat. It was repellent: he would not allow it.

His sun-drenched office was lined with gray metal cabinets and tables laden with files; in one corner by the wall of windows was a computer console with its cable plunging through the floor and down the four stories to the basement. In the middle of the blue carpet were the vinyl couch and chrome chairs that seemed out of place in the cluttered setting. The room’s modernity had been tamed by Arie’s intense will, transforming everything he touched. The office did not look new despite the furniture or the contemporary expanse of window by his steel desk.

In one locked drawer he kept personal papers, a letter his mother had written to him a decade ago, just before she died of wounds from a bomb launched from southern Lebanon and falling on the city center in Nahariyah. It was one more of those unrecorded acts of terror or contrition or grit and bravery which constituted daily life in Israel. Next to the letter was the only weapon Arie kept with him in his office, a souvenir of the concentration camp from which his parents had been liberated months before he was born. His father had given him the German officer’s silver Luger, so that he would not forget. Before he stood to leave, he opened the envelope and reread the ending of her letter.

“This fog thickens. I don’t know where my legs are sometimes; this paper and pen sometimes disappear. I remember the rocket whooshing in. The sun was baking my back. I saw the crystal blue of the Mediterranean stretching beyond the town. Then I heard it rushing in, cracking the air closer. Not all your Intelligence could keep that Palestinian rocket from finding its way to me walking in the burning Nahariya sun. I felt spun into the sky, wheeling, and then slowly circling. Now when you and the others visit, I see you revolve slowly before me. We are all weightless and irradiated with a special light. Not like Mediterranean light at all. Now it turns to fog which closes in on my hand as I write, on my mouth when I speak.”

It was five o’clock on Wednesday, the eighth evening of the Jewish New Year. Rosh Hashanah had passed; Friday night and Saturday would bring Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, the holiest of the calendar.

* * *

These streets did not shelter, the early autumn sun did not warm, and the elegant buildings did not bear ancient witness. The Avenue Foch swept by Ezra, from the Etoile toward the Bois de Boulogne, its mile-long lines of chestnut trees sheltering gilded houses. Already in late September, the leaves of some trees turned red and pale gold.

With his Renault parked two blocks from the Arc de Triomphe, he walked to the Etoile on the wide avenue designed by Baron Haussmann. Was Haussmann a Jew?

He rounded the ring of the Etoile, plunging into the crowd flowing over the Champs Elysees this Wednesday afternoon near the Drugstore. A hangout of Americans in Paris. It was an American whom he would meet here in the crowd. This morning the phone had rung in the basement office of the Israeli Embassy; the anonymous caller spoke the blank and slouching English of an American, stony, mumbling through the receiver.

“Please speak up.”

“I have some information for you.”

“Who are you?”

“I have something for you.”

“Who are you?”

“Jaeger.”

There was silence.

“About Iraq.”

“About Iraq,” Ezra repeated. "Naturally."

“I have some information. About the missiles in western Iraqi missiles. I want to meet.”

“I suppose so. In St. Severin, there’s a café at...”

“The Arc of Triumph. Inside the northeast corner at noon. I’ll know you.” The stony voice stopped. The phone had clicked off.

Ezra crossed the wide boulevard of the Champs Elysees and descended into the underground. Traffic rumbled over his head, and a memory suddenly poured through him from years ago: Baghdad is a distant blankness down the highway. He sits in a battered Fiat two miles from Osirak. A tide of slick mirages sweeps over the baked asphalt. He has infiltrated Abu Ibrahim’s cell in Baghdad, and he is Arie’s primary ground contact in Iraq. He watches the F-16 draw an invisible line across the slate-blue sky and instantly release its load of bombs. The domed head of the nuclear installation juts out of the desert, and when the bombs hit, the bowels of the building rumble and burst. A direct hit. Ezra turns the car ignition, and slowly the wheels turn over the burning highway, heading south. He sees a great cloud of fire and sand billow up and out, with flecks of debris—bits of metal, stone, and flesh—reeling in the air all about the compound.

Wind and music swept through the walkway beneath the Etoile, and a group of rock musicians filled the passage with their blaze of rhythm. Ezra’s face stiffened. When he passed musicians with their cases open playing Mozart or Vivaldi, his soul soared into the region of solace and forgetting.

He lumbered up the steps two at a time to join the tourists by the massive legs of the Arc de Triomphe. The cement island swelled with the crowd.

The Champs Elysees swept past into the body of Paris, down to the Place de la Concorde, the Tuileries, the Louvre. How fragile the city was, its brilliant vista subject to the compass of a man’s gaze. He walked by the gas flame of the Unknown Soldier, and his feet slapped over the pavement stones commemorating the dead in each world war. All a city offered was its past, its accumulation of deaths. Slowly he moved back toward the stairs to the underground passage. He passed the American rockers again, and he re-emerged on the avenue, crossing to the entrance of the Drugstore.

Ezra sat at the bar in back, elevated above the diners eating their Friday lunches, and he ordered a cognac. His fingers warmed the oval of glass from which he slowly sipped. Arie would insist that the truth be unearthed. No fact or rumor was too trivial to be ignored, the chief of Special Operations always said. Agent and head had known each other first as students at Hebrew University. Five years ago, Arie had become head of the service. Such was his will. He had risen to become Chief while Ezra had roved from one operation to another, chief of none.

He walked back through the glittering hall of the Drugstore and stopped at a bank of phones. In the Embassy, Haim answered.

“Our man didn’t show up. Any word there?”

“Nothing.”

Haim was six years younger than Ezra, but it was brilliance and temperament, not youth, which gave the younger man’s voice its taciturn purity. He would go far. Haim reminded Ezra of a Mossad hero, Baruch Cohen, who in the nineteen-sixties had exposed the terrorist Carlos. The PLO murdered him some years later.

“Brilliant!” Ezra said, and he imagined his colleague sitting patient and cool behind the steel door of their shared office at the Embassy.

Ezra emerged from The Drugstore into the autumn air on the Etoile. He left his black leather coat unbuttoned, fluttering behind him as he walked back down the Avenue Foch and unlocked the door to his blue car. Safely in, Ezra turned the key to the ignition.

* * *

Loyalty was the key to each operation he conducted. His comrades—the vanguard of the loyal—followed him with a fervor born of the terrible conjunction of despair and hope. Inside the book-lined study of his second-story apartment, this handful of men stood to say goodbye. They were leaving to have dinner with their parents, their brothers, their friends, while he would sit in his apartment reading and thinking and eating his customary portion for dinner—yogurt cheese, olives, and a circle of sesame-crusted bread. Ascetic, disciplined by anger and isolation, Sayeed abjured eating with friends or relatives here in East Jerusalem, even with his mother, who lived twenty minutes away—she was a fine homemaker, a skilled cook, a refined temperament, forced by poverty and her husband’s death to serve an Israeli household, to take orders from less-than-human beings, with their false superiority and cruel power. He looked out the window of his study at the busy avenue below. Scattered vendors sold stacks of sesame rounds and sandwiches as pedestrians hurried home in the darkening dusk through the imprisoning net of Israeli checkpoints spread over their portion of the city.

His four followers planned to meet him surreptitiously at midnight when they would become five vigilantes patrolling the Temple Mount, so that no Israeli could desecrate with impunity the Arab holy place. Ishmael, Ghosh, Mohammed, and Gamel were bound to him by their respect for his learning—in Islam and in revolutionary thought—and for his pragmatic imagination, his capacity to conceive and plan actions that could help end Israel’s grip on their lives. But the five friends were joined together also by their desperation at that grip of oppression, at the Israelis turning the state into a machine of terror, whose sought-for order was the mad order of apartheid and deportation. And Sayeed’s friends also were bound to him above all by a shared faith in the vision he, a stocky and diminutive servant of God, offered of glorious transcendence: not simply the beautiful reward in heaven, but the possibility of transforming life on earth into a new-born state of grace, free of both Israeli oppression and Western materialism.

“How can Palestine escape from this intolerable dictatorship?” he asked them this afternoon. “Our souls will atrophy and expire unless we stop the juggernaut of Israeli oppression. Israel must be given a dire and decisive warning, for it must turn away from the dark abyss of ethnic cleansing, from its genocidal goal. We will strike the fear of God in those who aim to obliterate us. No longer can we tolerate these vicious dogs.”

His listeners murmured their assent, curious what warning Sayeed planned. Yes, he had found a loyal cadre of desperate men, willing to dedicate their lives, even unto death, to ending the Israeli dictatorship. They were neither dissatisfied PLO fighters nor Hamas hangers-on. These were educated, unemployed, devout Muslims who were at the end of their patience. He had found them in coffee houses and in the adult education courses he taught, and he had drawn them into his private study group here a few blocks from the American Embassy. He had taught them about the dead souls of Western culture, for example how the racists Conrad and Eliot had identified the horror of the wasteland in the West, the hollow man, the papier-maché Mephistopheles. Anything, Sayeed told them, was better than the soulless malignancy of Western imperialism. And he had initiated these men—his former students, now his comrades—into a vision of the life of action, taking arms against the sea of struggle. He implied that he had recruited Abu Ganayem, the first suicide martyr, who had taken over Bus 405 a year ago on its way from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem and driven it over a cliff above Quyat Ye-Arin; the explosion killed fifteen Israelis and himself and injured scores of others. His comrades sat rapt and asked him what he planned now, what final warning was he engineering. He had refused to answer.

* * *

Haim’s Fiat swerved into the ring of the Etoile, then slowed as it turned onto the Avenue Haussmann. Two blocks ahead there were a cordon of French police and a ring of rope. He nodded to a man about twenty-five, leaning nonchalantly against the trunk of a chestnut tree near where he parked. Like Haim, the man had close-cropped black hair, and both had the olive skin of Sephardic Jews, though the young man by the tree was darker. He was a Tunisian, not a mixture like Haim, whose mother was Sephardic and father Ashkenazi.

“Anything?” Haim asked.

“Nothing.”

The two slowly strolled to the police blockade. A uniformed Frenchman eyed them and then turned to scan the other passers-by.

The windows of the nearby mansions were shattered. Bits of glass and metal were strewn over the gardens, the sidewalk, the road. Their fences had fallen into gardens, and the iron-railings had twisted into concave skeletons. The ivy on the toppled fences was ashen, and the chestnut trees were blackened on either side above the hole where Ezra had been. The rear of a Mercedes and the front of a Ferrari were burned and torn hulks.

Haim turned abruptly, walking back along the police barrier on the edge of the wide Avenue. Nissim hurried to catch up amid the lunchtime strollers.

Beneath the chestnut tree shedding its leaves in the September breeze, Haim turned to speak to him, and the young man slammed suddenly up against the tree trunk, a hole sliced silently into the brown forehead. Haim, on the sidewalk, crawled in a spray of blood, which covered his face and clothes. Noontime pedestrians screamed and gesticulated above him. Police grabbed him and lifted him from the pavement.

“Name. Identification.”

His mumble hardly audible, Haim handed the officer his papers. He seethed beneath his fey staring face. Wailing police cars began spreading another net of surveillance. Ambulance attendants came to cover Nissim’s head and body with a sheet and bore him away on a stretcher. Haim leaned by his Fiat and spit the gall gathering in his mouth into the Avenue Haussmann.

* * *

“Father.”

“How are you?”

“You’re coming tonight.”

“Elena said, seven-thirty.”

“I’ve called you on impulse.” Arie had the line continually sanitized; nothing could be left to chance. “I want to tell you about something here.”

“About Iraq?”

At seventy-five, Rami had still a full and plangent voice just as when Arie was a child and his father joined the Foreign Service. As a diplomat, his voice was always warm and pliant, willing to change a word here, a point there, until his opponents found themselves agreeing to what Rami all along had sought.

“One of my men in Paris was murdered in a bombing this afternoon. I just heard. There was an attempt on the life of another. An American is involved. It’s possible someone in the CIA.”

“So, it’s happened.”

“It’s happened.” Arie laughed grimly. “Now it’s more than an academic question: Who serves whom? What are they trying to tell us?”

“You’ll clear it up. I’m sure it’s some confusion. Who was killed?” Over the years, he had watched his son create a hierarchy of agents and play the role of brilliant warlord over Mossad’s Special Operations.

“Ezra. Haim Lipsky is in Paris too. He was nearly killed.”

“I know you consider them fine men, but...”

“There are no buts, father. These men and women are more than fine; to protect our nation, they must be absolutely vigilant and firm.”

“Vigilant and firm? Israel can’t live inside an iron curtain, Arie; a nation is not something to be hoarded. We’re a living, growing organism. It’s a matter of overcoming, of becoming. You know a nation’s real power is its ability to grow. Your task is to help—and to understand.”

“For God’s sake!” Arie shouted over the phone. “Don’t use these cliches on me. And German ones, at that! ‘Overcoming!’“

“Yes, that’s echt Deutsche, isn’t it?” Rami said; “but what about ‘vigilant and firm’?”

Always there was the old man’s teasing, his lecturing, and his crippled faith. The son felt opposition but no contempt for his father, who always thought dialectically; for him, there was still one more point, another angle not to be ignored. Finally Arie’s quiet voice broke the silence. “Whatever you say, father. We’ll see you at seven-thirty, no?”

“It will work out, Arie.”

Rami lowered the receiver into its cradle and sat still in his apartment near the Old City. From the side table he lifted a small pot of thick black oriental coffee to pour himself a cup. When his son first entered intelligence service, Arie had been all vigor and confidence, having already risen to the top of the Interior Ministry. And in his first years at Mossad, his son had helped plan the attack on Iraq’s nuclear reactor. Rami recalled the day he and the world learned of its success. “Everyone, including the Arabs, is glad we took out the reactor,” Arie had said.

“It’s ironic,” Rami said, “Iraq is the site of Eden: Sumeria. You know the Hebrews emigrated from there. So too did the Palestinians.”

Now Rami lifted a cup of the sweet, black liquid and sipped. He looked out the barred windows of his apartment to the narrow, sunny passageway outside. His son disagreed with him about Israel, for Arie was prepared to give up on the open, imperfect process of politics. His son believed in the purity of hierarchy, in the small cell of chosen individuals, each of whom would protect and defend the integrity of the state. Born in the months after Auschwitz, Arie was an issue of the camp itself, and the white haired survivor felt deeply implicated. What would happen to his son, to Israel itself, this stony, star-bound land? No language existed to tell their need. Words belied and cheapened. “Yet I must try to tell him once more,” he said aloud, and his voice reverberated in the dusty motes of light filtering through the old apartment.

Notes on the Modern period - 9: Yeats and modernity

I want to reiterate some of the features of the modern as we attempt to place Yeats in the perspective of the early twentieth century. In many ways “modernism” is a revolutionary response to the crisis of the self’s relation to community. Though the first decade of the twentieth century seemed to offer a picture of peace, wealth, and empire, in truth a profound agitation for change was occurring, indicated by the movement toward women’s suffrage, the inclusion of labor parties in governments, the rise of nationalist movements among the colonies, and even by the increasing decay and self-indulgence of upper-class culture. In my first two posts, I mentioned these matters as well as revolutionary new ideas in physics, psychology, philosophy, painting, music, and literature. With regard to the sense of community, there was an increasing fragmentation of culture beyond Matthew Arnold’s worst nightmares about Victorian puritanism as opposed to the “sweetness and light” of classical Hellenism. The breach grew ever wider between the semi-literate consumption of mass-produced popular media and the increasingly alienated artists with their turn toward experimentation; modern artists concertedly pursued aestheticism, abstraction and an intentionally paradoxical fragmentation of effect, as well as primitivism and a subversively frank truth-telling. The exploration of art’s form and content became the emblem and stage of freedom. All this ferment and breakdown was suddenly plunged into Europe’s Great War, the great upwelling of primitive violence which was the First World War from 1914 to 1918 and the millions of deaths which nothing seemed able to avoid. The proud achievements of wildly growing technology and science yielded the horror of modern armaments. Partly as a result, modern literature took up the task of judging the entire span of western civilization, which was suffering such an apocalyptic breakdown. For example, in 1919, Yeats writes in “The Second Coming” that “Things fall apart; the center cannot hold,” and later in the poem, there is the “revelation” that “a vast image” of mythic Sphinx-like violence “moves its slow thighs” to assault modernity – “And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, / Slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?”

From 1910 to 1939, Yeats made his greatest contribution to the flowering of modern art. With the other modernists, he confronted the crisis of how art’s language and consciousness itself can exist in the midst of the chaos of a failed society. What is breathtaking, even overwhelming about Yeats is his capacity under the circumstances to grow into a greater and greater poet, cultivating always new modes and resources of imagination from decade to decade; in this, his true peers are Wordsworth and Milton. Yeats began as a dreamy aesthete and Paterian; his first important imaginative transformation occurred around 1900, at the age of thirty-five. Yeats wrote about this period (in “The Trembling of the Veil”) that Pater’s aestheticism had “taught us to walk upon a rope, tightly stretched through serene air, and we were left to keep our feet upon a swaying rope in a storm.” From the experience of the inevitable fall to earth, Yeats made greater and greater poetry. It is not only that he widened the range of diction beyond conventional “literary” diction, or that he widened the range of tone so that it stretched from personal to public, from formal to vernacular within a phrase, from sorrowful to sarcastic, all the while maintaining a distinctive cadence, a voice. The greatness of that poetic voice also results from its continual laying bare of the power and limits of the imagination; with increasing authority, he probes how the imagination infuses and transforms the reality of that fall to earth. The authority of his voice was earned over decades of writing and living as he opened himself to the aesthetic influence of the French Symbolists and then to the new aesthetic force of a stripped down modernist compression (the first via friendship with Arthur Symons and the second with Ezra Pound; he shared rooms with the former in 1900 and the latter in 1911). Yeats never ceased pitting himself against his weaknesses; from his founding of the Abbey Theatre in 1904 onward, he was a shy man who projected himself into the public arena, weathering its exposures and questioning its integrity as well as his own. Yeats’ voice as a poet possesses an authority based on self-consciousness and critique; his voice of reckoning and self-reckoning infuses each of the characters he creates as speakers, including himself.

Many influences fed the poet’s growth. Beyond the high – indeed, tightrope – ideal of “art for art’s sake” and then the French symbolists’ play with silence and subversive nuance, the Nietzschean aesthetic of self-challenging self-creation increasingly shaped his poetry – “whatever flames upon the night / man’s resinous heart has fed.” There was also the Irish independence movement and Yeats’ participation in its imaginative life, celebrating it in his plays (for example, “The Countess Cathleen”) or questioning it in certain poems – the seeming product of “an Irishman enraged by his Irishness.” There was his admiration for and editing of Blake’s poetry with its blend of spiritual yearning and passionate honesty, as well as its mythologizing systems, a taste for which Yeats maintained into his seventies and which yielded many a poem’s imagery as well as his book “A Vision.” And finally there was the fertile influence of revolutionary modernism, not only resulting from Pound’s model of hewn-down concreteness of image, but also from the search to find the language for the experience of Europe at war and the plummet toward independence and civil war in Ireland.

The awareness of how, in the midst of chaos, the imagination shapes language and life never ceases to mark his work. In “Easter 1916,” he casually introduces the rebel leaders – later executed – of the abortive Easter Uprising against British rule in Ireland; he initially uses realistic, deflating phrases about them (“I have passed with a nod of the head / Or polite meaningless words, / Or have lingered awhile and said / Polite meaningless words”). And yet he writes that even the least worthy of the rebels, a “drunken vainglorious lout,…has resigned his part in the casual comedy; / He, too, has been changed in his turn, / Transformed utterly: / A terrible beauty is born.” Yeats’ imagery for the rebels’ transformation, the “terrible beauty,” describes the nature of the imagination for him: the fanatic “hearts” of the rebels were “enchanted to a stone / To trouble the living stream” of ordinary life as it changes and lives “minute by minute: / The stone’s in the midst of all” shaping the flux of life. Finally, the stoniness of the verse in the last stanza proclaims that a nation is shaped and lives by such monolithic acts as the rebels’ violent sacrifice. [See Selected Poems And Four Plays of William Butler Yeats.]

Yeats reveals the role of the imagination in shaping society and history, but also in forming the self. In “Among Schoolchildren,” he explores how he – like the children he visits, as an Irish senator – is shaped by the work (the learning and internalization) of images and identities; this is the theme, too, of a late poem “The Circus Animals’ Desertion,” about the need toward the end of life to return to the sources of imagination and identity, “the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart.” The last stanza of “Among Schoolchildren” celebrates the inspired labor of the imagination, potentially uniting life and art, image and reality, drawing together spirit and sense, body and soul: “Labour is blossoming or dancing where / The body is not bruised to pleasure soul…. / O body swayed to music, O brightening glance, / How can we know the dancer from the dance?” And in “Sailing to Byzantium,” the aging persona would be released from the “sensual” music of “the young [i]n one another’s arms,” for “This is no country for old men.” Instead he yearns for the “monuments” and music of the spirit, but he insists that the icons of the spirit be formed from the stuff of life; though “An aged man is but a paltry thing,” his soul can and must “clap its hands and sing, and louder sing / For every tatter in its mortal dress.” In “Byzantium,” his deepening of the previous poem’s vision, Yeats evokes the mosaics in the walls of Hagia Sophia, where violent generations of soldiers occupied and slept amid the golden, turquoise, bejeweled mosaics of the basilica. Of these glistening, vibrant artworks he writes: “I hail the superhuman; / I call it death in life and life in death.” As these images of religious passion, of saints and symbolic dolphins loom above the soldiery, “All complexities of fury leave, dying into a dance, an agony of trance, an agony of flame that cannot singe a sleeve… / These images that yet fresh images beget, that dolphin-torn, that gong-tormented sea.”

One of Yeats’ later celebrations of the power of the imagination is voiced by a persona called Crazy Jane; her voice and understanding embody Yeats’ vision with great vitality and audacity, particularly in “Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop.” As she argues with the latter, a mouthpiece of conventional mores, she uses springing, pithy epigrammatic phrases to celebrate the full cycle of birth, sex, and death, even welcoming her body’s aging, accepting the death of friends, and affirming that she is “learned in bodily lowliness / And in the heart’s pride… / But Love has pitched his mansion in / The place of excrement; / For nothing can be sole or whole / That has not been rent.” Yeats’ insight – a source of his power – is to accept the full cycling of life as the matter of the imagination, the material and source of his images. Simultaneously he recognizes ruin, death, and a vanishing nothingness as vital elements of the process, and that makes his understanding of the imagination particularly modern – for Yeats shows that the low and uncontrolled, the irrational heart and excremental part, are vital to the process of our noblest, most transcendent desire, of love, and alternatively that culture’s variously hallowed images can shape, even as they are shaped by, the moments of our animality.

In my next post, I hope to turn to the “modernity” of T. S. Eliot’s poetry.

Notes on the Modern period - 8 - Pater and Aestheticism

In the current version of the Modernism course I’m teaching, our focus moved from Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud to the founding thinkers in the modern social sciences including Simmel, Veblen, Le Bon, Frazer, as well as two early modern feminist writers; we have also spent a week on modern science (befitting a general education seminar at CWRU), reading essays by Darwin and then by Einstein and Heisenberg. Most of this occurred before we turned to the development of modern literature, music, and art. However, in these notes, I think it will be better first to discuss modern literature and then in later posts to turn to the array of other topics in the development of modernism. This post will attempt to discuss some of Walter Pater’s ideas as they influenced Yeats and other modern writers. It’s tempting to spend some time exploring Pater, for he offers a sort of Nietzschean aesthetic, but in the English language and in terms of English culture.


Pater was a ‘fellow’ and tutor at Oxford, and two of his students were among the most original writers of the late nineteenth century, Oscar Wilde and Gerard Manley Hopkins. The celebration of aesthetic experience in the professor’s work clearly influenced each of these men. The point of Wilde’s paradoxes is often to assert the primacy of art and the pervasiveness of aesthetic artifice in either shaping or insulating us from life. And the greatness of Hopkins’ poems is to develop a language infused with the force of – and the tension between – his sensuous ‘aesthetic’ sensitivity and his fervent Catholicism. It was also Pater who invited Mallarmé to Oxford in 1872, to deliver his lecture on “Literature and Music.” The British modernist writers of the next generation were all young Paterians, including William Butler Yeats, Virginia Woolf, D. H. Lawrence, and James Joyce (as well as T. S. Eliot).

A part of Pater’s description of Leonardo’s Mona Lisa was placed by Yeats at the conclusion of his introduction to the edition he edited of the Oxford Book of Modern Poetry, and the poet transformed Pater’s prose into a poem, adding line breaks at the end of each phrase. The passage projects a breath-taking ambiguity, reminiscent of the tension in Hopkins between a sensuous aestheticism and religious images; here Pater evokes Mona Lisa as simultaneously an inhabitant of the region of evanescence and death (“dead many times…[she] has learned the secrets of the grave”), and a pagan goddess (“as Leda, [she] was the mother of Helen of Troy”), and a religious figure (“and, as St. Anne, [she] was the mother of Mary”) – this combination of the holy, the pagan, and the deathly presents the painting as an ambiguous aesthetic paragon, indeed (for “all this has been to her but as the sound of lyres and flutes”). The paragraph is part of Pater’s Studies in the Renaissance, with its chapters on the Italian masters, with its famous formulation that “all art aspires to the condition of music,” and with its infamous “Conclusion.” [Studies in the History of the Renaissance (6915)]

It is the “Conclusion” which had the most significant impact on the next generation of intellectuals in Britain. It begins with an analysis of experience as “a perpetual motion” of “moments.” Consciousness experiences these moments as a stream of “impressions, unstable, flickering, inconsistent, which burn and are extinguished with our consciousness of them” – in many respects his description parallels the new “modern” insights into the psychology of consciousness – for instance, William James’ idea of the “the stream of consciousness.” This self-conscious flux of “momentaneous” impressions is “ringed round for each one of us by that thick wall of personality through which no real voice” has pierced; here one can see a sort of veiled Hegelian combat in Pater against the roles and mores of often hypocritical and euphemistic late Victorian culture. A sort of death of that insulated, obligatory Victorian self is suggested by him in his evocation of the evanescent flux and “tremulous wisp” of the self.

Pater’s imagery and syntax, with the suspense of its delayed or buried verbs, create a suggestive, even subversive air of instability and ambiguity. For instance: “it is with this…passage and dissolution of impressions, images, sensations, that analysis leaves off – that continual vanishing away, that strange, perpetual weaving and unweaving of ourselves.” The “service” of the intellect “towards the human spirit” can be “to rouse, to startle it to a life of constant and eager observation – for “every moment some form grows perfect in hand or face; some tone…some mood of passion or insight or intellectual excitement is irresistibly real and attractive to us – for that moment only. Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself, is the end.” These sentences were seen as a subversive threat to the morals of youth, to the Victorian faith in the roles of “ladies and gentlemen.” As a result, the “Conclusion” was banned and not reprinted in the second edition of Pater’s Studies in the Renaissance (though it was restored in the third, a decade later). To live life with such intensity that “the greatest number of vital forces unite in their purest energy:” such is Pater’s injunction, his call to experience the full range and intensity of human experience, the sensual and spiritual, the pagan and the holy. “To burn always with this hard, gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life.”

“While all melts under our feet,” Pater writes, echoing Hegel’s description of self-consciousness, “we may well grasp at any exquisite passion, or any contribution to knowledge that seems by a lifted horizon to set the spirit free for a moment, or any stirring of the senses, strange dyes, strange colors, and curious odors, or work of the artist’s hand, or the face of one’s friend. Not to discriminate every moment some passionate attitude in those about us, and in the very brilliancy of their gifts some tragic dividing of forces on their ways, is, on this short day of frost and sun, to sleep before evening.” Many interpretations are invited by this passage – it may seem a call to lead a sort of dandified life of surface refinements, yet that is the least insinuating of interpretations, for the “Conclusion” emphasizes the life of the passions, and its imagery seems to promote a passionately erotic or sensual responsiveness. No wonder that the teen-aged Lawrence, intent on throwing off the yoke of Victorianism, named his small circle of Paterians “The Pagans.” Seize the day, Pater almost seems to write, for “we are all under the sentence of death, but…we have an interval, and then our place knows us no more.”

In the climax of the “Conclusion,” Pater describes how we may spend that interval – some “in listlessness, some in high passion, the wisest…in art and song. For our one chance lies in expanding that interval, in getting as many pulsations as possible into the given time.” To achieve “a quickened, multiplied consciousness,” art is celebrated as offering the best means (now there’s a bit of Paterian syntax for you). “Of such wisdom, the poetic passion, the desire of beauty, the love of art for its own sake, has most. For art comes to you proposing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass, and simply for those moments’ sake.” In my next post, we’ll see how this high ideal of aestheticism is adapted by Yeats and other writers to modernity with its buffeting changes, its wars, and its commitment to experiment.

Notes on the Modern period - 7 - on Freud

Reading through these notes, I realize they are very rough drafts needing later revision, for there are many typos, inadvertent mistakes, and awkwardnesses in the wording and ordering of sentences, for all of which I apologize. My basic feeling has been that it’s best for me to get these drafts out, rather than waiting for the ideal circumstances in which to refine and revise; otherwise, I might never attempt to work out some of these formulations, incomplete as they are.

Freud wrote a series of short books after World War I, in the two decades before he died in 1939, and they respond to the pervasive sense of disillusionment and the reality of death resulting at least partly from the Great War and from the possibility of the coming cataclysm, from 1939 to 1945. In “The Ego and the Id,” “Civilization and Its Discontents,” and other works, he explores how civilization struggles to control the irrational passions which can erupt in society and particularly in war, i.e., the mad destructiveness of the “death instinct.” In this period, Freud lifts the veil covering the irrational and unconscious forces at work in the human community, just as he had lifted that veil with regard to the individual psyche in his earlier work, for example “The Interpretation of Dreams” and the “Dora” case in 1900. His work is in this way related to that of Marx and Nietzsche, for all three attempt to reveal “the real conditions” of our lives and the forces which shape and deform our “relations” to each other – socio-economic forces for Marx, “the will to power” for Nietzsche, and the irrational instinctual drives for Freud.

Studying Freud in my teens, I was grateful for his understanding of the instincts and for the language he offered to portray the irrational as part of human experience. When I read “The Ego and the Id” I marveled at his inclusion of the death instinct in the gamut of instinctual drives, for his recognition helped me clarify the sense more and more apparent to me in these years, from 1959 to 1962, that the instinct to destroy could threaten to well up in our lives as self-destructive rage, let alone in our society as the menace of nuclear weapons. And I was drawn to Freud’s conception of the ego’s capacity to transform those instinctual forces, to sublimate them into a livable and affirmative life, into something potentially “sublime.” The neurotic deformations or “complexes” of feeling – mirroring the mythic patterns of Oedipus, Electra, etc. – were illuminating for me, as was the notion of therapeutic intervention through the manipulation of a person’s transference of his primal feelings onto an objective person, the therapist who would help to bring the transference to the patient’s awareness and thus potentially to heal the wounds.

By the time I entered college, I hoped to become a psychiatrist, and in my freshman year, I enrolled in pre-med and psychology courses. I also found that there was a course on psychotherapy listed in the catalogue. Without hesitation, I went to the first evening meeting, stood outside the door of the classroom, and waylaid the professor; he talked to me for five minutes and permitted me to join the graduate class as an auditor. There were only two students enrolled, both interning at local hospitals, and the psychoanalyst initiated our little group into the mysteries of how to treat schizophrenics, manic-depressives, alcoholics, and other sufferers from maladies of the mind. Needless to say, I no longer wanted to be a psychiatrist after my freshman year; part of my disillusion derived from what I came to feel was the Draconian or at least all-too-confident application of Freud’s ideas, a reductive tendency in practice which of course could also beset Freudian interpretation generally. Recognizing how simplistic the use of Freud can be does not diminish, however, his significance in the modern period.

As I wrote in my previous post, some of the primary characteristics of modern thought – promoting radical change, assuming destabilization, and proposing an alternative order – are evident in Freud’s thinking, with its assignment of rational power to the ego, its recognition of the unconscious irrational flux of the id, and its analysis of a three-part mechanism operating in our minds, comprised of the ego as reason, the id as the erotic drive, and the super-ego as the death instinct or “thanatos.” He constructs his scientific theory of the mind by conceptualizing those “forces” as abstract and somewhat mechanistic psychological structures, and it is clear that Freud’s abstractions are means to achieve control and detachment in the face of the turbulence, threat, and compulsion of the irrational in human life. He developed his theories first amid the suffocating repressions and hypocrisies of fin-de-siècle Vienna and then in the wake of the murderous First World War. His theories about the neurotic complexes are in some respects attempts to cope with the sense of the immanent death of “the self” in the period, and his understandably desperate struggle to develop modes of healing and reassembling his patients’ identities find expression in certain controversial conceptions of child abuse, female sexuality, and other matters. Nevertheless, he brings a remarkable moral impetus to his conception of psychology as an objective science and to his affirmation of the self’s capacity to confront the forces of the id, the super-ego, and hostile external reality. The Ego and the Id, Civilization and Its Discontents/Standard Edition

The modernist dynamic – the use of critical self-consciousness as a means both to lift the veil obscuring modern reality and to confront the revealed forces – is at work in Freud’s thought as it is in Marx’s and Nietzsche’s. In my next post, I hope to explore some other examples of that ‘dynamic’ at work in the modern period.

Notes on the modern period - 6 - on Nietzsche and Marx

Two primary modern conceptions of power – of how it operates in society and in the individual – are offered by Marx and Freud, respectively. Nietzsche also developed ideas about what power is and how it operates, and my previous post rather deemphasized his ideas about “the will to power” and instead drew a humanist or perhaps nostalgically post-humanist picture of his vision of Dionysian “joy” arising in tragedy, a picture akin to that presented by Walter Kaufmann and even by Walter Benjamin, say in “Fate and Character” with its image of the tragic form – where “the head of genius lift[s] itself for the first time from the mist of guilt…and becomes aware that he is better than his god” (but as a result is exiled from ordinary language by the very structure of language, of society’s laws and condemnation by the gods).

In Nietzsche's conception of power, the sublimity “beyond good and evil” achieved by the tragic hero (as he confronts the gods' imposition of guilt) is not merely a matter of sublimation or a careful cultivation of his newly realized power. In much of Nietzsche’s exposition of “the will to power,” the hero’s “sublimity” is rather a product of engaging a war-like gauntlet of strengthening possibilities ranging widely from destructive cruelty to fertile creativity, a “saying yes to life” in its destructiveness and its creativity. According to “A Genealogy of Morals,” the will to power at its most primitive involves a brutal purgation of the “ugly,” hypocritical, resentful, self-suppressing, life-rejecting slave morality imposed, in Nietzsche’s view, by the Judeo-Christian religion on humankind. The improvisatory, even perverse intensity of Nietzsche’s condemnations and enthusiasms make his version of the modern dialectic of power seem more unstable and provocative than the more soberly analytical versions offered by Marx and Freud.


Yet their ideas in their own right shake the foundations, and they are in a sense more encompassing, and certainly more modern, for both Marx and Freud employ a modern ‘technological’ language, the mechanistic abstractions of industrial processes, grown massive as the nineteenth century issued into the twentieth. Here is an example from Marx’s early “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts:” “The alienation of the worker from his product means not only that his labor becomes an object, an external existence, but that it exists outside him as something alien to him, and that it becomes a power of its own confronting him…as something hostile and alien,…turning him into a machine” and condemning him to the privation, sheltering “hovel,” and deformity of the “mediocre.” And in “The Communist Manifesto” he and Engels write, there is in modern society “no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous ‘cash payment’…[which] has resolved personal worth into exchange value” (here and in “Capital,” the abstractions of “political economy” seal the argument – exchange value, use value, surplus value, etc.).

As in Nietzsche’s work, the power of the Marxist revolution would destroy the “alienated” negating structure of human relations and – in a sort of double negation akin to the notion “death, thou shalt die” – would clear the field in order to create a new structure of relations in its place. The dialectical struggle between the bourgeoisie or owning class and the proletariat or working class is even more total in encompassing society as that combat Nietzsche imagines between the quasi-aristocratic “overman” (who self-consciously overcomes his own weaknesses and mediocrities) and the masses (who stew in resentment and/or content themselves with cretinism). The ideal result of Marx’s revolution would be (by means of the negation of private property) the proletariat’s just and no longer alienating appropriation of the bourgeoisie’s negative space of constant technological change and consumption. There is a double destabilization occurring here: the drive toward continually increasing productivity in which “all that is solid melts into air” confronts the drive to erase capitalist ownership and finally to yield the synthesis of a classless society – or in the western democracies, to spread the capacity for ownership widely among the working masses (which Marx, of course, considered a liberal deception and betrayal of workers’ interests). The Marx-Engels Reader (Second Edition)

Marx’s contributions to the modern include this template for the use of power and revolutionary change, the resulting assumption of radical destabilization, and an orderly mechanistic analysis, which paradoxically underpins the program for wiping away, in Marx’s time, the entire economic system of the western world. Related qualities characterize much modern thought across the arts and sciences, from the “paradigm shift” in physics to musical dissonance’s subversion of the harmony based on the conventional diatonic scale. And these qualities – modeling radical change, assuming destabilization, and proposing an alternative order – are equally characteristics of Freud’s thought, with its assignment of rational power to the ego, its recognition of the unconscious irrational flux of the id, and its analysis of a three-part mechanism operating in our minds, comprised of the ego as reason, the id as the erotic drive, and the super-ego as the death instinct or “thanatos.” Freud will be the subject of my next post.