Sunday Pages: "May 24, 1980"

A poem by Joseph Brodsky

Dear Reader,

This week, as we held the wake and the funeral for my father, news ground to a halt in the United States. The seditious conspiracy wing of the House GOP—led by an alleged sex trafficker of underage girls and a woman whose now husband was arrested at a bowling alley for exposing his tattooed penis to some underage girls—hijacked the election of Speaker. For five days there was no functioning House of Representatives. It was a dangerous, deliberate chaos, intended to weaken the country.

On Tuesday, I recorded the intro to Friday’s PREVAIL podcast, which I usually do Wednesday afternoon or Thursday morning. I said, “By the time you’re listening to this on Friday, we may even have a Speaker.” I figured the joke would be old by the time the podcast dropped. It was not.

By Friday night, the insurrectionists had had their fill. Kevin McCarthy—himself a disgusting traitor of the highest order, an amoral shithead who pledged allegiance to the orange clown at Mar-a-Lago weeks after January 6, despite knowing exactly who and what he is—is now second in line to the presidency. So much depends on the health of Joe Biden, more than any of us probably realize.

Joseph Brodsky, the Russian poet who emigrated to the U.S. after being thrown out of the Soviet Union in 1972 for social parasitism, once remarked, “There is no doubt in my mind that, should we have been choosing our leaders on the basis of their reading experience and not their political programs, there would be much less grief on earth.”

The FPOTUS, of course—to paraphrase Pete Rose—has written more books than he’s read. Gaetz strikes me as a CliffsNotes kind of guy; if he’d read enough Victorian novels, he might have recognized himself in the villain in so many of them that he would be less of a dick now. Marjorie Taylor Greene probably thinks Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man is a graphic novel about Sue Storm’s dad. As for Lauren Boebert, is she even capable of reading something more complicated than Beezus and Ramona?

I don’t mean to sound elitist here. Not everyone is going to enjoy analyzing “The Waste Land” or picking apart long paragraphs from Ulysses. But by celebrating and rewarding willful ignorance, Trump’s GOP is responsible for the dumbing down of the American discourse. And that is dangerous. These people are anti-science, anti-expert, anti-intellectual. They would sooner ban a book than read it. And they are now in charge of the House for the next two years.

“By failing to read or listen to poets, society dooms itself to inferior modes of articulation, those of the politician, the salesman or the charlatan,” Brodsky said, presciently, in his opening remarks as U.S. Poet Laureate in October 1991. (Trump, it should be noted, is all three.) “In other words, it forfeits its own evolutionary potential.”

Yesterday I went to a short ceremony at the cemetery vault, where my father’s ashes were committed—the last formal opportunity to say goodbye. I had him in mind all day, as well as all the lovely messages I’ve gotten this past week—an outpouring of support for which I am beyond grateful.

Last night, I was flipping through Poet’s Choice, a wonderful anthology by Edward Hirsch, and came across Brodsky’s poem “May 24, 1980.” This was written on the occasion of the poet’s fortieth birthday, translated from the Russian by Brodsky himself. I dig the way he plays around with both meter and rhyme.

I’m sharing the second half of the poem here; the last two lines perfectly articulate how I feel right now:

I’ve admitted the sentries’ third eye into my wet and foul
dreams. Munched the bread of exile; it’s stale and warty.
Granted my lungs all sounds except the howl;
switched to a whisper. Now I am forty.
What should I say about life? That it’s long and abhors transparence.
Broken eggs make me grieve; the omelet, though, makes me vomit.
Yet until brown clay has been rammed down my larynx,
only gratitude will be gushing from it.

Thank you.

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ICYMI

Our brilliant friend Allison Gill, indefatigable podcast host of the Daily Beans, Mueller She Wrote, and Jack, was our guest on The Five 8 this Friday:

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Photo credit: GPA Photo Archive. Joseph Brodsky, Nobel Prize for Literature, 1987.