Sunday Pages: "The Envoy of Mr. Cogito" and “Asphodel, That Greeny Flower"

Poems by Zbigniew Herbert and William Carlos Williams

Dear Reader,

For nine years and counting, Donald Trump has traumatized the people of this country—those of us with souls, that is. His failed insurrection, against the backdrop of his failed pandemic response, was nothing less than spiritual assault and battery. The Biden presidency, which we hoped would decisively win the battle for the soul of America, proved merely to be a four-year hiatus, a Delaware speed-trap on the I-95 to tyranny, as insufficient as it was brief. All of Joe’s many great achievements may as well be colorful chalk drawings on the pavement; the impending MAGA thunderstorm will wash them all away.

Not that we should be surprised. Disappointed, yes—profoundly—but not surprised. By the end of 2021, the writing was on the wall. I wanted, we all wanted, not to translate the Dantean verse spelled out in bold letters before us. But there it was, penned in Merrick Garland’s flimsy hand: Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch’intrate. In Italian it sounds so pretty.

I’m writing this the morning after the Date That Shall Live in Infamy. Eighty-three years ago, Pearl Harbor was attacked, and we went to war against, first, Imperial Japan and soon after, the Nazis. We are now, eight decades later, somehow, on a path to become Nazis ourselves.

Six weeks from tomorrow, the uneasy interregnum that is the lame-duck period of the Biden presidency comes to an end. Since that new Date That Shall Live in Infamy—November 5, 2024—I have been, we all have been, preparing for this unwelcome new phase in U.S. history. It is no longer about How Did This Happen, but rather What Should We Do Now? These are unpleasant questions to consider: How bad will it get, really? How much suffering will my family have to endure? Am I in actual, you know, danger? “Don’t Obey in Advance” is prudent advice, but how should that actually manifest, in the real world? I ask myself: what will I do, over the next four years?

I think again of a 1993 poem by Zbigniew Herbert (1924-98) called “The Envoy of Mr. Cogito.” Born in Lwów—then in Poland, now Lviv, Ukraine—Herbert had the misfortune of living under first the Nazi, and then the Soviet, occupations. That harrowing experience informs his work.

I can’t pretend to know what the poem, in its entirety, means. But I have always read it as a meditation on grief, and on the need to continue to serve the greater good, even in the face of death. These lines, in Bogdana Carpenter’s translation, I take as an instruction, if not an outright command:

go upright among those who are on their knees
among those with their backs turned and those toppled in the dust

you were saved not in order to live
you have little time you must give testimony

be courageous when the mind deceives you be courageous
in the final account only this is important

and let your helpless Anger be like the sea
whenever you hear the voice of the insulted and beaten

Read those lines out loud a few times: it’s powerful, inspiring stuff.

“You were saved not in order to live,” to me, means that we all have an obligation, collectively, to do what we can to make the world a better place. Or, as Star Trek puts it: “Survival is insufficient.” More is required.

The poet Robert Hass wrote that Herbert was “an ironist and a minimalist who writes as if it were the task of the poet, in a world full of loud lies, to say what is irreducibly true in a level voice.” In Trump’s America 2.0, in the halls of power, in the Fourth Estate, and especially in the broadcast media, that quality is in short supply. For me, that means I must continue, in a MAGA world full of loud lies, to say what is irreducibly true in a level voice. Or, simply put, to “give testimony.” And so I shall.

As a nation, as a people, we cannot and will not heal until this grotesque monster is brought to justice. Instead, we are sending him again to the White House. The psychic damage he’s inflicted, and will continue to inflict, is incalculable. From the moment the Rough Beast came down the gilded escalator in the tacky tower that bears its name, we have been caught in an Escherian information loop. The news is coming too fast to process, but also, paradoxically, not fast enough to bring relief.

This torrent of news again brings to mind “Asphodel, That Greeny Flower,” a poem by William Carlos Williams. Williams is best known for short verses—the poem about eating the plums in the refrigerator is probably his most anthologized work. “Asphodel,” by contrast, is a long, rambling poem, a bit odd and hard to parse, written when he was 72, and supposedly about him confessing his infidelities to his wife as he lay dying. The eponymous flower is a symbol of a peaceful afterlife, of resting in peace; in Greek mythology the asphodel is associated with Hades.

Here is the end of the poem. I read this as a celebration of the power of poetry, which can—and which shall!—provide solace from the madness of the horrors swirling around us:

My heart rouses
thinking to bring you news
of something
that concerns you
and concerns many men. Look at
what passes for the new.
You will not find it there but in
despised poems.
It is difficult
to get the news from poems
yet men die miserably every day
for lack
of what is found there.
Hear me out
for I too am concerned
and every man
who wants to die at peace in his bed
besides.

The key line: “It is difficult / to get the news from poems / yet men die miserably every day / for lack / of what is found there.” The lack, that is, of what is found in poems. Art deficit. Literature dearth. Poetry famine. The quintessential MAGA complaint. Now, more than ever, we must turn to art, to literature, to poetry, to restore our souls. Even the artless need poetry in their lives, whether they realize it or not.

Herbert’s command to “give testimony” echoes an earlier snippet from “Asphodel” that seems uncannily applicable to the here and now:

And so
with fear in my heart
I drag it out
and keep on talking
for I dare not stop.
Listen while I talk on
against time.
It will not be
for long.

Williams wrote that as an old and dying man. “It will not be / for long” meant, for him, that his life would soon be over. But for us, heading into the nonconsecutive second term of Orange Grover Cleveland, those lines can be taken optimistically, in the sense of “don’t worry, MAGA won’t last long.”

Will Trump Redux really be the end of American democracy, and the start of a banal and evil dictatorship? Or will it be a short-lived, head-scratching phase that our more evolved descendants will have trouble explaining, like Bob Dylan’s Jesus period?

Time will tell, as time does. In the meantime, come what may, we must let our helpless Anger be like the sea, and counter the piss-stream of MAGA lies with the mighty ocean of truth.

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ICYMI

Fantastic discussion with Frank Figliuzzi on Friday’s The Five 8:

And here is a new patriotic anthem for 2025, “America the Stupidful,” with animation by CHUNK and vocals by Stephanie St. John:

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Photo credit: Sludge G. Postcard of Lvov Bus Station, USSR ca. 1980. Today Lviv Ukraine.