Telling more lies To prove you aren't a liar Committing arson To cover up a fire Pretending away Facts that burn your soul Pretending away Truth that takes a toll Festering lilies Troubles grow like weeds Caress and fondle The monsters that you feed Pretending away The pain and the smell Pretending away The things you never tell Cardboard illusions Menageries of glass Forsaken future Imaginary past Pretending away What everybody sees Pretending away Your own reality by Richard W. Bray
Washing out the spot
That never goes away
How many children
Did you kill today?
Staring at the basin
In all your distress
What happens in your head
Is anybody’s guess
Now you’re making speeches
Reciting practiced lies
I wonder what’s behind
The empty in your eyes
Where does it come from?
The hunger that devours
Destroying whole countries
For a little taste of Power
by Richard W. Bray
The thousand natural shocks that flesh
is heir to
are there to
remind you
you’re alive
every cut
and every kiss
says you’re real
and you exist
This dappled world we’re living in
this tender box
of bone
and skin
every cut
and every kiss
says you’re real
and you exist
by Richard W. Bray
Happiness is a sad song
—Charles Schultz, from the book Happiness is a Warm Puppy
Everything was beautiful
Until it went wrong
Happiness
Is sad song
Weeping for Hecuba
And all those hurts beyond
Happiness
Is sad song
Poking ancient agony
Clutching what is gone
Happiness
Is sad song
Accepting my reality:
I loved you all along
Happiness
Is sad song
by Richard W. Bray
Abelard and Héloise are dead
It doesn’t really matter what they said
Get your pretty face out of that book
Nature got a need for us to cook
Juliet and Romeo ain’t real
We can vanquish love like it’s a meal
Ravish and devour me till dawn
Live the life we got until it’s gone
Helena and Paris stole away
That’s what you and me should do today
Spirit me away in dark of night
Enchant me in delirious delight
Mark Antony and Cleo had their time
So we should make the most of yours and mine
Living blood is scorching through our veins
Let’s drink each other up just like Champagne
by Richard W. Bray
Sweetest nut hath sourest rind;
Such a nut is Rosalind.
Touchstone, from As You Like It by William Shakespeare
Do you have a secret
That you’re too afraid to tell?
Are you delicate and tender
Underneath your heavy shell?
Have you suffered shocks and stings?
Did you build a barricade?
Did you turn those slings and arrows
To a daunting palisade?
Can you let me in your fortress?
Is it big enough for two?
Can we fortify each other?
Or is your castle just for you?
by Richard W. Bray
—William Shakespeare, Sonnet 116
I love you when you’re mean
I love you when you’re mad
I love you when you’re angry
I love you when you’re bad
Love is not a smorgasbord
For me to pick and choose
Always have to clean my plate
When I’m digesting you
I love you when you pout
I love you when you cry
I love you when you’re dirty
I’ll love you till I die
Love is not a sometimes thing
Love is not a switch
I love you as an angel
I love you as a bitch
by Richard W. Bray
The earth is an oyster with nothing inside it,
Not to be born is the best for man;
—W.H. Auden, The Dead Echo
Wow. That’s pretty depressing. In fact, I wrote that listening to Auden read “The Dead Echo”* from The Voice of the Poet series makes me want to lie down in the fetal position and turn out all the lights.
Is our human existence, as Auden suggests, so meaningless that we would be better off without it? No. Because Love.
In his famous soliloquy Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow Shakespeare’s Macbeth complains that
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
As an ardent nonbeliever, I don’t see how human existence signifies anything beyond itself. But our existence is nonetheless pretty awesome when considered on its own terms.
I’m pretty sure that there isn’t any anthropomorphized God up in outer space listening to all our prayers, a god who cares about every little thing that happens in the universe, including the death of every sparrow. Yet I see reason for hope in this terrifying realization because it informs me that human beings must rely upon one another instead of inventing a god in order to assuage our cosmic loneliness.
However, Auden makes another claim in “The Dead Echo” which haunts me to the core of my being:
A friend is the old old tale of Narcissus
In other words, our hunger for Love is merely a manifestation of ego since we are only capable of viewing the world through the prism of our own interests and our own self-perception. As Auden explains in his collection of essays called “The Dyer’s Hand” :
Almost all of our relationships begin and most of them continue as forms of mutual exploitation, a mental or physical barter, to be terminated when one or both partners run out of good.
This is true, of course. But it hardly renders Love meaningless. The act of caring about others is selfish and selfless at the same time. It’s one of life’s many paradoxes. Our lives are full of paradox not because that’s how the universe is designed; we see life as being full of paradox because that’s how our brains are designed.
When Samuel Goldwyn complained that a script she had submitted “ended on a sad note,” Dorothy Parker noted
“I know this will come as a shock to you, Mr. Goldwyn, but in all history, which has held billions and billions of human beings, not a single one ever had a happy ending.”
So what should we do about this whole being alive thing? Well, in addition to depressing the hell out of us in “The Dead Echo,” Auden provides us with some practical advice:
Throw down the mattock and dance while you can.
And as another poet notes, between birth and death, It ain’t no sin to be glad you’re alive.
So the loveliest and most courageous thing we can do is acknowledge the hurt and ugly in our lives and still manage, somehow, to face the music and dance.
* Auden elsewhere refers to this poem as “Death’s Echo”
by Richard W. Bray
Frank O’Hara
J.K. Simmons garnered an Academy Award for his portrayal of the cruel, exacting, excellence-obsessed music teacher Terrence Fletcher in the movie Whiplash. Fletcher tells his struggling student that “there are no two words more harmful in the English language than ‘good job.’” In other words, Fletcher argues, he is merely hard on people for their own good, pushing them to achieve new levels of excellence.
Fletcher is echoing Hamlet’s assertion that “I must be cruel only to be kind.” Today in our success-worshipping culture the clichéd notion that we are doing people a favor when we are hard on them is repeated often by parents, teachers, and others who suggest that they only want the best for us while they are abusing us.
But we should ask to whom, exactly, is Hamlet being kind. Notice that Hamlet makes his famous cruel-to-be-kind assertion right after he stabs Polonius in fit of rage. Yet Polonius was merely guilty of eavesdropping, hardly a capital offense. However, Hamlet demurs when presented with an opportunity to kill Claudius, the man who murdered Hamlet’s father. (Claudius is certainly a much more appropriate target for Hamlet’s sword than Polonius.)
Hamlet is a cruel, insufferable, whimpering coward who, like Terrence Fletcher, is usually cruel just to be cruel. For sport, Hamlet badgers poor, innocent Ophelia, a woman who simply wants to love him. Later Hamlet whines when he discovers that Ophelia has committed suicide.
So Hamlet abuses people for fun and Terrence Fletcher abuses people because he wants to win jazz competitions. They’re both losers in my book.
However, the obviously hypocritical and self-serving sadism of Fletcher and Hamlet notwithstanding, there certainly are times when it is necessary to be hard on people.
But when is outright cruelty justifiable? I’m not a big fan of fussing and fighting, yet Alfred Kazin notes in his memoir A Walker in the City that sometimes a healthy screaming row is necessary in order to clear the air, so to speak: “In Yiddish we broke all the windows to let a little air into the house” (119).
And the poet Frank O’Hara makes a similar point:
Hate is only one of many responses
true, hurt and hate go hand in hand
but why be afraid of hate, it is only there
think of filth, is it really awesome
neither is hate
don’t be shy of unkindness, either
it’s cleansing and allows you to be direct
like an arrow that feels something
out and out meanness, too, lets love breathe
Some people enjoy hurting other people; I don’t. It sounds pretty wacky to me, but according to physicists, all matter is connected. So maybe when we attack others we are actually attacking ourselves. Or maybe Allan Seager’s description of poet Theodore Roethke also applies to me: “his despair seems to prove that he already had the prime requisites of a poet, a tingling sensitivity as if he lacked an outer layer of skin.”
by Richard W. Bray
Alexander Pope
Many vices have corresponding virtues. Consider the following pairs of adjectives.
Confident/Cocky
Trusting/Gullible
Audacious/Impudent
Candid/Indiscreet
Gallant/Foolhardy
Deliberate/Dithering
In each of the above examples, there is a point where excess converts virtue into vice.
Consider the Wooden Paradox from basketball coach John Wooden: Be quick but don’t hurry. In other words, give maximum effort without losing control. Expedience is good; reckless haste is not. Thus we excel by straining a virtue to the edge of the border where it becomes its corresponding vice.
Controlling our appetites is a key to maximizing virtues without rendering them vices. As philosopher Phillipa Foot* notes, “Virtues belong to the will” (13).
For example, there is virtue in Hamlet’s impulse to redress his father’s murder; however, the mindless barbarism of Hamlet’s hunger for retribution obliterates a guiltless family—Ophelia, Polonius, and Laertes. Enraged recklessness is the vice which transforms Hamlet’s valor into senseless carnage.
To his credit, Hamlet is aware of such folly. That’s why he salutes Horatio’s staid and sober equanimity:
Give me that man
That is not passion’s slave, and I will wear him
In my heart’s core, ay, in my heart of heart,
As I do thee
It is not good enough simply to act upon justifiable impulses because, as Foot notes, “almost any desire can lead a man to act unjustly” (9). Like Hamlet’s ill-fated quest for justice, much death, loss, and destruction is perpetrated in the name of love, charity, temperance, and security. Alexander Pope warns us to be wary because
The same ambition can destroy or save,
And makes a patriot as it makes a knave.
It is difficult to discern the corresponding virtues for “moral failings such as pride, vanity, worldliness and avarice” which “harm both their possessor and others” (Foot 3). Pride is a fundamental flaw bred in the bone of humanity. Excessive self-satisfaction puffs us up; it distends the ego and smothers benevolence. But you don’t have to take my word for it:
Before destruction the heart of man is haughty (Proverbs 18:12)
Whether we credit our existence to God or evolution, there is no such thing as a self-made man.
Let’s imagine a man who comes into the world with a massive endowment of skill and will who also happens to be born at that right time and place to garner great fortune and esteem during his lifetime. Shouldn’t this man be immensely grateful for his fortuitous circumstances? Why does pride so often trump modesty in the solipsistic hearts of the fortunate?
Compassion and humility are the best antidotes to our capacious appetites and our rampant self-love.
*All Philippa Foot quotations from Virtues and Vices and Other Essays in Moral Philosophy
by Richard W. Bray
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