Age of the Strong Man

There is such a thing as global weather, though no one can predict it, neither Marx, nor Lenin, nor Che Guevara. Not Hegel, not Woodrow Wilson, and certainly not Gorbachev.

Global weather is as difficult to predict as the meteorological version. And yet there is such a thing. Everyone alive in 1968 felt it; it was as if history were coming to an epitome. Many were stunned by the counter thrust —Reagan, Thatcher, Deng Xiaoping.

These days we throw around words like "fascism" to explain current politics but maybe we need to peer beneath such ideological categories and recognize that this, above all, the age of the strong man.

The evidence is too abundant. One of those things you either ignore or explain away if you can.

In the United States there is the populist, anti-democratic Trump, of course.

In Russia, there is wildly popular, anti-democratic Putin.

In China, Xi Jinping is, as the LA Times described him, "on the cusp of gaining power unseen since Mao Tse-tung."

The US, Russia, China — the three great powers. What global mood do they reflect or collaborate to fashion?

On a smaller scale there is of course Turkey's Erdogen. And though I don't mean to complicate the issue beyond reckoning, Netanyahu is on this scale, too, Netanyahu as Israel's seemingly eternal, eternally crushing  potentate.

It's the age of the strong man. Whatever can be done for democracy must reckon with that brute fact.

Ashbery 7/28/1927 - 9/3/2017

John Asbery

7/28/1927 - 9/3/2017

I've been reading and contending with John Ashbery since his early book Rivers and Mountains (1966). I resisted him, and still do, while learning to enjoy him, within measure. His poems frustrate the hunger for settled, discursive meanings — ideas, things to extract, chew on and discuss. He is an artist of the anti-idea. Meaning for his poetic practice was a sort of tyrant — best to skirt and never mention.

Though Walter Benjamin and John Ashbery couldn't be further apart intellectually, Benjamin echoed, or prefigured, this unspoken goal of Ashbery's when he wrote: "Children, when thinking up stories, are stage managers, who do not allow themselves to be censored by meaning."

There are times when, despite all Ashbery does to defend against it, meaning does come coalescing through the artifices.

As, I think, in the following, badly camouflaged and therefore all the more lovely love poem:

"A Blessing in Disguise," by John Ashbery

Yes, they are alive and can have those colors,

But I, in my soul, am alive too.

I feel I must sing and dance, to tell

Of this in a way, that knowing you may be drawn to me.

And I sing amid despair and isolation

Of the chance to know you, to sing of me

Which are you. You see,

You hold me up to the light in a way

I should never have expected, or suspected, perhaps

Because you always tell me I am you,

And right. The great spruces loom.

I am yours to die with, to desire.

I cannot ever think of me, I desire you

For a room in which the chairs ever

Have their backs turned to the light

Inflicted on the stone and paths, the real trees

That seem to shine at me through a lattice toward you.

If the wild light of this January day is true

I pledge me to be truthful unto you

Whom I cannot ever stop remembering.

Remembering to forgive. Remember to pass beyond you into the day

On the wings of the secret you will never know.

Taking me from myself, in the path

Which the pastel girth of the day has assigned to me.

I prefer "you" in the plural, I want "you,"

You must come to me, all golden and pale

Like the dew and the air.

And then I start getting this feeling of exaltation.