86 - Eternity

Henry Vaughan on eternity, P.J. O'Rourke on apartheid South Africa, and Spider-Noir 4-6

Eternity

“I saw Eternity the other night,

Like a great ring of pure and endless light,

All calm, as it was bright;

And round beneath it, Time in hours, days, years,

Driv’n by the spheres

Like a vast shadow mov’d; in which the world

And all her train were hurl’d.”

-from “The World” by Henry Vaughan

This is from the start of a longer, not very interesting poem called “The World”; this section is called by Palgrave “A Vision”, and that is where I first saw it. It stands apart from the rest as really very concentrated poetry. If I may almost be unfair to Vaughan – if I may ignore his priority in time – we almost hear echoes of Blake with the simple diction and Wordsworth with the focussed language, and of both with the noble personification. In fact, it is more tantalizing to consider some underrated influence of Metaphysicals on Romantics; perhaps Vaughan is the missing grandfather of the movement! (Perhaps not.)

One thing worth saying is that, stylistically, this isn’t very Metaphysical. There are no tags from theology or ancient languages; no educated puns; no very complex metre or rhyme. There is one moment of the educated Metaphysical in our excerpt – one wonders at first glance if the image of our world being thrown around in space, though not here quite literal, is drawn from contemporary discussions of heliocentrism. Otherwise, this is quite open and approachable at the image of language and image.

Meaning is harder to be certain about.

I saw Eternity the other night,

Like a great ring of pure and endless light,

All calm, as it was bright

What is Vaughan seeing? Are we to accept Palgrave’s gloss that this is A Vision? Eternity is contrasted to Time:

And round beneath it, Time…

The longer poem will go on to consider various miserable people trapped in the darkness of Time, whilst only some ascend into Eternity. That makes sense as to the metaphysics, and the poem’s name (“The World”) certainly gives us a setting, but the imagery is suggestive. There is a cosmological framing which seems to me the obvious immediate forerunner of the image.

Vaughan looks up to the heavens which do not change; he looks at the world beneath of mutable time. The verticality, the contrast of changelessness and change, the actual physical location. This is all very classic, really. Yet there is a wrinkle, because the “spheres” drive Time, seemingly, and “hurl” our own world around.

I think what is going on in this: Vaughan still has the old “Model” (Lewis’ term) in mind, but has made it more viscerally Copernican. Rather than the celestial zone beginning above our moon – that is, in the realm of the other spheres – the actual sky you see is part of the mutable zone, and follows a more modern, violent idea of motion (informed by heliocentrism, mentioned above). Beyond that, in the old “upper” Heaven (perhaps Paul’s Third Heaven of 2 Corinthians – that’s a debatable image), tranquillity remains. This may also explain the “pure and endless” quality of the light – not something to ascribe to the mobile and changing planets.

Models are rarely settled. We surely live now, imaginatively, between any numbers of Models, and can scarcely define them – we just imagine and believe the mixture we do. Vaughan is probably only half-aware of what he is doing here. What he is trying to do is find an imagistically sound depiction of eternity with which to contrast the images of futile mutability later in the poem. It still works for us, I think, because this image is fairly canonical: a far, bright, changeless world of ideas or divinity, a rapidly changing and somewhat chaotic material world. It is perhaps a reason why Platonism appealed to some of the Metaphysical generation – a relocation of the Real to somewhere beyond physical observation, now telescopes were going round supposedly disenchanting the skies. (But even in your world, a star is not just a ball of gas.)

Quote of the Week – P.J. Rourke on Apartheid South Africa

“I was prepared for South Africa to be terrible. But I wasn’t prepared for it to be normal. Those petty apartheid signs, NO DOGS OR NON-EUROPEANS, are rare, almost tourist attractions now. There’s no color bar in the big “international” hotels or their restaurants or nightclubs. Downtown shopping districts are integrated. You see as many black people in coats and ties as you do in Chicago. If I’d really tried, I could have spent my month in South Africa without noticing any hint of trouble except the soldiers all over the place. South Africa is terribly normal. And this is why, I think, we get so emotional about it.

Everywhere you go in the world somebody’s raping women, expelling ethnic Chinese, enslaving stone-age tribesmen, shooting Communists, rounding up Jews, kidnapping Americans, setting fire to Sikhs, keeping Catholics out of country clubs and hunting peasants from helicopters with automatic weapons. The world is built on discrimination of the most horrible kind. The problem with South Africans is they admit it. They don’t say, like the French, “Algerians have a legal right to live in the sixteenth arrondissement, but they can’t afford to.” They don’t say, like the Israelis, “Arabs have a legal right to live in West Jerusalem, but they’re afraid to.” They don’t say, like the Americans, “Indians have a legal right to live in Ohio, but, oops, we killed them all.” The South Africans just say, “Fuck you.” I believe it’s right there in their constitution: “Article IV: Fuck you. We’re bigots.” We hate them for this. And we’re going to hold indignant demonstrations and make our universities sell all their Krugerrands until the South Africans learn to stand up and lie like white men.”

- From “In Whitest Africa”, Holidays in Hell by P.J. O’Rourke

One thing with O’Rourke is that he never gave you it less than straight. His reasoning wasn’t always persuasive, his attitude was often overcaustic, but he never really wanted to hide the rough edges. This is a good example.

From this short section, do you think O’Rourke’s general view is for or against apartheid? Well, I think we can infer he is against it – he sees it as on a level with setting fire to Sikhs and banning Catholics (like O’Rourke!) from country clubs. He has the Saffers call themselves bigots. But he’s obviously just a little admiring, if appalled, by their frankness. It’s quite nice, isn’t it, to hear some people say out loud the basis on which they live? (This is something you note when comparing a “moderate” slavery advocate in the Old South to many Northern politicos; the planter is frank and attempts to sum up the tradeoffs and the unsolvables, his opponent moralizes. His opponent is quite probably right but he’s also avoiding the actual heart of the discussion.)

His comparison to America – to which he returns, implicitly, once or twice – is pointed. South Africa is like Chicago. Chicago may not be perfect but it’s not a total racial hellhole, is it? Not racially equal, but there’s some “equal opportunity”, right? The only reason we cry about South Africa but not Chicago – in the 1980s, anyway – is because the Saffers are frank about the way a mixed society “must” work, and we hate them for it. He also highlights, elsewhere, other tensions of different kinds: the Voertrekkers are a lot like American pioneers, in historiography anyway; it’s only in white South Africa that rare animals get protected; the educated blacks and the Anglo Saffers mince and hope for the best but the real choice is between two kinds of strong and violent politics; and so forth.

What’s a shame, perhaps, is that O’Rourke never quite pushes in on this hypocrisy. In a sense, he’s doing too much actual journalism; “In Whitest Africa” is a foul-mouthed cousin of Penn Warren’s Segregation, not a phillipic against Western political pietism. I also hardly expect O’Rourke to weigh and measure the great problems of modern societies. I do, however, expect him to have a go at the ridiculous, and he never quite gets there in this piece.

It has aged interestingly, though. He offers no prescription on solutions; he is not overly sanguine about the Necklacers getting any power; but he does presume that if the educated blacks he meets get in charge, a multicultural and peaceful society will come into being, much on the same longer-term trajectory as America. This has not happened. The efforts of de Klerk and Mandela look vastly superior to the debacles that led to Mugabe in Zimbabwe, and then the policies he pursued once free of the Cold War; nevertheless, South Africa is further from being America now, at least in any positive sense, than it was in the 1980s, when it was deeply inequitable and economically blockaded by half the world.

Spider-Noir, Episodes 4-6

The headline here is that this is more of the same as last time, in every good way. But let me sum up one thing that makes this work: it is cheerfully and unashamedly pulp. Perhaps it is sometimes a little self-awaredly pulp – to be pulp now is to be self-aware, I suppose, unless you’re writing werewolf romances for Amazon POD – but it is genuinely pulp. It has made a stand and it has chosen to be fun and to do the things that fit the Good Old Story and so it’s good. Observing the death of the Big Superhero Industry, this is an important point. What recent Superhero things have been genuinely good? Friendly Neighbourhood Spider-Man and Caped Crusader both come to mind, and they’re both vigorous, inventive, positive takes on the characters.

This is only sometimes Pulp Superhero. Most often it’s Pulp Noir – there’s a femme fatale who betrays the hero with good intentions! – and it plays into Pulp Horror and Pulp Science Fiction very heavily (heroes rescue prisoners from crazy Nazi experiments, compare Hellboy; mad scientist experiments on her patients to find a cure for her son). Episode 6, the strongest example of the genre shift, is one of the strongest episodes of the show. The arc around the crazy lady doctor (episodes 5 and 6) also has a great feature for Andrew Robinson, Garak from Deep Space 9, who in that latter role played the best sci-fi role of the ‘90s.

The show now has two episodes to do a realistic amount of concluding: pay off the Cat’s betrayal; deal with Silvermane and his trio of sinister misfits, all of markedly different moral persuasions; and decide the future of the Spider, who perhaps now can become a hero for the people, rather than a mere thrill-seeker.