This poem originally appeared in The Echo.
Service in St. Paul’s
—London, 2003
Acrophobia turned
upside down:
fear floating away,
gravity deciding
to suddenly
give up.
There’s a dome
overhead, a glowing
Jesus over the altar,
and too much space
to pray
comfortably.
Imagination
among the scaffolding,
eye to eye with Joseph,
now falling facing up:
heaven does
not seem so high.
The following lines come from two dissents by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. I have rendered the lines in poetic form to suggest that Holmes’s writing is poetic, perhaps even inspired by Modern American poets such as William Carlos Williams.
Black & White Taxi & Transfer Co. v. Brown & Yellow Taxi & Transfer Co.[1]
A Poem[2] (1928)
It is very hard to resist the impression
that there is one august corpus
to understand which clearly is the only task
of any Court concerned.
If there were such a transcendental body of law
outside of any particular State
but obligatory within it unless and until changed by statute,
the Courts of the United States might be right in using
their independent judgment
as to what it was.
But there is no such body of law.
The fallacy and illusion that I think exist
consist in supposing that there is this outside thing to be found.
Law is a word used with different meanings,
but law in the sense in which courts speak of it today
does not exist
without some definite authority
behind it.
Gitlow v. New York[3]
A Poem[4] (1925)
Every idea
is an incitement.
It offers itself for belief
and if believed
it is acted on
unless some other belief
outweighs it
or some failure of energy
stifles the movement
at its birth.
The only difference
between the expression
of an opinion and an incitement
in the narrower sense
is the speaker’s enthusiasm
for the result.
Eloquence may set fire
to reason.
But whatever may be thought
of the redundant discourse
before us
it had no chance of starting
a present conflagration.
Troy Camplin holds a Ph.D. in humanities from the University of Texas at Dallas. He has taught English in middle school, high school, and college, and is currently taking care of his children at home. He is the author of Diaphysics, an interdisciplinary work on systems philosophy; other projects include the application of F.A. Hayek’s spontaneous order theory to ethics, the arts, and literature. His play “Almost Ithacad” won the PIA Award from the Cyberfest at Dallas Hub Theater.
Transcendence
Descending from the mountains, down the plain,
Into the valley, I have found a cave
To live in and to contemplate my pain
And joy, the love and strife designed to save
Me from my selfishness, to be reborn.
Do not mistake my constant strong desire –
The animal is transformed to adorn
The unity whose friction brings the fire
Of love out of apparent fleshly lust,
Erecting a true temple to embrace
The higher life of love and joy and trust
That life will lead me right and bring me grace.
When I want to make love to you it’s so
Our spirits can emerge and merge and grow.
Made, and Made Anew
The stones are worn with even, weary waves –
The ships are rusting by the rotting dock
That constitutes their cold, collective graves –
As weather runs down every object’s clock.
I look at you, your each new crease and gray –
The sand swirls, eddies up around your feet
With waves which wash so no sand, stone will stay
The way or where it is with every beat.
And yet our children play and chase the birds
That live with what the waves stir up. The seals
Are nursing pups. Sea grass will feel the herds
Of deer who make for cougar mothers’ meals.
Destruction is a part of nature, true –
But first things must be made, then made anew.
Lost Girl
She had the words. She knew she had the words.
They forested her, dimmed the light. Her limbs
Spread, palms outstretched to block her movement. She
Had no idea which way to go. She cut
The roots, expecting she would float away –
She tumbled, crushed the touch-me-nots. Brown seeds
Shot out from curling pods. Forget-me-nots
As blue as bluets made mere scents of crushed
Herbaceousness the moment her trunk landed.
So certain, she set out, discovering
New lands – she named new things – but she will not
Return to tell us what she saw. No blaze
Was ever made. She’ll be forgotten, turn
To soil, become the forest floor, mere food F
or fungi. The words will mould, fertilize
A future poetry upon her bones.
She had the words – for one of future’s branches –
Should other poets trim the tree just right
With all their wind and lightning, rhythmic storms
That shape the art by felling forests. Then
She’ll be discovered, newly unforgotten.
James Banks is a doctoral student studying Renaissance and Restoration English literature at the University of Rochester. He also contributes to the American Interest Online. He has been a Fellow with the Intercollegiate Studies Institute Honors Program; in addition to The Literary Lawyer, he has written for the Intercollegiate Review, First Principles and The Heritage Foundation’s blog The Foundry. A native of Idaho’s panhandle, he lives in upstate New York and serves in the New York Army National Guard.
Agrarianism has been an organized antagonist of American capitalism for longer than Marxism has, and it provides a welcome avenue for those who reject the gospel of a bourgeoisie paradise but are averse to the cosmopolitan and authoritarian tendencies of Marxism. It has occasionally found its way into public policy, such as the Second Bush Administration’s efforts to turn all Americans into property owners (though, by that point, “the family farm” had become a suburban home with a two car garage and white picket fence). Most recently, a debate boiled up in the blogosphere over a comment made by First Things editor Joe Carter arguing that Agrarianism was essentially utopian in nature.
Front Porch Republic—which, from what I can make out, is not explicitly Agrarian but is highly sympathetic to its tenets—was quick to come back with a number of repartees. Nonetheless, these repartees (for this reader anyway) only accentuated some of the problems with the ideology that they sought to defend. Front Porch Republic’s best contribution to the debate is Mark T. Mitchell’s. Professor Mitchell is an author of considerable ability and one who—in as far as I can make out—comes pretty close to living the philosophy that he advocates. I would not question the consistency of his views, just the correctness.
In his discussion of Wendell Berry’s Agrarianism, Mitchell writes:
The agrarian is guided by gratitude. He recognizes the giftedness of creation and accepts the great and awful responsibility to steward it well. Such a recognition “calls for prudence, humility, good work, propriety of scale.”[3] In the use of the land, soil, water, and non-human creatures, the final arbiter, according to Berry, is not human will but nature itself.[4] But this is not to suggest that Berry is some sort of pantheist. Instead, “the agrarian mind is, at bottom, a religious mind.” The agrarian recognizes that the natural world is a gift, and gifts imply a giver. “The agrarian mind begins with the love of fields and ramifies in good farming, good cooking, good eating, and gratitude to God.” By contrast, the “industrial mind “begins with ingratitude, and ramifies in the destruction of farms and forests.”
I can sympathize with the desire to live close to the soil (and would purchase a farm could I afford it). The problem with the argument, though, is that it implies a fundamental distinction between the “agrarian mind” and the “industrial mind”; in truth, the difference between the two is one of degree rather than fundamental difference. Perhaps the agrarian mind “recognizes that the natural world is a gift,” but does it recognize it as such more than does the mind of the hunter/gatherer? And, if not, why should we not go further and work to incorporate elements of the hunter/gatherer’s economy into our postmodern existence? Read the rest of this entry »
Writers on Holmes have forgotten just how influential poetry and literature were to him, and how powerfully literary his Supreme Court dissents really are. The son of the illustrious poet by the same name, young Holmes, or Wendell, fell in love with the heroic tales of Sir Walter Scott, and the “enthusiasm with which Holmes in boyhood lost himself in the world of Walter Scott did not diminish in maturity.”[1] Wendell was able to marry his skepticism with his romanticism, and this marriage, however improbable, illuminated his appreciation for ideas past and present, old and new. “His aesthetic judgment,” says Mark DeWolfe Howe, author of the most definitive biography of Holmes and one of Holmes’s former law clerks, “was responsive to older modes of expression and earlier moods of feeling than those which were dominant at the fin de siècle and later, yet his mind found its principle nourishment in the thought of his own times, and was generally impatient of those who believe that yesterday’s insight is adequate for the needs of today.”[2] Holmes transformed and adapted the ideas of his predecessors while transforming and adapting—one might say troping—milestone antecedents of aestheticism, most notably the works of Emerson. “[I]t is clear,” says Louis Menand, “that Holmes had adopted Emerson as his special inspiration.”[3]
Classically educated at the best schools, Wendell was subject to his father’s elaborate discussions of aesthetics, which reinforced the “canons of taste with the heavier artillery of morals.”[4] In addition to Scott, Wendell enjoyed reading Sylvanus Cobb, Charles Lamb’s Dramatic Poets, The Prometheus of Aeschylus,[5] and Plato’s Dialogues.[6] Wendell expressed a lifelong interest in art, and his drawings as a young man exhibit a “considerable talent.”[7] He declared in his Address to the Harvard Alumni Association Class of 1861 that life “is painting a picture, not doing a sum.”[8] He would later use art to clarify his philosophy to a friend: “But all the use of life is in specific solutions—which cannot be reached through generalities any more than a picture can be painted by knowing some rules of method. They are reached by insight, tact and specific knowledge.”[9]
At Harvard College, Wendell began to apply his facility with language to oft-discussed publications in and around Cambridge. In 1858, the same year that Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. gifted five volumes of Emerson to Wendell,[10] Wendell published an essay called “Books” in the Harvard undergraduate literary journal.[11] Wendell celebrated Emerson in the piece, saying that Emerson had “set him on fire.” Menand calls this essay “an Emersonian tribute to Emerson.”[12]
Holmes had always admired Emerson. Legend has it that, when still a boy, Holmes ran into Emerson on the street and said, in no uncertain terms, “If I do anything, I shall owe a great deal to you.” Holmes was more right than he probably knew.
Holmes, who never gave himself over to ontological (or deontological) ideas about law as an existent, material, absolute, or discoverable phenomenon, bloomed and blossomed out of Emersonian thought, which sought to “unsettle all things”[13] and which offered a poetics of transition that was “not a set of ideas or concepts but rather a general attitude toward ideas and concepts.”[14] Transition is not the same thing as transformation. Transition signifies a move between two clear states whereas transformation covers a broader and more fluent way of thinking about change. Holmes, although transitional, was also transformational. He revised American jurisprudence until it became something it previously was not. Feeding Holmes’s appetite for change was “dissatisfaction with all definite, definitive formulations, be they concepts, metaphors, or larger formal structures.”[15] This dissatisfaction would seem to entail a rejection of truth, but Emerson and Holmes, unlike Rorty and the neopragmatists much later, did not explode “truth” as a meaningful category of discourse. Read the rest of this entry »
Introduction
In the unbelievable and unknown –
In the unrefined and those without thought –
In the unremarkable and unwise –
We find our leaders
We find our heroes
We find our artists
I see it – there is a sun on the horizon –
The rosy fingers of an ancient dawn –
A rebirth of everything from everything we have torn apart –
A world in fragments – no longer a world –
Fragments gathered up –
A world reborn from the fragments –
A world reborn from the past, the ancients –
Greeks, Romans, Chinese, Africans, Arabs, Indians, and aborigines –
Yet –
I am not a postmodernist
And I am not a classicist
And I am not a romantic
And I am not a modernist
And I am not a naturalist
No –
I am each of these – and none
I am the moon and the sun
I am the earth and the sea
I am woman and man
Seriousness and fun
Fragments and unity
Plurality and one
An Astrology
I stand, stare at the Cantor dust of stars,
Stand alone in the open field of grass
That glows in the silver of the moon brass
And dark emerald under a rising Mars.
I wage a silent war within my mind
As I wait in vain for a happiness
These stars cannot bring me. My loneliness
Soaks into the ground to be left behind.
I turn away from Mars and search the sky –
The false-star Venus must be out among
The stars and darkness, a beacon for me
To connect my life to, so I can fly
And leave this lonely-soaked ground a far-flung
Memory. I want to love and to be.
Etre Sartre
In France was an atheist, superb
At finding new ways to disturb –
A communist brand,
A Nazi’s friend, and
Philosophy based on a linking verb.
I wrote the following piece about three weeks ago, while I was vacationing in Destin, Florida, with my family.
If we expect others to rely on our fairness and justice we must show that we rely on their fairness and justice.
—Calvin Coolidge
My wife and I are on vacation in Florida. Yesterday morning, over a cup of coffee and a doughnut, sitting on the balcony and reading the newspaper amid sounds of seagulls and the grating roll of morning waves, I noted that one Michael Stone—a blind man, XTERRA champion, and 10-time Ironman triathlete who recently published a book, Eye Envy—will speak at the University of North Florida on August 13. I haven’t read Stone’s book, but it’s apparently a resource not only for those suffering from vision-loss any degenerative disease.
Stone began to lose his sight in 2004. His blindness is a result of a rare disease called cone-rod dystrophy. Despite his handicap, he has accomplished amazing things, but not without the help of others. During races, he relies on guides, who shout directions and warnings to him.
I’ll never understand why God makes some people handicapped and others not, why some must rely on others, and some must be relied on. Someday and for a time, everyone relies on someone or something and is relied on by someone or something. Read the rest of this entry »
The old adage “big things come in small packages” has perhaps never been more fitting for an artist than in the case of Jennings, the one-name moniker of New York based siren Mary Jennings.
Standing just a shade over five feet tall, Jennings delivers a robust and heartfelt sound that is anything but small-scale. Her music reflects an enormous strength and drive that is uniquely hers, combining a deep range of rock and pop influences with an unabashed sense of vintage style that few, if any, could ever pull off.
“I believe that the difference between an artist and the average person is a fearless and relentless willingness to expose their quarks, oddities, secrets, and passions for all of the world to see and hear,” says Mary.
Mary’s surge in musical expression started after the sudden death of her mother in 2001. “This tragedy rocked me to the core, but there is so much beauty in what it allowed me to do,” she says. “All of my emotions came pouring out in the form of melody.”
At the time, her father, a former musician himself, gave her the option to go through therapy or record an album. He knew both would be equally helpful to her, but by recording her music, she would be able to have something to hold on to and share with others for a lifetime.
It was on that first album that Jennings established her creative foundation, crafting music that bonds her to the listener in a genuinely honest and relatable way. That openness, and the raw emotion that she has shared on subsequent records, has attracted praise from fans and press alike. “Jennings’ music is sweet, lush, powerful, full of great hooks, intelligent and meaningful to boot! I love it!” said Heather Miller-Rodriguez of 100.1FM KRUU. Platinum award winning producer John Rowe agrees, calling Jennings’s music “creative and original… A breath of fresh air!”
Recent years have seen Mary’s musical aspirations starting to take shape. She has worked with Billboard-charting songwriters, toured with national acts and has had a number of her songs placed on popular television shows. While the professional growth and the accolades are nice, she values most the simple act of connecting with a live audience. “Live performances give me such a rush,” she says. “They are one of the best parts about being a musician. To me, they are what really brings the music to life. To know that you only have a few moments to capture an audience and keep them engaged long enough to fall in love with you and your music is a difficult task, but one that I wouldn’t trade for any other profession.”
Jennings’s growth continues with the release of her latest album, Collapse Collide. It’s a project that reflects an artist, and a woman, who has confidently found her voice over the course of a long, and, at times, heart-breaking journey and the beginning of what many have already predicted: a bright and promising future for a truly one-of-a-kind talent.
1. The subject of the poems must be on economics. Naturally, metaphorical treatments are acceptable.
2. Poems are to be submitted to Troy Camplin at zatavu1@aol.com
3. Co-bloggers cannot enter.
4. All judgments are final and cannot be contested.
5. Deadline for entries: June 30, 2011
6. The winning entry will be posted on Austrian Economics and Literature and the author of the winning entry will receive a signed copy of Troy Camplin’s book, Diaphysics.
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