R i f f s & P l a i n t s
Here Mark blogs. From time to time. Expect lyric rants and quieter meditations on the matters that concern him and many of us—climate justice, care with language, soul-making, landscape, the lyric, reading and writing and parenting and the art of living well. These are the plaints. The riffs will be similar, but lighter. Short essays and filibusters and letters from Here. And the odd poem.
The Inhumanities; Or, the war on the humanities & why our humanity is at stake
We need the humanities because of the inherent inhumanity of the marketplace. We need poetry because we have economics, and because a job is not a life. We need the humanities to teach us to be human. Is it a coincidence that a government chooses a moment of outcry against inhumanity to announce its plans to dismantle the humanities? Forget the ideological wars, the culture feuds, some would engage in. It’s too late for all that. It always was. There is only humanity and the more than merely human world. There is all the work we have yet to do to begin to understand each other—the work of the arts and humanities. There is no west and east; there is only civilisation and the wild, the world and the human heart and time, and time is running out.
The Syntax of Wisdom
Never stop learning the intimate ecology of the heart, the divine intricacy of the natural world, and a charged clarity of style (a simplicity not too clear and a clarity not too simple) that is the idiom in which the heart and the world get their Being enacted—life deserves nothing less than our leanest and wisest sentences.
The Fire Next Time
Racism, enmification, all forms of cruelty, all failures of the human spirit, begin in refusal to forgive oneself for being human. We tend to hate in others what we cannot accept—the beautiful and the wounded and the wild—in ourselves. If we can bring out what’s within us we will save ourselves; if we cannot, we may destroy ourselves and those around us. James Baldwin writes about this in an essay from 1962 (“Letter from a Region in my Mind”” that’s suddenly very current as Trump’s America goes up in flames. But the message in America’s immolation should not be lost on each of us. And poetry can be our teacher: one of its gifts is forgiving us for being human, while asking a little more of us, beginning with our language.
Thursday Morning Rant Against Cant
Look at the trillions of dollars our leaders can, all of a sudden, find to spend shoring up the economies now under threat because of an organic event that disrupts all that we had been told was so robust. Look at these trillions! It's right to spend to save jobs and lives, of course. But in this sudden, fearful, desperate profligacy, the bankruptcy (the hypocrisy) of conservative arguments for thrift, and against spending on what always really counts, is laid bare.