It Was the Old World Yet

I’m thinking now of Housman’s poem “Terence, This is Stupid Stuff” Terence is the poet, A.E. Housman, and in the poem his friends berate him for the dolorous, depressing views of life expressed in his poetry: “It gives a chap a belly-ache” they moan! Pipe us a tune to dance to, Terence, and give up singing these dismal bits of poetry that are so sad that they even killed the cow to whom these poems were first chanted! But Terence responds: If it is good cheer you want, friends, there are sources more appropriate than poetry; liquor seems to Terence the most effective antidote to depression and despair. 

Ale, man, ale’s the stuff to drink
For fellows whom it hurts to think:
Look into the pewter pot
To see the world as the world’s not.

Inebriated beyond consciousness, fallen drunk into a stupor, the world appears pleasant and hospitable until, alas, one rouses in the ditch into which he has fallen in his drunken stupor and realizes that the happy tale was all a lie: “The world, it was the old world yet,/I was I, my things were wet . . .” And so would begin another day. Some years later Samuel Beckett will have Pozzo pronounce something similar: “But¾but behind this veil of gentleness and peace night is charging and will burst upon us pop! Like that! just when we least expect it. That’s how it is on this bitch of an earth.” We live in troubled times. I am frequently anxious.

Terence offered a very guarded and even oxymoronic cynical optimism. In response to his friends’ complaint concerning his poetry, he advises them that though the world contains much good, there is, in fact, much less good than ill, and that his friends would do well to live their life expecting and preparing for that ill rather than hoping for and awaiting the good. Of his poetry he cautions his friends, “Tis true, the stuff I bring for sale/Is not so brisk a brew as ale . . . If the smack is sour, The better for the embittered hour.” We toughen ourselves with small doses of the bitter that we would be not destroyed by it when it powerfully and inevitably assails us! There was a king in the East, Terence says, who knew how easy it was to poison the food upon which he would feast, and so each day with each meal the king would add a small portion of “all that springs to birth/From the many-venomed earth.” And as “they” added arsenic to his meat and poured strychnine into his wine, his would-be assassins sat aghast at the failure of their poisons to affect any harm. They “shook to see him drink it up.” But the king had made himself immune to the poisons by imbibing a bit of them every day. “I will tell the tale I’m told,” Terence says, “Mithridates, he died old.” I guess that that is one answer. I remember also Housman’s poem, “To an Athlete Dying Young,” in which the poet suggests that there is benefit to dying before the athlete’s renown is forgotten and his medals rusted and decayed. I suppose that is another answer.

Every day I am appalled by the behavior of Republicans who continue to promote the lie that the election of Joe Biden to the Presidency was rigged; who refuse to advocate for vaccination to manage the Coronavirus epidemic; who vote against the voting rights bills that ensure that the people can go freely to the polls; who deny climate change and will not spend monies to address the serious problem now facing the globe; who continue to support the repulsive behaviors and obscene talk from Trump and who continue to advocate for his agenda. Last night I watched Matt Gaetz, himself now under suspicion for immoral behavior with a minor, sound like a Fook as he refused to answer questions from Jonah Raskin about his advocacy of the Big Lie. Every morning I awake to the old world yet and I am I and my things are wet. And what dose of the poison shall I brace myself with today?