League of Inveterate Poets

By Mark Traphagen on April 15, 2010

I read the other day that one of the changes that happens to the middle-aged brain (typically, though not always) is an increased ability to see the bigger picture of things. Perhaps that in part explains what I perceive as the theme of my life journey these past several years: a growing comfort with most (all?) things not having to be black or white.

So I find myself now bewildered (and sometimes angered) by the very fundamentalism (whether it be religious, political, or otherwise) that I once took for granted. I think the thing about fundamentalism that most upsets me is its pretense to literalism. I say pretense, because an absolute literalism is impossible. As soon as one makes an interpretation–whether of a past event, a doctrine, an idea–one has engaged selective data and imagination. This is inescapable.

Poet Robert Browning expressed this marvelously in an excerpt from his poem “Mr Sludge, ‘the Medium’” that I found in the novel Possession: A Romance by A. S. Byatt:

…And all this might be, may be, with good help
Of a little lying shall be: so Sludge lies!
Why, he’s at worst your poet who sings how Greeks
That never were, in Troy, which never was,
Did this or the other impossible great thing!…

But why do I mount to poets? Take plain prose–
Dealers in common sense, set these at work,
What can they do without their helpful lies?
Each states the law and fact and face o’ the thing
Just as he’d have them, finds what he thinks fit,
Is blind to what missuits him, just records
What makes his case out, quite ignores the rest.
It’s a History of the World, the Lizard Age,
The Early Indians, the Old Country War,
Jerome Napoleon, whatsoever you please.
All as the author wants it. Such a scribe
You pay and praise for putting life in stones,
Fire into fog, making the past your world.
There’s plenty of “How did you contrive to grasp
The thread which led you through this labyrinth?
How build such solid fabric out of air?
How on so slight foundation found this tale,
Biography, narrative?” or, in other words,
“How many lies did it require to make
The portly truth you here present us with?”