everywhere nowhere jactatively away like the falling tide
Adapted from the poem, Words in a Certain Appropriate Mode” by Hayden Carruth as published in Collected Shorter Poems, 1946–1991 (Copper Canyon Press: Port Townsend, Wash, 1992).
Aside from the many moods captured in the poem that match many of my current moods,
If there were a tide, and what is left Is nothing, or is the everything that keeps Its undifferentiated unreality, all
It was that word there, Jactatively.
Was it made up?
Is it really a word?
Was gratified to find it is indeed a word.
And what a word!
According to the Online Merriam-Webster, Jactatively is an adverb derived from the rare word jactative (pertaining to boasting or the restless tossing of the body), meaning in a manner characterized by bragging, ostentatious false claims, or restless physical agitation.
In the 17th century, lawyers began tossing around the word jactitation, which can be traced back to the Latin verb jactare, meaning “to throw.” Originally, jactitation was used as a word for a false claim or assertion being publicly thrown about to the detriment of another person. Run-of-the-mill slander and false claims of being married to someone were two common types of jactitation brought to court. Before long, jactitation had jumped over to the medical profession, where it continues to serve as a word for restless, jerky, or twitchy body movements. In 1761, British writer Laurence Sterne threw jactitation into his novel Tristram Shandy as a substitute for discussion, but that meaning never caught on.
Restless physical agitation.
BOY HOWDY!
All I have to do is turn off the light and lay down yet my mind jactatively refuses to release me to sleep.
Here is the poem.
It is not music, though one has tried music. It is not nature, though one has tried The rose, the bluebird, and the bear. It is not death, though one has often died.
None of these things is there.
In the everywhere that is nowhere Neither the inside nor the outside Neither east nor west nor down nor up Where the loving smile vanishes, vanishes In the evanescence from a coffee cup Where the song crumbles in monotone Neither harmonious nor inharmonious Where one is neither alone Nor not alone, where cognition seeps Jactatively away like the falling tide If there were a tide, and what is left Is nothing, or is the everything that keeps Its undifferentiated unreality, all Being neither given nor bereft Where there is neither breath nor air The place without locality, the locality
With neither extension nor intention But there in the weightless fall Between all opposites to the ground That is not a ground, surrounding All unities, without grief, without care Without leaf or star or water or stone Without light, without sound anywhere, anywhere . . .
pursuit of money renders no longer worthy of citizenship
Adapted from the book, The Bully Pulpit : Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of journalism by Doris Kearns Goodwin (Simon & Schuster: New York, 2013), where Ms. Kearns writes about the impact of Ida Tarbell’s profile of John D. Rockefeller serialized in nineteen articles that ran from November 1902 to 1904.
Ms. Kearns wrote:
As her narrative progresses, Tarbell’s indignation at Rockefeller seems to grow, and her language sometimes slips into the same metaphors for soulless mechanical power that cheapened White’s portrait of Boss Platt.
She describes his eyes “as expressionless as a wall,” notes the “downward” droop of “his mouth,” his “cruelest” and “most pathetic” feature, and the repellent puffiness of his cheeks.
More than a touch of personal vindictiveness colors her representation of Rockefeller as she describes how his pursuit of money renders him no longer “a human man” but rather “a machine — a money machine — stripped by his overwhelming passion of greed of every quality which makes a man worthy of citizenship.”
According to Wikipedia: Magazine historian Frank Luther Mott called it, “one of the greatest serials ever to appear in an American magazine.” It would contribute to the dissolution of Standard Oil as a monopoly and lead to the Clayton Antitrust Act. Tarbell concluded the series with a two-part character study of Rockefeller, perhaps the first CEO profile ever, though she never met or even talked to him. Rockefeller called Tarbell, “Miss Tarbarrel”.
We talk a lot about citizenship today.
We talk a lot about what qualifies a person for citizenship today.
We talk a lot about who qualifies as a citizenship today.
I put it to you readers that the pursuit of money renders anyone no longer “a human” but rather “a machine — a money machine — stripped by their overwhelming passion of greed of every quality which makes anyone worthy of citizenship.”
As an exercise, I asked AI, which is as numb to feelings as numb can get, what are qualities which makes anyone worthy of citizenship?
AI responded: put the emphasis on character and conduct rather than wealth, education, religion, or political affiliation.
AI then said, some of the strongest qualities are:
Respect for others – Recognizing that fellow citizens have the same basic rights and dignity, even when you disagree with them.
Respect for the rule of law – Accepting that laws apply to everyone, including those with whom you agree and those with whom you strongly disagree.
Personal responsibility – Taking responsibility for your own actions rather than constantly blaming others.
Honesty and integrity – Telling the truth, keeping commitments, and acting ethically when nobody is watching.
Civic responsibility – Voting, staying informed, serving on juries when called, paying taxes, and contributing to the functioning of society.
Tolerance – Understanding that a free society necessarily contains people with different beliefs, cultures, religions, lifestyles, and political opinions.
A willingness to contribute – Contributing to the community through work, service, volunteering, raising a family, creating businesses, teaching, helping neighbors, or other productive activity.
Respect for freedom – Valuing your own freedoms while recognizing that other citizens possess those same freedoms.
Courage – Being willing to stand up for what is right, including defending the rights of people with whom you disagree.
A sense of community – Understanding that citizenship isn’t simply “What does my country give me?” but also “What do I owe the people with whom I share this country?”
Willingness to learn – Being open to evidence and changing one’s mind when facts demonstrate that one is wrong.
Commitment to the country – Not necessarily blind patriotism, but a genuine desire for the country and its people to prosper.
Easy to dismiss as AI but lets go back to that sentence, stripped by their overwhelming passion of greed of every quality which makes anyone worthy of citizenship.
Now imagine some of the folks I have in mind and take these 12 points as a check list and review them one by one against these folks and answer yes or no for that person.
I get 12 for 12 in the no column.
Stripped by their overwhelming passion of greed of every quality which makes anyone worthy of citizenship.
sweet love remembered such wealth brings that I scorn to change my state with kings
When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes, I all alone beweep my outcast state,
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries, And look upon myself and curse my fate, Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
Featured like him, like him with friends possessed, Desiring this man’s art and that man’s scope
With what I most enjoy contented least;
Yet … in these thoughts myself almost despising …
Haply … I think on thee,
and then my state,
(Like to the lark at break of day arising from sullen earth)
sings hymns at heaven’s gate;
For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings That then I scorn to change my state with kings.
Sonnet 29 by William Shakespeare (1609).
I know that a sonnet is having 14 lines of iambic pentameter ending in a rhymed couplet and the recitation of such should follow the rhythm of the scan but when I am already editing Mr. Shakespeare down to a haiku, how much more of an offense can it be to try and add parsing in my own fashion (which I stole from a YouTube recitation of the Sonnet 29 by Judi Dench (which I will leave to you to look up on your own)).
BUT I Digress as the point of this is to say in words better than I can write, Happy Anniversary, to my wife!
1989 to 2026, for some better and lots worse, and still together … after all these years!
For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings … That then I scorn to change my state with kings.
peerless brightness blinds you like a spell; you feel you could follow it to hell
The men who can’t remember when they learned to swing a pack, Or in what lawless land the quest began; The solitary seeker with his grub-stake on his back, The restless buccaneer of pick and pan. On the mesas of the Southland, on the tundras of the North, You will find us, changed in face, but still the same; And it isn’t need, it isn’t greed that sends us faring forth— It’s the fever, it’s the glory of the game.
For once you’ve panned the speckled sand and seen the bonny dust, Its peerless brightness blinds you like a spell; It’s little else you care about; you go because you must, And you feel that you could follow it to hell. You’d follow it in hunger, and you’d follow it in cold; You’d follow it in solitude and pain; And when you’re stiff and battened down let someone whisper “Gold,” You’re lief to rise and follow it again.
From The Prospector as published in Ballads of a Cheechako by Robert William Service (Toronto: William Briggs, 1911).
to repudiate Yalta, Marshall Plan, ties with UN and NATO
“… the first issues that were going to come up in the Eighty-third Congress would be foreign policy issues, and in foreign policy the dominant Republicans in Congress (and in particular in the Senate, which would, because of its treaty-approving power, be the focus of foreign policy debate) were not Eisenhower’s natural allies but his natural enemies.
It was the support of the eastern, internationalist wing of the party that had given Ike the presidential nomination over Taft, but the Taft wing consisted mostly of Republicans from the Midwest, bedrock of isolationism.
The Ohioan’s midwestern allies — Jenner, Bourke Hickenlooper, Welker, Ferguson, Molly Malone — had yearned for years to dismantle the Roosevelt and Truman policies that the liberals thought were so wonderful.
Now, they felt, their time had come at last.
They would, Johnson was certain, move at once to repudiate Yalta, slash away at the Marshall Plan, and loosen or sever America’s ties with the United Nations and with NATO.
But Eisenhower was not merely a supporter of NATO; he had been commander of NATO.
Says George Reedy, who was down on the ranch with Johnson and was familiar with his thinking, Eisenhower “had actually spent most of… the preceding twenty or thirty years in virtual support of the foreign policies of Roosevelt and of Truman.
The Republicans … under Taft were opposed to that policy, [so] he and the congressional Republicans were just bound to be at loggerheads.”
All the Democrats had to do was “take advantage” of the situation.
Isolationism was back on Capitol Hill, and it was back strong. Journalists who remembered the America First Committee filling the Senate galleries in 1940 and 1941 saw what Richard Rovere called a “resurgent isolationism” in the way the galleries were filled in 1953 when Joe McCarthy was scheduled to speak.
The thunderclap of Pearl Harbor may have demolished in an instant the arguments of the Borahs and Nyes, the thunderclap of Hiroshima may have made it even clearer that in an age of nuclear weapons and modern air forces, the oceans were no longer moats; but those thunderclaps seem to have been heard only faintly in Senate Republican councils, in which the views of quite a sizable bloc (including, of course, the Republican leaders, the defiantly isolationist Taft and the suavely isolationist Bridges) sometimes seemed to resemble the views of the Republican senators who had helped Henry Cabot Lodge Sr. defeat the Treaty of Versailles.
From Master Of The Senate: The Years Of Lyndon Johnson by Robert A. Caro (Random House: New York, 2002).
And of course, Mr. Caro is writing about events in 1952.
The phrase that rang my bell?
Now, they felt, their time had come at last.
I remember a chat in the early 2000’s about George W. Bush and the feller I was chatting with said something along the lines of “We thought we had our guy in there and he is such a disappointment.”
He was one of those fellers who felt the United States had no business, no defined role in any world affair – just stay home and take care of us.
That feller felt, their time had come at last.
They got behind George H.W. Bush.
Now, they felt, their time had come at last.
And H.W. Bush led the coalition of world powers against Saddam Hussein and watch the Soviet Union dissappear.
They got behind Ronald Reagan.
Now, they felt, their time had come at last.
And Reagan led the coalition of world powers to strengthen NATO and call on the Soviets to tear down that wall.
They got behind Richard Nixon.
Now, they felt, their time had come at last.
And Nixon stunned the coalition of world powers by establishing relations with the Peoples Republic of China.
And they got behind Ike.
Now, they felt, their time had come at last.
And, as Mr. Caro writes, “But Eisenhower was not merely a supporter of NATO; he had been commander of NATO … Eisenhower “had actually spent most of… the preceding twenty or thirty years in virtual support of the foreign policies of Roosevelt and of Truman. Eisenhower ‘had actually spent most of… the preceding twenty or thirty years in virtual support of the foreign policies of Roosevelt and of Truman.“”
Prior to Ike were the years of Franklin Roosevelt.
The man who had been on office so, a good part of America thought his first name was President.
The man who was elected President 5 times but the last time he was elected, it was Harry Truman’s name on the ballet.
There is a strong school of political science that feels Truman’s surprise reelection was just that, the 5th time FDR won.
There was a joke that after FDR died, a Republican said to the Democrat … Who are going to vote for now? The Democrat replies, We’ll dig some one up … NO NO PLEASE.
Prior to FDR you have the 12 years of Harding, Coolidge and Hoover that led to that blip in history known as The Great Depression.
Good name though there was nothing great about it.
And before those three guys you have Woodrow Wilson.
When they said, their time had come at the last, they were thinking back to the time when the views of the Republican senators who … helped Henry Cabot Lodge Sr. defeat the Treaty of Versailles.
Defeat the Treaty of Versailles and Woodrow Wilson.
There was no winner in World War 1.
The world at war decided it was time to call it quits, arranged an armistice on Nov. 11th, 1918 and agreed to meet and work out a treaty to settle the game.
President Wilson showed up with 14 points for a peace plan that caused French Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau to famously remark, “Even God only had 10.”
One of those points, which was accepted by other nations involved was the formation of the League of Nations where problems of international importance could be settled and, maybe, future wars avoided.
President Wilson brought the treaty to the United States Senate, the body that had to approve all treaties by a 2/3 vote.
Back then the United States Senate took its role as a part of the Government of The United States seriously.
That and the fact that that 2/3 vote meant that for anything to pass, you had to get votes from both sides.
It came close in a vote several times, but the Republican party controlled the Senate and every effort was made to reject the Treaty of Versailles and the League of Nations.
As a point of trivia, the United States of American and the German Empire did not official end World War 1 until August 21, 1921.
Another point of trivia is that in the election of 1918, the Republican Party won control of the Senate by 1 vote.
Had one seat in 1918 gone Democratic, the vote would have been tied and the Vice President would break the tie giving Democrats control on the Senate and the Senate Foreign Policy Committee.
That year Henry Ford of Ford Motor Company fame and supported of Woodrow Wilson ran for Senate in the State of Michigan.
He entered BOTH the Republican and Democratic Primaries (which was allowed back then) and had he won the primaries he would have be awarded the Senate Seat.
Ford lost the Republican primary and ran as a Democrat and lost the general election by 8,000 votes out of 430,000 votes cast.
Michigan sent Republican Truman Handy Newberry, former Secretary of the Navy to the Senate.
Republican’s organized the Senate by virtue of the 8,000 Michiganders who voted against Henry Ford and the League of Nations was formed without the United States.
The league clearly operated less effectively than it might have. Standing apart from the league also made it easier for the United States to turn inward over the next two decades and to view growing world crises as someone else’s problem. After Pearl Harbor, many Americans concluded that Wilson had been right—fueling support for what became the United Nations.
