What is the final lesson of March Madness, of cruel single-elimination tournaments in which powerful franchises display their prowess and ruin the dreams of underdogs?
What do we learn from sports? History? War? These which triumph with anxiety and farewell?
The Final Four means sixty participants died, and their honorable participation results in nothing but a record of their futility, a haunting record of loss which lives eternally.
Are the fiendish masters of war right? Is gone the only here? Is heroism only possible this way?
Or excellence?
True worship and admiration?
Even…true love? Are these virtues only possible by flowering this way?
Is the difficult, fearful journey the only way home?
Must the wasted efforts of losers bring us all that is wonderful and good? Are we peat, dirt, moss?
Does our doom fertilize the blessed?
Here is the feast of the Final Four.
Heinrich Heine says with a lyric what all the philosophers and priests try to say but cannot.
The dionysian triumphs briefly, brightly. Jim Morison and the Doors defeated every guitar solo in their day; compared to the Doors it was all decoration. The Doors defeated the Beatles’ intelligence, whimsy and charm, even the shouts of the Rolling Stones, their mod, anti-Beatle, growl, had its heady moments, but was finally a popular pose in the end, as the jet, decade after decade, took Mick and Keith home.
Jim’s throaty “Persian light, babe! See the light babe! Save us! Jesus!” was truly dionysian. Morrison, disappearing into himself so transparently, was the only sage on stage. Drop a line.
One piece of conniving criticism survives, one by Blackmur, which makes no sweeping claim, but explodes some rocks and hollows out the bottom of a tower. Read for a bit of understanding.
And finally, fiction. Hawthorne: probing, original, dark, disturbing, yet always lofty, dignified, tasteful. An author infinitely calm throughout the operation. Nothing American about this. Yet, American.
Is there something about Scarriet March Madness which is holy and real?
Are these bodies, these lives—is our statuesque reality—carved by anxiety and conflict?
NORTH
Heinrich Heine 1797-1856 (“Die Rose, die Lilie, die Taube, die Sonne” The Poetry of Heinrich Heine p. 70 1969)
The rose, the lily, the sun and the dove,
I loved them all once in the rapture of love.
I love them no more, for my soul delight
Is a maiden so slight, so bright and so white,
Who, being herself the source of love,
Is rose and lily and sun and dove.
SOUTH
James Morrison 1943-1971 (“The Crystal Ship,” The Doors, 1967)
Before you slip into unconsciousness,
I’d like to have another kiss,
Another flashing chance at bliss,
Another kiss, another kiss.
The days are bright and filled with pain.
Enclose me in your gentle rain.
The time you ran was too insane.
We’ll meet again, we’ll meet again.
Oh tell me where your freedom lies.
The streets are fields that never die.
Deliver me from reasons why.
You’d rather cry, I’d rather fly.
The crystal ship is being filled,
A thousand girls, a thousand thrills,
A million ways to spend your time.
When we get back, I’ll drop a line.
WEST
R.P. Blackmur 1904-1965 (The Double Agent p. 204 1935)
The poetry is the concrete—as concrete as the poet can make it—presentation of experience as emotion. If it is successful it is self-evident; it is subject neither to denial nor modification but only to the greater labour of recognition. To say again what we have been saying all along, that is why we can assent to matters in poetry the intellectual formulation of which would leave us cold or in opposition. Poetry can use all ideas; argument only the logically consistent. Mr. Eliot put it very well for readers of his own verse when he wrote for readers of Dante that you might distinguish understanding from belief. “I will not deny,” he says, “that it may be in practice easier for a Catholic to grasp the meaning, in many places, than for the ordinary agnostic; but that is not because the Catholic believes but because he has been instructed. It is a matter of knowledge and ignorance, not of belief or scepticism.”
EAST
Nathaniel Hawthorne 1804-1864 (“Wakefield” in The Celestial Railroad and Other Stories 1980)
In some old magazine or newspaper I recollect a story, told as truth, of a man—let us call him Wakefield—who absented himself for a long time from his wife. The fact, thus abstractedly stated, is not very uncommon, nor—without a proper distinction of circumstances—to be condemned either as naughty or nonsensical. Howbeit, this, though far from the most aggravated, is perhaps the strangest instance on record of marital delinquency; and, moreover, as remarkable a freak as may be found in the whole list of human oddities. The wedded couple lived in London. The man, under pretense of going on a journey, took lodgings in the next street to his own house, and there, unheard of by his wife or friends, and without the shadow of a reason for such self-banishment, dwelt upwards of twenty years. During that period, he beheld his home every day, and frequently the forlorn Mrs. Wakefield. And after so great a gap in his matrimonial felicity—when his death was reckoned certain, his estate settled, his name dismissed from memory, and his wife long, long ago, resigned to her autumnal widowhood—he entered the door one evening, quietly, as from a day’s absence, and became a loving spouse til death.
Now read back over the entries which lost. And weep.
Salem, MA March 2024