For my next trick . . .

I shall try something I have not done since College: try to tie three completely different books together thematically: Joshua, Mark Doty: My Alexandria, and John Coetzee: Waiting for the Barbarians.

***

Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated. Not only you, but your relationship, your nation, each worldly possession and whatever you're feeling at this very moment will melt, thaw and resolve itself into a dew. All flesh is grass. This too shall pass.

This is why Empire is a terrible idea, as Coetzee observes: "What has made it impossible for us to live like fish in water, like birds in air, like children? It is the fault of Empire! . . . Empire has located its existence, not in the smooth recurrent spinning time of the cycle of the seasons but in the jagged time of rise and fall. Of beginning and end, of catastrophe" (131). In Waiting for the Barbarians, Coetzee creates an allegorical world where The Empire, as empires do, tries to strengthen its borders as proof against the foe of any empire, The Barbarians. But this Empire discovers exactly what America has: the more one attacks, the more one is attacked; the very action of attack is destructive to oneself. In fact, The Barbarians really have nothing to do with the fall of The Empire in Coetzee's book. Its demise is completely self-inflicted.

And one wonders if the same is not true of the nation of Israel--not just in modern times, but even at its heyday as a power. By Coetzee's reasoning, "Every place that the sole of your feet shall tread upon I have given to you. . . No one shall be able to stand against you." turns out to be pretty rotten advice (Joshua 1:3-4). For one thing, the prediction was false. Certain tribes resisted the Israelites; their conquest was not the blowout they had been promised. "They did not, however drive out the Canaanites who lived in Gezer: so the Canaanites have lived wihtin Ephraim to this day," a fact which is a pity for modern Israel; the Canaanites were the forerunners of modern Palsetinians (16:10). Neither did they drive out the Geshurites, the Maacathites or the Jebusites. And yet, the writer of Joshua claims that "The LORD gave them rest on every side, just as he had sworn to their ancestors; not one of all their enemies had withstood them for the LORD had given all their enemies into their hands" (21:44). If only. For the Judean Empire is a classic example of "the jagged time of rise and fall" Coetzee describes. As I prepare to reread Judges, I remember its contents: Israel is rescued by the LORD. Israel sins. Israel is reconquered (as punishment). Repeat ad infinitum. What Joshua takes for a tesimony to Israel's power, I take as a seal on their doom: "[The LORD] gave you a land on which you had not labored, and towns that you had not built, and you live in them; you eat the fruit of vineyards and oliveyards that you did not plant" (24:13). Such an empire can not only be expected to return tot he dust, it should be encouraged to do so.

And what is true for political empire is true for the little empires we build around ourselves as well. Mark Doty does an excellent job of describing this in My Alexandria, a delightfully cohesive volume that makes and destroys little cities on every page. I almost wrote an entire post on "Demolition," I found it so dense and layered. It took me actual research and rereading to extract its full efect, an effort to which I am not used. The poem describes a building that the author is watching fall, but is peppered with seemingly random episodes that I was at first unable to tie together. What do Oscar Wilde, Robert Lowell, and the monument to General Shaw (which I have actually seen) have to do with this building? The key, after the fourth or so reading, came in the seemingly out of place word, "we". "Waitaminnit," I realized, "Who's we?" As it turns out, the entire thing is about watching the last pieces of a failed relationship fall, and in retrosopect it is too obvious. If you read the poem, you may understand the difficulty of analysis and forgive me my thickheadedness. Most poems in this volume bear up under similar scrutiny, and I will take time out from my topic to just mention that "Difference" is one of the best poems I have ever read, but what it says cannot be communicated in words, at least not by me. Read it. In its way, though, it is also about the undulating pulse of the universe, against which it is futile, but more importantly desstructive, to resist. We are all slowly "becoming a meadow," ebbing and flowing through our existence, which doesn't belong to us at all (Becoming a Meadow). We are all music, " gather[ing] and tumbl[ing] / like water collecting in a fountain / all hesitation and sudden release" (Lament-Heaven). But nonetheless, we all--even those of us who know better--try to build empires. "If we are all continuous," Doty observes, "rippling from nothing into being / why can't we let ourselves go?" (Lament-Heaven).

BTD 16