A Questioning Spirit

I went to the video store the other night, intending to rent a selection of almost-new movies to wallow in while away from work this week. The idea was to catch up on some of the movies we'd missed this past winter and avoid writing the one commissioned piece I'm meant to finally write this week. Thus art would be made to serve both pleasure and procrastination, and what could be more fun than that? However, when I'd brought my four movies to the rental counter, I was furious to find that Hollywood Video had changed their policy, and my membership, without so much as a warning. Now I was allowed only two DVDs at a time, not four. Instead of paying a flat monthly fee and renting anything I liked -- so long as it was not a "hot" title, meaning brand new -- Hollywood Video now uses that same monthly fee in combination with a system of "points," assigning various values to all their rentals, and when my "points" have been used up, so has my monthly fee. We've kept our membership with this store despite the closure of the location nearest us and the fact we must now drive three miles each way to get to the next nearest, specifically because of their membership program. But now, instead of an all-but unlimited resource, admittedly with a very limited selection, our video store has rewarded our loyalty with a new "deal" which will limit our rentals to roughly five a month. Who benefits?

Well, Netflix, it seems. A. signed us up last night.

I will still be making regular pilgrimage to Scarecrow Video, the greatest video store on the West Coast and perhaps the world, to rent Ernst Lubitsch silents, and British miniseries and the like, but as for as for American popular entertainment... it seems we will be queuing online with the rest of the country.

In my furious disappointment, and, again, to avoid doing what I ought to be, I came home, avoided the laundry and the dishes in the sink, and decided to read Amours de Voyage, by one Arthur Hugh Clough. Now this may seem an unlikely response, and I suppose it is, but what I wanted was a bit of adventure, a bit of excitement and a thorough distraction. If I could not have it cinematically, why not in poetry? And so a nice long poem, in fact a novel in verse, told in letters and dialogues, detailing the fall of Rome and Mazzini's republic to the invading French in 1849. Clough (pronounced "Cluff,") was there.

Good old Arthur Hugh Clough was a "questioning spirit," starting Evangelical, then from Low Church to High, almost Catholic, then Unitarian, then possibly agnostic, etc., then dead at only forty-two. In his short life he covered a good deal of ground, did Arthur Hugh Clough. He went to France for the Revolution of 1848, then on to Italy. He came to America, briefly to visit Emerson and look for a job, which he didn't get. He scandalized his wife and his Victorian readers with frank talk, for the time, of sex and feminism and revolution and doubt. What, I ask you, is not to love about Arthur Hugh Clough?

It remains to be seen if I'll finish his novel in verse, but for now, I share two excellent poems, first this:

AND YET CONSIDER IT AGAIN

'OLD things need not therefore be true,'
O brother men, nor yet the new;
Ah! still awhile the old thought retain,
And yet consider it again!
The souls of now two thousand years
Have laid up here their toils and fears,
And all the earnings of their pain,--
Ah, yet consider it again!
We! what do we see? each a space
Of some few yards before his face;
Does that the whole wide plan explain?
Ah, yet consider it again!
Alas! the great world goes its way,
And takes its truth from each new day;
They do not quit, nor can retain,
Far less consider it again.

And then this:

THERE IS NO GOD THE WICKED SAYETH

"THERE is no God," the wicked saith,
"And truly it's a blessing,
For what He might have done with us
It's better only guessing."
"There is no God," a youngster thinks,
"or really, if there may be,
He surely did not mean a man
Always to be a baby."
"There is no God, or if there is,"
The tradesman thinks, "'twere funny
If He should take it ill in me
To make a little money."
"Whether there be," the rich man says,
"It matters very little,
For I and mine, thank somebody,
Are not in want of victual."
Some others, also, to themselves,
Who scarce so much as doubt it,
Think there is none, when they are well,
And do not think about it.
But country folks who live beneath
The shadow of the steeple;
The parson and the parson's wife,
And mostly married people;
Youths green and happy in first love,
So thankful for illusion;
And men caught out in what the world
Calls guilt, in first confusion;
And almost everyone when age,
Disease, or sorrows strike him,
Inclines to think there is a God,
Or something very like Him.

And close with a clerihew:

ARTHUR HUGH CLOUGH

Poor Arthur Hugh Clough
Found God rather rough,
High church? Low church? Unitarian? Or Jew?
His prayers being answered: dead at forty-two.