Forgive me if my mind wanders even more than usual these days. I used to think of my habit of forming strange and far-reaching connections as an asset; these days associations come unbidden, feeling more intrusive than clever or surprising. Be that as it may, here is the most recent chain of thought, originally triggered by a day of darkness.
Literal darkness, that is, as you can discern yourself when realizing today’s photographs were taken at noon, overlooking San Francisco Bay, some days ago. A darkness likely to have enshrouded the Oregon landscape as well, a consequence of the devastating fires.
It brought to mind Lord Byron’s poem, Darkness, attached below. It was written in the summer of 1816 after the explosion of the Indonesian volcano Mount Tambora in 1815. The eruption killed more than 10,000 people, while an additional 30,000 across the world perished from the crop failures, famine, and disease that resulted from extreme weather triggered by the explosion. Volcanic ash blotted out much of the sun for more than a year, having people believe that the sun was dying. The average global temperature dropped by a whole degree. The poem reads like a prescient description of both climate change and/or the more figurative darkness that surrounds us in these days of the demise of our democracy.
Darkness
BY LORD BYRON (GEORGE GORDON)
I had a dream, which was not all a dream.
The bright sun was extinguish’d, and the stars
Did wander darkling in the eternal space,
Rayless, and pathless, and the icy earth
Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air;
Morn came and went—and came, and brought no day,
And men forgot their passions in the dread
Of this their desolation; and all hearts
Were chill’d into a selfish prayer for light:
And they did live by watchfires—and the thrones,
The palaces of crowned kings—the huts,
The habitations of all things which dwell,
Were burnt for beacons; cities were consum’d,
And men were gather’d round their blazing homes
To look once more into each other’s face;
Happy were those who dwelt within the eye
Of the volcanos, and their mountain-torch:
A fearful hope was all the world contain’d;
Forests were set on fire—but hour by hour
They fell and faded—and the crackling trunks
Extinguish’d with a crash—and all was black.
The brows of men by the despairing light
Wore an unearthly aspect, as by fits
The flashes fell upon them; some lay down
And hid their eyes and wept; and some did rest
Their chins upon their clenched hands, and smil’d;
And others hurried to and fro, and fed
Their funeral piles with fuel, and look’d up
With mad disquietude on the dull sky,
The pall of a past world; and then again
With curses cast them down upon the dust,
And gnash’d their teeth and howl’d: the wild birds shriek’d
And, terrified, did flutter on the ground,
And flap their useless wings; the wildest brutes
Came tame and tremulous; and vipers crawl’d
And twin’d themselves among the multitude,
Hissing, but stingless—they were slain for food.
And War, which for a moment was no more,
Did glut himself again: a meal was bought
With blood, and each sate sullenly apart
Gorging himself in gloom: no love was left;
All earth was but one thought—and that was death
Immediate and inglorious; and the pang
Of famine fed upon all entrails—men
Died, and their bones were tombless as their flesh;
The meagre by the meagre were devour’d,
Even dogs assail’d their masters, all save one,
And he was faithful to a corse, and kept
The birds and beasts and famish’d men at bay,
Till hunger clung them, or the dropping dead
Lur’d their lank jaws; himself sought out no food,
But with a piteous and perpetual moan,
And a quick desolate cry, licking the hand
Which answer’d not with a caress—he died.
The crowd was famish’d by degrees; but two
Of an enormous city did survive,
And they were enemies: they met beside
The dying embers of an altar-place
Where had been heap’d a mass of holy things
For an unholy usage; they rak’d up,
And shivering scrap’d with their cold skeleton hands
The feeble ashes, and their feeble breath
Blew for a little life, and made a flame
Which was a mockery; then they lifted up
Their eyes as it grew lighter, and beheld
Each other’s aspects—saw, and shriek’d, and died—
Even of their mutual hideousness they died,
Unknowing who he was upon whose brow
Famine had written Fiend. The world was void,
The populous and the powerful was a lump,
Seasonless, herbless, treeless, manless, lifeless—
A lump of death—a chaos of hard clay.
The rivers, lakes and ocean all stood still,
And nothing stirr’d within their silent depths;
Ships sailorless lay rotting on the sea,
And their masts fell down piecemeal: as they dropp’d
They slept on the abyss without a surge—
The waves were dead; the tides were in their grave,
The moon, their mistress, had expir’d before;
The winds were wither’d in the stagnant air,
And the clouds perish’d; Darkness had no need
Of aid from them—She was the Universe.
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The poem’s apocalyptic tone was not just caused by the strange, dark weather. Byron himself was at one of the lowest points in his life, his reputation shattered by revelations of his incestuous relationship with a half-sister, and public disclosure of his marital cruelty (he was sexually and emotionally abusive to his partners, men and women alike, throughout his life time.) He left England in disgrace at age 28, never to return again, wracked by debt and alcoholism. He died in exile from illness contracted through exposure to the elements. Notorious to the last, and yet he was a shining star in romantic poetry’s firmament, of bright intensity or intense brightness, your pick.
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Notorious is also a term for me, for many of us, prominently associated with RBG. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, may her memory be a blessing, died last week on the eve of Rosh Hashanah, a bright sun extinguish’d. For all she fought for, trailblazed, conquered, for a life lived with integrity at the opposite end of the spectrum from Byron, she, too was not granted a peaceful death. The very knowledge that her passing would be exploited for yet another power grab by those who care for nothing but, must have weighed heavily for someone ready to be freed from the ravages of cancer and yet clinging to life in hopes of gaining time towards the election. It was not to be.
We must mourn her, and then tend to her legacy by whatever means we have. I find it heartening to be reminded that this is not on individuals alone. If you reread the poem above, look at the lines that signal connectedness – “And men were gather’d round their blazing homes
To look once more into each other’s face” – we are in this together. Or the lines that point to a future, even if shrouded by fear – “A fearful hope was all the world contain’d.” And then various descriptions of how people, other than those giving up, acted on that hope.
The poem does not end happily, but rather in desolation. That is a choice, but one the poet himself did ultimately not give into. Byron dreamt of revolutionary changes for the world and actually fought for social justice in his few years in government service. So did Bader Ginsburg in her reckonings with the powers that be. Here are Byron’s words from Canto IV of Childe Harold:
But I have lived, and have not lived in vain:
My mind may lose its force, my blood its fire,
And my frame perish even in conquering pain,
But there is that within me which shall tire
Torture and Time, and breathe when I expire [.]
For the rest of us: let’s tire, if not torture or time, then at least the current President and Senate hellbent on filling a Supreme Court Seat that does not belong to them. Make them weary with an onslaught of action. Exhaust them, weaken them by all means in our repertory. Unless darkness becomes the universe.
Music today uses the words from another Byron poem, She walks in Beauty. Rest in power, RBG. You have not lived in vain.
