December 18, 2011


Green-gray dawn, Lauridson coming from my computer. Painted yesterday, wrote, worked out and slept: in some ways, perfection.

Vowed to write a sonnet a day in December. At 13 now I am behind, but not so far behind as one might have anticipated.

Rhetoric surrounding the Republican candidates illuminates a problem I had with Tolkien, with his vision, specifically, of Mordor, of evil. The problem I had was that evil in the books did not seem to give any advantage to those who practiced it. Did an orc or a man of Harad really derive pleasure or advantage from wicked deeds? They denied things to others without seeming to retain them for themselves. One imagines that fear of punishment could drive a being to do selflessly wicked deeds (think, in actual history, of all those Nazis) but eventually flight or inertia or rebellion would certainly kick in. Climbing the dark ladder, the captains and generals of Evil are to be feared and that fear might drive those beneath them, but might not even they ask if their quality of life were actually improved by what they were doing? Not even Sauron, presumably, liked living in soot and brimstone, never being able to rest for fear of usurpation. But I read where people were speaking out about Newt Gingrich, fearing that he was not “conservative” enough, that his “conservative” credentials were in doubt because, once in a while, he advocated policies that were not thoroughly selfish and inhumane. Actual advantage, actual value were lost in the desire for doctrinal purity– dedicated parties expecting a purity– in this case of evil-- no thinking human can sustain. It dawned on me, the awesome power of rhetoric, which, once adopted, replaces reason and humanity and even self-interest as the mind’s governor. Adherence to the party line becomes the whole field of vision, which no greater good or greater reasonableness may ever budge, because the first tremor is the prelude to collapse. To make an exception or to moderate a bad policy cannot be considered, for to consider the policy is to reveal the badness of it. Conservative theorists cannot admit reason or proportion, or compromise, or statesmanship at any point, because only blind assertion will allow their ideas to exist at all. “War Against the Light” can impel the throngs of Mordor so long as they never put it that way, so long as it is described as resistence against interference and creeping otherness and absolute self-will. That the will is resigned as soon as one signs on to an inflexible doctrine cannot be admitted. Investment bankers convincing waitresses and dock workers that they all have the same interests is like the captains of Mordor drawing men into the ranks of evil– a deed so incomprehensibly contrary to self-interest that it must tap some inner, reptilian impulse to cast one’s lot with Power, no matter how inimical the Power is to one’s own well being. Finality of blind assertion is the great power of conservatism. Many Americans think that what is reasonable, provable, scientific, is a kind of elitism, and that blind assertion of untested principle is a kind of self-determination. Of course it is, but the freedom of Mordor, to be made at once cruel and miserable by the sanctification of one’s prejudices.

Played Saint Nicholas at church today. Each year it’s bigger and rowdier, and I hear myself getting louder and faster to overcome it and get through. It is gratifying afterward to have a toddler point at me and scream, “Saint Nicholas!”