Martin Luther King

The Birmingham Vulcan (for MLK)

~ Frank Hudson ~ 2 Comments

The Holiday

Monday is Martin Luther King Day in the United States, which I take as an occasion to honor the man but also to honor the American promise that changes for the better can be achieved, albeit via earnest efforts and personal costs.

At my age King and the mid-century struggle for what was then called “Civil Rights” were not history — they were current events. I can tell you that despite the somewhat anodyne holiday we celebrate this year, these things were in King’s time as fractious and deadly as any issues today. Some of the immediate issues in the struggle were things we might now assume are self-evident, equivalent civic rights for Black Americans: the rights to vote, to travel, to sit in a restaurant, to speak for change. I assure you these things were controversial, and that it was easy to find short and long arguments as to why they were impossible or contraindicated by the inherent and/or empirical nature of Black or white America. Those things, or so it was widely said, were impossible, impractical, ill advised, a poor use of resources, against human nature.

Are any of my readers thinking that the consideration of history including so many instances of injustices is depressing? Or what of the fears that this will cause inordinate shame? Let me then point out on this holiday: societies can advance, costs borne in the struggle for those advances will be honored. On July 4th we celebrate the improbable founding of our country as “A republic if we can keep it.” On Memorial Day we celebrate great losses to preserve that country. On your choice of Labor’s Day we say our nation takes broad-based work. On Martin Luther King Day we can see all those things too. while being reminded that King was not a President or General, but a man who represented and gained his power from us, American citizens, asking adamant with the effectiveness of soul-force, for our country to stop doing what harms us, to start doing better. Isn’t that a fine thing to celebrate?

The Birmingham Vulcan Illustration

The 56-foot-tall Birmingham Vulcan exhibited before installation overlooking the city. How the iron man looked around the time MLK was in Birmingham. How it looks today atop it’s base and observation tower. African ancestor: Ptah. The MLK memorial statue.

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The Song

Are any readers still reading who feel what I wrote above is jejune? If you’re still here, thank you for your patience, but I’m about to try your patience some more. “The Birmingham Vulcan (for MLK)”  has never found an audience, and there are times when I can see why. I have an unreasonable love for unusual connections — things that in my mind connect but to most seem trivial. You’d think poetry might allow some license in such things, but that’s not so. When I showed this to my former group of poets when we were all alive together a few years ago, this piece was to them confusing and without a shred of emotional connection. My takeaway? I had portrayed nothing of the wide-ranging connections to them then. It’s gone through a couple of revisions since, likely improving things, but the core problem is that this piece requires a somewhat unique combination of knowledge to make sense.

So, let me take the usually foolish step of providing a brief decoder ring to the mythological story “The Birmingham Vulcan”  tells. Poets and songwriters: you should know this is a bad idea. “The Waste Land”  and “American Pie*”  aside, few readers like the impression that the poem knows something they don’t.

My poet group first-readers stopped right off at the second word. “Who’s this Solon?” Short answer, he’s a big macher for classical Greek Athens and it’s system of government. “What’s he doing in Africa?” Plato told a story in one of his Symposiums that Solon went to Egypt, and the learned priests there told him that he had no idea about the history of his region. Now this is an interesting story choice in that the Greeks were famous for thinking they were exceptional, and here are these foreign Africans telling them they knew more about history than they did.

“OK, so who’s this iron man?” He’s Hephaestus to the Greeks, but to the Egyptians he was Ptah,** and to the Romans he was Vulcan. All three of these ancient gods were makers and metalworkers. Hephaestus has some additional particulars: he was segregated from the other Olympians, was described as deformed or ugly, and in a connection that will come up later, he was also the patron of weavers.

Birmingham arrives in the second stanza. When I said this was connected to MLK’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail”  that rang a bell, but what’s lesser known is the reason the southern American city that jail was in was called Birmingham. They wanted to be an industrial city dealing with iron, steel, and metalwork, like unto Birmingham England. And yes, they actually erected a giant statue of Hephaestus/Vulcan at his forge to overlook their town early in the 20th century.

Did the statue’s maker make him clearly Afro-American? Nope, I don’t think the city fathers*** would have paid for any such depiction of Vulcan. But sometime between the World Wars they painted this iron statue brown, either to hide the corrosion or to make the connection to iron more plain.

Third stanza: segregation and regulation to lower paid jobs. One of the “Well, you don’t understand, it just works better that way” situations that King went to Birmingham to oppose.

Fourth stanza: King arrives. King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail”  is as wide-ranging as an Emerson essay in terms of references, but I loved this little noted connection: King was in a city of foundries and chose as an example of soul-force civil disobedience the men from the biblical book of Daniel thrown into a fiery furnace for disobeying the ruler.

Fifth stanza: “Letter from Birmingham Jail”  is not written to dispute overt racists or the segregationists. Rather it was addressed to ostensible supporters who raised objections to getting on with stopping what was hurting the country and offending justice. The non-segregationist position was to object on a wide range of fronts to that civil rights movement — some with practical, strategic or logistical concerns, some seeking to assuage those whose “culture” and “traditions” might be offended. And of course, many too were silent on those issues out of fear, ignorance, or distaste for struggle. King spoke to those too in his letter.

The original version of this piece was called “The Cord of Life,”  a phrase mysteriously used in King’s letter, and one I loved for its connection to Hephaestus, and so it remains in this stanza.

I trimmed some stanzas as the poem went through revision that directly referred to the infamous Birmingham Sunday terrorist bombing of a church during the civil rights struggle in Birmingham. A great many poems and songs have already sung of this and of the four schoolchildren killed going to Sunday School, so I hope it’s still remembered. That act was so offensive that the terrible sacrifice helped move public opinion. The sixth stanza is all that remains of that matter, and I still feel the song is a bit long, but I left this one in so that there’s some motivation for the Vulcan statue to magically speak in the concluding stanza.

The last stanza as the silent statue finally speaks has been worked over several times. I still hope it has some power on this day. You can hear my sung version of “The Birmingham Vulcan (for MLK)”  with the player below, or for those who don’t see the player, with this highlighted link.

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*I admire the former and am generally uninterested in the latter. So even for the exceptions this doesn’t always work.

**Ptah, venerated particularly in Memphis. As in the delightful Talking Heads lyric “Cities”  got away with it: “Memphis, home of Elvis and the Ancient Greeks.” That song, like mine, is briefly referring to the “African origin” theory/myth that assuming that Western culture started with the Greeks ignores that African cultures may have informed the Greeks.

***The writer’s group, poets of good taste, disliked my play on words “foundering men.”

The Fly

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

The state I live in, Minnesota, has a reasonable list under “claims to fame.” Lots of lakes, a funny accent, Prince, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sinclair Lewis* and Bob Dylan. And bugs.

It may be all that water, Some of the Twin Cities sits on what was once marshland, and even when it forgets that, the bugs have longer memories such that the oldest joke in the state is that the Minnesota State Bird is the mosquito. Farther upstate to our northern forests the most feared animal isn’t the bear or wolf, but the tiny biting gnats and other larger and blood-hungry black fly species. All and all, it’s likely there are no vampires in Minnesota. Too much competition.

I’ll go to English romantic poet, political radical and mystic William Blake for today’s piece “The Fly”  from his collection Songs of Experience.  Blake’s short poems can be shockingly brief in a way that Emily Dickinson’s sometimes are too. For a simple looking poem with only small and common words, there are numerous commentaries explicating the mystic or philosophic meanings of “The Fly.”  It opens with an uncomplicated setup: a fly bugs Blake one summer day, he brushes it away, something a hundredfold mundane. In an impossible way, he says he did this thoughtlessly, as he’s got four more short stanzas packed with thought and meditation.

Songs_of_Innocence_and_of_Experience_THE_FLY

Here’s the text of the poem as Blake the artist presented it. Toddler Robert Frost in front right is telling the woman that Allen Ginsberg (pretty in pink) is playing badminton without a net again.

 

For a mere 30 words in two stanzas Blake speaks on the similarities between the insect and himself. In a typical explication of this poem, the first stanza’s shoe-fly act, self-labeled by the poet as thoughtless, is read by those as a swat, killing the fly. But Blake doesn’t describe that as I read it. Instead I read it as a mutual act of interruption. Blake has interrupted the fly who has interrupted him.

The fourth stanza in my reading sums up a value Blake sees in this interaction, a stanza which would be quite obscure if this was indeed a meditation on a sudden death of the fly. The fly’s interruption wasn’t thoughtless after all, it caused thought in Blake.

The “Dance and drink and sing” line is not, or at least not only, a paean to the joys of living. It’s a remark on the superficialities of life for a fly and human, in the Buddhist sense, maya. “Thought is life…and the want of thought is death” is Blake’s precept here. It was good that he and the fly engaged in a momentary summer dialectic. The final stanza is mysteriously balanced. If to think is to live, the unconsidered life is death. The human choice should be then to think, to interrupt thoughtlessness. In the final stanza, is Blake saying that the fly’s insect’s brain cannot choose, and that humans who don’t make their possible choice for thought may be happy flies, but they are not exercising their human potential?

I wonder if Blake was knowledgeable of Socrates and his claim that he must be a gadfly to society, the presenter of bothersome ideas, the interrupter of the thoughtless, or if this was an independent realization. Others certainly borrowed it. Gandhi liked Socrates’ fly thought. Martin Luther King used that gadfly line of Socrates in his “Letter from Birmingham Jail”  too, and it even inspired the periodical that alternate Parlando reader Dave Moore started up that he called The Gadfly  a half-century ago.

Minnesota also had a reputation for political progressivism. Maybe it was the bugs?

I won’t interrupt you long for today’s audio piece, my performance of Blake’s “The Fly.”  There’s a player gadget below.

 

 

 

 

*Literarily, a step down in fame, we also have Robert Pirsig, who wrote Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance  living over a shoe-store a couple of blocks away from where I’m typing this, and Robert Bly, he of the deep image and a revised-standard-version of masculinity. Some would even claim John Berryman, an interstate grump who was teaching here when he took a faith or faithless leap off the Mississippi bridge that  I once traveled over between my job at a hospital and my last few dollars of college education. I kept walking, and encourage you to do so too.

I Heard of Emerson and Wagons

~ Frank Hudson ~ 1 Comment

“Hitch your wagon to a star”. We all know what it means, and we’re wrong.

Well, maybe we’re not exactly wrong: it’s human to draw a variety of meanings from what other humans communicate. The Emily Dickinson poem in the last post is perfect example. I don’t know exactly what Dickinson was trying to say in I Felt a Funeral in My Brain, but the strength of the language and music of her saying of it compels anyway. Poems, particularly short poems, often benefit from this kind of ambiguity. They become, in effect, several poems, poems that are experienced differently—even by the same reader—at each reading. In the end those varied readings become a kind of unstable hologram, a poem that the reader can see around corners in. I think that’s one of the benefits of these Parlando project recordings. You can listen to the words without making singular understanding the all-important goal as you enjoy the musical setting, and you can repeat the process of hearing them. A poem is not an important email from your boss that you must understand correctly immediately.

An essay on the other hand does prioritize clarity. “Hitch your wagon to a star” is from one of Emerson’s essays, and Emerson is a very clear essayist. You can read the published version of the essay, Civilization, where the famous quote appears here.

For the moment, I’m going to pass on Emerson’s racialist and sometimes racist views which saturate much of the first half of that essay. If you are an Indigenous American or a Central African, you may be so revolted by this section that anything Emerson says later may be lost on you. TLDNR: despite some nods to North African, Arabian, Buddhist, and Icelandic (Iceland! Was Emerson predicting Sigur Rós, Jóhann Jóhannsson and Björk?) cultures; civilization is kind of white, temperate zone, coastal U.S./European thing. Gee Ralph, checked your white privilege much lately?

In the second half of the essay, Emerson develops another point. He starts by saying “Civilization depends on morality.” What expectations does that sentence give you? Anytime you read that sentence in the last 50 years, you know what comes next:  a catalog of received, traditional, probably religious, precepts that the author will no-doubt find are being violated frequently by a fallen mankind who is ignoring this at their peril. You expect him to say “Stop screwing around with traditional morality, or civilization is doomed.” Is this what you get?

Nope. He’s soon launching into a rhapsody about the telegraph, and since he doesn’t mention that great mid-19th century technology by name, you could almost dump it word for word into the last part of the 20th century as praise for the Internet. As he talks about the telegraph’s “invisible pockets” you almost think he must be about to invent TCP/IP protocols more than a hundred years early! Instead of the Moral Majority, you get Emerson the Steam Punk.

And then he moves on to describe a then common Massachusetts technology, a mill that was powered by ocean tides, and at his observation of this, he says:

“Now that is the wisdom of a man, in every instance of his labor, to hitch his wagon to a star, and see his chore done by the gods themselves. That is the way we are strong, by borrowing the might of the elements.”

From there Emerson develops the thought that a natural morality of utility, justice, civil order and freedom is—like the geo-thermal power of tides—an undeniable force for progressive change and improvement.

This section of Emerson’s essay is still a complex and novel approach. Emerson’s fellow Transcendentalist Theodore Parker condensed this thought in a way that Martin Luther King often cited:

“The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”

Is this not proof of the maxim? Emerson in the middle of the 19th century, suffering from the ignorance and misapprehensions of racialism and racism, yet works for abolition of slavery and his philosophy helps inspire others a hundred years later to bring about long-delayed progress?

So that’s why I say we misunderstand “Hitch your wagon to a star.” Emerson would approve the gist of our misunderstanding: that it’s good to set goals high—but that’s not what he meant. What he meant on striking the coinage was more like “align yourself with the natural moral laws of the universe and your struggle for change gains great power.”

Radio Flyer Wagon

Today’s audio piece, I Heard of Emerson and Wagons recounts my mother telling me to “Hitch your wagon to a star” when I was a child. She, like most of us, meant it in the “dream big” way, and in that busy-parent way “yes, that’s nice. Dream big, but I’m busy right now.”  In this piece, the young me is puzzled by just which big dream is the right one—just the thing that Emerson thought he was, in fact, offering guidance on.

To hear the LYL Band perform I Heard of Emerson and Wagons, just click on the gadget that will appear below.