The Collapse of America, Preface

John Brown homestead, 1995

Preface

"The Collapse of America" is a long poem that I began in August 2019 and completed in January 2020.  •  What impressed me about America in the past no longer impresses. Instead of American confidence I now see empty bravado; instead of greatness I see a country that is a caricature of its former self; instead of democracy I see excessive wealth and power in the hands of a small minority; in other words, I see a country on the edge of moral collapse. That's what I'm talking about, a country on the edge of moral collapse.  •  Many of us were very fond of the United States, we used to travel back and forth across the border on business, as tourists, visiting family members, or just on day-outings to buy a few groceries or see a movie. But our porous Canada-America border, "the longest undefended border in the world", has lost its once friendly nature. A few years ago I saw sharp-shooters lying on the roof of an American border crossing building, their guns aimed at us, tourists who wanted to spend money in the United States; at LaGuardia Airport in New York City I was questioned by a woman customs agent after I said that my wife had packed my carry-on bag, "isn't that suspicious?" she asked; well, no, I saw nothing suspicious in it at all. •  I never wanted to write on politics, just talking about politicians makes me feel contaminated by them. Politicians are shapeshifters instantly assuming whatever disguise they feel will convince you of their integrity and the correctness of what they say. In his essay, "Up to Easter", Matthew Arnold writes, "Nothing I should like better than to feel assured that I should never have occasion to write on politics again. I write on other subjects with much more pleasure."  Stephen Morrissey April 2020

Poetry, D.H. Lawrence, & the Apocalypse

D.H. Lawrence writes the following in Apocalypse:

To get at the Apocalypse we have to appreciate the mental working of the pagan thinker or poet – pagan thinkers were necessarily poets – who starts with an image, sets the image in motion, and then takes up another image. The old Greeks were very fine image-thinkers, as the myths prove. Their images were wonderfully natural and harmonious. They followed the logic of action rather than of reason, and they had no moral axe to grind. But still they are nearer to us than the Orientals, whose image-thinking often followed no plan whatsoever, not even the sequence of action. We can see it in some of the Psalms, the flitting from image to image with no essential connections at all, but just the curious image-association. The Oriental loved that.

To appreciate the pagan manner of thought we have to drop our own manner of on-and-off-and-on, from a start to a finish, and allow the mind to move in cycles, or to flit here and there over a cluster of images. Our idea of time as a continuity in an eternal straight line has crippled our consciousness cruelly. The pagan conception of time as moving in cycles is much freer, it allows movement upwards and downwards, and allows for a complete change of the state of mind, at any moment. One cycle finished, we can drop or rise to another level, and be in a new world at once. But by our time-continuum method, we have to trail wearily on over another ridge.

The old method of the Apocalypse is to set forth the image, make a world, and then suddenly depart from this world in a cycle of time and movement and event, an epos; and then return again to a world not quite like the original one, but on another level. The ‘world’ is established on twelve: the number twelve is basic for an established cosmos. And the cycles move in sevens.

            --From Apocalypse, by D.H. Laurence, Penguin Books, 1974, p. 54-55