{"id":731,"date":"2011-07-20T08:29:43","date_gmt":"2011-07-20T12:29:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/fglaysher.com\/TheGlobe\/?p=731"},"modified":"2011-07-20T08:29:43","modified_gmt":"2011-07-20T12:29:43","slug":"roadside-dog-czeslaw-milosz","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/fglaysher.com\/TheGlobe\/2011\/07\/20\/roadside-dog-czeslaw-milosz\/","title":{"rendered":"Roadside Dog. Czeslaw Milosz."},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/p>\n

\"Czeslaw<\/a>

Czeslaw Milosz<\/p><\/div>\n

A Roadside Dog.<\/em><\/strong> Czeslaw Milosz.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Antinomies\u2026.<\/strong> October 24, 2000<\/strong><\/p>\n

In\u00a0A Year of the Hunter<\/em>, Czeslaw Milosz unequivocally writes, \u201cPoetry\u2019s separation from religion has always strengthened my conviction that the erosion of the cosmic-religious imagination is not an illusion and that the vast expanses of the planet that are falling away from Christianity are the external correlative of this erosion.\u201d\u00a0Road-Side Dog<\/em> exudes this same consciousness, yet, interested only in Christianity, he fails to perceive that vast expanses of the planet have also left behind the Islamic, Hindu, Taoist, Confucian, and Buddhist religions.<\/p>\n

Like his contemporaries, Milosz is a child of dualities and contradictions, as he discloses in\u00a0Unattainable Earth<\/em>: \u201cSometimes believing, sometimes not believing, \/ With others like myself I unite in worship.\u201d Though \u201cloyal and disloyal,\u201d he performs what is in itself an act of affirmation. One reason for such tensions must be his recognition that we are \u201cIn an intermediary phase, after the end of one era and before the beginning of a new one.\u201d In another entry he writes, \u201cThere is only one theme: an era is coming to an end which lasted nearly two thousand years, when religion had primacy of place in relation to philosophy, science and art. . . .\u201d Milosz recognizes the validity of his own honest doubts and the abyss of evil and historical calamity that is swallowing everything before it, yet he does so while continuing to \u201cunite in worship.\u201d Similarly, in \u201cLecture V\u201d of The Collected Poems<\/em>, the persona affirms \u201cWe plod on with hope,\u201d and then allows, \u201cAnd now let everyone \/ Confess to himself. \u0081eHas he risen?\u2019 \u0081eI don\u2019t know.\u2019\u201d It was perhaps these lines that led Pope John Paul II to say to Milosz, as he reports in A Year of the Hunter<\/em>, \u201cYou always take one step forward and one step back.\u201d In an essay in\u00a0New Perspectives Quarterly<\/em>, Milosz describes himself as a believer, while in A Year of the Hunter<\/em> he refers to an experience in church on Palm Sunday as an \u201cintuitive understanding that Christ exists.\u201d These contradictions achieve their fullest expression in \u201cTwo Poems\u201d in Provinces: The first poem celebrates earthly life and its values, while the second poem, \u201cA Poem for the End of the Century,\u201d bitterly, ironically recalls the religious past. Of these two contrasting poems, Milosz writes in a headnote that \u201ctaken together\u201d they \u201ctestify to my contradictions, since the opinions voiced in one and the other are equally mine.\u201d To highlight either side over the other would be a distortion of his psyche. Milosz conveyed his complexity to the Pope when he replied, \u201cCan one write religious poetry in any other way today?\u201d I have often thought of Virginia Woolf\u2019s Mr. Ramsay in\u00a0To The Lighthouse<\/em>, ascending the island rocks, exclaiming, in one of the most poignant settings of modern literature, \u201cThere is no God.\u201d<\/p>\n

Perhaps because Milosz perceives our age as an intermediary one, he finds it more possible than most poets to hold out hope for the future. His hope, though, as we have seen, is not naive, foolish, or unaware of the incessant disintegration. It is that of one tried by experience, who yet believes there are reasons for such a poem as \u201cThankfulness.\u201d To give \u201cthanks for good and ill\u201d manifests a trust that transcends our usual human self-centeredness and that submits to the power of the mystery of being, a trust that acknowledges in another poem \u201cThey are incomprehensible, the things of this earth.\u201d Such trust is also the prerequisite to finding \u201cEternal light in everything on earth.\u201d Although from the viewpoint of traditional Catholic belief some might think such lines are suffused with vague gnosticism, accuse him of having fallen off from the faith, of \u201cwilling belief,\u201d as he says of himself in The Land of Ulro<\/em>, one must recognize the honest complexity of his commitment if one wishes to confront, as he has, the undeniable damage that has been visited upon all organized forms of religion and government during the modern era.<\/p>\n

In reference to religion, while recognizing the undeniable damage, Milosz has often expressed his skepticism and uneasiness with Catholicism. Although he seems to favor at times reversion to Catholicism, suggests he himself is a heretic, harbors the conceit of possessing the true truth among the great religions, he also writes of going \u201cforward, but on a different track,\u201d of a \u201cnew vision,\u201d \u201ca new awareness,\u201d \u201cnew perspectives,\u201d as in\u00a0A Year of the Hunter<\/em>:<\/p>\n

Why should we shut our eyes and pretend, rejecting theobvious, that Ancient Rome is again in decline, and this time it\u2019s not pagan Rome under the blows of Christianity, but the Rome of the monotheists\u2019 God? Since this, and nothing else, is the undeclared theme of contemporary poetry in various languages, obviously this conflict has already crossed the threshold of universal consciousness. . . . Perhaps . . . new perspectives will open up . . . .<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Milosz has worked more deeply with the spiritual dislocations of modern life than any other poet of the twentieth century since T. S. Eliot.<\/p>\n

In regard to government, Milosz\u2019s experience prepared him to understand where we have been and where we are going in a manner unique among modern poets. All the more eloquently rings his plea in his Nobel Lecture for sanity eventually to prevail among the nations of the earth:<\/p>\n

We realize that the unification of our planet is in the making, and we attach importance to the notion of international community. The days when the League of Nations and the United Nations were founded deserve to be remembered.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This realization of the importance of international community can be found throughout his writings. Its source, beyond his own experience, was, by his own testimony, his uncle, Oscar Milosz, poet and seer, who predicted the \u201ctriumph of the Roman Catholic Church.\u201d Narrow Catholic hopes aside, history, lower case, moves toward the vindication of both of them, as well as of all those who have stood throughout this century for the further development of international institutions through which the nations may cooperate for the protection of the weak and vulnerable, for the protection of the little ones. If \u201cThere are no direct lessons that American poets can learn from Milosz,\u201d the fault lies entirely with us and the age of academic criticism that has almost strangled the life out of poetry.<\/p>\n

Frederick Glaysher<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Czeslaw Milosz has worked more deeply with the spiritual dislocations of modern life than any other poet of the twentieth century since T. S. Eliot…. If “There are no direct lessons that American poets can learn from Milosz,” the fault lies entirely with us and the age of academic criticism that has almost strangled the life out of poetry. Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[200,3],"tags":[476,478,302,404,479,482,481,807,480,477],"class_list":["post-731","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book","category-beyondpostmod","tag-a-roadside-dog","tag-collected-poems","tag-czeslaw-milosz","tag-league-of-nations","tag-new-perspectives-quarterly","tag-nobel-lecture","tag-to-the-lighthouse","tag-united-nations","tag-virginia-woolf","tag-year-of-the-hunter"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/fglaysher.com\/TheGlobe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/731","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/fglaysher.com\/TheGlobe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/fglaysher.com\/TheGlobe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fglaysher.com\/TheGlobe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fglaysher.com\/TheGlobe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=731"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/fglaysher.com\/TheGlobe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/731\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/fglaysher.com\/TheGlobe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=731"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fglaysher.com\/TheGlobe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=731"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fglaysher.com\/TheGlobe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=731"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}