And Rise Again...
satire, and exposing the ridiculous
One of the great pleasures of writing on Substack is making chance connections with others, and the wonderful contributions those people often make in the comments section - sometimes amounting to worthy posts in themselves. When I posted ‘Rise Like Lions’ yesterday, I received such a comment from V.N. Alexander (whose Substack ‘The Posthumous Style’ I always find inspiring). As well as being powerful and relevant-to-the -times satire, it contains some fascinating information about Percy Bysshe Shelley’s family connections:
This is what V.N. wrote in her response to the post:
I made that poem central to the theme of my "new" novel, "Covid-1984, The Musical." (It's been siting on an editor's desk at Skyhorse Publishing with no no forthcoming for nine months now, and no yes either.) I'm starting to get antsy about that fact. I can't imagine who else would publish it. So, if I may, let me share my Percy bit in your comments section.
In my novel, Winston is working for Octopus (their digital book division) at the NYPL digitizing (and eventually memory-holing) great works.
After returning to New York..., I managed to get a gig in the Casaubon collection at the NYPL, which preserves the work of Percy Shelley—the most radical of Romantics and a political revolutionary—and some manuscripts relating to his more popular wife, gothic novelist Mary Shelley, of Doctor Frankenstein fame, as well as the papers of her father, universal suffragist and direct democracy advocate, William Godwin, and of her mother, first feminist, Mary Wollstonecraft. What a family.
Percy is credited with the thoughtcrime of peaceful civil disobedience later copied by Thoreau, Gandhi and MLK. ... I’ve had access to papers and books of some pretty impressive authors for this job, but this assignment, in particular, seems especially important now. Percy’s The Masque of Anarchy is about the lawlessness of those in power. Think of it as rhymed verse describing the motley parade of leaders on your nightly newscast. It features personified concepts like Murder, Fraud, Hypocrisy, and most grotesque of all, Anarchy who claims, “I am the Science,” no wait, the actual line is 'I AM GOD, AND KING, AND LAW!’ in all caps.
I reckon Percy must have argued with his father-in-law, who was an anarchist, about the term he used for his poem. Sheer naked power without lawfulness is fascism, not anarchy, the absence of invested power. But ultimately it doesn’t matter what ideological label you start with; it all tends to devolve into slavery for the proles.
Yesterday, I had to pause to stoke the quiver of hope that ran through me as I scanned the original manuscript that recorded the lines,
`Rise like Lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number,
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you --
Ye are many -- they are few.
Ultimately Percy’s advice to the downtrodden was to go ahead and let them murder a few hundred peaceful protesters in broad daylight so that others would be inspired to non-compliance. When they start killing children that should really do it.
We’ll see. Childhood vaccine deaths will probably be reinterpreted alternately as fake news, extremely rare, and necessary collateral damage for the greater good. What’s so frustrating for someone looking back at history is to see how many times we recreate the same problems over and over. You know what they say about power and yet we keep handing it over to those who least deserve it. Right now the Tech Lords are gathering up all the reins, and don’t let Octopus’s original motto, “Don’t be Evil,” fool you. It’s what they’ve always had in mind.
This is wonderful work, contributing to the ongoing process of opening eyes.
Thank you, Michael, for turning my too-long and presumptuous comment into a post. It's so good to have friends like you on Substack. I love the line from your post, "Why Culture Must Lead": "we must reverse the widely-held belief that it is the government's job to create conditions in which a healthy culture can flourish. Quite the opposite is true: It is culture that must create the conditions in which good government becomes a possibility."
Maybe I'm just biased because I'm a literary fiction writer and I'm looking for a cheerleader to make it possible to continue, against all odds, to try to get my work in front of readers.
I hear it again and again whenever I mention to a new friend that I'm a novelist: "Oh, I don't have time to read fiction; I only have time for facts." (My husband in number among that group, but I married him anyway.) So where have all the fiction -- and poetry -- readers gone?
I blame a lot of this on the fact that in English Departments, professors have long given up teaching students about literary style and the use of devices and rhetoric to create new connotative meaning. They teach to the subject matter instead. What is the book about? not, How is it written? And the subject matter that they focus on has been largely confined to Identity Politics.
People may complain now that Identity Politics dominates politics and economics. Well, it got its start in English Departments thirty years ago. That's why I left literary criticism and theory in 2000 and went into complex systems science instead. I found more people who sympathized with my interests in art among scientists than I had found among literature professors and students.
Just as we (people interested in sanity) are having to develop our own alternative news outlets, food systems, and health centers, we will have to develop our own cultural institutions.
In a way, it's a great time to be alive, while the world is in transition -- assuming we survive.
I was struck by V.N.Alexander's comment too, so I'm glad you're giving it a wider reach. So intrigued by The Masque of Anarchy -- I'm checking it out now! Thanks, Michael.