| My Love For All Things Warm and Breathing
by William Kloefkorn
I have seldom loved more than one thing at a time,
yet this morning I feel myself expanding, each
part of me soft and glandular, and under my skin
is room enough now for the loving of many things,
and all of them at once, these students especially,
not only the girl in the yellow sweater, whose
name, Laura Buxton, is somehow the girl herself,
Laura for the coy green mellowing eyes, Buxton
for all the rest, but also the simple girl in blue
on the back row, her mouth sad beyond all reasonable
inducements, and the boy with the weight problem,
his teeth at work even now on his lower lip, and
the grand profusion of hair and nails and hands and
legs and tongues and thighs and fingertips and
wrists and throats, yes, of throats especially,
throats through which passes the breath that joins
the air that enters through these ancient windows,
that exits, that takes with it my own breath, inside
this room just now my love for all things warm and
breathing, that lifts it high to scatter it fine and
enormous into the trees and the grass, into the heat
beneath the earth beneath the stone, into the
boundless lust of all things bound but gathering.
"My Love For All Things Warm and Breathing" by William Kloefkorn, from Cottonwood County: Poems by William Kloefkorn and Ted Kooser. © Windflower Press, 1979. Reprinted with permission. (buy now) It's the birthday of historian Charles Beard, (books by this author) born in Knightstown, Indiana (1874). He started out as a professor, but he resigned from Columbia University as a protest in 1917 after the institution fired some of his colleagues who opposed American involvement in World War I. After that, he never taught in academia again, but he wrote a lot of books and ran a profitable dairy farm in Connecticut. He wrote the popular book The Rise of American Civilization (1927) with his wife Mary, in which they explained American history in terms of economic principles — for example, that the Civil War wasn't an ideological conflict about slavery as much as it was an economic one that pitted the industrial North against the agrarian South. This argument is has been widely adopted in some circles looking to maintain white nationalism and has been used to minimize the impact of slavery and the civil war on American History. He wrote: "All the lessons of history in four sentences: Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad with power. The mills of God grind slowly, but they grind exceedingly small. The bee fertilizes the flower it robs. When it is dark enough, you can see the stars." It's the birthday of astronomer Anders Celsius, (books by this author) born in Uppsala, Sweden (1701). His father and grandfather were both astronomy professors, and his other grandfather a mathematics professor. He too became a professor of astronomy, when he was 29, taking over for his father after he died. Celsius was in Paris, at the French Royal Academy of Sciences, and there was a huge debate about the shape of the Earth. Newton had proposed that the Earth is an ellipsoid, flattened at the poles, but that had never been proven. Celsius suggested they all stop arguing about it and go figure it out. So the French Academy organized expeditions of scientists, one to northern Sweden to measure the length of a degree along the pole, and one to Peru (now Ecuador) to measure the length of a degree along the equator. Celsius participated in the Swedish trip. The results were compared, and Newton's theory was confirmed. For his services, he received a large annual pension from France. He published some of the first work on the aurora borealis, and he discovered that the aurora was influenced by the Earth's magnetic fields. But he is best remembered today as the inventor of the Celsius temperature scale, a fixed international temperature scale for thermometers, which accurately accounted for how air pressure influenced the boiling point of water. But Celsius might not have recognized the version we use now — he designed it with 0 degrees as the measurement of boiling water and 100 degrees freezing water. After his death, someone reversed the temperature scale, so that water boiled at 100 degrees and froze at 0. It's the birthday of the man who said, "I know I am making the choice most dangerous to an artist in valuing life above art." That's writer James Agee, (books by this author) born in Knoxville, Tennessee (1909). During his lifetime, he was best known as one of the greatest film critics of his era. And he was not afraid to disagree with what was popular. He wrote a passionate, three-part defense of Charlie Chaplin's Monsieur Verdoux (1947), which was panned by critics when it was released. Agee wrote: "Chaplin's performance as Verdoux is the best piece of playing I have ever seen: here, I cannot even specify the dozen or so close-ups each so great and so finely related and timed that withdrawn and linked in series they are like the notes of a slow, magnificent, and terrifying song, which the rest of the film serves as an accompaniment. […] Chaplin's theme, the greatest and most appropriate to its time that he has yet undertaken, is the bare problem of surviving at all in such a world as this." Agee was also a successful screenwriter and book critic. But today he is best known for two books: Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941) and A Death in the Family (1958). After he graduated from Harvard in 1932, Agee was hired by Fortune magazine, which had just started up two years earlier. He wrote some articles on hydroelectric power and flood control in Tennessee, and Henry Luce — the man who created Fortune, TIME, Life, and Sports Illustrated — was impressed with the young writer. A few years later, Agee was assigned to do a story about sharecroppers in Hale County, Alabama, with a photographer. He insisted on Walker Evans, from the Farm Security Administration. They lived with three farm families for about two months — Agee took notes and Evans took photos. But after Agee got back to New York, he couldn't figure out a way to put everything he had seen into a neat little article that would fit in Fortune's "Life and Circumstances" series. So it was never published in Fortune. Instead, he spent several years writing the book that became Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. It was a long and difficult book, more like poetry than journalism in parts, and by the time it was published, the country was more interested in World War II than in the Great Depression. So the book was a total flop, selling only about 600 copies and quickly going out of print. Agee moved on to his career as a critic and screenwriter. He published a novel, was married three times, and had four children. He was an alcoholic and a heavy smoker, and he died in 1955 at the age of 45, from a heart attack. His second novel, A Death in the Family (1957), was published two years after he died and won the Pulitzer Prize. A few years later, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men was reissued and came to be considered a classic, one of the great books of the century. In it, he wrote:
"A man and a woman are drawn together upon a bed and there is a child and there are children:
First they are mouths, then they become auxiliary instruments of labor: later they are drawn away, and become the fathers and mothers of children, who shall become the fathers and mothers of children:
Their father and their mother before them were, in their time, the children each of different parents, who in their time were each children of parents:
This has been happening for a long while: its beginning was before stars:
It will continue for a long while: no one knows where it will end:
While they are still drawn together within one shelter around the center of their parents, these children and their parents together compose a family:
This family must take care of itself; it has no mother or father: there is no other shelter, nor resource, nor any love, interest, sustaining strength or comfort, so near, nor can anything happy or sorrowful that comes to anyone in this family possibly mean to those outside it what it means to those within it: but it is, as I have told, inconceivably lonely, drawn upon itself as tramps are drawn round a fire in the cruelest weather; and thus and in such loneliness it exists among other families, each of which is no less lonely, nor any less without help or comfort, and is likewise drawn in upon itself:
[...]
So that how it can be that a stone, a plant, a star, can take on the burden of being; and how it is that a child can take on the burden of breathing; and how through so long a continuation and cumulation of the burden of each moment one on another, does any creature bear to exist, and not break utterly to fragments of nothing: these are matters too dreadful and fortitudes too gigantic to meditate long and not forever to worship." Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.® |
