Twenty-first lecture for my students in English 140, UC Santa Barbara, Summer 2012. Course website: http://patrickbrianmooney.nfshost.com/~patrick/ta/su12/index.html

1. Lecture 21: Palimpsest of the Departed World
English 140
UC Santa Barbara
Summer 2012
11 September 2012
To-morrow the rediscovery of romantic love;
The photographing of ravens; all the fun under
Liberty’s masterful shadow;
To-morrow the hour of the pageant-master and the musician.
To-morrow for the young the poets exploding like bombs,
The walks by the lake, the winter of perfect communion;
To-morrow the bicycle races
Through the suburbs on summer evenings: but to-day the struggle.
—W.H. Auden, “September 1937”

2. An important reminder
Don’t forget to bring a
blue book to the final!

3. They passed through towns that warned
people away with messages scrawled
on the billboards. The billboards had
been whited out with thin coats of paint
in order to write on them and through
the paint could be seen a pale
palimpsest of advertisements for goods
which no longer existed. (127-28)

4. The decay of the world
Do I look like an imbecile to you?
I dont know what you look like. (65)
My brother at last. The reptilian calculations in
those cold and shifting eyes. The gray and
rotting teeth. Claggy with human flesh. Who
has made of the world a lie every word. (75)
We’re not robbers.
He leaned one ear forward. What? he called.
I said we’re not robbers.
What are you?
They’d no way to answer the question. (162)

5. What does he look like? his father said.
I dont know. I cant see good. (166)
After a while he fell back and after a while the
man could hear him playing. A formless music
for the age to come. Or perhaps the last music
on earth called up from out of the ashes of its
ruin. (77)
There were times when he sat watching the boy
sleep that he would begin to sob uncontrollably
but it wasnt about death. He wasnt sure what it
was about but he thought it was about beauty
or about goodness. Things that he’d no longer
any way to think about at all. (129-30)
He’d been ready to die and now he wasnt going
to and he had to think about that. (145)

6. The boy nodded. He sat looking at the map.
The man watched him. He thought he knew
what that was about. He’d pored over maps
as a child, keeping one finger on the town
where he lived. Just as he would look up his
family in the phone directory. Themselves
among others, everything in its place.
Justified in the world. Come on, he said. We
should go. (182)

7. The re-invention of the world
He [the man] watched him stoke the flames.
God’s own firedrake. The sparks rushed upward
and died in the starless dark. Not all dying
words are true and this blessing is no less real
for being shorn of its ground. (31)
The color of it moved something in him long
forgotten. Make a list. Recite a litany.
Remember. (31)
they sat warm in their refuge while he told the
boy stories. Old stories of courage and justice
as he remembered them until the boy was
asleep in his blankets. (41)

8. Sometimes the child would ask him questions
about the world that for him was not even a
memory. He thought hard how to answer. There
is no past. What would you like? (53-54)
[The man’s wife:] You talk about taking a stand
but there is no stand to take. (57)
he sat holding him while he tousled his hair
before the fire to dry it. All of this like some
ancient anointing. So be it. Evoke the forms.
Where you’ve nothing else construct ceremonies
out of the air and breathe upon them. (74)
His dreams brightened. The vanished world
returned. (187)