On the Arena

 

1.

My old man’s bladder urges me awake a couple times each night.  Returning from the toilet, I look out my second-floor window next to the bed, past the shadowy roof and old heavy cornices of the house next door.  Forty yards away, two residential streets intersect.  In the dead of Winter, the streets are clad in rutted ice, grooved ruts where cars have skidded in front of the stop sign.  Two streetlights lean over the intersection, drizzling a soft, amber-colored light onto the place where the roads meet.  When it is summer, the asphalt in the intersection glows with pale radiance under the street lamps: the crossroads looks like a hollow in the desert, dimly lit, paved with pebbles and veins of sand.

Of course, I am very near-sighted and my eyes blur the intersection so that it seems like a desolate amphitheater, ill-focused and vague, faintly lit by rays the color of old papyrus.

Perhaps, it is the dire hour or the residue of dreams from which I have surfaced, but the cross roads under the window always seems strangely fateful to me, consequential in an eerie, indefinite way.  There is something theatrical about the view – the intersection seems a sort of stage, empty but waiting for its characters to arrive.  

2.

Philip Larkin finished a poem called “Sad Steps” in April 1968.  (The verse appears in Larkin’s last book, 1974's High Windows.) Men experience the same things and his poem documents a landscape seen in the desolate middle of the night.  Instead of strange desolate arena near his home, Larkin sees the moon soaring over the landscape.  But his thoughts are disquieting, influenced by darkness and age and memories, mind and mood always disconsolate in wee hours of the morning.

Larkin sets the scene with these words: “Groping back to bed after a piss / I part thick curtains and am startled by / The rapid clouds: the moon’s cleanliness.”  It is four-o’clock in the morning and, as in my vision of the arena, space seems “cavernous”, a “wind-picked sky” in which the moon “dashes” overhead in a way that seems “somewhat laughable.”  The heavens are a place where a battle has been waged: the clouds stand apart, blown into separation like “cannon smoke.”  The shattered clouds are not only laughable – they are “preposterous,” presided over by the moon that Larkin mocks as the “Lozenge of love”, the “Medallion of art!”  The moon hurling through broken clouds in the vault of the sky should trigger in the poet a certain romantic sensibility characterized by “wolves of memory!” or “Immensements!” – a strange word, borrowed from French, the language of love, simply meaning “immensely”.  (The use of this word a few stanzas below “groping back to bed after a piss” is discordant, indeed, laughable and preposterous.)  At this point, the poem’s tone changes and Larkin’s mockery deepens into something more complex: the moon’s abject haste is both risible but, also, a reminder of the passions of youth.  Viewed in one light, youthful romanticism is laughable.  But it is equally true that the moon’s “stare” (“hard” and “bright” and “stony”) is a reminder of “the strength and pain / Of being young”, yearning that “can’t come again” for poet, but “is for others undiminished somewhere.”  There’s an obscene pun on “can’t come again” – the poet’s genitals are now only good for “pissing.”  This recognition has caused the poet to “shiver slightly”.  With fine delicacy, Larkin shows the poet feeling something that he is only able to put into words a few lines later.  Sensation and emotion come first, then, ratiocination explaining the emotion.  The moon’s singleness is emphasized – the light of the moon is the “singleness of that wide stare.”  (“Singleness” is another incongruous word that echoes the peculiar “immensement.”) Although the moon is a single beacon in the sky, a great eye staring earthward through the detritus of blasted clouds, it’s light has a different meaning to young lovers and old men.  To the young lovers, the moon signifies “pain and strength”, that is, the travails of desire.  To the aging poet, the moon casts a harsh stony light on the barren rooftops and “wedge-shadowed gardens” – an analytical radiance with unmasks the folly of young love, but accords that emotion its own particular dignity.  In this verse, Larkin manages to both praise and mock romantic desire.  This is characteristic for the poet – he is both sardonic about human folly, but still capable of recalling the emotions on which such folly is based.

Ultimately, the poem shows us an arena rendered uncanny by the absence of the poet.  All the insignia of romantic love are invoked but desire “can’t come again...(although) for others undiminished somewhere.”  

3.

A young man who worked as a lawyer in my office put on his wall a framed poster emblazoned with the words “The Man in the Arena”.  This is a well-known desideratum, beginning with the words:

It is not the critic that counts, the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or how the doer of deeds could have done them better.  The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, who’s face is marred with sweat and blood, who strives valiantly...

As ordinarily quoted, the text continues for another four or five inspirational lines and is attributed to Teddy Roosevelt.

The young man who posted these words on his wall was very large with a full black beard.  But, like many big men, he was very cautious, even dainty, and didn’t use his size to intimidate.  He came from Moorhead and had a law degree from the University of Minnesota.  Before going to law school, he had been educated at an expensive private school and must have sang in the college choir because he had an exceedingly sweet tenor voice.  I often heard him singing to himself in his office.  While at work, he listened to classical music that he played very softly on a radio next to his desk.  This big man seemed very gentle and he wasn’t well-suited for the law, not because of his deficit in aggression (mad dogs are aggressive and it’s not necessarily a good quality), but because he seemed dreamy, lost in reverie, and neglected details that were important to the competent performance of his work.  I was dissatisfied with his performance but didn’t intend to encourage his dismissal – indeed, I liked him personally and thought that, with proper mentoring, he might find a niche and become a good lawyer.  When his father died after a protracted illness, the young man lost heart and quit work at our law firm.  He was quickly hired at a law firm in the South Metro, but lasted there only a few months.  

I was always puzzled by the poster inscribed with Roosevelt’s words.  The ringing phrases didn’t seem to describe the young man and were foreign to his character.  Perhaps, he was trying to encourage himself to possess these qualities that were otherwise alien to him; perhaps, he wanted to impress those entering his office with words suggesting fortitude and indomitable resolution; perhaps, the musician in him liked the ring of the words and knew them well because he was from a town on the border with  North Dakota and Teddy Roosevelt is a kind of culture-hero in that State.  I never mentioned the poster to him and didn’t even take the time to read the entirety of the inscription.

Roosevelt spent 1909 in Africa, killing big game.  He returned to the United States via a speaking tour in Europe.  “The Man in the Arena” speech is a fragment from a longer oration called “Citizenship in the Republic” – a harangue delivered at the Sorbonne in April 1910.  Two-thousand people heard the speech and it was instantly famous – five-thousand copies were printed and sold in a few days.  

The speech is an impressive specimen of oratory. Roosevelt starts by outlining the progress of civilization from the medieval founding of the Sorbonne through the conquest of the American West.  He, then, outlines the characteristics required for a citizen in a republic.  The oration is forceful, but politically indistinct – it is not clear whether Roosevelt is speaking as a man of the Left or Right.  In fact, he takes pains to steer a path between “extreme individualism” and “extreme socialism.”  He denounces the “monied interests” and says that successful republics require men with the “will and power to work, and to fight, and to have plenty of children.”  This last factor proclaims Roosevelt’s interest in eugenics, a subject that was important at the time.  Roosevelt says that “the first essential of any civilization is that the man and woman shall be father and mother of healthy children so that the race shall increase and not decrease.”  After outlining other important qualities of the ideal citizen, Roosevelt ends the oration praising France (and its Sorbonne university) for “teaching and uplifting mankind.”  The famous “man in the arena” peroration is only a small part of the speech and occurs near the beginning of the oration.  The burden of this passage is that civilization requires “doers of deeds” although all action is imperfect in achieving its intended effect – but this truth doesn’t warrant timidity and inaction; rather, men must act with the full understanding that they will be criticized for their deeds by those too frightened (or lazy) to act themselves.  

This species of desideratum has probably always existed -- pithy or eloquent statements providing practical advice for success.  A hundred years ago, copies of Kipling’s aspirational poem If adorned the walls of many offices and homes.  In the seventies, posters of an old prose poem by Max Ehrmann were ubiquitous, many of them rendered in beautiful calligraphy.  Ehrmann’s words were simply entitled Desiderata and commence with the famous injunction: 

Go placidly amid the noise and haste and remember what peace there may be in silence...

The text proceeds to give useful advice on various topics, including business dealings and friendship.  Although the prose-poem was written by a Harvard-educated lawyer, the advice has a vaguely Buddhist tone, counseling serenity and peace in the hurly-burly of life.  So, the message was resonant to a generation that had dabbled in Eastern mysticism and regarded peace as an important objective both politically and personally.  In some ways, Desiderata is the opposite of Roosevelt’s pugnacious and bare-knuckled admonitions in the “The Man in the Arena”.  It would be interesting to know if anyone posted the two exhortations side-by-side.

Desiderata was written by Ehrmann before 1927.  Ehrmann lived in Terre Haute, Indiana and was born in 1872.  After attending Harvard, he practiced law in his home-town and was corporate counsel to family enterprises, including a packing plant and factory were overalls were manufactured.  Ehrmann had sent the prose poem to family members in the mid-twenties, printed on Christmas cards.  He never made any money off the text which was reprinted from time to time in collections of aphorisms.

Ehrman died in 1945.  Desiderata was made famous by a recording made in 1971 by Les Crane, a late-night talk show host who was briefly (for about 17 weeks) a competitor to Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show.  Crane’s recording of the prose-poem was successful and, indeed, won a “spoken word” Grammy.  Crane, although forgotten today, had connections extending throughout pop culture.  Casey Khasem credited him with inventing the concept of the “Top 40 most requested (pop) songs.”  

Roosevelt’s “Man in the Arena’ is a celebration of those “who quell the storm and ride the thunder.”  It has inspired people as disparate as Richard Nixon, who quoted the text when he resigned from office, Nelson Mandela, and Miley Cyrus, the pop singer, who has much of the quotation incised by tattoo into her left forearm.  By contrast, I’m not aware of anyone who has endured tattooing of Desiderata into their flesh.  

4.

Outside my window, “after a piss”, I still survey the strange arena made by the street lamps illumining the intersection a lawn away from my bedroom window.  The space between the curbs seems hushed and expectant, waiting for something of consequence to occur.  Perhaps, someone will appear and stand in the forum under the wan orange-yellow light and speak words that the world is waiting to appear.  

The wind rattles in the barren shrubbery. At this hour, even the freeway on the edge of town is silent and there is no rumble on the railroad crossings on the East Side or out in the country.  Cold constellations wheel overhead.

Maybe Vladimir and Estragon will amble on-stage to wait for Godot.  Or, maybe, Robert Johnson will come to this crossroads with only one thin dime in his pocket, ready and willing to exchange with the Devil the only of any value that he possesses.

This is the perdurable world after my death.  The arena remains but the chief actor is missing.