Poetry, Soporific and Stimulating

Today, David Paterson, the governor of New York, gave the state of the state address. I have to admit that I’m usually impressed by Paterson. He walks through crowds unassisted even though he’s almost totally blind. Because of that affliction, he also can’t read a TelePrompTer and must memorize all of his speeches. He doesn’t give those speeches perfectly—today he used the phrase “the living and the dud”—but he give a speech about as flawless as someone reading a speech. And he can be surprising. Today he surprised me by reciting a section of the poem “Opportunity” but a poet I had never heard of, Edward Rowland Sill. He explained having had learned the poem as a student, which might explain why he thought this poem good enough to mention out loud:

This I beheld, or dreamed it in a dream:—
There spread a cloud of dust along a plain;
And underneath the cloud, or in it, raged
A furious battle, and men yelled, and swords
Shocked upon swords and shields. A prince’s banner
Wavered, then staggered backward, hemmed by foes.
A craven hung along the battle’s edge,
And thought, “Had I a sword of keener steel—
That blue blade that the king’s son bears, — but this
Blunt thing—!” he snapt and flung it from his hand,
And lowering crept away and left the field.
Then came the king’s son, wounded, sore bestead,
And weaponless, and saw the broken sword,
Hilt-buried in the dry and trodden sand,
And ran and snatched it, and with battle-shout
Lifted afresh he hewed his enemy down,
And saved a great cause that heroic day.

Somehow, this fairly terrible poem was supposed to arouse passion and the will to fight in us New Yorkers—Paterson even dramatically repeated lines of it at the end of the speech, as a rallying cry. But I was long gone before then.

I was watching the state of the state address in the Carole F. Huxley Theatre nestled within the New York State Museum, and a couple of dozen staff members were in the audience with me watching the huge projection screen. As I watched the speech, I noted that it was a standard “state of the” speech, consisting of a seemingly random sequence of things that were wrong with the state and positive actions we could take in the coming year—some of the latter even related to the former. Even with Paterson’s signature quips, the speech was too lacking in substance to keep me awake, and I fell asleep for a few seconds. Realizing I’d fall back to sleep if I didn’t take drastic action, I decided I had to

Geof Huth, “boring is it not?” (7 January 2009)
start creating fidgetglyphs. Since fidgetglyphs are influenced by the world around me, the first fidgetglyph, the first of the year, begins with the word “boring.” I like the style of the wrawing, and I’m sure it’s a bit too difficult to read.

Geof Huth, “What Li.e.s before us?” (7 January 2009)
The second fidgetglyph is a shorter one (textually, at least) that puns on its central word, “Lies” (spelled with a backwards L as “Li.e.S”).

Neither of these fidgetglyphs seems to lead anywhere, to answer a question, to ask a question, to finish a sentence. But that is how they mean and are supposed to mean. They are simply suggestion, against which we must do our thinking. I know I’ve already done some thinking against them—and I’d keep doing that right now if I didn’t think I might fall asleep if I did.

ecr. l’inf.