Fanning - The Middle Ages

THE MIDDLE AGES THE MIDDLE AGES Roger Fanning PENGUIN POETS PENGUIN BOOKS Published by the Penguin Group Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street,
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Johannesburg 2196, South Africa Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England First published in Penguin Books 2012 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2 Copyright Roger Fanning, 2012 All rights reserved Page 95 constitutes an extension of this copyright page. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA Fanning, Roger. The middle ages / Roger Fanning. p. cm.

ISBN: 978-1-101-57725-7 I. Title. PS3556.A49M53 2012 811.54dc23 2011034502 Printed in the United States of America Set in Trump Mediaeval LT Std Designed by Catherine Leonardo Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publishers prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser. The scanning, uploading and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the authors rights is appreciated.

ALWAYS LEARNING PEARSON Thank you Paul Slovak, Jim Backstrom, Heather McHugh, Brooks Haxton, Kathy Wright, and Henry Fanning When you visualized a man or woman carefully, you could always begin to feel pitythat was a quality Gods image carried with it. When you saw the lines at the corners of the eyes, the shape of the mouth, how the hair grew, it was impossible to hate. Hate was just a failure of imagination. Graham Greene

Fed up with Seattles coffee jitters, Star Trek fans, and flame tattoos, a semi-Luddite I tromp my boots on the arboretum boardwalk, going fishing. I feel better once Im squinching a hook through a worm. As for you, perch, creampuff among convicts, preferring not to struggle when caught, Ill take solace from your no ms, no ms.

Meantime, the bobber: trembles and blips tough to decipher, befuzzed, like radio signals from Liechtenstein, or moon-bounced messages on a Ouija board, as waterweeds go back and forth, back and forth like snoring. Thus the deadpans of fishermen. Hard to tell if the two on the bank are friends or not till one speaks up, and the other laughs so ruefully I see the chockablock city skyline as busted teeth, I see the beatitudes ruined mouth, as the small fry nibble, undecided.

Between TV and computer screens counterfeiting a dragon glow in our mouths agog and fundamentalists dreaming up real fire and smoke to transmogrify the U.S.A., we may be on our way to something else, as people in the Middle Ages sensed the decay of the feudal system. Little orange mushrooms sprouted from castle mortar and lilies festered, till BOOM, the Gutenberg Bible blew the roof off the church. In 1620 F. In 1620 F.

Bacon posited three inventions as the high tech hocus-pocus behind societys sea change: printing, gunpowder, and the magnet. Thats right, the magnet. Used in compasses, it made heavenly bodies obsolete, thus exploration of the New World easy as pie. I mention in passing Columbuss packs of Mastiffs and Greyhounds trained on human flesh (brown), but the main needle that guides my life is the needle of debt. True North: My Mortgage. I find myself thinking of Las Vegas, where I might bathe in lilac neon and wander palaces, tickled by the bickering roulette wheels and the final clicks.

And get free drinks. And catch a lion act. And I would turn my back on all that, sagely, and walk out in the desert, letting my crows feet crinkle ironically. Out in the desert at sunset the wind must sequin up a sandgrain or two, and the prodigal pruneface moon appear above a dune. Beautiful. Poignant as hell.

And I bet you can hear, far-off, barking Lotto numbers the Beast of the Apocalypse. Yes, yes, a Vegas vacation might be just the thing. Yes, but I recall my childhood most keenly: Hansel and Gretels predicament: luminous breadcrumbs one by one blinking out, a bird too dark to be seen.

Possessed of a Red Ryder BB gun, I liked to hunt; that is, I liked to be calmer than usual, watchful in the woods behind our house. We lived near a Navy base, outside which a billboard blared PLEASE PARDON OUR NOISE, IT IS THE SOUND OF FREEDOM. And when the fighter jets of the hellfire decibels did screech overhead, they halfwitted the rabbits and birds below.

The jets gave you a chance to scuttle within range of any blank-eyed, briefly deaf creature you chose. And in the conspicuous quiet afterward you could aim. My brain at such times mustve resembled one of Uncle Miltons Ant Farms, intricate and busy, only the ants had names like Cruelty and Tenderness and Self-RighteousnessI even thought Cowardice had a part to playactors in a teeming allegory, lets say. Yes. And how would I now name my actions on a given day, cruel or tender or self-congratulatory? Did I pull the trigger and feel sick at my stomach, or did I not pull the trigger and still feel sick at my stomach? I refuse to say. I refuse to tell that sort of story.

Sometimes the sound of freedom is a loud silence, an angry silence in which the hero sets his stubbled jaw (or his peachfuzz jaw, as the case may be), listening to the hackle-raising roar of untold hormones, my nations and my own.

(Shoes and socks: Is the CIA agent wearing socks or not? How can one be ironic about socks? Ask somebody McHemingway, ask somebody subterfuge.) Ask the desert dwellers, the most eloquent, least ironic of people, according to Yeats. The emptiness of the desert makes lush their language, an oasis of words. Bush the Father and Bush the Son, Bushdog, Bushpig the signs in Pakistan Day-Glo, without irony, bobbing in a mob. They want George W.s head on a stick! But What is rhetoric but the will trying to do the work of the imagination?, Yeats also says.

Which leads to the work of the hands, the Book of Job adds. George W.s revenge rhetoric begat bravery and grand debacle. Lets emphasize the bravery. (And, on an apolitical note, I pray Jesus silence the voices in my head. They goaded me to slash a savage confusion of something like quotation marks into my wrists, apotheosis of irony.)

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