12.3.14

I enjoy conversations that take you places. Not necessarily anything meaningful, mind you, but the kind that makes you think, "how did I get to this topic?"

This morning my spouse wondered aloud, "How did the thumbs'up become the symbol for hitch-hiking?" Initially he had said "universal", but I found out it actually isn't, due to the thumb being a rude gesture in several cultures. I followed this lovely rabbit hole to a Slate article, identifying the symbol's American origins and popularity coming with the rise of the automobile. It had some great literary references, from various magazine articles to The Grapes of Wrath and Looney Tunes. One of the citations was from a poet, Vachel Lindsay, who I had never heard of. I guess that isn't very strange, as author TR Hummer points out in another Slate article: "Even dedicated readers of poetry in our own time can be divided into two groups: those who know Vachel Lindsay and his work, and those who don’t. When I was in my teens and 20s, the first group was by far the larger; now the latter is, and the difference in magnitude between them seems to grow exponentially with every passing year."

Apparently Lindsay fell out of favor in the way some do, because his work is now considered overtly racist. Many books/authors/pieces of that time fell into this category, because unfortunately racist attitudes weren't considered incorrect. Whether he was intentionally or unintentionally racist, his work seems to have fallen out of favor in schools. (We still read Rudyard Kipling, T.S. Eliot, and Orson Scott Card, at least in my childhood, so the wand of favor doesn't seem to be particularly consistent, but that's another thing). The article features this poem from Lindsay: Why I Voted the Socialist Ticket



I am unjust, but I can strive for justice.
My life’s unkind, but I can vote for kindness.
I, the unloving, say life should be lovely.
I, that am blind, cry out against my blindness.

Man is a curious brute—he pets his fancies—
Fighting mankind, to win sweet luxury.
So he will be, though law be clear as crystal,
Tho’ all men plan to live in harmony.

Come, let us vote against our human nature,
Crying to God in all the polling places
To heal our everlasting sinfulness
And make us sages with transfigured faces.


Here is another I liked, in a similar vein of dissatisfaction with our society.



The Voice of a Man Impatient with Visions and Utopias

We find your soft Utopias as white
As new-cut bread, and dull as life in cells,
O, scribes who dare forget how wild we are
How human breasts adore alarum bells.
You house us in a hive of prigs and saints
Communal, frugal, clean and chaste by law.
I’d rather brood in bloody Elsinore
Or be Lear’s fool, straw-crowned amid the straw.
Promise us all our share in Agincourt
Say that our clerks shall venture scorns and death,
That future ant-hills will not be too good
For Henry Fifth, or Hotspur, or Macbeth.
Promise that through to-morrow’s spirit-war
Man’s deathless soul will hack and hew its way,
Each flaunting Caesar climbing to his fate
Scorning the utmost steps of yesterday.
Never a shallow jester any more!
Let not Jack Falstaff spill the ale in vain.
Let Touchstone set the fashions for the wise
And Ariel wreak his fancies through the rain. 


Do you think we ought to stay away from artists or art that doesn't gel with our current mores? Or ought we to challenge ourselves and look towards context, see if there is something to be learned from work we don't agree with?