Yes, I Mean Poetry, Now!
Albrecht Classen
University of Arizona. Email: aclassen@arizona.edu
Volume 12, Number 5, 2020 I Full Text PDF
DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v12n5.rioc1s0n3
Introduction
In a certain way, COVID-19 has forced the world to wake up again and to realize how little we are in control of our own existence. We have increasingly built a world of fantasy on the basis of science and medicine over the last decades or so, but one tiny virus has now brought that house of cards down in an incredibly short period of time, and no end is in sight while I am writing these lines (July 2020). We have been asleep for far too long, dreaming of a bright future in which everything would be possible without any costs to ourselves and the earth. But we live now in the Anthropocene, the new age in which the earth is slowly but certainly getting out of control because of the human impact, while we humans also face the horrifying reality that we are surrounded by an infinite number of viruses that could all become deadly for us.[i] How do we then live under those circumstances, and where do we find ourselves now that we are coming out of these dreams?[ii]
Throughout the centuries, if not millennia, pandemics have raked humanity, taking a huge toll each time, but then people managed somehow to pick up their previous activities and kept living, deeply shaped by the tragedy, but still, living.[iii] However, there were the dead, thousands, if not millions. And the grief, the mourning, the personal suffering, the huge questions, WHY? And, WHAT IS THE PURPOSE of it all? Love or religion did not help to prevent anything, death came and cut down so many people, good ones and bad ones, old and young, men and women, all races, all genders; the grim reaper has never made a difference; it’s only the number that matters, the more the better, at least from death’s perspective. We could almost re-write human history as a history of suffering, of tears, or pain, and question the true nature of the creature we call homo sapiens. All founders of world religions have been deeply moved by this realization and have tried, more or less successfully, to come to terms with these almost quixotic questions. If we have to die anyway, why do we live?[iv] We only need to think of the Crusades, the Hundred Years’ War, the Thirty-Years’ War, World War I and II, the Vietnam War, the Afghanistan wars, the Biafra War, the Kosovo War, the civil war in Syria, the war between Saudi-Arabia and Yemen, and countless other conflicts, and could despair over the endless aggression and hostility in the name of this or that religion, ideology, political claims, or racist notion. It almost seems a miracle that humankind has not yet annihilated itself by now, especially in light of the nuclear threat since the Cold War, a threat that has not effectively been eliminated until today, irrespective of what poets might have said about it ever since the first explosion….FULL TEXT PDF>>
[i]. Michael B. A. Oldstone, Viruses, Plagues, and History: Past, Present, and Future (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010); Michael G. Cordingley, Viruses: Agents of Evolutionary Invention (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017); the current literature on this topic is legion.
[ii]. David Farrier, Anthropocene Poetics: Deep Time, Sacrifice Zones, and Extinction. Posthumanities, 50 (Minneapolis, MN, and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2019); Reinhold Münster, “The Anthropocene, Technology and Fictional Literature,” Humanities 9(3), 56 (2020); https://doi.org/10.3390/h9030056; Gregers Andersen, Climate Fiction and Cultural Analysis: A New Perspective on Life in the Anthropocene. Routledge Environmental Literature, Culture and Media (London and New York: Routledge, 2020).
[iii]. Pandemic Disease in the Medieval World: Rethinking the Black Death, ed. Monica Green. Medieval Globe (Kalamazoo: Arc Medieval Press, 2015); John Aberth, Plagues in World History. Exploring World History (Lanham, Boulder, et al.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2011); Pest: Die Geschichte eines Menschheitstraumas, ed. Mischa Meier (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 2005); Peter C. Doherty, Pandemics. What Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).
[iv]. In the Middle High German verse narrative, “Der arme Heinrich,” by Hartmann von Aue (ca. 1190), the protagonist is destined to die a very early death because of leprosy. A medical doctor down in Salerno, Italy, has told him, however, that if a young nubile virgin were willing to die for him, then her blood could heal him. This is, of course, impossible, but at the end, when Heinrich is awaiting his death while staying with a farmer whom he had granted numerous privileges before, the man’s young daughter learns of this miracle cure and quickly volunteers to die for him so that he could live. Although her parents are horrified about this, she develops such rhetorical skills in justifying her decision that they have to give in, as much as it grieves them deeply. Heinrich also accepts her offer, but just before the doctor is then about to cut open her body to take out her heart, the protagonist peeks through a hole in the wall and suddenly realizes the terrible misdeed that he is about to commit via the doctor. Like in an epiphany, he recognizes the spiritual beauty within and the ugly nature of his body outside, so he forgoes the sacrifice, despite her vehement protests. Amazingly, he is then miraculously healed because God, the speculator cordis (the scrutinizer of the heart), has observed that Heinrich has healed spiritually, which makes it possible for him to return to the living completely recovered in body and mind.
When the girl discusses her decision to sacrifice herself for Heinrich, she explains: “till now worldly desires that lead to hell have not touched me. Now I thank God that in my young days he has given me the good sense to scorn this fragile life completely. I intend to surrender myself into God’s power, pure as I am now. I fear that if I get old, the sweetness of the world will draw me underfoot, as it has drawn very many whom its sweetness has duped. Then I might well be denied to God. . . . Our life and our youth are mist and dust. Our stability trembles like a leaf. He is surely a misguided fool who likes to fill himself with smoke . . . who cannot grasp this and who pursues the world; for a silk cloth is spread over the fool dung before us. He whom the splendor seduces is born for hell and has lost nothing less than both soul and body.” The Complete Works of Hartmann von Aue, trans. with commentary by Frank Tobin, Kim Vivian, and Richard H. Lawson (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001), 225. I have argued before that the young woman actually symbolizes Heinrich’s soul, and only when he accepts his spiritual and material side as a holistic whole, can he live fully. Albrecht Classen, “Herz und Seele in Hartmanns von Aue “Der arme Heinrich.” Der mittelalterliche Dichter als Psychologe?,” Mediaevistik 14 (2003): 7-30; id., “Utopian Space in the Countryside: Love and Marriage Between a Knight and a Peasant Girl in Medieval German Literature. Hartmann von Aue’s Der arme Heinrich, Anonymous, ‘Dis ist von dem Heselin,’ Walther von der Vogelweide, Oswald von Wolkenstein, and Late-Medieval Popular Poetry,” Rural Space in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Age: The Spatial Turn in Premodern Studies, ed. Albrecht Classen, with the collaboration of Christopher R. Clason. Fundamentals of Medieval and Early Modern Culture, 9 (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2012), 251-79.