La Cucaracha

A HOUSE WHERE ALL'S ACCUSTOMED, CEREMONIOUS

~ A Favorite Game of Childhood ~

~~~~~~~

First they came for the Socialists,
and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a communist.
Then they came for the communists,
and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a communist.
Then they came for the socialists,
and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a socialist.
Then they came for the trade unionists,
and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews,
and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a Jew.
Then they came for the Catholics,
and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a Catholic.
Then they came for me,
and there was no one left to speak for me.

Paraphrased from the lectures of
Lutheran minister Martin Niemöller (1892-1984),
spoke against Hitler and was imprisoned
who in concentration camps from 1937 - 42
Whenever I hear these lines from Niemöller, I am reminded of the following poems by Muriel Rukeyser. And I was reminded of them again this weekend in connection with the hugely popular Purdue Bug Bowl -- a giant science / fun fair, held every spring, where they are more than decent to cockroaches, and insects are king!

What Do We See?
When they’re decent about women, they’re frightful about children,
When they’re decent about children, they’re rotten about artists,
When they’re decent about artists, they’re vicious about whores,
What do we see? What do we not see?

When they’re kind to whores, they’re death on communists,
When they respect communists, they’re foul to bastards,
When they’re human to bastards, they mock at hysterectomy-
What do we see? What do we not see?

When they’re decent about surgery, they bomb the Vietnamese,
When they’re decent to Vietnamese, they’re frightful to police,
When they’re human to police, they rough up lesbians,
What do we see? What do we not see?

When they’re decent to old women, they kick homosexuals,
When they’re good to homosexuals, they can’t stand drug people,
When they’re calm about drug people, they hate all Germans,
What do we see? What do we not see?

Cadenza for the reader

When they’re decent to Jews, they dread the blacks,
When they know blacks, there’s always something : roaches
And the future and children and all potential. Can’t stand themselves
Will we never see? Will we ever know?

by Muriel Rukeyser
from Breaking Open, 1973

In "What Do We See," Rukeyser is willing to count everyone in. Her pattern of inclusiveness extends to all the groups she can think of who are regularly subject to oppression and exclusion. In an ideal world, no group or individual would suffer discrimination for her being or her beliefs; yet the poet is realistic, realizing that even if in theory everyone is accepted, in practice this is almost never so. If we bring ourselves at last to take all human beings on their own terms, we'll balk at something else.


Cockroach, Periplaneta americana
Pushing the limits of tolerance, Rukeyser concludes with an invitation to consider the cockroach. Could we go that far? Can we overcome the words we were taught to sing as children:

La Cucaracha, La Cucaracha!
Me, I love you not at all!
To be fair, the roach is merely another living creature, trying to do its job on the planet, just as we are trying to do ours. In much the same context, Rukeyser expands upon the roach image in a later poem, "St. Roach," testing the reader's ability to empathize with the outgroup, the other. The poem begins with a lament for closemindedness:

St. Roach
For that I never knew you, I only learned to dread you,
for that I never touched you, they told me you are filth,
they showed me by every action to despise your kind;
for that I saw my people making war on you,
I could not tell you apart, one from another,
for that in childhood I lived in places clear of you,
for that all the people I knew met you by
crushing you, stamping you to death, they poured boiling
water on you, they flushed you down,
for that I could not tell one from another
only that you were dark, fast on your feet, and slender.
Not like me.
For that I did not know your poems
And that I do not know any of your sayings
And that I cannot speak or read your language
And that I do not sing your songs
And that I do not teach our children
to eat your food
or know your poems
or sing your songs
But that we say you are filthing our food
But that we know you not at all.

Yesterday I looked at one of you for the first time.
You were lighter than the others in color, that was
neither good nor bad.

I was really looking for the first time.
You seemed troubled and witty.

Today I touched one of you for the first time.
You were startled, you ran, you fled away
Fast as a dancer, light, strange and lovely to the touch.
I reach, I touch, I begin to know you.

by Muriel Rukeyser
from The Gates, 1976 (McGraw-Hill)

Any discussion of the poetic cockroach must include at least a nod to poor Gregor Samsa who is certainly troubled but beyond all wit. Rejected by all who know him, he is a victim of the disregard and loathing that Rukeyser describes. Untouchable.

On the witty side is Archy, the clever typing (all lower case) cockroach (and his friend Mehitabel the cat) created by humorist Don Marquis. Perhaps not as well known today, Archy was everyone's favorite cockroach when I was growing up:

He was literary:

" . . . the main question is
whether the stuff is
literature or not"

romantic:

"when the pendant moon in the leafless tree
clings and sways like a golden bat
i sing its light and my love for thee
. . . us for the life romantic"

wise:

" . . . there is always some
little thing that is too
big for us every
goliath has his david and so on ad finitum

pithy:

"procrastination is the
art of keeping
up with yesterday"

witty:

"to hell with anything unrefined
has always been my motto"

perceptive:

" . . . the lyric and imperial
attitude
believe that everything is for
you until you discover
that you are for it"

cosmic:

"I find it possible to forgive
the universe
i meet it in a give and take spirit
although i do wish
that it would consult me at times"

opinionated:

" . . . i hate one of these
grinning skipping smirking
senseless optimists worse
than i do a cynic or a
pessimist"

and just:

" . . . i would not consider
it honorable in me as a
righteous cockroach to crawl into a
near sighted man s soup . . . "

from
Archy and Mehitabel




A troop of clever cockroaches, perhaps not as wise as Archy but equally entertaining, appear in T. S. Eliot's Book of Practical Cats. The Old Gumbie Cat takes it upon herself to domesticate the roaches and put them to use around the house:


Postcard by dosankodebbie
These cartoonish cockroaches are fun, but it is Rukeyser's "St. Roach" and "What Do We See" that really ask if we are capable of overcoming prejudice and modifying our behavior. Can we open our hearts to the cockroach and grant it the title of "Saint"? A tall order, but something to think about.

What do we see?
What do we not see?
Will we never see?
Will we ever know?
In closing, thanks to Eileen Sheryl Hammer who said,
"We love Muriel, who understands what our world is made of!"

Previous References to Muriel Rukeyser
on this blog:
Icarus, Who Really Fell
Lot's Wife, Who Gave Her Life For a Single Glance
and coming next time: When the Iris Blows Blue

and on my daily blog The Quotidian Kit
All the Little Animals
Another Good Poem by Muriel Rukeyser
The Wrong Answer


SEE YOU IN TWO WEEKS FOR MY
Next Fortnightly Post
Sunday, April 28th

Between now and then, read
THE QUOTIDIAN KIT
my shorter, almost daily blog posts
www.dailykitticarriker.blogspot.com

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The Little Door

A HOUSE WHERE ALL'S ACCUSTOMED, CEREMONIOUS

Carriage House in University City, West Philadelphia
Here is the Little Door
Lift up the latch; O lift!
We need not wander more,
but enter with our gift . . . "
~ Chesterton

"Strive to enter through
the narrow door:
for many, I tell you,
will try to enter
and will not be able."
~ Luke 13: 22

[L: The Cutest Playhouse
in all of Philadelphia!]


There are numerous symbolic doors in literature: opening, closing, revolving, inviting, forbidding, remaining locked forever. As I read on a poster once, "There are as many doors as there are desires." Here are four of the most meaningful doors that I have come across in my reading:

1. In Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird,
a door representing one's own humanity:

"We write to expose the unexposed. If there is one door in the castle you have been told not to go through, you must. Otherwise, you'll just be rearranging furniture in the rooms you've already been in. Most human beings are dedicated to keeping that one door shut. But the writer's job is to see what's behind it, to see the bleak unspeakable stuff, and to turn the unspeakable into words -- not just any words but if we can, into rhythm and blues.

"You can't do this without discovering your own true voice, and you can't find your true voice and peer behind the door and report honestly and clearly to us if your parents are reading over your shoulder. They are probably the ones who told you not to open that door in the first place. . . .

"'Why, though?' my students ask, staring at me intently. 'Why are we supposed to open all these doors? Why are we supposed to tell the truth in our own voice?'

. . . And it's wonderful to watch someone finally open that forbidden door that has kept him or her away. What gets exposed is not people's baseness but their humanity. It turns out that the truth, or reality, is our home" (198 - 200).

2. In Edna St. Vincent Millay's sonnet "Bluebeard,"
a door representing privacy:

This door you might not open, and you did;
So enter now, and see for what slight thing
You are betrayed…. Here is no treasure hid,
No cauldron, no clear crystal mirroring
The sought-for truth, no heads of women slain
For greed like yours, no writhings of distress,
But only what you see…. Look yet again—
An empty room, cobwebbed and comfortless.
Yet this alone out of my life I kept
Unto myself, lest any know me quite;
And you did so profane me when you crept
Unto the threshold of this room to-night
That I must never more behold your face.
This now is yours. I seek another place.

Lamott's words give me courage when my self - editor starts taking over. Her metaphor reminds the writer that keeping a lock on the door does not guarantee safety. Any more than opening it wide insures disaster. In fact, opening up may well put you in less danger, not more. So go ahead and grant yourself the freedom of self - acceptance. However, as Millay warns, just don't go bashing down doors that aren't yours to open. That's not the path to authenticity or humanity.

3. In Franz Kafka's parable, "Before the Law,"
a door representing the Law:

"Before the law sits a gatekeeper. To this gatekeeper comes a man from the country who asks to gain entry into the law. But the gatekeeper says that he cannot grant him entry at the moment. . . . the law should always be accessible for everyone, he thinks, but . . . he decides that it would be better to wait until he gets permission to go inside. The gatekeeper gives him a stool and allows him to sit down at the side in front of the gate. There he sits for waiting for days and years."

Nearing the end of his life, the man asks the gatekeeper, "so how is that in these many years no one except me has requested entry?” And the gatekeeper answers: “Here no one else can gain entry, since this entrance was assigned only to you. I’m going now to close it.” Can it be true? Following the parable, a discussion of its meaning takes place between K and a priest. The priest points out that perhaps the Door Before the Law can never be shut, and he reminds K that when the man "sits down on the stool by the side the door and stays there for the rest of his life, he does it of his own free will."

Of course my sympathy always lies with the Man Before the Law, never with the bossy, small-minded gatekeeper. Yet I can't shake my mixed feelings about the man's predicament. Yes, the Law can be contrary; we all know that. But how can he allow himself to sit so quietly, never growing impatient at the waiting, the impotence, the lack of useful information? Why doesn't his reach exceed his grasp? It should.

4. In E. B. White's essay, "The Door,"
a door representing (in)sanity:

"First they would teach you the prayers and the Psalms, and that would be the right door(the one with the circle) and the long sweet words with the holy sound, and that would be the one to jump at to get where the food was. Then one day you jumped and it didn't give way, so that all you got was the bump on the nose, and the first bewilderment, the first young bewilderment. . . .

"You wouldn't want me, standing here, to tell you, would you, about my friend the poet (deceased) who said, 'My heart has followed all my days something I cannot name'? (It had the circle on it.) And like many poets, although few so beloved, he is gone. It killed him, the jumping. First, of course, there were the preliminary bouts, the convulsions, and the calm and the willingness.

"I remember the door with the picture of the girl on it (only it was spring), her arms outstretched in loveliness, her dress (it was the one with the circle on it) uncaught, beginning the slow, clear, blinding cascade-and I guess we would all like to try that door again, for it seemed like the way and for a while it was the way, the door would open and you would go through winged and exalted (like any rat) and the food would be there, the way the Professor had it arranged, everything O.K., and you had chosen the right door for the world was young. The time they changed that door on me, my nose bled for a hundred hours--how do you like that, Madam? Or would you prefer to show me further through this so strange house, or you could take my name and send it to me, for although my heart has followed all my days something I cannot name, I am tired of the jumping and I do not know which way to go, Madam, and I am not even sure that I am not tired beyond the endurance of man (rat, if you will) and have taken leave of sanity. What are you following these days, old friend, after your recovery from the last bump? What is the name, or is it something you cannot name?"

If you have a moment, to read the entire essay, you'll find an eerily broken-hearted description of the disjunction between perception and reality. I have kept it in my folder of favorites for many years, something to reread periodically as I follow my own heart's quest for something I cannot name. As radio / telvision personality Clifton Fadiman summed it up, "E. B. White [better known as the author of Charlotte's Web] never again wrote anything like 'The Door.' Nobody has done so."

To conclude, I'll tag on a couple of German vocabulary words whose connection you will appreciate: the first, weltschmerz, particularly in relation to E. B. White's essay of pain and distortion; the second, torschlusspanik, to Kafka's Man Before the Law whose doomed life illustrates the very concept:

weltschmerz (VELT-shmerts) noun meaning world-pain or world weariness; pessimism, apathy, or sadness felt at the difference between physical reality and the ideal state.

torschlusspanik (TOR - schluss - panic) noun describing the door-shutting panic experienced at the thought that a door between oneself and life's opportunities is closing forever.

DON'T FORGET TO
CHECK BACK FOR MY
Next Fortnightly Post
Saturday, August 14, 2010

Between now and then, read
THE QUOTIDIAN KIT
my shorter, almost daily blog posts
www.dailykitticarriker.blogspot.com

Looking for a good book? Try
KITTI'S LIST
my running list of recent reading
www.kittislist.blogspot.com