The Arsonist

 

by Brett Rutherford

     Adapted from Victor Hugo, l’Année Terrible, “June 1870”

One strides before me with a flaming brand.
I call him back. He turns and faces me. I ask,
“Are you the one who just burned down
     the library of the Louvre?”
He wipes his brow, puts down the torch,
extends a fraternal hand toward me.
“Yes, sir,” he says. “That fire you see,
was nearly all my work.” My hand
does all it can to not become a fist.

“But that’s a crime!” I shout. “Incredible!
A crime against yourself, an infamy.
In that black smoke, the ray of your soul
has been extinguished. The very torch
you held so proudly up is canceled
by the horror of what you have done.
What have you burned in this mad rage?
Your property! Your honor! Your dowry!
The whole of your inheritance!”

He would race on; I stop him.
Hands on his shoulders, man-to-man,
I must, I must, I must
     get through to him somehow.

He waits me out, he knows enough
to understand respect
for a distraught old poet, at least.
So I do my best to explain.

“Some of those books
were your masters’ worst enemies.
They worked to your advantage.
The book has always taken up your cause.
What is a library but an act of faith
that darker times invest against the coming sun?
By telling the truth, they bear witness for us.

“What seems to you a tomb to desecrate,
is a living repertory, a mass of truths,
out down in masterpieces so fine
that lightning and clarity spark out from them.
Out of the centuries the speak; they tell
of ancient men, in histories that spell
a warning to the future. And in the poets,
thoughts that first came and never ceased
to echo, live on and on. Bibles die here,
lost in the abyss with a thousand authors,
Homers and Aeschyluses, Shakespeares and Jobs,
far off the upper-shelf horizon; they led the way
to Molière, Voltaire and Kant.
Into Reason itself you cast your wretched,
flaming torch, the human spirit up in smoke!

“Books liberate men. Have you forgotten this?
One book can stand above the human fray.
It glows with its own light. Because it shines
its pure white beam of reason, the scaffolds
fall, wars stop, and famine is averted.
A book well-read ends slavery, calls home
the outcasts whom ignorance banished.

“Just open a book. Plato, Milton, Beccaria.
Prophetic texts! Dante, or Shakespeare, or Corneille;
the great soul that dwells within them
awakens in you. Dazzled, you feel transformed.
You tread their steps and think their thoughts,
as though you had been, all along, one person.
Reading makes you serious, thoughtful, and kind.

“You are quite young. Perhaps you doubt ideas
can leap from a page into your own being.
The great men past await your company,
the same way dawn gold-lights a cloister.
Ideas plunge deep into your understanding.
Their warm rays soothe and quicken you.
Your hesitating soul gains confidence.

“At last you recognize yourself as good,
and capable of better — old prides and furies,
evils and prejudices, even the obeisance
you once gave to kings and emperors
melt off like snow at the start of spring,
all because knowing pushes fear aside.

“Then freedom comes.
     Yours were this light and glory,
yours between those walls of stone,
and it’s you who have blacked them out!
All that you dreamt of ever being —
some book in there could show the way.
Books read and thought about
     sever the Gordian knots
that error and truth were tangled in.
Doctor, guide, and guardian, a book!
One would have healed your hatred,
     another your madness —
Not yours! Not now! And it is all your fault!

The book is your wealth. Where but from here
do knowledge, law, truth, virtue, and duty,
progress, and reason, dispel delirium?
How could you have done this? Answer me!”

This is, in so many words,
     what I try to tell him.
The Arsonist regards me. He looks
half-mad, half-god. My words
have stunned him. As eye to eye
he keeps my gaze, he answers:

“No one ever taught me
     how to read.”

I Have No Anger

by Brett Rutherford

After Victor Hugo, l’Année Terrible, “June 1871”

 

I have no anger, and that surprises you.
Your tiny cough is supposed to sound
like thunder. You growl, and puff away
to make your pale lantern flare, and I
am supposed to feel lightning at my heels.

For all the trouble you take
     to get my attention,
I scarcely notice you’re there.

You, self-styled villain, you sense
there is something in me that forgives you,
and that is like a slap to your face.
In fact, you are already punished
     for the mere act of wanting
          so much to hurt another.

It’s pitiful. Worse yet,
     when in a gang you plot
another’s downfall,
     and attempt to achieve it,
even the honor of a kick is denied you.
That hurts:
     the insignificance of hatred.
Not even a slap in the face in return
for all that plotting — imagine that!

Sometimes the outcast falls, and still
does not acknowledge what was done,
or by whose conniving he was attacked.
He acts as though nothing has happened.

And if the thinker appears to be disturbed,
it is not about you. He has the business
of the universe on this mind, you know.

Will I be irritated, then?
     I doubt I even know
the names of the ones attacking me.

We pensive outcasts
     may seem uncultured.
Before we get angry
     on hearing an insult,
we stop to look down
     at what is beneath us:

down there, among the ants,
     that buzzing sound,
a blur of eye-stalks and tentacles,
tiny, segmented minions
     with a hundred legs.
These are the ones
who have declared war on us,
a centipede conspiracy!

 

 

 

In Good Company (A Letter)

by Brett Rutherford

Adapted from Victor Hugo, l'Annee Terrible, "June 1871"

Dear lady,
     I say that what I did was good.
And I was punished for it.
That seems to be the order of things.
You, who were so valiant,
     calm and charming,
in the terrible siege and the grim ordeal,
braving this hideous war
     and the hurricane of crime
          that followed it,
beauteous soul
     that heaven made sister
of another lofty soul, my friend,
wife of that proud and gentle thinker
     whose guest I was;
you, who always knew when to give
     support, and how,
you should see what has happened to me!

 

To name a few events:
You saw me return to France,
     almost an apotheosis,
now you see me chased away, reviled.
From that to this, and in less than a year.
Things change so suddenly,
     and for the worse.
Rome, Athens, and Zion endured such times.
Paris has the same right to save itself.
In other places, they have lacked the nerve.
Which ones? No matter. Spare Montague,
and Capulet calls it a crime. Yet Capulet,
given the stronger place, abuses it.

In the same kind of war of factions,
I am now an old buzzard, a criminal.

So be it. Today they insult me, the very
ones who cheered me on a year ago.

Maybe the purpose
     of my late-in-life acclaim,
was to be toppled and taught a lesson.
Not much of a triumph, eh? Does one
in its flimsiness warrant the other’s cruelty?

Madame, I think I have a heart like yours,
the same as those around you, whose minds
sustained by one another, are never dark.
Does the robe of the old outcast fit me best?
Can you bear again to see me this way?
Defending the people, and fighting off
the priests: I would do it again.
Isn’t the abyss a beautiful place to be,
considering the good company?
I am down here with Barbes and Garibaldi,
and I think you like me better since my fall.

So This Is Exile

 by Brett Rutherford

 

     After Victor Hugo, l’Annee Terrible, “June 1871”

 

V

The narrow path is not an easy one.
Ah! Just try it for a while. It takes
a special daring to prove the crowd wrong,
to be upright in one’s own soul
     and stay that way,
to guard the universal sense of right
when all around you trample and bruise it.

When one who tries this is declared “outlaw,”
the outlaw is rewarded with as much
of this thing called exile that the law allows.
You do not exile just anyone you please.
Not house-arrest and not imprisonment,
this punishment is inexpressible,
a terrible and almost holy thing.

 

How many will come and stare
at the front door of your remembered home?
How many, from afar, will squint and scan
the eaves of your old roof, and ask, “Where is he?”
Will there even be an acceptable
reply, that is not a lie, or an evasion?
Imagine him in some desert place, alone,
or crowded in where every step is watched
and no one is allowed to say his name?
What’s on his mind, in a place
where his native tongue is seldom spoken?
The flower he picked with a childish hand?
A dark street corner that one furtive glance
imbued with a spell that would never quite fade?
Old times and lessons learned in school?
Old dawns, fields that were greener then
with far more sonorous birds?
A certain blend of sky and cloud
that curtained one place, and no other?
To learn, by hear-say only
of those who died in his absence,
their bedside unattended, tombs
he would never see as moss
and vines erase familiar names.
This is exile.

 

Exile is a water-torture, infamous,
a timid executioner’s delight,
pangs to the heart
as granite of duty,
rings with the falling drops
and erodes away.

 

Exile is a compound-interest penalty
inflicted on the innocent and just,
so under Tarquin, or Augustus Caesar,
or Bonaparte, condemned men die
because they are innocent and just.

 

Exile, a place of shadow and longing,
is a dimly-seen mist, an expanding silence
made up of stolen glimpses,
     snatches of song and bird-call,
a dark wood glimpsed, a reef
that is there one day and gone the next,
     a breath, a sourceless sound,
all closing in upon a pensive brow.
Oh!  Tell him his homeland still exists!
(This being true is the most terrible fact of all.)

 

By an invisible thread our homeland holds us,
     the one thing which, once lost,
retains its charm for us forever.
The fields of one place only
     seem to belong to us,
its trees not shaped like any others,
     its riverbanks, its lowering sky —
this place alone brings back our steps.

 

Homeless, we shall forever wander,
and if some foreign king should banish us,
     we slough it off,
for banishment is not an exile.

Exile is a form of death,
     taken in slices of clock and calendar,
some letters unsent,
     and many more undelivered.
Alive at his desk with pen in hand,
his words must issue forth so fast
the censors cannot catch and cancel them.

Each exile, unique and solitary,
is given a chance for immortal glory.
As for the kings and tyrants,
full half or more of them are dust,
names scarcely recalled
in the cavalcade of idiots.

I Have No Episcopal Palace

by Brett Rutherford

Adapted from Victor Hugo, l’Annee Terrible, “June 1871”

 

I have no episcopal palace in town.
I have no stipend or government salary.
My humility is not offered up a throne
within a temple of stone. No stern
Swiss guards stand watch on either side
of me. I do not go daily forth
beneath a four-plumed canopy,
watched by the wide-eyed imbeciles.
France, even now in its abysmal low,
is still for me defined
by the labor of one great people
from whom the great law emerges.

 

I hate to see my nation bound and gagged,
or covered all over with dainty fleur-de-lys.
I do not tell church visitors
     they haven’t seen Christ
until they’ve paid to see the Van Dyck painting.
My holy place suffices to itself.
Churchwardens and beadles frown not there;
trustees, custodians, and clerks
     neither annoy nor admonish me.
Deacons and vicars I pass on by.
I have no Saints, nor even part of one
     stiffed into a reliquary,
nor under lock and key some flask
     purporting a miracle.
My robe is not festooned with diamonds,
and no one pays me by the line for prayers.

 

At court, I am not really presentable.
It baffles me that dowagers admire
some fellow begging pennies with a wooden bowl.
With no gold cope around my neck,
nor a gleaming miter atop my head,
I have no good women hand-kissing me.
I may have had a glimpse of heaven once;
no fold of bleating lambs it seemed.
The way in was narrow, and I had no key.
No one calls me Monseigneur.
I am out in the fields a lot; incense
is not the whiff you would get from me.
My dresser has no purple stockings.

 

Yes, I have made mistakes,
     each one an act sincerely made.
I keep hypocrisy apart from me:
the things I say are what I think.
I put imprisoned Socrates
     right next to Jesus on his cross.

When, hunted like a beast, a man
cries out, I save him if I can.
If he was my enemy,
     must he remain forever so?
I despise Basil, and disdain Scapin.

 

I give the hungry child some bread.
I fought for what was true, and good,
and honest; and in the howling storm
I suffered two decades’ exile.
God willing, I will start again
tomorrow. And when that voice in me
says “Forward!”, that way I go.
The wind may go against me, but I go.
Because I do my duty thus,
the Bishop of Ghent, bless his heart,
writes here in today’s newspaper
that if I am not indeed a madman,
I should be called a bandit.

 

Holy Water Like a Hail of Stones

by Brett Rutherford

     Adapted from Victor Hugo, l'Annee Terrible, "June 1871"

IV

Was it something I said?
When from my house I offered up
the concept of clemency,
I brought upon myself this town’s
idea of a serenade.
What a sweet romance they bring me,
a chorus whose boisterous refrain
is “Kill him! Kill him now!”

 

The morning news is full of it,
the priestly journals especially
fill columns with a frightening mess
of hateful invective — This man,
who calls himself a poet, of all things,
dares to take pity on a fleeing enemy!

 

The audacity! He takes
our own Christian welcome literally.
He dares us! The ones above
are angry over this;
even the middle class gets riled
(foam bubbles forth
     from their clenched lips).

 

The squires and sacristans
run in the streets like dog-packs.
A waving censer becomes a David sling;
its missile cracks my tiles.
They pray, and from the ends
of bottle-brushes the Holy Water
descends on me like hailstones.
I am so thoroughly exorcised
that they have almost killed me
(or so they would have it,
imagining me belly-full
of demons and mortal sins).

 

In short, and by the grace of God,
I am expelled. To make their point,
the rabble are now shouting
“Get out of town!” adds to the rain
with paving-stones hurled hard
against my closed-up window shutters.
So— man stones! So many styles,
a mason’s gazetteer of Brussels.
I am dazzled as the projectiles fly —
not since the Crusades
has the sky been so assaulted
with rock and point and pike!

 

My name is called, repeated.
When I do not show myself,
an alarm bell rings incessantly
but fails to summon a single
constable. More crowds arrive.

“Brigand!” they shout.

(Has this hand ever threatened another?)
“Incendiary! Arsonist!” they howl.
(It is all I can do to light a fireplace!)
“Assassin! Assassin!” — that hissing lie.
(No death has ever come from my hand!)

 

Now they are gone,
     and we are safe inside.
The notable battle colors us:
they, so true and good, as white
     as a murder of crows, and me,
as black as a solitary, gliding swan.

Some Kind of Monster

 by Brett Rutherford

 

Adapted from Victor Hugo, l’Année Terrible, “June 1871”

 

Some want to call me a chimera,
that impossible monster compiled
of bits and scraps of various beasts,
and why? Because I remain fraternal.
To dream of a Europe as free
as the far-flung states of America,
to demand fairness, the examination
of facts and science; indeed, to reason,
makes other say you live in clouds,
your words as meaningless as wind-gusts;
who, witnessing a vast
     and harsh triumph,
refuses to exult, raising his hand
against the worse of two evils,
to lessen on every side the misery.
What am I, then, a monster,
unwilling as I am to sweep aside
the unhappy multitude, to offer up
to butchery one man to another,
or to deny asylum to those condemned to die.

 

What kinds of beasts am I amalgam’d from,
refusing to press upon the weak and blind,
and, as I have a forgiving nature,
will they write me out of evolution’s tree?

 

If I say that we owe the just
     and common law to all,
excepting not the brigands
or the bandits who lurk
at every crossroads, then I
myself am called a criminal!

 

Let’s just ignore the critics —
whose pens hold a lot of brains
but very little courage — and fight.
The dark time of our trial has come.
Our mettle shall be tested now.
Well you might plead your age,
old Veteran of many wars
(I am an old man, too, remember!)
If we are old, so then, we are old.
We must carry on, even when faced
     with denial and failure.

 

The kindest of histories will only say
you acted because your mind was gone.
Others will curse, and mock, and scold.
Get ready for insults, and boos, and pelted stones.
Like me, you shall be hunted down
by the always-ready criminal
slanderers. After the stoning,
banishment. But who in the end
shall history praise, and who condemn?