Henkimaa » James P. Carse

Table 2 (poem)

Mel Green — Tue, 05 Apr 2011 22:05:55 +0000

Table 2, from the article "National Prison Population Growth: A BJS Report" in the Winter 1996 issue of the Alaska Justice Forum

Table 2

Between 1980 and 1994 the total number of people held in federal and state prisons and local jails almost tripled — increasing from 501,886 to 1,483,410.

— Bureau of Justice Statistics, U.S. Department of Justice

I am making a table. My hammer
is the keyboard of the computer —
tap tap — my nails are the commas
and decimal points that keep these legs
of numbers standing true.
The grain is the roundness of zeros and eights,
leaning spines of nines and percentage signs,
sharp angles of fours and sevens.
I will call this table (slightly
modifying its original name) Table 2:
Number of Adults in Custody
of State or Federal Prisons or in
Local Jails; and though it’s only
a copy, when I’m done it will be
a clearer, cleaner version of
the Bureau of Justice Statistics table
from which I copied it to include
in the Alaska Justice Forum.

But it’s not the ideal table.

Though I’m of that kind, a maker of poems
whom Plato had Socrates exclude
from his rational, perfect Republic —
an imitator of imitations, my work
one step from the carpenter’s table or bed,
but two steps from the idea of table
in the ether around God’s head —
for my day job I’m also of that kind
essential to the Republic. Sustained
by statisticians, I am a maker
of passionless tables that summarize
in numbers the reasoned philosophy
of this well-ordered State’s philosopher-kings.

But if this poem I make by night is a pale
faded imitation of the table I made by day,
the white spaces between my table’s columns
are paler copies yet of the concrete walls,
steel bars, control rooms, keys, and guns
of guards in towers. And its numbers in their
hundred thousands, the total in its millions
(seven digits divided by commas)
imitate in mere paper and ink the bodies,
the sweat and sheen and stink of bodies,
the rage and fear and anguish of minds,
the sorrow and grief and violent hatreds
of prisoners one mere step away:

embodying the closest approximation
of the ideal that waxes ineffable
in the ether around God’s head.

[April 15, 1997]

About this poem

Before 1990, most of what I knew about the American justice system came from fiction — books, movies, TV. Then I took a job as a publication specialist at the UAA Justice Center, which entailed amongst other thinks making lots of tables & charts on various aspect of the justice system. That’s the lens through which I became aware of the extraordinary growth of correctional populations in the U.S., especially due to the so-called “war on drugs” that began during the Reagan administration.

Sometime in about 2001, the U.S. surpassed the Russian Federation to become the nation with the highest rate of incarceration in the world. Here we are now (from an article in our most recent issue of the Alaska Justice Forum):

Figure 3. Rate of Incareration in Selected Nations (most current data available as of February 2011). From "Prisoner Reentry and the Uniform Collateral Consequences of Conviction Act" by Deborah Periman, Alaska Justice Forum 27(4), Winter 2011.

Makes you feel all proud & patriotic, eh?

As for Plato’s Republic: Plato didn’t much like poets, because the poetic imagination weakened the power & authority of the Plato’s idealized philosopher-king. As James P. Carse writes in The Religious Case Against Belief,

Plato’s Republic is a completely rational and comprehensive system. It is threatened more by the poets than by its military enemies — in fact, it needs those enemies.

Explains a lot, that does.

For my part, most “philosopher-kings,” idealized or not, go off the rails almost from the moment they achieve power & authority. Give me a poet any day.

No Questions, Questions (poem)

Mel Green — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 20:40:34 +0000

Jerry Prevo on my TV. June 21 Father's Day sermon at the Anchorage Baptist Temple: lots of damning things to say about homosexuals. As usual.

I’m not sure this is it in final, but as I just told a friend, poetry is nothing if not full of variants. (As I’m sure all the poets of the Bible full well knew.) So, call this version 1 if you like; I’ll see if there are any others.

No Questions, Questions

The man, smug in his pulpit,
has no questions.
He never has questions
except the rhetorical
question always followed
by his ready knowing answer read
from the book at his right hand:
the book at the right hand of God,
the book — the right hand of the judge
who judges the quick and the dead
to damn whoever fits
the words of his ready
answers read from that book.

I have questions…
What makes one so certain?
How does one live inside a closed book
behind closed doors in a windowless room
surrounded by a great great wall
blocking off all the horizons,
everything known, counted, familiar?
How does one live on a flat, flat Earth,
a horizonless planet where nothing new
ever walks, is seen, is encountered?
How does one breathe there?
How does one breathe where there are only
two kinds of people, the damned and the damning? —
and the smug man in his pulpit smiles,
knowing himself as the latter,
casting the former to flames,
smiling to serve such a God
who made things this way.

Somewhere beyond a horizon
on a round Earth set among stars
crafted by illimitable god,
I catch my breath.

Melissa S. Green
Tuesday, 23 June 2009
Anchorage, AK

My first brand-spanking new poem in awhile. Inspired by — hard to guess, innit? Same place, same circumstances, same ideologues — just a different year — as what drew “Sermon” out of me in 1992. Most of this was written yesterday on People Mover bus #36 during the long construction-interfered-with journey from UAA to the Loussac Library. Tip o’ the nib to James P. Carse whose The Religious Case Against Belief has been a necessary friend these past months.

Religion v. belief

Mel Green — Wed, 20 May 2009 05:14:06 +0000

The Religious Case Against Belief by James P. Carse (New York: Penguin, 2008)

Friday before last, on my way down for coffee, I spotted a book on the new books shelf of the UAA/APU Consortium Library whose title caught my interest: The Religious Case Against Belief. Its author, James P. Carse, is a professor emeritus of religion at New York University, where he spent 30 years directing its religious studies program.

I checked it out & spent a good part of the next morning waiting for my tire changeover at Johnson Tires & fighting my muzziness (I’d been up into the early morning hours finishing my post on same-sex marriage) to read it, & actually getting a lot out of it despite my sleepiness.

Later in the day, a friend of mine came to visited my blog & made a comment on a post I’d written way back in 2006 called “The god thing.” It was interesting coincidence — or perhaps, as I said in my reply to her comment, “perhaps the intervention of Dice the spirit of luck, or so I call her in my eternally forthcoming novel Mistress of Woodland” — that my friend should find that post to comment on just when I’d found this book, which in part discusses what I was saying in that post, and in part what my friend was critical of in organized religion. As she stated:

I don’t believe in any religion on the planet. (Jim Jones and his mass murder/suicide of men, women and children Guyana in 1975 was my wake-up call.) As far as I’m concerned, if the leader has a human body/mind that person can be wrong, wrong wrong…about anything. No flipping way I’m going to follow them.

So far, I’ve found in Carse a pretty good explication of what turns both my friend & I away from organized religion. My main difficulty (at least on the muzzy, sleep-deprived mind I had last Saturday) is that Carse uses terminology in a way that is unfamiliar to me (despite my B.A. in Religion): e.g., he uses the terms religion where I would more likely use the terms spirituality, & belief or belief system where I would more likely say organized religion or religious ideology.

But same diff. By Carse’s light, belief system is the kind of horror we’re used to having to put up with from the hardcore “true believer” types who’d like to kill people for differing with them, & who are so hardwire-tied to their belief systems that they’d die for them. And they do both.

It’s this kind of ideological attachment to belief systems — to religious & other putatively all-explaining ideologies, which claim to have all the answers, & to hold the blueprints of the heavens, as it were— that are responsible for most of the wars in the world. And those belief systems are not, by Carse’s light, truly religion, because true religion does not presume to hold all the answers; true religions recognizes the unknowable. Carse is, in essence, calling for religion to toss out the belief systems — the ideologies that are the true destructive forces which lead people into violence, murder, war.

And now that I’m getting accustomed to his terminology, I’m in full agreement with him.

As I wrote in my post “The god thing” –

Any time science learns how to “explain,” answers a question, it gives rise to umpteen further question: there is no end to them because we, just tiny motes of what-god-is, can’t fit any more into our understanding than what we can fit into our thoughts, our speech, our books. As my calculus tutor used to explain, no system can contain a metasystem. No matter how much we understand, there will always be Mystery beyond that. Which is why, I think, people who are wise are also people with humility: however much they know, they are aware how very little that really is.

Somehow, for me, using that word god keeps me mindful about all that. But I don’t think one must use that word to be conscious of it.

As I wrote in my poem “Sermon” –

God cannot be enclosed in a book
or in the miser’s soul
which portions out justice in dribbles
and rations out love in crumbs,
then wonders why we starve.

I’m still reading this book. I’m finding Carse’s analysis very useful for looking at some of the bad stuff going on in the world, both in the larger world of international politics — Israel & Palestine, Iraq, the “War on Terror” — & in the world closer to home, as our local “true believers” continue to wield the weapon of their willful ignorance, willful misuse of language, & false witness to maintain an unjust status quo.