Marvin Bell

The Book Of The Dead Man (conversation)

The dead man hath spoken with Matthew Arnold about ignorant armies. He hath cautioned Keats on the isolate love of beauty. If there were ever Grecian odes on the shore, they were smashed in the general onslaught. Like sand castles adrift in the idea of architecture, like bas reliefs planed to the texture of papyrus, like rubber in acid, the repositories of beauty did not outlast the idea of them. The dead man is of a mind, and a mind to, and his exploration has been in the places where an idea may fit. It has been a long thrill in the dark for the dead man and friends. The dead man is on the side of art but also on the side of artlessness. Absent the blank page, the word must forever be muddied. The words can be true only to one another, like Arnolds lovers ?the ideal. Well, says the dead man, what have we here? It seems the dead man has caught the words in a compromising position. This verbal interruptus is aquiver from circling an invisible vase where the lovers have been trying to catch one another. Must poetry forever be anticipation and delayed gratification? The dead man has been talking with T. S. Eliot about escaping ones personality, which he has.

The Dead Have Nothing to Lose by Telling the Truth

What can they do to gain our attention? Shall he dance, shall he spin in the air, shall he vote with his feet, with his voice, with the shells of his burning ears? Shall she tell the world to hear the world’s crying? Shall she number the bodies, the prisons, the pyres, shall he mark the graves, display the bloody shackles? How many pairs of disembodied heads will it take? How many detached hands and feet? How many hollow cheeks, empty stomachs, vacant eyes? How many skulls without memory? He has been there, she has seen it, they have lived and died a long time. He has something to say about who did what. She has something to say about the living. Let history honor the murmurs of conscience that are heard above ground. Let praise flow to those who unclenched a fist. Who granted men and women the freedom of the sparrow. Who taught us to think twice. Who showed us that famine is not a fast. That exile is the last step. That the rights of the few must be written down by the many.

Where He Stood: Schulze's Portfolio

The Iowa land rolls and turns like the human body. Surprise, Califor nia! Surprise, New York! You out there have giants among you, moun tains and skyscrapers to point to heaven. We have a flower in the moonlight, a river that goes black, a parks worth of trees that form-up like a herd of cows, a silence the high winds pass without disturbing. We have a meadow of ivory, what snow turns to in our own gray. We have a spindly aspen on which every leaf is a message. We have a lacy weaving in the winter and a thaw in the spring you can see coming. The work gets done in the morning and the afternoon. Anything you say can go to find its echo, and love can go a long way where any eye can reach the horizon.