Now that it's too late perhaps I should suggest that you not
applaud after individual poems.
There's a good reason for making that suggestion.
You see, if you don't applaud after the next one
I want something to blame it on.
I guess I should tell you what happened
when I read that at the Phi Beta Kappa ceremonial.
None of the awful things you might suppose.
But I was being followed there by the great Jewish historian,
the great Jewish history specialist Professor Baron,
who had to deliver a formal lecture
without any notes in hand about the Jewish problem in history.
He had just come from the Eichmann trial in Israel
and he had to deliver a formal lecture
on the subject of the Jewish problem without any notes.
So of course he didn't hear a word that I said.
I mean, if you're on the stage with someone
you don't hear anything that they say anyway.
You're thinking about what you have to do.
And if you have a formal lecture before a bunch
of brilliant young men, and I must
say that the boys at Columbia are very bright indeed insofar
as the poem is about the academic world,
they got the point of that rather quickly.
Besides, it happened-- I was lucky.
It was commencement day and all the professors
were wearing their academic robes.
So there sat all the boys in Phi Beta Kappa, not quite
daring to laugh out loud, or throw rocks at me,
or scream, or go blind, or any of the alternatives.
And in this terrible dead silence,
Professor Baron got up and said, I'm
sorry that I must now take you away
from this beautiful world of poetry.
[LAUGHTER] I mean, he never knew what happened to the room.
I'm going to read a specially beautiful poem.
In my first book there was a poem that had a Greek title,
still has a Greek title.
By the second printing of the book,
we even got the Greek right.
But I'm not sure that we ever got the poem right.
I guess I wasn't sorry that I wrote that poem.
But this much was certain that no one
could understand it and have the information
that it meant to me.
Now perhaps that isn't important but it certainly was important
that I knew that anybody reading that poem got
a much thinner experience than my experience of the material
had been.
You couldn't argue about that.
That was just bad.
And so I wanted to try to handle that material again.
There's a poem in which I do try to handle
the material, material which for me began in during World War
II when I was in the Navy at San Bruno in California.
And a man took about 50 of us out one morning
and gave us a class in how, if you should get caught out
without any weapons at all, you can
blind a man with your bare hands and then go on to kill him.
And I must say, I cared quite a lot about the things
that man said.
They were very important to me and I guess
that must be 25 years ago.
I guess I think I could reproduce just what he said.
Well, in the first poem that I had
tried to handle this material, I had put it
through a kind of mythological transformation
and it became Odysseus blinding the Cyclops
and all kinds of things like that I didn't care about
very much about.
And I decided that when I tried to handle it again,
I'd let the man say just exactly what
he said to us that morning.
That that was at least seemed to me so important and kind
of atypical that I couldn't do anything to that
was going to make it more interesting than it had--
than it was just as it was.
I've compressed it and that's all.
In the poem now he says just what he says,
but you don't hear his voice alone.
You hear it colliding with another voice
and that oddly enough is another voice
that I discovered at just the same time.
The voice of the great Jewish philosopher
Baruch Spinoza, who again in the poem
is saying just what he said in a couple of places in his books.
And I think when you hear these two voices colliding
as they do in the poem you hear two lines from one and two
from the other, two from the first, two from the second,
back and forth.
When you hear these voices colliding this way,
of course at first you're struck by the tremendous difference
between them and of course they are terribly different.
The hand-to-hand combat instructor
must surely be one of the most savage men who's ever lived.
The- Spinoza as you must know surely
was one of the gentlest, and kindest, and decent,
and most humane of that not very humane group humans.
and there's a terrible difference, of course,
between them.
Yet I don't think I'm-- insofar as I know why these voices
should be colliding in the poem, it isn't only
for their difference.
It's also for the fact that in some very essential way
they are saying the same thing and that
frightens me very badly.
I don't think I'm doing that to undercut Spinoza and say
that if you believe the kind of things that he believes,
you'll end up doing the kind of things described by the poem.
That's nonsense.
You don't do things of that sort because of anything you
believe, you do that because of the kind of man you are.
And at least if I know why that's happening in the poem,
it's happening to undercut the importance of any system
of ideas or any system of--
if you just have to tell me you're a Christian,
if you can't live without telling me
you're a communist, go ahead.
I'll turn my hearing aid down but then
tell me something that counts.
Have you quit beating your wife?
How do you act as strangers?
Visiting poets, say.
I'd like to know something about your qualities as a person
since it seems to me that that's a great deal more important.
With the best ideas in the world we
have again and again committed the worst actions
and have used those best ideas as a tool toward the worst
actions.
Whereas on the other hand, you've
known people who had 15th rate ideas, who behaved very well--
and I don't mean you ought to go looking for 15th rate ideas,
you don't need to, they'll come to you.
But getting better than 15th rate ideas I don't think
is any guarantee that you'll be anything more than 15th rate.
The first voice that you hear in the poem though,
is that of Spinoza saying just what he said.
"After experience taught me that all the ordinary surroundings
of social life are futile and vain.
I'm going to show you something very ugly.
Some day it might save your life.
Seeing that none of the things I feared contain in themselves,
anything either good or bad.
What if you get caught without a knife?
Nothing.
Even a loop of piano wire.
Accepting only in the effect they had upon my mind.
I resolved to inquire.
Take the first two fingers of this hand,
fork them out, kind of a V for victory.
Whether there might be something whose discovery would grant me
supreme unending happiness.
And jam them into the eyes of your enemy.
You have to do this hard, very hard.
Then press.
No virtue can be thought to have priority over this endeavor
to preserve one's being.
Both fingers down around the cheekbone
and setting your foot high into the chest.
No man can desire to act rightly,
to be blessed, to live rightly, without simultaneously.
You must call up every strength you own
and you can rip off the whole facial mask,
wishing to be, to act, to live.
He must ask first in other words to actually exist.
And you, whiner, who wastes your time dawdling
over the remorseless Earth, what evil, what unspeakable crime
have you made your life worth."