To The Place Where I Come From

How strange it is that here in mid January I find myself in the southern tip of Africa on a warm summer afternoon that would almost be too hot except for a gentle breeze that moves in from where two oceans meet, yet never cross. I had been asked by a magazine editor in Germany about a poem I may possibly know of, something by Robert Frost. Off hand the theme that the poem was meant to express was not something I recognised as being within Frost’s domain, but it did cause me to pull from my book case a volume of his complete works, The Poetry of Robert Frost, and scan through the long list of titles.

In less than a week’s time I will be taking a flight from Cape Town to Boston, via Paris. When I land in Boston Logan it will be winter, proper winter, cold with snow defied by heated homes with fireplaces burning. Like Robert Frost, I was born and raised in New England. I recall he lived in New Hampshire, the state that borders Massachusetts to the north. The cluster of states known as New England, shares not only a common climate but also a similar history, as they were the early English colonies. Apart from the city of Boston, there are the well-known towns of Arlington, Lexington, Concord and Braintree. There is Walden Pond, which is surprisingly small, that provided Henry David Thoreau’s setting for his famous On Walden Pond and also where he worked on his treatise Civil Disobedience. Back then Thoreau was a young man and devoted to his intellectual hero and self chosen teacher, Ralph Waldo Emerson. It seems only natural that in my youth the generation I was part of identified with Thoreau, while like him, I too looked up to the universal intellect of Emerson, whose library included works from the great poet Goethe, that Emerson read in their original German, to the Persian poet Hafiz.

While I have not been able to locate the poem purported to be by Robert Frost that the magazine editor asked about, I did start to read through several of Frost’s poems that I remember reading when still at school. Frost became a cultural icon after the Second World War, and every English class across America studied his poems. Furthermore, he was specifically connected to rural New England, its woodlands and small farms that so acutely expressed an intimate understanding of a stoic yet unpretentious ethic. If Emerson was the foremost poet and thinker of the early American Transcendentalists, who were born into the Unitarianism of New England in the early decades of the nineteenth century, then Frost was a voice of an outwardly more simple folk who possessed a depth of homely wisdom that barely managed to survive the tumult of two world wars only to then dissipate before the rise of an unmitigated hubris that took hold of the American psyche and would land it in the Bay of Pigs, then Vietnam; both of which went terribly wrong. There was the proto model of Indonesia, a massive victory for unrestrained capitalism while plunging America into a moral quagmire as it sequestered a whole region’s vast wealth of natural resources in the name of halting the spread of Communism. Then on to Chile and El Salvador, for which the writing of Joan Didion is essential to see the true face of a two faced foreign policy, and so many other places around the world where the claim was always the same: America was going to put things right. They would halt Communism and the spreading of its evil empire. Later, with the Cold War over it became the miasma of global terrorism that provided yet another carte blanche to secure needed energy resources for a rapacious society with a most heterodox anomaly: being somehow so incredibly naive and outrageously arrogant at the same time.

Today, the claim of putting things right around the world seems less and less palatable as its home situation has been exposed as far from exemplary. The unmitigated avariciousness of its financial institutions has shocked a people who had been lulled into consumerist complacency.  The impotency of their political leaders in the face of supra-banking fuelled by a debt-based economy has left a country wondering who is actually running the show. But, as they say on Broadway: ‘The show must go on’, so its proving hard for a country that has been so enamoured by its own myth to face the bare facts of what is happening. 

At least there is the build up to the American presidential elections, which is always its own form of Roman circus, so if nothing else it should provide some degree of distraction from an otherwise tenuous at best, or otherwise immitigably perilous fiscal landscape. Again you can see that efflorescent innocence of hope coupled with the largest fucking military machine in the world. It has worked before, so it may work yet again – or maybe not. For too long not only the general public but also Congress and its sacred House of (elected) Representatives have been far too willing not to ask how the country was kept safe and prosperous. Maybe better not to know. But now it seems far less safe, and also nowhere  near as prosperous.

Well, I am soon to be travelling to America. It is there more than any place else in the world that I feel most a stranger, upon the familiar soil from which I grew. It is late now, just past midnight on a warm summer night in January, and I have arrived at a poem by Robert Frost that most seems to take me back to the place where I come from:

Stopping By Woods On A Snowy Evening

Whose woods these are I think I know.

His house is in the village, though;

He will not see me stopping here

To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer

To stop without a farmhouse near

Between the woods and frozen lake

The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake

To ask if there is some mistake.

The only other sound’s the sweep

Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark, and deep,

But I have promises to keep,

And miles to go before I sleep,

And miles to go before I sleep.