Why I Will Never Make the World A Better Place

I’ve been reading Tim Bowling’s latest book, Fathom, and have been struck yet again by the power his poetry often has. My favorite image so far has to be one from the poem “I Didn’t Go In At the Recess Bell.” The narrator comes across a cat raiding a bird’s nest and eating the “almost-foetal blind” young. The cat’s meal becomes a horrific image:

the crack-eared cat looked once
at me through jaundice-yellow eyes
but did not cease to chew
and quickly swung back,
drool-strings rendering it
an awful puppet.

It’s Tim’s dark take on things that I find appealing, despite the considerable focus on nature in his work.

Years ago we had an opportunity to exchange ideas on poetics and, on the surface of things, we certainly have little in common in terms of our poetic interests. His world is the natural, mine is the artificial. He writes lyrics poetry, I prefer satire. But it’s only lately occurred to me why I’m drawn to his work: he is a fatalist. His world view is not too distant from that of Thomas Hardy who himself inherited fatalism from an ancient English tradition and before that the Greeks. My fatalism is more of the prophetic variety, inherited from the likes of Cassandra, William Blake and Irving Layton. Tim’s poetry reflects the belief that we cannot overcome life’s deepest most essential difficulties because they are built into the nature of existence. I can get on board with that, and I also subscribe to the belief that everything good is bad for somebody and vice versa. Dead bird, fed cat. And you’ll note the drool as puppet strings takes on new meaning in the larger context of Tim’s poetry as a whole.

This doesn’t mean that either of us are grim people and natural born party-killers. In fact, the most fatalistic of writers have often been quite good at parties. Think of Mark Twain and his lively if occasionally vicious sense of humour. Or even O. Henry who was one of the most widely read American writers during his lifetime and whose stories were considered quite funny even though they were often about people’s utter inability to change. (See, for example, “The Cop and the Anthem” and “The Roads We Take.”) The same could be said of Chekhov. Funnily enough, O. Henry’s work was popular for many decades in Russia where they know a good fatalist when they read one.

And being fatalistic doesn’t mean I can’t be moved by heroic struggles and attempts to change the world. Just tonight I watched part of the American Film Institute’s tribute to inspirational films, 100 Years… 100 Cheers. Many of the scenes from these films can get me a little bit teared up. And some of my favorite films made the list, but then so did the absolutely satanic film, Forrest Gump. Oh well, sympathy for the devil and all that.

What I do take issue with, though, is all those people who say they want to make the world a better place. It sounds good, but before I let anyone go ahead with their plans I’d like to take a look at a mock-up of the better place they have in mind. Do they mean the better place that groups like Greenpeace and Doctors Without Borders are working toward? Maybe, then, that’s a good thing. Or do they mean a better place like Hitler was striving for? A contemporary example would be someone like George Bush who I truly believe is trying to make the world a better place. I wish he would stop. I do not want to live in his better place.

Fatalists know there can be no better places. Fatalists do not necessarily resign themselves to the gloom of the past, but they do try to look carefully at what is right in front of them and study what has happened before. They know that deep meaningful change may never happen and that when it does it’s over millennial stretches of time.

As for all of you who want to make the world a better place in your lifetime, I wish you all the best. But I hope I’m gone by the time you succeed.