Ashbery on the Crisis

I am aware that I should have something to say - other than observing the baldness of Darling - about the latest phase in The Crisis. Alas, I seem to have nothing. Lots of other bloggers and columnists are banging away about this but my credulity has snapped. They're just pretending to know something and, alarmingly, clear ideological divisions are now appearing between neo-liberals and neo-Keynsians. This will have the effect of entrenching positions which - and this I do know - are wrong because not determined by reference to present reality. Indeed, they are smothering present reality. Far from knowing what should be done, most of us - actually all of us - don't know what is happening or has happened. 'Uncharted waters' is a phrase often used, which is true enough in its way but the full implications of the words are not understood. People tend to use the phrase as a prelude to the pretence that they know how to do the charting and, anyway, all waters are uncharted, a truth which the comment culture finds hard to accept. So sod them all, only great poets can handle this stuff. Here's Ashbery on the true meaning of uncharted.

Tomorrow is easy but today is uncharted,

Desolate, reluctant as any landscape

To yield what are laws of perspective

After all only to the painter's deep

Mistrust, a weak instrument though

Necessary. Of course some things 

Are possible, it knows, but it doesn't know

Which ones. Some day we will try

To do as many things as are possible

And perhaps we shall succeed at a handful

Of them, but this will not have anything

To do with what is promised today, our

Landscape sweeping out from us to disappear

On the horizon.