The temptation that the preacher in The Black Cottage resisted is one that Brad McLaughlin succumbed to in The Star-Splitter. The obliteration of memory and custom is explored through the telling of Brad McLaughlin’s infatuation with science, specifically astronomy. Frost was no enemy of science; in an interview in Paris Review from the summer and fall of 1960 with Richard Poirer, he admits to his being influenced by the science of his times. Through Brad McLaughlin, we see the seduction of scientism: in order to acquire a telescope to satisfy his amateur endeavor into astronomy, and to, as he says, inquire into man’s place among the stars, and after several attempts to sell the house and farm that has been handed down to him, that never changed hands, he burns it down to receive the fire insurance money to secure his purchase. “Has a man, I should like to ask, no rights/These forces are obliged to pay respect to?” asks Brad McLaughlin. So, to inquire into this question of his, he decides to give up farming, which he was not successful at.
. . . having failed at hugger mugger farming
He burned his house down for the fire insurance
And spent the proceeds on a telescope
To satisfy a lifelong curiosity
About our place among the infinities.
“What do you want with one of those blame things?”
I asked him well beforehand. “Don’t you get one!”
“Don’t call it blamed; there isn’t anything
More blameless in the sense of being less
A weapon in our human fight,” he said.
“I’ll have one if I sell my farm to buy it.”
There where he moved the rocks to plow the ground
And plowed between the rocks he couldn’t move,
Few farms changed hands; so rather than spend years
Trying to sell his farm and then not selling,
He burned his house down for the fire insurance
And bought the telescope with what it came to.
“The best thing that we’re put here for’s to see;
The strongest thing that’s given us to see with’s
A telescope. Someone in every town
Seems to me owes it to the town to keep one.
In Littleton it might as well be me.”
After such loose talk it was no surprise
When he did what he did and burned his house down.
What was once sacred and ensured a way of life was eradicated in one decision. The sentence “He burned house down for the fire insurance” only some lines apart from each other emphasizes Frost’s deep concern for such an act as this. This rashness caused some talk in the town, mean laughter even, as Frost goes on to say. It is a blasphemous act, yet the townspeople take no umbrage. They were planning, however, to say something to him, yet they decided not to, knowing their own frailty and imperfections, forgiving him, an ancient trait and act in itself.
Mean laughter went about the town that day
To let him know we weren’t the least imposed on,
And he could wait – we’d see to him tomorrow.
But the first thing next morning we reflected
If one by one we counted people out
For the least sin, it wouldn’t take us long
To get so we had no one to live with.
For to be social is to be forgiving.
There is still speculation, though, on the burning of the house. No lover of mere materialism, Frost shows that property is still a vital part of a stable community, and that a house handed down through generations ensures a certain amount of independence; more than that, it is a reminder of ancestry and identity. In short, to burn away the house is to burn away all the past. They, the townspeople, do not make too much of the house, while not advocating Brad’s action, which none of them would do. They go on to try to reason it.
. . . Well, all we said was
He took a strange thing to be roguish over.
Some sympathy was wasted on the house,
A good old-timer dating back along;
But a house isn’t sentient; the house
Didn’t feel anything. And if it did,
Why not regard it as a sacrifice,
And an old-fashioned sacrifice by fire,
Instead of a new-fashioned one at auction?
In this reasoning, though, they still do not convince themselves, at least there is no hint of fully understanding and accepting what Brad has done, because a house, though not sentient, is a symbol of tradition, of a family, of personal as well as a community’s history. Frost constantly reminds us of the action Brad has taken, beginning the next stanza with it and the consequence that followed. This repetition contains lament and regret for Brad and is how the reader knows that Frost and the rest of the townspeople, as forgiving as they are, cannot, deep down, accept Brad’s action.
Out of a house and so out of a farm
At one stroke (of a match), Brad had to turn
To earn a living on the Concord railroad,
As under-ticket agent at a station
Where his job, when he wasn’t selling tickets,
Was setting out, up track and down, not plants
As on a farm, but planets, evening stars
That varied in their hue from red to green.
It was so easy to burn away one’s foundation (the preacher in The Black Cottage was close to this). In the end, Brad McLaughlin had no way of supporting himself and had to take a job with the railroad company selling tickets. No longer self-sufficient, he had to rely now on being employed by another. Unlike the widow’s cottage which is left untouched by her two sons and serves as a reminder for the preacher (and we remember Burke’s statement about those who are not reflective will never think of tomorrow), Brad McLaughlin’s family’s farmhouse is wiped away in the onslaught of metaphysical speculation under pure rationalism. No enemy of science, Frost joins Brad McLaughlin during his nightly gazing at the stars.
He got a good glass for six hundred dollars.
His new job gave him leisure for star-gazing.
Often he bid me come and have a look
Up the brass barrel, velvet black inside,
At a star quaking in the other end.
I recollect a night of broken clouds
And underfoot snow melted down to ice,
And melting further in the wind to mud.
Bradford and I had out the telescope.
We spread our two legs we spread its three,
Pointed our thoughts the way we pointed it,
And standing at our leisure till the day broke,
Said some of the best things we ever said.
That telescope was christened the Star-splitter,
Because it didn’t do a thing but split
A star in two or three the way you split
A globule of quicksilver in your hand
With one stroke of your finger in the middle.
It’s a star-splitter if there ever was one
And ought to do some good if splitting stars
’Sa thing to be compared with splitting wood.
This is some of the most beautiful language ever employed for narration in a poem, especially his journey in the poem from looking through the eyepiece, up the telescope’s barrel, all velvet black inside and then up at the stars. We think again of Brad’s comment earlier in the poem, “The best thing we’re put here for’s to see . . .” They ‘split’ star after star after star nightly. But what do they really see? In these nightly inquiries, is anything learned? The answer to the question of science’s ability to give us the answer to the question that is not scientific in nature is no.
We’ve looked and looked, but after all where are we?
Do we know any better where we are,
And how it stands between the night tonight
And a man with a smoky lantern chimney?
How different from the way it ever stood?
There are no new answers or no new discoveries about man that can be made through mere scientific means. Science may be able to answer questions that concern our material surroundings, our environment and our physical health, but beyond that, we cannot look to it for society’s salvation. Surely scientism could answer those vital questions that have been asked since time immemorial, and Frost replies in the negative. The challenge Frost poses in this poem is to how to use this science and how it could be implemented in our daily lives. In an unpublished version of an essay called The Future of Man, Frost speaks of science thus,
Now science seems about to ask us what we are going to do about
taking in hand our evolution . . . Every school boy knows how amazingly
short the distance was from monkeys to us. Well it ought not to be
much longer from us to supermen. We have the laboratorians ready
and willing to tend to this. We can commission them any day to go
ahead messing around with rays on genes for mutations or with sperm
on ovules for eugenics till they get us somewhere, make something
of us for a board or foundation to approve of . . . I am in danger of
making all this sound as if science were all. It is not all. But it is much.
It comes into our lives as domestic science for our hold on the planet,
into our deaths with its deadly weapons, bombs and airplanes, for war,
and into our souls as pure science for nothing but glory; in which last
respect it may be likened unto pure poetry and mysticism. It is man’s
greatest enterprise. It is the charge of the ethereal into the material. It
is our substantiation of our meaning. It can’t go too far or deep for me.”[1]
After stating all of this, he then affirms that science is not the be all and end all, that it does not follow its own ways and is the answer for salvation. Eugenics was a method in which its adherents sought to shape society by playing God and to create utopia. There would be no imperfections. A bureaucracy whose power has the last say in everything, even in how the citizens look, would rule this society and it will be a planned society. (It was just such a society that Hitler attempted to create).
Still it is not a law unto itself. It comes under the king . . . Science is
a property. It belongs to us under the king. And the best description
of us is the humanities from of old, the book of the worthies and
unworthies. The passing science of the moment may contribute
its psychological bit to the book like one of the fleeting elements
recently added to the chemical list. As one of the humanities itself
it is jealous for their dignity and importance.[2]
These are the thoughts of one who has observed closely the scientific advancements of his time and welcomes them, while being very well aware of the seductions which are as attractive and alluring as Solomon’s harlot who calls outside of her house, enticing the passerby with her lips that drip honey. Science is not its own wisdom and we are not wise, but must follow Wisdom that has been the guide for centuries.
No comments:
Post a Comment