Arise, arise (1973)

27 June 1936, rev. 30 Nov. 1940/ Kulchur 6 (Summer 1962)

The play was given a reading performance in the Dramatic Workshop directed by Erwin Piscator at the New School for Social Research in winter 1947. LZ attended a performance in August 1965 at the Cinémathèque Theatre in NYC, directed by Jerry Benjamin. The first publication of the play did not take place until 1962 in Kulchur, and then as a book in 1973 by Grossman.

Title      The title of the play comes from both John Donne (see 1) and L’International (see 33).

1          “At the round earth’s imagined corners / blow…: John Donne (1572-1631) “Holy Sonnet 7”:
At the round earth's imagined corners, blow
Your trumpets, Angels, and arise, arise
From death, you numberless infinities
Of souls, and to your scattered bodies go,
All whom the flood did, and fire shall o'erthrow,
All whom war, dearth, age, agues, tyrannies,
Despair, law, chance, hath slain, and you whose eyes,
Shall behold God, and never taste death's woe.
But let them sleep, Lord, and me mourn a space,
For, if above all these, my sins abound,
'Tis late to ask abundance of thy grace,
When we are there; here on this lowly ground,
Teach me how to repent; for that's as good
As if thou hadst seal'd my pardon, with thy blood.

5          “here on this lowly ground…: from Donne’s “Holy Sonnet 7”; see note page 1.

9            Wolsey’s Wilde: a popular keyboard tune by William Byrd (1543-1623), as LZ indicates at 10. This tune is also mentioned in the contemporaneously written “Modern Times” (Prep+ 58).

9          Le Pauvre Laboureur: traditional French folksong, the title means “The Poor Laborer,” although the English version is “The Man Behind the Plow.” There are various versions of the lyrics to this song, but those sung by the Attendant seem most likely loosely adapted by LZ.

11         The Trojan elders on the wall…: refers to a scene from Homer, Iliad Book III; LZ’s second stanza appears to be his own elaboration on Homer’s text. EP includes a version of this scene in Canto II:
            “The two sages, Ucalegon and Antenor, elders of the people, were seated by the Scaean gates, with Priam, Panthous, Thymoetes, Lampus, Clytius, and Hiketaon of the race of Mars. These were too old to fight, but they were fluent orators, and sat on the tower like cicales that chirrup delicately from the boughs of some high tree in a wood. When they saw Helen coming towards the tower, they said softly to one another, ‘Small wonder that Trojans and Achaeans should endure so much and so long, for the sake of a woman so marvellously and divinely lovely. Still, fair though she be, let them take her and go, or she will breed sorrow for us and for our children after us’" (trans. Samuel Butler).

14         We came to the garden in flower…: the Son’s speech here and following, as well as the final speech of the scene (page 18), reproduce LZ’s translation of Guillaume Apollinaire’s poem, “The Gathering” (La cueillette, from Il y a). Although it does not appear in the book version of Le Style Apollinaire, LZ apparently published the poem with “Sequence from ‘The Writings of Guillaume Apollinaire’” in the Columbia Review (May 1934). The translation can be found in “Discarded Poems” in Terrell (1979).

15         That there comes a time when twenty years are but one day…: as CZ has suggested, alludes to Washington Irving, “Rip Van Winkle” (1819): “…it’s twenty years since he want away…but whether he shot himself…nobody can tell…for the whole twenty years had been to him but as one night” (as qtd. American Friends 26)—these phrases express the townspeople’s reaction to Rip’s disappearance, except for the last which describes Rip’s feelings on his return. In the following scene of the play, Attendant R explains Attendant D’s disappearance: “They explained nothing. Said he shot himself” (20), and then late in the play when Attendant D mysteriously reappears, he explains: “Oh, I see what’s troubling you! I’ve been at Valenciennes, man, sleeping on the railroad tracks […]” (48).

16         He came also still…: these and the immediately following lines by Attendant D from a 15th century carol:
I sing of a maiden
  That is makeles;
King of all kings           
  To her son she ches.   
 
He came al so still
  There his mother was,    
As dew in April 
  That falleth on the grass.  
 
He came al so still  
  To his mother's bour,
As dew in April 
  That falleth on the flour.
 
He came al so still      
  There his mother lay,
As dew in April
  That falleth on the spray.  
 
Mother and maiden 
  Was never none but she;           
Well may such a lady     
  Goddes mother be.       

16         canon: in music, a contrapuntal work in which a melody in one part is exactly imitated in other parts.

18            “Sentimentally I am disposed…: a well-known quote from Charles Lamb (1775-1834), “A Chapter on Ears”: “I even think that sentimentally I am disposed to harmony. But organically I am incapable of a tune. I have been practising ‘God save the King’ all my life; whistling and humming of it over to myself in solitary corners; and am not yet arrived, they tell me, within many quavers of it. Yet hath the loyalty of Elia never been impeached.”

20         Said he shot himself: see note on “Rip Van Winkle” at 15.

21         Van Tienhoven: Cornelis Van Tienhoven (d. 1656), arrived in New Amsterdam in 1633 as an accountant, became Secretary to Peter Stuyvesant and eventually Sheriff and Attorney General of New Amsterdam in 1652 but was removed from office for both personal and public misconduct. He appears to have provoked some of the devastating Indian wars of the period.

22         All one’s friends…: from Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams (1918), Chap. XXII: “For a hundred years, between 1793 and 1893, the American people had hesitated, vacillated, swayed forward and back, between two forces, one simply industrial, the other capitalistic, centralizing, and mechanical. In 1893, the issue came on the single gold standard and the majority at last declared itself, once for all, in favor of the capitalistic system with all its necessary machinery. All one’s friends, all one’s best citizens, reformers, churches, colleges, educated classes, had joined the banks to force submission to capitalism; a submission long foreseen by the mere law of mass. Of all forms of society or government, this was the one he liked least, but his likes or dislikes were as antiquated as the rebel doctrine of State rights. A capitalistic system had been adopted, and if it were to be run at all, it must be run by capital and by capitalistic methods; for nothing could surpass the nonsensity of trying to run so complex and so concentrated a machine by Southern and Western farmers in grotesque alliance with city day-laborers, as had been tried in 1800 and 1828, and had failed even under simple conditions.”

22            Minuchihr would treat as worse than evil…: one of the great kings in the Persian epic, Shahnamah by Firdosi; also mentioned in Ferdinand (CF 222). Here the allusion is to a speech Minuchihr makes on his ascension to the throne on the powers and responsibilities of kingship:
Whoever in the seven climes of earth
Departeth from the Way, abandoneth
The faith, inflicteth hurt on mendicants
Oppresseth any one of his own kin
Uplifteth in the pride of wealth his head,
Or causeth sorrow to the suffering,
All such are infidels in my regard
And worse than evil-doing Ahriman.
All evil-doers that hold not the Faith
Are banned by God and us: hereafter we
Will put our hand upon the scimitar,
And in our vengeance desolate their realm. (trans. Arthur George & Edmond Warner)

23         “we understood…: from John Donne’s “The Second Anniversary: Of the Progress of the Soul.”

24         He came also still…: see medieval carol quoted at 16.

30         It is plain, moreover, that work now brutal under suitable conditions…: from Karl Marx, Capital, Chap. XV: see quotation at 32.

32         It is just as stupid to regard the Christo-Teutonic form of the family…: this through the following Doctor’s speech from Karl Marx, Capital, Chap. XV.9: “But it was not the misuse of parental authority which gave rise to the direct or indirect exploitation of immature labour power by capital. On the contrary, it was the capitalist method of exploitation which, by sweeping away the appropriate economic basis of parental authority, transformed that authority into an abuse. However terrible, however repulsive, the break-up of the old family system within the organism of capitalist society may seem; none the less, large-scale industry, by assigning to women, and to young persons and children of both sexes, and a role which has to be fulfilled outside the home, is building the new economic foundation for a higher form of the family and of the relations between the sexes. I need hardly say that it is just as stupid to regard the Christo-Teutonic form of the family as absolute, as it is to take the same view of the classical Roman form, or of the classical Greek form, or of the Oriental form—which, by the by, constitute a historically interconnected developmental series. It is plain, moreover, that the composition of the combined labour personnel out of individuals of both sexes and various ages—although in its spontaneously developed and brutal capitalist form (wherein the worker exists for the process of production instead of the process of production existing for the worker) it is a pestilential source of corruption and slavery—under suitable conditions cannot fail to be transformed into a source of human progress” 528-529; trans, Eden & Cedar Paul).

33         A specter is haunting Europe…: from the opening sentence of Marx and Engels’ The Communist Manifesto (1848).

33         Debout les damnés de la terre…: from the opening of the L'Internationale, the anthem of socialism, originally composed by Eugene Pottier to celebrate the Paris Commune of 1871:
Debout les damnés de la terre
Debout les forçats de la faim
La raison tonne en son cratère
C'est l'éruption de la fin
Du passé faisons table rase
Foules, esclaves, debout, debout
Le monde va changer de base
Nous ne sommes rien, soyons tout

      [Refrain. Sung twice]
      C'est la lutte finale
      Groupons-nous, et demain
      L'Internationale
      Sera le genre humain

[There are several English versions that are more or less free translations of the French original; the Son’s brief beginning of a translation on the following page is very literal as far as it goes.]

Arise ye workers (starvelings) from your slumbers
Arise ye prisoners of want
For reason in revolt now thunders
And at last ends the age of cant.
Away with all your superstitions
Servile masses arise, arise
We'll change henceforth (forthwith) the old tradition (conditions)
And spurn the dust to win the prize.

So comrades, come rally
And the last fight let us face
The Internationale unites the human race.
So comrades, come rally
And the last fight let us face
The Internationale unites the human race.

34         No man sick with ever such sickness…: the rest of this speech and continuing at the bottom of the next page from Henry Adams, Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres (1905), Chapter XII: Nicolette and Marion. Adams discusses and quotes in detail the 13th century “Aucassins and Nicolette,” a “chante-fable” in poetry and prose:
Whom would a good ballad please
By the captive from o'er-seas,
A sweet song in children's praise,
Nicolette and Aucassins;
What he bore for her caress,
What he proved of his prowess
For his friend with the bright face?
The song has charm, the tale has grace,
And courtesy and good address.
No man is in such distress,
Such suffering or weariness,
Sick with ever such sickness,
But he shall, if he hear this,
Recover all his happiness,
             So sweet it is!
[…]
As [Aucassins] looked before him along the way he saw a man such as I will tell you. Tall he was, and menacing, and ugly, and hideous.  He had a great mane blacker than charcoal and had more than a full palm-width between his two eyes, and had big cheeks, and a huge flat nose and great broad nostrils, and thick lips redder than raw beef, and large ugly yellow teeth, and was shod with hose and leggings of raw hide laced with bark cord to above the knee, and was muffled in a cloak without lining, and was leaning on a great club. Aucassins came upon him suddenly and had great fear when he saw him.
             "Fair brother, good day!" said he.
             "God bless you!" said the other.
             "As God help you, what do you here?"
             "What is that to you?" said the other.
             "Nothing!" said Aucassins; "I ask only from good-will."
             "But why are you crying!" said the other, "and mourning so loud? Sure, if I were as great a man as you are, nothing on earth would make me cry."
             "Bah! you know me?" said Aucassins.
             "Yes, I know very well that you are Aucassins, the count's son; and if you will tell me what you are crying for, I will tell you what I am doing here."
             […]Yet he dared not tell the truth, so he invented, on the spur of the moment, an excuse; —he has lost, he said, a beautiful white hound. The peasant hooted—
             "Listen!" said he, "By the heart God had in his body, that you should cry for a stinking dog! Bad luck to him who ever prizes you! When there is no man in this land so great, if your father sent to him for ten or fifteen or twenty but would fetch them very gladly, and be only too pleased. But I ought to cry and mourn."
             "And—why you, brother?"
             "Sir, I will tell you. I was hired out to a rich farmer to drive his plough. There were four oxen. Now three days ago I had a great misfortune, for I lost the best of my oxen, Roget, the best of my team. I am looking to find him. I've not eaten or drunk these three days past. I daren't go to the town, for they would put me in prison as I've nothing to pay with. In all the world I've not the worth of anything but what you see on my body. I've a poor old mother who owned nothing but a feather mattress, and they've dragged it from under her back so she lies on the bare straw, and she troubles me more than myself. For riches come and go if I lose to day, I gain to-morrow; I will pay for my ox when I can, and will not cry for that. And you cry for a filthy dog! Bad luck to him who ever thinks well of you!"
             "Truly, you counsel well, good brother! God bless you! And what was your ox worth?"
             "Sir, they ask me twenty sous for it. I cannot beat them down a single centime."
             "Here are twenty," said Aucassins, "that I have in my purse! Pay for your ox!"
             "Sir!" said he; "many thanks! and God grant you find what you seek!"

35         Bach’s “Around thy tomb”…: as LZ indicates in the stage directions, this refers to the final chorus of J.S. Bach’s St. Matthew Passion (see “A”-1.1.2), which is sung around Christ’s tomb (see “A”-2.8.16). Attendant R’s following speech is adapted from this chorus:
We sit down in tears
and call to you in the grave:
Rest softly, softly rest!
Rest, you weary limbs!
Rest softly, rest well!
Your grave and tombstone shall be
to the troubled conscience
a comfortable pillow,
and for the soul a resting place.
In highest contentment,
there my eyes close in slumber.

35         Death’s woe: see Donne’s “Holy Sonnet 7” (note page 1).

35         Should you pass her door…: from Henry Adams, Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres, continuing the tale of Aucassins and Nicolette (see 34 above):
[… Meanwhile] Nicolette had built herself a little hut in the depths of the forest:—
So she twined the lilies' flower,
Roofed with leafy branches o'er,
Made of it a lovely bower,
With the freshest grass for floor
Such as never mortal saw.
By God's Verity, she swore,
Should Aucassins pass her door,
And not stop for love of her,
To repose a moment there,
He should be her love no more,
             Nor she his dear!

39            “Around thy tomb”: see page 35.

40         Arise damned of earth!: from the first line of the Internationale; see page 33.

42         the accumulators have produced their own gravediggers: echoing Marx and Engels’ The Communist Manifesto: “The essential conditions for the existence and for the sway of the bourgeois class is the formation and augmentation of capital; the condition for capital is wage labor. Wage labor rests exclusively on competition between the laborers. The advance of industry, whose involuntary promoter is the bourgeoisie, replaces the isolation of the laborers, due to competition, by the revolutionary combination, due to association. The development of Modern Industry, therefore, cuts from under its feet the very foundation on which the bourgeoisie produces and appropriates products. What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable” (trans. Samuel Moore).

42         the intellect has become common property: Cf. The Communist Manifesto: “The bourgeoisie has, through its exploitation of the world market, given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country. To the great chagrin of reactionaries, it has drawn from under the feet of industry the national ground on which it stood. All old-established national industries have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed. They are dislodged by new industries, whose introduction becomes a life and death question for all civilized nations, by industries that no longer work up indigenous raw material, but raw material drawn from the remotest zones; industries whose products are consumed, not only at home, but in every quarter of the globe. In place of the old wants, satisfied by the production of the country, we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and climes. In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal inter-dependence of nations. And as in material, so also in intellectual production. The intellectual creations of individual nations become common property. National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible, and from the numerous national and local literatures, there arises a world literature” (trans. Samuel Moore).

43            Mesquakies: the Sac or Fox Native Americans now in Iowa, but previously in the northern New York state and Great Lakes regions.

43         What is money?...: the following “definition” of money by the Son is primarily a paraphrase of Marx’s discussion in Part 1 of the first volume of Capital. Much of this passage will also be echoed in the first half of “A”-9. The following are two relevant passages from Capital:
             Part 1.3.A.2: “Human labour power in motion, or human labour, creates value, but is not itself value. It becomes value only in its congealed state, when embodied in the form of some object. In order to express the value of the linen as a congelation of human labour, that value must be expressed as having objective existence, as being a something materially different from the linen itself, and yet a something common to the linen and all other commodities.”
             Part 1.3.C.3: “The universal equivalent form is a form of value in general. It can, therefore, be assumed by any commodity. On the other hand, if a commodity be found to have assumed the universal equivalent form (form C), this is only because and in so far as it has been excluded from the rest of all other commodities as their equivalent, and that by their own act. And from the moment that this exclusion becomes finally restricted to one particular commodity, from that moment only, the general form of relative value of the world of commodities obtains real consistence and general social validity.
             The particular commodity, with whose bodily form the equivalent form is thus socially identified, now becomes the money commodity, or serves as money. It becomes the special social function of that commodity, and consequently its social monopoly, to play within the world of commodities the part of the universal equivalent.”

44            forerunners: from Daniel Denton (1626-1705), A Brief Description of New York (1670): “Orchard cherries thrive well and produce large fruit. Spanish cherries, forerunners, morellaes, of every kind we have, as in the Netherlands; and the trees bear better, because the blossoms are not injured by the frosts. The peaches, which are sought after in the Netherlands, grow wonderfully well here. If a stone is put into the earth, it will spring in the same season, and grow so rapidly as to bear fruit in the fourth year, and the limbs are frequently broken by the weight of the peaches, which usually are very fine.” LZ was intrigued enough by the name of this fruit to mention it later in Bottom 86.

44         One wrote of an east river: a narrow passage…: this and the longer speech by the Son on the next page are quoted from Daniel Denton, A Brief Description of New York (see preceding note):
             “New-York is setled upon the West-end of the aforesaid Island, having that small arm of the Sea, which divides it from Long-Island on the South side of it, which runs away Eastward to New-England, and is Navigable, though dangerous. For about ten miles from New-York is a place called Hell-Gate, which being a narrow passage, there runneth a violent stream both upon flood and ebb, and in the middle lieth some Islands of Rocks, which the Current sets so violently upon, that it threatens present shipwreck; and upon the Flood is a large Whirlpool, which continually sends forth a hideous roaring, enough to affright any stranger from passing further, and to wait for some Charon to conduct him thorough; yet to those that are well acquainted little or no danger; yet a place of great defence against any enemy coming in that way, which a small Fortification would absolutely prevent, and necessitate them to come in at the West-end of Long-Island by Sandy Hook where Nutten-Island doth force them within Command of the Fort at New-York, which is one of the best Pieces of Defence in the North-parts of America. […]
             [Describing Long Island] For wilde Beasts there is Deer, Bear, Wolves, Foxes, Racoons, Otters, Musquashes and Skunks. Wild Fowl there is great store of, as Turkies, Heath-Hens, Quailes, Partridges, Pidgeons, Cranes, Geese of several sorts, Brants, Ducks, Widgeon, Teal, and divers others: There is also the red Bird, with divers sorts of singing birds, whose chirping notes salute the ears of Travellers with an harmonious discord, and in every pond and brook green silken Frogs, who warbling forth their untun'd tunes strive to bear a part in this musick […].
             The Fruits natural to the Island are Mulberries, Pesimons, Grapes great and small, Huckelberries, Cranberries, Plums of several sorts, Rasberries and Strawberries, of which last is such abundance in June, that the Fields and Woods are died red: Which the Countrey-people perceiving, instantly arm themselves with bottles of Wine, Cream, and Sugar, and instead of a Coat of Male, every one takes a Female upon his Horse behind him, and so rushing violently into the fields, never leave till they have disrob'd them of their red colours, and turned them into the old habit.”

45            Morning stars, maritoffles…: this comes from a descriptions of gardens in New Amsterdam by Adriaen Van der Donck (c.1618-1655), A Description of the New Netherlands (1655): "The flowers in general, which the Netherlanders have introduced, are the red and white roses of different kinds, the cornelian roses and stock roses, and those of which there were none before in the country, such as eglantine, several kinds of gilly flowers, jenoffelins, different varieties of fine tulips, crown imperials, while lilies, the lily frutilaria, anemones, baredames, violets, marigolds, summer sots, etc. The clove tree has also been introduced, and there are various indigenous trees that have handsome flowers which are unknown in the Netherlands. We also find there are some flowers of native growth, as for instance, sun flowers, red and yellow lilies, mountain lilies, morning stars, red, white and yellow maritoffles (a very sweet flower), several species of bell flowers, etc., to which I have not given particular attention, but amateurs would hold them in high estimation and make them widely known."

45         Divers birds chirping harmonious discord…: from Daniel Denton, A Brief Description of New York; see quotation at page 44.

45         tho its trees one time were so laden…: from another early account of New York in 1679 by the missionaries Jasper Danckaerts and Peter Sluyter.

46         Small fish are fried best…: from W.H. Gibson, Camping for Boys (1913).

47            Propped on the earth, and from where, what sleep […] awake…: all of this speech by Attendant D, with the exception of the last sentence is quoted with variations from an uncollected poem by LZ, “(Awake!),” whose opening lines are: “Propped on the earth / And from where, what sleep, awake! Your head— / And kissed the center of your forehead— / Knowing we have escaped from death / Of sleep” (published in Pagany 2.1, Jan.-March 1931).

48         I’ve been [..] sleeping…: see note on “Rip Van Winkle” at page 15.

48            Valenciennes: city in northern France in a major coal producing area. There was a General Strike across much of France in June 1936, in which the socialist leaning Valenciennes region played a significant part.

48            vaticinate: to prophesy, foretell (AHD).

52         One thing we pray of Diana. Let whoever never loved…: from the Pervigilium Veneris (probably 2nd-3rd century), by an unknown Latin author. LZ is taking this from EP’s The Spirit of Romance (1910, 1929), in which the first chapter, “The Phantom Dawn,” concludes with a translation of this poem, presumably by EP, but could be by J.W. Mackail from whom EP frequently cribs in this work. EP gives this succinct description of the poem: “It celebrates a Greek fest, which had been transplanted into Italy, and recently revived by Hadrian: the feast of Venus Genetrix, which survived as May Day” (18). LZ primarily quotes the famous refrain precisely as in EP, “Let whoever never loved, love tomorrow, / Let whoever has loved, love tomorrow,” plus an edited version if the opening of one of the strophes: “One thing which we pray thee, Virgin Diana, / Let the grove be undefiled with the slaughter of wild things” (20).