Decadence and the Drum-keeper: Some Thoughts on Paul Claudel and the Poet’s Search for Cadence

We have a more difficult matter to devise
than your return, patient Ulysses.
—Paul Claudel, in “The Muses,” from Five Great Odes

A brown horse-skin drum hangs on the wall of my bedroom. I made it in the tradition of the old Hungarians, from a hoop of smooth, light wood and the thick leather of a single animal. The back is laced tightly and evenly, pulled together into a cross for a handle. I soaked that leather in the water of our creek in the dark of a winter night until it was heavy and pliable, and made it by firelight, drying and tightening it before the flames. It is a very simple drum. It is not perfect, in the same way that I am not perfect. But it is taut and strong and it sings with a voice like a loud, low bell when struck, and you can feel it move something in your ribs.

Humor me, in all the rest of this essay. Like the making of the drum, what I have to say may sound quaint, or odd, or pleasantly useless. I believe it is more than all that, a matter of joy and gift and art and survival, and at the center of it all, for me, is the simple image of that drum.

Consider for a moment whether a culture’s life may be described in terms of music. A people’s progress through time might be compared to the rise and fall of melody; their relationship toward other peoples and cultures as harmony (or the dissonance of conflict); and their self-consistency throughout time—a culture’s integrity—as rhythm. (Another word for rhythm, of course, is cadence.)

A healthy culture sustains its music clearly. It moves on-beat, keeping time with its essential character, and giving stability to the many lives that move within it. Trusting in a larger, shared regularity, people have the gift of taking their surrounding social and spiritual environment for granted. They may rest upon it, cling to it, and grow with it. A cadent culture moves with a ragged unity of form through seasons, years, decades, and centuries. Its pace is human. A cadent culture cherishes a larger life that beats within it. It matches that life; it dances and marks time by it.

As centuries pass, a clear beat may be discerned, as the gifts of creation extend through a people learning to know and love them with rooted particularity. A song emerges, rich and lovely because of its singularity: a song that offers a unique people’s unique gift to the wider world, witnessing to their particularities of time and place. This is, to a great extent, the work and the joy of the poet. We keep the drums going. We express the rhythm of this great shared music, and in that expression, the people find that their dance is held together. We keep a beat of authentic life, a beat that holds steady, like a heart, what is essential to our being.

But all things have lifespans, and the beat is not guaranteed. There is no faultless metronome, and loss of this cadence—decadence—is the entropy constantly calling the world back to a state of decomposed potential. Western culture, particularly in America, shows many qualities of advancing decadence. The resulting cacophony of “music” is clear at every level of society, from the rise of commonplace vulgarity and violence to the degrading quality of our politics.

In the fine arts, we see the results of a decades-long retreat of true imagination, able to tear down but rarely to build, and covering its impoverished spirit only by means of constant novelty and self-reference. At a time when the Internet could be leading to a golden age of ambitious and powerful new music, poetry, fiction, and cinema, audiences have divided into subgroups of subgroups, losing nearly any shared cultural experience except for franchised media such as the endless regurgitation of franchised entertainment “universes.” The results are unpleasant, confusing, and deafening. In this, the drum-keepers’ work is to try to discern and return to a state of clear, tight cadence.

To do this is not easy. But the contemporary artist or poet, as drum-keeper, is not left alone. We are not the first to face the daunting task of nourishing and advancing a common rhythm; we will not be the last.

Paul Claudel (1868–1955) may be seen as one of the last poets of a cadent culture (that of a largely Catholic France just before the ascent of recognizable Modernity). His was a search for the Real among novel counterfeits—a quest that (despite his culture’s freethinking heritage: Voltaire, Rousseau, Rabelais) would not have made much sense even one generation before his and would not bring much surprise even one generation after.

“Claudel,” writes translator Jonathan Geltner in his introduction to the Five Great Odes (Angelico Press, 2020), “was among the last artists of the Christian civilization of Western Europe: an artist who wrote from the heart of that civilization, not as an isolated survivor of it living on in an altered world.”

This altered world—the product of technological advances (radio, the airplane, moving pictures) and violent moral regressions (particularly the global violation of innocence that was the First World War)—resulted in a wholesale loss of a cultural beat that had existed for centuries in Europe in general and Catholic France in particular. Claudel’s style of ecstatic, allusive poetry in the Odes shows a self-consciousness that betrays him as a man uncomfortably conscious of his place, or lack of it, in a changing world. For all his faith, the poet knows (the knowledge is horrible and overwhelming) that he has alternatives to it: socially acceptable alternatives, even palatable ones. Indeed he is conscious, deeply conscious of his own failings and temptations and throws himself, desperate, on larger lives than his own for rhythm and support.

Claudel’s attention is drawn by spiritual forces—from Muses, Saints, and the spirits of numinous Places, to Jesus Christ understood as the Word going out from God the Father Himself—and he consciously depends upon their steadiness and strength. His is a faith made more desperate and delightful by its clear proximity to doubt, his cadence more potent because of its painful awareness that rhythm is not assured. There are moments of self-consciousness in Claudel that betray a sense of wider doubt than his own, bearing the marks of his culture’s erosion around him.

At the beginning of the Third Ode (“Magnificat”), Claudel writes:

Oh the long bitter roads of before, and the long time
I was one and alone—
that long walk in Paris, descending to Notre Dame.
Like a young athlete racing toward the finish line,
in the midst of the others, urged on by friends and coaches,
and yes, at the start a teammate whispers in his ear
or wraps a band around his injured muscles—
but alone
I went among the hurrying feet of my gods.

The image of the essential loneliness of the (pained) runner, despite being surrounded by those who love and cheer him, whose destiny is tied so closely to his own success, is linked by Claudel to the culture of his time and place. Most notably, the image of the lonely runner is implied as the operative state of the idolater.

Claudel’s work swirls with the concept of spiritual allegiance and its many overlaps with erotic love. Love and worship are intimately connected. (Claudel’s biography is nearly as illustrative of this as his poetry.) For Claudel, a recurring theme is the exclusivity of relations between lover and beloved. Only a page after the lines just referenced above, we find Claudel’s loneliness transmuted into a different kind of isolation—an escape from idolatry to the refuge of true worship. Claudel addresses God:

You have called me by my name
as one who knows it truly, you have chosen me
among all those of my generation…

While a psalmist’s prophetic grandiosity is surely present here, there is more: a paradoxical and humble elation, as of one highly favored (“The Magnificat” is not remotely accidental), an elation of intimacy that has drawn the poet into a new and enlarged life; so stark an intimacy that, like sex to a virgin’s body, one can divide life into a “before” and “after” on its basis. And, as with this threshold experience, this incursion of new life places the poet into a new relationship not only with all of physical reality but also with his culture as a whole.

What is that relationship? To what high responsibility does Claudel feel called and chosen; what has he heard, in that closeness to the heart of God?

A poet keeps the beat. And the beat I am describing is the pulse of a culture’s true and best nature. This can always be described as some variation of a wisdom tradition, which in every intact culture is the domain of poetry and its close cousin, fable. While there are functions (“speech-acts,” to let Derrida briefly in the room) of poetry that are certainly not primarily intended to teach, poetry as a whole has a clear cultural mandate: to gently, skillfully, and often unconsciously both preserve and cultivate a people’s capacity to know truth and beauty. In this way, all poetry fulfills a usually unspoken ethical and cultural mandate: to keep those humans who contact it in touch with goodness.

As the decadence of any lapsing culture proves, keeping the beat is not guaranteed. As with music, a brief lapse of rhythm may happen from time to time and be barely noticeable. Since most cultures keep their time on the scale of centuries, it is only in the ability of a culture to transmit its best qualities across generations that allows an observer (“listening” back through history) to determine what its essential rhythm is, and in what ways it is beautiful, and to what end the whole thing seems to incline.

The state of American poetry over the past half-century mirrors the state of our culture’s shaping forces, creating an often beautiful but supremely inconsistent body of work whose focus is on the primacy of the individual. Here we face a situation that, while far different than Claudel’s, still represents a breakdown of the beat. In our present situation, we could gloss the present canon and imagine that we were seeing the poetic heritage not of one culture, but of hundreds or thousands of individual cultures and subcultures, some of which are clearly limited to a population of one—the poet. While much loveliness can be found throughout the tangle of the contemporary scene, the overall effect is one of complete decadence, in the true and technical sense of that term. To what end do we all beat our individual drums, simultaneously rolling through wildly disparate time signatures? And how could our culture, or any culture, dance to this noise? What are we keeping? In what are we participating? Where is the happy roll and the step of it? In the numbing profusion of beats, our beat has become lost.

Lost, but not because it is gone. Because it has become difficult to discern. For this reason, any poet who takes poetry seriously—not only as a mode of personal expression, but of joyful obligation or cultural service—finds himself or herself faced with a challenge comparatively few of our ancestors had to countenance. Indeed, as I have noted, an argument could be made that Claudel’s generation was one of the first to face it. No longer is it enough today to seek to give voice with freshness, skill, and energy to the best parts of human life. Today we must select what those parts are. To honor any subject, particularity, moment, concept, or tale with our poetic energy is to say to those who choose to be our audience: You ought to look at this; it will be good for you. This is a thing that is beautiful; this is a thing that is true.

In this sense, the Christian poet—or any poet defined enough by a great tradition to use its heritage and music without irony or apology—has a tremendous advantage in a time of decadence. The typical contemporary mind was given stones; we have inherited cathedrals. And like Claudel, hurrying to Notre Dame with the image of the lonely runner in his brain, we find that in that inheritance we are lifted above our default idolatry, caught up and even carried away by a larger life and music than our own.

For no great poet produces any work in isolation. Claudel’s debt to Classical and Biblical literature and narrative is immense and visible at every level of the composition of his Odes, from the invocation of the Muses (and the recurring appearance/presence of Terpsichore), to his extended and intricate allusions to the stories of Moses and Mary, to the ecstatic style and structure which can be rightfully compared both to Hebrew psalm and Greek oracle. The presences of these more-than-referential qualities represent no dead summoning of easy symbols or cliched images. Rather, under Claudel’s pen they maintain their status as living tradition. The poet claims for himself a cultural heritage that has come to him honestly as a European, a Westerner, and a Catholic, and he is able without a sense of guile to extend and participate in that imperfect but good heritage. As just one example of the strength of this participation, Claudel’s invocation of the Muses is uncomfortable for some Christian readers precisely because of the strength and the sincerity of its belief. It is obvious that it is no dead allusion; it is a living prayer.

I believe it is an early and essential task of poets today to understand what our real work entails. Before the pull of craft or career, it is our essential calling to rediscover cadence in life: a cadence that can and must shape our souls as well as our writing. The search for this beat, and for our own participation in it as a living tradition (after the examples of Paul Claudel and so many others), can be a consecrating activity. It requires introspection, even a measure of the disciplines of examen. It requires a reckoning with what is real. It requires finding a measure of inward silence and discernment.

In this we may understand the poet as a drum-keeper, as one who helps hold their people to their beat. In some ages this could not be a more obvious statement. In others, even the method of making the drum is becoming lost, the goodness of the music questioned, the very existence of a drum debatable. The work of the poet is not merely to report on beauty or truth as abstractions. It is to keep alive the rhythm of such beauty and truth as a living tradition.

This participation must be an ecstatic participation. It must be a lifting-up, a tearing of the veil. This has been understood by the shamanic cultures (all of whom claim the drum as their essential tool), which always are wisdom cultures, oral cultures, and poet-cultures. We must be able to be carried by the beat-making thing, carried up to move among the spiritual forces of the world with a sense of their tangible reality. We must develop the strength to be held in that state of “flow” that allows for the patterns in the world to emerge and present themselves to our sight. We must see, and learn to skillfully and faithfully sing of what we see.

Oddly, Paul Claudel—a French diplomat who might seem quite the opposite of such a bardic way of poetry and spirit—embodies this ecstatic vision. In his poetry we find the poet directly calling various spiritual forces into faithful service to their Creator. Claudel drums out a beat both faithful to his tradition and capable of carrying him. He allows himself to be so carried.

So how can poets in such a time as ours follow suit, to make a body of work larger than the contours of their individual life? As a first and essential part of our poetic education, we must be willing to listen, and do so very critically. We must seek to internalize, to the point not merely of craft but, more deeply, of intuition, the best and purest beats of our cultures—local, religious, ethnic, tribal, national, literary, ethical, aesthetic, environmental, civilizational—and pay enough attention to these that we begin to participate in these rhythms, and learn how and in what ways we might be able to keep and advance them. In this sense there is no true art in the decadent age without sending the roots of the mind out to find cadence and (I mix my metaphors) drinking from it.

To be so carried up is the opposite of the relativistic poetry of the contemporary self. It is a path upward and outward, of being caught up in a vast, beloved, and objective music larger than one’s limited life could ever provide. We poets—all writers, all artists—must be able to forget ourselves, to lose ourselves in a larger life than our own, and to give voice to that life, placing unique personality at the service of a project larger than mere personality. This is spiritual work, tied intimately to a form of paradoxical self-forgetfulness; it is an artistic way of losing our life to find it.

But there are dangers for anyone seeking to join and participate in the larger rhythm. One of them is certainly a preoccupation with or even a fetishization of the past. This can become a metastasized aesthetic nostalgia that stultifies poets with real talent by (falsely) painting a picture of a past state of art or society so appealing that they become unable to work richly in the present. Such work invariably becomes imitative and ingrown, because whatever feeling or rich turn of phrase might be found, such poets are functionally “dressing up.” They pine for the dead and begin to speak with the voices of ghosts.

Another and more inward danger is the possibility of real arrogance and spiritual pride on the part of the poet who, something like Ignatius Reilly in A Confederacy of Dunces (“O Fortuna!”), thinks (worse, knows) themselves too good for their age or their place. That state of soul risks remaining pitiably little, lonely, and ungenerous. Here the words of Schiller in On the Aesthetic Education of Man are a good reminder of the internal balance that must be struck: “Live with your century, but do not be its creature.”

A third danger is that of distraction—the poet ceases to be poet, moves gradually from the realm of holistic human response into over-analysis, sits fretfully thinking while holding feeling at arm’s length, and as a result constantly plays the role of an insecure self-censor, fearful to be seen or counted among their generation. This leads to an inner fragmentation, a sense of basic doubt of both self and vocation, of which the unforgettable description of the Apostle James become true: “double-minded and unstable in every way…” (James 1:8, NRSV)

To counteract these dangers, I think constantly of one of the wisest things I have ever heard. The source eludes me (please find a way to remind me if you know it), but the sentiment is this: we do not drink the water our ancestors drew up; we seek to drink from the same wells they did. Like Claudel, who saw, felt, and realized himself as the heir of a large and living literary and spiritual tradition, poets who seek cadence in a decadent age must learn to listen and join a project larger than themselves. This process of learning to truly see oneself and one’s time in the clarifying and wide lens of history is in itself a form of spiritual pilgrimage. It is a journey from the timebound to the timeless, in order to return to one’s time with gifts fitting and needful for it.

The joyousness, the boundless joyousness of this—all this—is simple and free. Though a culture may lose its beat, the first cadence it has stewarded, the deep rhythms to which it has danced, may be always caught by those with ears to hear. They are the beats of life—the rich and Triune life—resonant in all things that are made. As the Preacher says, God “has made everything suitable for its time, and he has given men a sense of past and future…” (Eccl. 3:11, NCB).

Or as Claudel puts the thought in the second Ode (“The Spirit and The Water”):

I salute you, world liberal to my eyes.
I grasp by what you are made present:
the Eternal is with you, and where there is the creature,
the Creator has not departed…

My heart no longer beats in time, it is
the instrument of endurance,
while the imperishable spirit envisions passing things—
But do I say passing?
Here is where they begin again. (46)

These lines are the joyful shout of an artist who has journeyed to a worthy destination, of a man who has found his beat, finding that the renewed drum of his heart has come to match a tempo better and more stable than his culture’s wobbling decay. By paths at which his culture looks askance, he has found something worthy of bringing back to that culture, unlocking the gifts of the generous (“liberal” in the original sense) world by a rich knowing and praising and loving of its Creator’s constant renewal. Among a people losing themselves, such a union of faith and art may constitute a rediscovery of soul, even a path to a minor sort of sainthood.

This road leads to a pilgrimage, certainly, and one that may be shared, line by line, with kindred aching hearts, hearts eager to match a larger beat than their own thumping. In this there is great hope, for such a cadence has hope. Hope of rising upward from the people to a worship in which the gods serve God beyond reach of idolatry, where the Muses give their music to the poet and his nation, upward—where even one man, among all those of his generation, may give voice and rhythm to restore and advance a lost music, upward to unite time with the timeless flow that is its rightful habitat and inheritance.