During the week I have been finalising my next book, 13 Ways of Looking at a Bureaucrat, and reading some essays and poems of Marina Tvetaeva (1892-1941), the great Russian poet, collected in Art and the Light of Conscience. A strange mix, true, but that is the life of my strange mind.
Tsvetaeva offered a model of prose. She suffered like many as a result of the 1917 Revolution and during the 1920s among the exiled or émigré Russians. In the essay, “Poet and Time”, she wrote,
“Every poet is essentially an émigré … [who bears] a particular mark of discomfort; by which you’ll know him even in his own home. An émigré from immortality in time, a non-returner to his own heaven.” (Art and the Light of Conscience, p. 93)
Between poetry and power, there lies the shadow. You could say this sums up my experience as a bureaucrat. I have had a foot in both camps, or shuttled ceaselessly between both camps during my whole working life. Neither side trusted me fully. Both sides declared me persona non grata at times. I became a stateless writer. I was exiled at home. As poet, like Tsvetaeva wrote, I was always an émigré. Bureaucrats, you would think, are never émigrés, and always insiders. But this bureaucrat was always an émigré too. In the end, I came to accept this fate. I discovered that in the shadows you can view more clearly the many ways of governing the world.
I have realised, in editing my writings on government for 13 Ways of Looking at a Bureaucrat, that my experience as a lowly official, in a minor provincial government, in an outer reach of the American Empire, is not narrow, local, petty, domestic and without insight. Just as you can see the universe in a grain of sand, so you can understand how to govern the unruly multipolar world by looking at this broken bureaucrat, from many perspectives.
I got my final proof draft of 13 Ways of Looking at a Bureaucrat ready and printed it out today for a couple of weeks of review. The last lap begins. I aim to publish by 1 July 2023, so you can read how I pulled myself together as poet, bureaucrat and émigré.
Until then, you can buy:
- my book of essays From the Burning Archive: Essays and Fragments 2015-2021.
- my collected poems, Gathering Flowers of the Mind.
I have given Amazon links for convenience but these books are also available on Booktopia, Barnes and Noble, Kobo and other online retailers.
Of course, you can also subscribe to my free weekly newsletter at jeffrich.substack.com, listen to my podcast, and follow my YouTube Channel.
