John Clare, Part 2

Prior to concluding the story of John Clare (1793-1864) with the possible cause of his madness, there were  things said yesterday during the confirmation hearing of the man who hopes to be the next Director of the CIA that deserve attention.

John O. Brennan, candidate for Director, when asked how much information should be disclosed about targeted killings, replied, "what we need to do is optimize transparency on these issues, but at the same time optimize secrecy and protection of our national security."

Dianne Feinstein, Chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, defended the CIA's record on drone strikes, noting they'd been minimal. When reminded by a reporter that she'd accused the agency of lying for years about its programs, Feinstein said, "I am confident of those figures until I am not confident of them."

As a boy and young man, John Clare liked to the wander the fields that surrounded the village of Helpston, walking for miles and miles, developing what some call an "open-field sense of place."  Parliament, however, passed a series of 'Enclosure Acts' beginning in the early 1800's, dividing the rural landscape into strips that supposedly could be farmed more productively.

What had been a circle for Clare--a universe where the interconnection between man and nature was a fact of his life--pretty suddenly became a linear landscape of rectangles which were then further subdivided by their owners.

Today, the Enclosure Acts don't seem like much, and though the change the act made in Claire's environment was not immediately evident in his behavior or in his poems, many now believe it to be the dislocation that created the condition for his descent into gentle madness and his confinement in asylums for so much of his life.