`Exit Ghost'

My review of Exit Ghost, by Philip Roth, appears today in the Houston Chronicle.

Owe Canada

I lived in three states -- Ohio, Indiana, New York – before moving to Houston three and a half years ago, always within 150 miles of the Familiar Stranger to our north, Canada. I confess, correspondingly, to a vast ignorance about Canadian literature. Before the 20th century – nothing. Nor have I read the big guns known to many Americans, such as Robertson Davies and Mordecai Richler. Unfortunately, some of the Canadian writers whose work I do know – Margaret Atwood, Michael Ondaatje, Anne Carson – are nearly as awful as their American counterparts – say, Joyce Carol Oates, David Foster Wallace, Susan Sontag. So, what’s a sympathetic American reader to do? Lend an ear to David Solway, a poet and author of some of the best critical invective since The Dunciad.

My ignorance puts me at some disadvantage reading Director’s Cut (2003), but it’s a pleasure watching Solway in his self-described role of “hometown Savonarola committing most of contemporary Canadian literature to the bonfire of the inanities.” Be assured that almost every observation he makes about his literary confreres holds true for the American scene. Think America while reading this from Solway’s preface:

“I am convinced that almost all of the poetry (and much of the fiction) being written in Canada these days – with only a couple of redeeming exceptions that stand out like crop circles in a featureless plain – is turgid, spurious and pedestrian stuff, the lame result of two highly questionable developments: (1) the proliferation of creative writing departments, those factories of undeviating blandness, in universities throughout the country, and (2) a largely subsidized literature industry, abetted by a press of cousinly critics and reviewers, intended to construct a patchwork national psyche, create a sense of ideological cohesion and glorify the tribe.”

Granted, literary accomplishment, like any artistic accomplishment, is rare and precious in any nation, in any era. But Solway exposes not merely the worthlessness of, for instance, Anne Carson’s unreadable work, but the egotism, bad taste and self-interest that drive her putative admirers – what Solway calls “the mediocrity industry”:

“Still, if the work is so obstreperously bad, how account for the reputation? This is mainly spread and consolidated by editors, critics and reviewers whose bookish expertise – regardless of whatever previous accomplishments they may licitly boast – can be described in far too many instances as a kind of higher Sesame Street word-and-number recognition faculty. They tend to sound like sciolistic Counts and half-educated Big Birds, reacting with manic delight to the lexical doits and clippings and allusions that Carson-type poetry provides for their enlightenment.”

Yes, Solway is reliably funny and dismissive of received opinion, especially of the fashionably “transgressive” sort. I’m reminded of Eric Ormsby’s recent reference, in a review of Andrea Zanzotto’s work, to “that gruesome being, an `experimental poet.’”

My fellow Americans, do not feel neglected. Some of Solway’s fiercest praise is reserved for the aforementioned Ormsby, a Montreal poet born in Georgia, and he likewise, in passing, lauds J.V. Cunningham, Wallace Stevens and Richard Wilbur. Also, he pays us the compliment of slaying some of the ugliest of our homegrown dragons, including Gertrude Stein, Sharon Olds, Rita Dove, Toni Morrison and John Ashbery. I’m especially grateful for his dismissal of Ashbery, who produces nihilistic nonsense at a prodigious rate. As best I can recall, Ashbery has not written a single line of pleasurable, interesting or memorable verse. Of an Ashbery poem ostensibly about sex, Solway asks, “but where is the love of language, the stroking and caressing of the flesh made word, the erotic attention to prosodic detail, the connection with the body of previous poetry, and the happy consummation of meaning in the union of poet and reader [?]”

Solway quotes with approval the American poet Timothy Murphy, who described Ashbery and A.R. Ammons as “frauds who hold their audiences in contempt.” Director’s Cut is the funniest and most common-sensical guide to contemporary poetry I know.

`Transient Magic'

Why do I find this poem so moving?

“The colors of disused railyards in winter;
the unnamed shades of iron at four o’clock;
the sun’s curiosity along abraded stones;
corrosion that mines the speckled lichen of woods;
the islands of stubbly rust on padlocked doors;
the fierce shoots of winter grass among cinders;
the fragile dim light, infused with tannin,
that falls clear on the stamped bottle glass
and regales the cast-off boot.
The colors of shale
cratered with dark rain. The rough knots
of crabgrass near the steps of the loading dock
and their sandy, scruffed umber.
The hues
of all negligible things: the nugatory blue
of slag chunks between the ties. Then, the smell
of those resinous blisters of red on the fence,
like a childhood of pines.
Such unpeopled places
luxuriate on Sundays. What was made for use
discloses in uselessness its transient magic,
assumes the radiance of the useless grasses.”

This is “Railyard in Winter,” by Eric Ormsby, from For a Modest God. Periodically, a poem or other work of art reminds us that others have shared our perceptions, even the most private, transitory and insignificant. I have always felt a pang of kinship for ignored, useless places, often home to weeds and trash. I have such a place in my backyard – the narrow corridor between the garage and the neighbors’ stockade fence. Because of the eave of the garage, the fence and the oaks in the neighbors’ backyard, the sun only briefly touches this sliver of space. The ground is paved with flagstones, covered in algae and moss. Brown leaves litter green stones.

Why should this be moving or even worthy of attention? Ormsby hints at an explanation, especially in the final four lines. “Unpeopled places” – empty places defined by absence, places we pass on the way to more important places, nevertheless redolent of the human. There’s a poignancy in places that echo with our presence but remain empty. As a reporter, I once spent a morning in the company of a field biologist (a disappearing breed) scouring a half-acre island of weeds and trees, surrounded by concrete, in Colonie, N.Y., a suburb of Albany. She identified the flora and fauna and I cataloged the trash. The story was understood by readers and editors as an environmental piece, and while I’m aware of the threats posed by litter and invasive plant species, the story for me, secretly, was more akin to poetry as Orsmby practices it. Not in form, obviously, but in intent and even in method – it was an Ormsbian catalog, tricked out with solid waste statistics and the history of purple loosestrife to make it palatable to editors and readers expecting news.

Of course, Ormsby has not given us a portfolio of photographs documenting a railyard. His language is ravishing (“nugatory blue”) and his lines are suffused with deeply meditative feeling. David Solway has written of Ormsby’s work: “The signet of his talent is an eclectic fusion of precision and prodigality, of discipline and flamboyance…” His poems recall Wallace Stevens’, in a homelier, more melancholy key.

I associate these scorned non-places with childhood memories, and that may be part of their significance for me. Most of my oldest memories are of out-of-context details – cracks in sidewalks, orange fungus on red oak trunk, the precise location of a yellow jackets’ nest one summer in the early nineteen-sixties. I also associate them with old movies and photographs. Part of the pleasure of watching, say, a Buster Keaton short is observing billboards, shops and passersby who clearly are not extras – all vanished decades ago. All glow with Ormsby’s “transient magic.” In a 1971 interview, the poet Daniel Hoffman illuminated the phenomenon I’m trying to describe:

“A real poem, any real work of art, has to be concerned with some object of feeling which is sacred – some feeling or object which the poet, or the reader, or the artist and his viewer, consider or can consider as a sacred object, as a source of numinous energies.”

Jan and John

While waiting for the mechanic to install my new battery, I sat in the waiting room and read the book I had grabbed on my way out the door – Still Life With a Bridle, by Zbigniew Herbert. For times such as this – enforced waiting, especially when a television is present – I favor books I already know well. In one of her poems, Bishop captures the peculiar dolor and discomfort of such times and places, describing herself as a little girl, almost 7, waiting while the dentist worked on her aunt. She read National Geographic, a magazine of horrors and delights for children. At the garage, the only reading matter was Motor Trend (a poet of Bishop’s generation, Randall Jarrell, a subscribed) and other automotive magazines. The alternative was the television, with the volume turned loud enough to drown the electric wrench and other sounds from the garage.

I reread “The Hell of Insects,” one of the short essays Herbert calls “apocrypha,” devoted to Jan Swammerdam, a pioneering entomologist in 17th-century Amsterdam. By Herbert’s account, Swammerdam was a man without a gift for happiness, and I thought of an old friend with a similar temperamental absence. In John’s case, the diagnosis might have been some idiosyncratic strain of melancholia. Herbert tells us Swammerdam had been “frail and sickly since birth.” His father was a well-off pharmacist, whose drug store stood beside the town hall in Amsterdam, and when Jan decided he wished to study medicine, he attended the University of Leyden:

“He succumbed to the charms of knowledge, and in an exaggerated way – he studied everything . He attended lectures on mathematics, theology, and astronomy; he did not neglect seminars where they read texts of ancient authors; he was also enthusiastic about Oriental languages. He gave the least attention to his chosen domain of knowledge, medicine.”

That is John, my friend, who is now about 50 and has spent most of his life in school. He earned two Ph.D.s – one in philosophy, one in English, both when he was already in his thirties. He is one of only three people I have known who seem to have read everything, but he always lived in squalor. His apartments and clothes stunk of his chain-smoked cigarettes. John had played in a punk band in the late seventies, and even performed at the late CBGB’s in Manhattan, and those memories sometimes made him smile. I remember when he had coffee with Robert Creeley, a poet whose work he professed to love, and found the meeting tiresome and disillusioning. He most often worked as a security guard, though inevitably he would quit or get fired. John seldom slept. Romance was impossible. So were the mundanities – utility bills, toothaches problems, keeping a car on the road. But he loved talking books and philosophy, and my self-appointed role was court jester, keeping John laughing.

Herbert tells us Swammerdam became a doctor but “did not ever dress a single wound.” Instead, “The new passion that never left him until death was the study of the world of insects. Entomology did not yet exist as a separate domain of science; Jan Swammerdam established it foundations.”

But Swammerdam, like John, repeatedly sabotaged himself. He did brilliant work with dung beetles, wasps and mosquitoes but it never brought him “revenue or fame.” A deeply religious man, he came to see his passion for insects as “a barren and useless occupation,” and a betrayal of God’s glory. Swammerdam died at age 43 but for years before that he “looked like a decrepit old man,” Herbert tells us, and continues:

“The soul that usually flies to infinity at the moment of death left Swammerdam’s tortured body prematurely. It could not bear the rustle of the wing cases, not the senseless buzzing that disturbs the pure music of the Universe.”

The last I heard, John was living with his mother in Rochester, N.Y. I trust his body and soul remain intact.

Tadeusz Borowski

I first saw the name Tadeusz Borowski around 1970, when the novelist Jerome Charyn included one of the Pole’s stories, “This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen,” in a fiction anthology he edited. The title sounded like a Lenny Bruce routine but the story was ruthlessly clinical and documentary-like in its depiction of life in Auschwitz. It was especially shocking in the midst of the tamer, more fashionable work Charyn had also chosen. A collection of Borowski’s stories had been translated into English and published by Viking in 1967. Philip Roth later included that volume, This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen, in a series he edited for Penguin, Writers from the Other Europe, alongside titles by Milan Kundera, Danilo Kis, Bruno Schulz and others. That’s the book on my shelf, a slender 1980 edition now brown, brittle and a bit ragged – the testimony of a man who survived for two years in Auschwitz, Dautmergen-Natzweiler and Dachau-Allach. The number tattooed on his arm was 119198. He was not a Jew.

Those of us who have admired (“enjoyed” sounds indecent) Borowski’s work are pleased that Northwestern University Press has published Postal Indiscretions: The Correspondence of Tadeusz Borowski. The 384-page volume is translated by Alicia Nitecki and edited by Tadeusz Drewnowski. Ruth Franklin reviews the book in the Sept. 24 issue of The New Republic, and includes her translation of four poems by Borowski. Here’s Franklin on Borowski’s stories:

“This Auschwitz, in contrast to the myths that sprang up immediately in the war's aftermath, is not a place of martyrdom or heroism. It is a place where inmates higher up in the camp hierarchy, the Polish political prisoners and others with special privileges, jeer at the Jews and Gypsies lower on the totem pole; where even a minor offense will be brutally avenged; where a prisoner, wondering if his girlfriend might have been sent to the gas chamber, muses, `So what, what's gone is gone.’ All this is recounted in a chillingly unsentimental and brazenly nihilistic voice that emphasizes its own detachment from the horrors that it records. Yet this detachment, it soon becomes clear, is a literary device for containing the speaker's fury, which bubbles up between the lines of each story even as he tries to choke it back.”

All that Franklin says is accurate except the phrase “brazenly nihilistic.” Yes, Borowski’s narrative voice is cool and detached, and never injects sentiment into the horrors it chronicles, but a nihilist revels in horror or denies its horrific nature. No sane and thoughtful reader of Borowski’s fiction can conclude he is enjoying the barbarism he witnesses. This is from “This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen,” as translated from the Polish by Barbara Vedder:

“I see four Canada men lugging a corpse: a huge, swollen female corpse. Cursing, dripping wet from the strain, they kick out of their way some stray children who have been running all over the ramp, howling like dogs. The men pick them up by the collars, heads, arms, and toss them inside the trucks, on top of the heaps. The four men have trouble lifting the fat corpse on to the car, they call others for help, and all together they hoist up the mound of meat. Big, swollen, puffed-up corpses are being collected from all over the ramp; on top of them are piled the invalids, the smothered, the sick, the unconscious. The heap seethes, howls, groans. The driver starts the motor, the truck begins rolling.”

Jan Kott, author of Shakespeare, Our Contemporary, contributed an introduction to the Penguin edition. Of the stories he writes:

“Borowski describes Auschwitz like an entomologist. The image of ants recurs many times, with their incessant march, day and night, night and day, from the ramp to the crematorium and from the barracks to the baths. The most terrifying thing in Borowski’s stories is the icy detachment of the author.”

Borowski started as a poet and turned to prose fiction after the war. Later he turned again, to journalism, joining and serving Poland’s Communist Party. His collected works, published in Poland in 1954, totaled five volumes. According to Franklin, the newly translated letters reveal Borowski’s tortured disillusion with the Stalinists. In West Berlin, he had acquired a copy of The God That Failed. In 1951, age 28, he asphyxiated himself with gas from a stove.

`Glowing Still'

Three hours earlier, when I was pulling newspapers from the azaleas, Venus burned low and bright in the eastern sky, but now, at 8 a.m., dirty clouds skimmed the rooftops as my 4-year-old and I crossed the schoolyard. Humidity turned the outdoors into a long-locked room until a raucous cackle from above threw open the windows and doors. A blue jay, the bossiest of birds, lectured us from his perch in a live oak. We laughed and I thought of J.A. (John Alec) Baker, the elusive English librarian whose book I had finished reading the night before:

“Swallows and martins call sharply, fly low; jays and magpies lurk and mutter in hedges; blackbirds splutter and scold. Where the valley widens, the flat fields are vibrant with tractors. Gulls and lapwings are following the plough. The sun shines from a clear sky flecked with high cirrus. The wind is moving round to the north. By the sudden calling of red-legged partridges and the clattering rise of woodpigeons, I know that the hawk is soaring and drifting southward along the woodland ridge.”

Note how Baker moves seamlessly from the sounds of birds to the tractor and sky and wind, and finally to the unseen hawk. In The Peregrine (1967), a profoundly strange book, Baker sees the landscape of coastal Essex and its inhabitants as a whole, indifferent to human purposes, as in Auden’s poem where “everything turns away/Quite leisurely from the disaster.” Nature mystics and Bambi sentimentalists will find small comfort in The Peregrine. It’s an austere, brutal book, because that is nature’s way, and Baker writes it with love and fidelity to the natural world. But for the occasional tractor or stonewall, the landscape might be Neolithic. The narrator – Baker – is the book’s only significant human presence, and he wishes not merely to observe the peregrine but to become one.

I had never heard of J.A. Baker before 2005, when New York Review Books returned The Peregrine to print. My spur to reading it was Bryan Appleyard recently calling it “astounding.” There are no footnotes or other references to previous ornithological studies, though the text is dense with information about the birds, theirs habits and habitats – all derived from Baker’s observations. For 10 years he watched his peregrines almost daily, an act we can rightly call devotional, like Thoreau’s reports on the ice on Walden Pond. The prose is stark, deeply focused, unpurple and reliant on the Anglo-Saxon inheritance of English:

“The peregrine swoops down toward his prey. As he descends, his legs are extended forward till his feet are underneath his breast. The toes are clenched, with the long hind toe projecting below the three front ones, which are bent up out of the way. He passes close to the bird, almost touching it with his body, and still moving very fast. His extended hind toe (or toes – sometimes one, sometimes both) gashes into the back or breast of the bird, like a knife. At the moment of impact the hawk raises his wings above his back. If the prey is cleanly hit – and it is usually hit hard or missed altogether – it dies at once, either from shock or from perforation of some vital organ.”

For most of us, the scene would be reduced to a blur of motion, but Baker counts the toes. Basil Bunting was a master of precision and concision, but his description of a falcon in “The Spoils,” though beautiful, seems almost generic beside Baker’s:

“His wings churn air
to flight.
Feathers alight
with sun, he rises where
dazzle rebuts our stare,
wonder our fright.”

Baker’s devotion was doubly intense because by the nineteen-sixties, as the result of DDT and other pesticides, peregrines, bald eagles and other raptors were headed for extinction. Baker wrote knowing he might be among the last humans ever to witness these magnificent birds in the wild. In the first chapter he writes:

“For ten years I followed the peregrine. I was possessed by it. It was a grail to me. Now it has gone. The long pursuit is over. Few peregrines are left, there will be fewer, they may not survive. Many die on their backs, clutching insanely at the sky in their last convulsions, withered and burnt away by the filthy, insidious pollen of farm chemicals. Before it is too late, I have tried to recapture the extraordinary beauty of this bird and to convey the wonder of the land he lived in, a land to me as profuse and glorious as Africa. It is a dying world, like Mars, but glowing still.”

His mention of the grail announces a quiet theme running through the book. The bird’s Latin name is Falco peregrinus, meaning “wandering falcon.” Falco is related to falx, Latin for “sickle,” presumably a reference to the bird’s silhouette in flight. I say “wandering,” but peregrinus, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, can also mean “coming from foreign parts, foreign, alien, exotic, concerned with foreigners or aliens.” In post-classical Latin it came to mean, as an adjective, “on a pilgrimage,” and as a noun, “pilgrim,” so it’s fitting the OED’s first citation dates from 1395 – Chaucer’s “Squire’s Tale”: “A faukon peregryn thanne semed she/Of fremde land.” By identifying so closely with the peregrine, Baker announces his self-elected status as an alien, an outsider from the human and avian worlds. He is also, while never using the word, a pilgrim, one who wishes to merge with the object of his worship. Consider Eliot’s non-ornithological use of “peregrine” in the “Little Gidding” section of Four Quartets:

“For last year's words belong to last year's language
And next year's words await another voice.
But, as the passage now presents no hindrance
To the spirit unappeased and peregrine
Between two worlds become much like each other,
So I find words I never thought to speak
In streets I never thought I should revisit
When I left my body on a distant shore.”

Baker is a “spirit unappeased and peregrine,” one who disturbed protocol by moving “between two worlds.” Fittingly, we know little about him, even when or if he died. In 1969, he published a second and final book, The Hill of Summer, which I also have and plan to read. Baker’s apparent disappearance does not surprise me, but the existence of a second book does. How could he move on after the apotheosis of The Peregrine? In Falcon (2006), one of the best-written titles in the “Animal” series published by Reaktion Books, Helen Macdonald notes the religious significance humans lend to falcons:

“Such unexpected religiosity reaches its highest pitch in The Peregrine by J.A. Baker. This classic of natural-history writing is a diary of one man’s obsessive quest for wild peregrines across the winter landscapes of East Anglia. An ecological Confessions of St Augustine or modern-day Grail-search, these are at heart the diaries of a soul’s journey to grace, a man looking for God.”

R.S. Thomas, I suspect, would have appreciated Baker’s book and vision. In his Autobiographies he writes:

“Anyone who has seen a peregrine falcon falling like lightning on its prey is sure to experience a certain thrill that makes him feel quite humble. These are the masters of the world of nature. One of the unfailing rules of that world is that life has to die in the cause of life. If there is any other way on this earth, God did not see fit to follow it. This is a doctrine that plays straight into the hands of the strong. As far as this world is concerned, Isaiah’s vision of the wolf dwelling with the lamb, and the leopard lying down with the kid is a myth.”

`The Slow Fruit is the Best'

A friend happily celebrated his 28th birthday on Monday, and my own 55th arrives in a month, and though I’m supposed to entertain wistfully bittersweet sentiments at such a convergence of events, I’m fairly content to be who and what I am. I’m significantly less stupid than I was at 28, less willful, impulsive and convinced of my own rightness, and those are all consolations. I also enjoy my company more. At last, I can begin to understand some of Walt Whitman’s insights into growing older. To his contemporaries, Whitman always seemed older than his calendar age, prematurely matured and, though childless, somehow fatherly. He was, in good American fashion, a late bloomer – 36 when he published the first edition of Leaves of Grass in 1855. The battlefield nursing he performed during the Civil War accelerated the aging of his demeanor, as did ill health, and by the time he was 45, in 1864, he appeared picturesquely superannuated. He reveled in self-display, and was photographed nearly as often as Abraham Lincoln, so we can chart his maturation. Ever histrionic, Whitman artfully grew into the role of patriarchal poet.

A consistent theme throughout the nine volumes (1.9 million words) of With Walt Whitman in Camden, Horace Traubel’s transcription of the poet’s conversations at his home in Camden, N.J., between 1888 and his death in 1892, is Whitman’s contemplation of aging. Call it rationalization, but he always praises the equanimity of maturity over the cocky bullheadedness of youth. This is from June 13, 1888:

“More and more as I grow old do I see the futility of calculation: refuse myself illusions – try not to get into the habit of expecting certain things at certain times – of planning for tomorrows, the eternal tomorrows, that never come quite as we arrange for them.”

And this, from Aug. 22, 1888: “It is singular how soon some natures come to a head and how long it takes others to ripen, though I believe, as a rule, the slow fruit is the best.”

No wise cracks about “slow fruit,” please. Here’s an especially reassuring remark, from New Year’s Day 1889: “…it’s mainly the slow maturers who mature to stay – mature to grow.”

And this, less reassuring but no less true, from Aug. 31, 1888: “I have heard it said that reason comes with the forties. I should say as to most men, that reason does not come even then – does not come at all – for I am impressed with the general lack of it.”

He said on Aug. 1, 1889, at the age of 70: “…I was a great deal more vehement years ago than I am now – Oh! I know I was! In my old days I take on the usual privilege of years – to go slow, to be less vehement, to trust more to quiet, to composure.”

And, finally, this, on a slightly different subject, from Oct. 2, 1888:

“Anyway you look at it, I’m not a bloomin’ success from the market point of view. I find that with regard to the abridged books I hate ‘em more and more. I hate the idea of being put somewhere with the harm taken out of me, as good house-wives alter Tomcats to make them respectable in the neighborhood.”

`A Lot of Days I Drown'

Thanks to Brian Sholis for passing along this fine profile of Kay Ryan, written by Richard Halstead for the Marin Independent Journal. Ryan must be one of the smartest, funniest people around, and one of our best poets. Here she is on her writing method:

“I wrap myself up in chains, drop myself in a tank and have to figure out how to get out of the chains and get to the surface before I drown,” Ryan says. “And some days I drown, a lot of days I drown.”

Pokeweed

The calendar confirms fall’s arrival but Houston remains hot and miasmic. Plants spawn and proliferate overnight, and in a week the left side of our house grows impassable. The bougainvillea and Mexican lime send out long arching shoots, pale green and beautiful and covered with thorns, and the fronds of the sega palms are green, fern-like needles. For self-preservation, flowering plants evolved to attract pollinators and cause pain to other species. Sunday afternoon I dug and hacked at the jungle. I was pleased to find tall, elegant mulleins, with leaves velvety like rabbit ears, and pokeweed -- Phytolacca americana – a source of sustenance and death. The noted ethnobotanist Tony Joe White prepared a monograph on the pleasures of poke salad in 1969. Both weeds show up as the unlikely culmination of the most exalted passage in “Song of Myself”:

“Swiftly arose and spread around me the peace and knowledge that pass all the argument of the earth,
And I know that the hand of God is the promise of my own,
And I know that the spirit of God is the brother of my own,
And that all the men ever born are also my brothers, and the women my sisters and lovers,
And that a kelson of the creation is love,
And limitless are leaves stiff or drooping in the fields,
And brown ants in the little wells beneath them,
And mossy scabs of the worm fence, heap'd stones, elder, mullein and poke-weed.”

This is from Section 5 of Whitman’s masterwork. The final three lines describe an ill-tended, gone-to-seed pasture. For him, the linkage between the hand of God and pokeweed is self-evident. All, after all, is holy. A “worm fence” is less exotic than it sounds -- a zigzag of crossed rails, forming an endless series of M’s or W’s (“Walt?” “Whitman?”) A “kelson” or “keelson” is the wooden member parallel to the keel of a ship that adds strength and stability to the structure. In Whitman’s metaphor, love lends strength to creation and holds it together in intricate unity, even the weeds.

`To Disinter and Re-present the World'

Eric Ormsby has again proven his reliability as a critic. I finally ordered a copy of his prose collection, Facsimiles of Time: Essays on Poetry and Translation. Included is a review of Bedrock (1993), by David Solway, a fellow Canadian poet. In a throwaway sentence, Ormsby mentions “Solway’s prose masterpiece The Anatomy of Arcadia.” The prose of poets always interests me, and Ormsby’s judgments never fail me, so I ordered the book through inter-library loan at my university library. I placed the order Monday and the book arrived Thursday – from Washington State University, in Pullman, Wash. An obscure volume traveled half a continent in three days so I could read it – a triumph of technology, intellectual freedom and good will.

Solway is a lover of Greece, ancient and modern, and has lived there for much of his life, a fact I already knew from having read his most recent volume, The Big Lie: On Terror, Antisemitism, and Identity. In it, Solway recalls how he learned of the Sept. 11 attacks from a television report in a café in Greece. The Anatomy of Arcadia (1992) describes the year (1983) he and his family lived on Paxos, an island in the Ionian Sea near Corfu. On one level, it’s a travel book, but a very self-conscious travel book that anatomizes the notions of travel and tourism. In the preface, referring to Daniel Boorstin’s The Image, Solway writes:

“Boorstin notes that the word `travel’ is related to `travail’ (`work’ in French and `torment’ in English) and derives from the Latin `trepalium,’ a three-staked instrument of torture. Thus the traveller is active, he takes risks, endures discomfort, is ready to improvise, anticipates shock and disappointment but is also capable of genuine exaltation. The word `tourism’ comes from the Latin `torus,’ which itself derives from a Greek word for a tool describing a circle. Accordingly, the tourist is passive, he expects interesting things to happen to him without a risk or effort, and remains comfortably ensconced in his privileged circle of prefabricated, Bowdlerized event.”

Already you can see Solway’s book is infinitely bigger and more elastic than, say, a Fodor’s travel guide. Solway stuffs into its brief discursive sections anything that catches his broad-minded fancy – Greek folkways, birds, poetry, etymology, family life, you name it. A paragraph that starts like this:

“It is no longer possible to let oneself go in an orgy of aesthetic admiration, in exaltations of tourist rapture.”

and after a pleasant digression into the ornithological abundance on Paxos, concludes like this:

“Rhapsody is cheap and sentimental, the privilege of the lunatic, the lover and the tourist. If death is the mother of beauty, as Wallace Stevens writes, it is also the sister of recollection and the wife of a belated realism.”

The title suggests Solway’s subject and his manner of addressing it. His theme is the persistence of Arcadia in the Western mind, as refuge and memento mori. We all know the cautionary reminder Et in Arcadia ego – a theme broad and rich enough to let Solway follow the example set by Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy. Solway is no less scholarly, playful and linguistically gifted than his 17th-century precursor. In this digression, Solway gives it all away:

“The great writer is the one who can bring off the swindle without his reader feeling cheated or abused. But to reproduce the world in its approximate shape, allowing for the inevitable warp of subjectivity, to disinter and re-present the world we have buried under our congenial and explanatory fictions, is also a plenary act of the imagination, which is to say, an act of motiveless love. One has to assume, at any rate, that the world is at least as interesting as oneself, and this is, perhaps, the supreme achievement of the imagination.”

Ormsby was not exaggerating. Solway has created a sadly overlooked and hugely enjoyable masterpiece. The paperback shipped to me from Washington was published by Véhicule Press of Montreal.

The Queen's Story

Among his many accomplishments, Søren Kierkegaard was a first-rate storyteller with a gift for compelling narrative. He even knew how to tell a good joke. Here’s one from Repetition:

“When the queen had finished telling a story at a court function and all the court officials, including a deaf minister, laughed at it, the latter stood up, asked to be granted the favor of being allowed to tell a story, and then told the same story.”

I bring this up because it reminds me of how the literary blogosphere customarily operates. The queen tells a story – for instance, the endless donnybrook over traditional book reviews versus litblogs – and everyone feels compelled to retell it, usually adding nothing of consequence but spleen. This is known as under-utilization of a medium. It’s ingrown and sterile, and couldn’t possibly interest anyone outside our miniscule tribe. Of course, I understand the attraction of this approach to blogging. It’s fundamentally lazy, because you wait for someone else to say something you don’t like and then you pounce, as though your opinion were somehow important. It also feeds the bottomless human appetite for self-righteous anger.

While engaging in these pointless dust-ups, litbloggers have left uncharted vast stretches of literature. When was the last time you read anything worthwhile, online or elsewhere, about Matsuo Bashō, Edgar Bowers, Christina Stead, Benito Pérez Galdós, Patrick White, Konstantin Paustovsky, Giovanni Verga, Fulke Greville or B.S. Johnson? A red-line policy, unspoken and perhaps unconscious, seems to be enforced. Some writers come with a stamp of approval; others are banished to the Gulag of the unread. Sometimes the motive is political. Sometimes it’s mere fashion, laziness or ignorance. Another culprit is the obsession with current or recent books at the expense of those from previous millennia, an obsession often linked to a benighted faith in artistic progress.

For almost 20 months, since I started writing Anecdotal Evidence, I’ve considered several writers for the title “proto-blogger,” with Lamb, Ruskin and Thoreau chief among them. The real patriarch, however, the Big Daddy of Blogs, was Montaigne, who practiced living and writing as an endless, unprecedented, unresolved experiment. The best litblogs seem closer in spirit to personal essays than formal literary criticism, though they often contain much of the latter. They integrate life and literature, sensibility and experience. I favor blogs that paint an oblique portrait of their authors, without descending into navel-gazing. In 1578, Montaigne first applied essai to what he was doing. His biographer and translator, Donald M. Frame, tells us:

“Before Montaigne began to write of his project as a series of trials, tests, attempts, or occasionally samplings (essais), he had often used the verb essayer (in modern French, normally to try) in ways close to his project, related to experience, with the sense of trying out or testing.”

Then, in part to illustrate Montaigne’s various uses of essais, he quotes the essayist himself:

“Judgment is a tool to use on all subjects, and comes in everywhere. Therefore in the test [essais] that I make of it here, I use every sort of occasion. If it is a subject I do not understand at all, even on that I essay [essaie] my judgment, sounding the ford from a good distance; and then, finding it too deep for my height, I stick to the bank…

“For the rest, I let chance itself furnish me with subjects, since they are all equally good to me; and moreover I do not undertake to develop them completely and to the bottom of the vat. Of a thousand aspects that they each have, I take the one I please. I am prone to grasp them by some unusual and fanciful angle. I would certainly pick out richer and fuller subjects, if I had any other purpose set than the one I have.

“Every action is fit to make us known.”

That’s a blogger, living in contingency (“chance”), trusting happenstance, unafraid of accepted opinion, acknowledging his or her weaknesses, enjoying the flow of events (including books) and rendering them in artful prose for the rest of us to enjoy. For Montaigne’s “judgment” substitute literary evaluation, if you must. For our motto I suggest To try.

`Just Because, Once, It Was'

If we heed the Polish masters Czeslaw Milosz and Zbigniew Herbert, the Dutch masters of the 17th century set the standard against which subsequent art must be judged. Both found in the Golden Age work of Rembrandt, Vermeer, Hals, Fabritius and others – in their genre paintings, still lifes, landscapes and cityscapes – an embodiment of humanism and the sacred. Consider “Realism,” a 1995 poem by Milosz, translated from the Polish by Milosz and Robert Hass:

“We are not so badly off, if we can
Admire Dutch painting. For that means
We shrug off what we have been told
For a hundred, two hundred years. Though we lost
Much of our previous confidence. Now we agree
That those trees outside the window, which probably exist,
Only pretend to greenness and treeness
And that language loses when it tries to cope
With clusters of molecules. And yet, this here:
A jar, a tin plate, a half-peeled lemon,
Walnuts, a loaf of bread, last – and so strongly
It is hard not to believe in their lastingness.
And thus abstract art is brought to shame,
Even if we do not deserve any other.
Therefore I enter those landscapes
Under a cloudy sky from which a ray
Shoots out, and in the middle of dark plains
A spot of brightness glows. Or the shore
With huts, boats, and on yellowish ice
Tiny figures skating. All this
Is here eternally, just because, once, it was.
Splendor (certainly incomprehensible)
Touches a cracked wall, a refuse heap,
The floor of an inn, jerkins of the rustics,
A broom, and two fish bleeding on a board.
Rejoice! Give thanks! I raised my voice
To join them in their choral singing,
Amid their ruffles, collets, and silk skirts,
Already one of them, who vanished long ago.
And our song soared up like smoke from a censer.”

The world is real and in some way holy, and art embodies and preserves it. This is Milosz’s response to postmodern glibness. He, who endured Hitler and Stalin, revels in reality and laughs at the nihilists: Who are you, he asks, to dismiss reality, in all its potent thereness, with a knowing smirk! I have similar thoughts daily as I drive past the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston. The front of the building resembles a playground designed by backward children. Every day I see Sui Jianguo´s “Jurassic Age.” The museum touts it as “one of the most celebrated icons of today´s Chinese Pop movement.” In fact, it’s a man-sized red dinosaur inside a red cage – tacky and pretentious. Herbert includes “The Price of Art” in Still Life with a Bridle, an essay collection devoted to the art and culture of the 16th-century Netherlands. Here’s his conclusion:

“It is we who are poor, very poor. A major part of contemporary arts declares itself on the side of chaos, gesticulates in a void, or tells the story of its own barren soul.

“The old masters – all of them without exception – could repeat after Racine, `We work to please the public.’ Which means they believed in the purposefulness of their work and the possibility of interhuman communication. They affirmed visible reality with an inspired scrupulousness and childish seriousness, as if the order of the world and the revolution of the stars, the permanence of the firmament, depended on it.

“Let such naïveté be praised.”

Such “inspired scrupulousness” is epitomized by The Goldfinch, painted by Carel Fabritius in 1654, the year he died in Delft when a powder magazine exploded. I first saw this painting around 1974, when it served as the cover art of Selected Poems, by Osip Mandelstam, as translated by Clarence Brown and W.S. Merwin – a rare case when you were safe in judging the contents of a book by its cover. In Carel Fabritius: 1622-1654, a catalog and brief biography, author Frederick J. Duparc identifies the species – Carduelis carduelis – and renders a history of the painting and the bird:

“The bird on a chain in front of its feeding-box, seen against a whitewashed wall, is a goldfinch…. recognizable by the red in its face and the bright yellow stripe on its black wing. [So far, it reads like an entry in a field guide.] The goldfinch was a popular pet already in Roman times: Pliny described its ability to learn difficult tricks. The bird’s name in Dutch -- `puttertje,’ which is derived from `putten,’ meaning to draw water from a well – was used as early as the sixteenth century. It refers to the bird’s dexterity in being able to draw its own drinking water (if taught to do so) by hauling up a thimble-sized bucket on a chain from a bowl or glass of water. Goldfinches can also open their own feeding boxes.”

When I see a reproduction of the painting – the original hangs in the Mauritshuis, in The Hague – I think of a sloping field I know in upstate New York, dense with thistles. The favorite food of the goldfinch is thistle seed, and late in the summer the birds light on the stalks, which bob and sway under their paltry weight. Duparc reports the painting was restored in 2003, which further confirmed Fabritius’ devotion to detail – the red spots on the bird’s face, the yellow streak on the wings. In the spring, goldfinches are drab as house sparrows, and their brilliant buttery yellow only gradually reveals itself. In his journal, Sept.4, 1859, Thoreau wrote:

“Three kinds of thistles are commonly out now, -- the pasture, lanceolate, and swamp, -- and on them all you are pretty sure to see one or two humblebees. They become more prominent and interesting in the scarcity of purple flowers. (On many you see also the splendid goldfinch, yellow and black like the humblebee.) The thistles beloved of humblebees and goldfinches.”

Thoreau’s artistry at this point, like Fabrisius’, converges with the eye of a scientist. Art and science become indistinguishable. In 1998, at the age of 87, Milosz wrote a beautiful prose poem, “Watering Can,” that returns to the Dutch masters and reads like a still life in words:

“Of a green color, standing in a shed alongside rakes and spades, it comes alive when it is filled with water from the pond, and an abundant shower pours from its nozzle, in an act, we feel it, of charity towards plants. It is not certain, however, that the watering can would have such a place in our memory, were it not for our training in noticing things. For, after all, we have been trained. Our painters do not often imitate the Dutch, who liked to paint still lifes, and yet photography contributes to our paying attention to detail and the cinema taught us that objects, once they appear on the screen, would participate in the actions of the characters and therefore should be noticed. There are also museums where canvases glorify not only human figures and landscapes but also a multitude of objects. The watering can has thus a good chance of occupying a sizable place in our imagination, and, who knows, perhaps precisely in this, in our clinging to distinctly delineated shapes, does our hope reside, of salvation from the turbulent waters of nothingness and chaos.”

Milosz’s reverence for objects and their “sizable place in our imagination” resembles Herbert’s (in “Pebble,” for instance) Rilke’s and Ponge’s. All stir us emotionally with devotion to detail and fidelity to the mute otherness of objects. Now to Herbert again, from another essay, “The Nonheroic Subject”:

“Freedom – so many treatises were written about it that it became a pale, abstract concept. But for the Dutch it was something as simple as breathing, looking, and touching objects. It did not need to be defined or beautified. This is why there is no division in their art between what is great and what is small, what is important and unimportant, elevated and ordinary. They painted apples and the portraits of fabric shopkeepers, pewter plates and tulips, with such patience and such love that the images of other worlds and noisy tales about earthly triumphs fade in comparison.”

`This Is a Poem I Must Live'

The fall 2007 issue of Boulevard includes a poem by Frank Wilson, the book review editor at the Philadelphia Inquirer and proprietor of Books, Inq. As a bonus, Frank contributes to a symposium on the Internet and literature. What strikes me about the poem, “Entering the Black Sea,” is its recycling of the Orpheus and Eurydice myth, and how that story has remained irresistible to artists for millennia. In the last century, writers as various as Rilke, Auden, Pynchon and Guy Davenport further mutated the ever-mutating story. In The First Poets: Lives of the Ancient Greek Poets (2005), Michael Schmidt writes about Orpheus as a historical being, a real poet, and that’s how subsequent poets have often treated him. In the year before his own death at age 93 in 2004, Czeslaw Milosz’s American wife, Carol, died. In a biographical note appended to Milosz’s Selected Poems: 1931-2004, Robert Hass writes:

“After his wife died unexpectedly, and rather cruelly – she was so much younger than he and they were so happy together – he was alone with Polish again. He said to friends, in the difficult days after her death, that he was surviving by incantation. One of the forms that incantation took was an elegy to his wife framed as a retelling of the story of Orpheus and Eurydice, the myth that he had read in Ovid as a schoolboy.”

“Orpheus and Eurydice” is the last poem in Selected Poems. Narrated in the third-person, here’s the final, heartbreaking stanza:

“Sun. And sky. And in the sky white clouds.
Only now everything cried to him: Eurydice!
How will I live without you, my consoling one!
But there was a fragrant scent of herbs, the low humming of bees,
And he fell asleep with his cheek on the sun-warmed earth.”

In Wilson’s hands, Orpheus narrates his own tale of love and loss, pursued by the hounds of hell. Without Eurydice, he is nothing: “The only songs I sing/Are those I bore from our embrace.” Here’s the ninth of the 18 seven-line stanzas:

“I have never shaken the smell of death,
Have been shunned, by women scorned,
Fled from by children. Whatever
Song may come of this shall not be
Mine. This is a poem I must live,
And living, die from, the fate
Hellish incantation prophesied.”

In the poem, Orpheus recalls the story of Actaeon, who spied Artemis bathing and was warned by the goddess never to speak or he would be turned into a stag. He inadvertently called out to others in his hunting party and, once he had become a stag, was torn to shreds by his own dogs. Frank’s version stops before Orpheus is torn up by the Maenads, as does Milosz’s. Both poems emphasize Orpheus’ devastation at the loss of a spouse. Wilson, in a moving gesture, dedicates his poem to Debbie, his wife. The poem is not available online, but please shell out $8 for the hard copy, where you’ll also be able to read this from Frank’s contribution to the symposium on the Internet and literature:

“Who knows what literary potential blogging may have? But consider this: The essay began as Montaigne’s method of exploring the contents of his consciousness, but quickly morphed into a vehicle for displaying literary style. Blogging may bring it back to what Montaigne was originally aiming at.”

That’s precisely what some of us are trying to do.

`It Is Like Writing to Music'

Of necessity, I often write to the sound of children playing; that is, fighting. My younger sons are four and seven, and every moment brings new provocation. They howl and bite like feral dogs. My brother and I were the same, for this is essential mammalian behavior and should cause us no anxiety. In fact, I’m suspicious of the sweet-natured little darlings who play together like sedated Unitarians.

Some of this I owe to decades spent in newsrooms, where the police scanner and the whining of reporters meld into ignorable white noise. I once worked for a newspaper that piped Muzak into the newsroom. Another outraged reporter and I removed the speaker from the ceiling above our desks and snipped the wires, so the swelling of strings would no longer distract from the cacophony. Charles Lamb, perennial bachelor, found solace in the hollering of children, even while writing. If a man requires silence and tranquility before he can write, I assume he has little worth saying. This is from one of Lamb’s Elia essays, “The Old and New Schoolmaster”:

“The noises of children, playing their own fancies—as I now hearken to them by fits, sporting on the green before my window, while I am engaged in these grave speculations at my neat suburban retreat at Shacklewell -- by distance made more sweet -- inexpressibly take from the labour of my task. It is like writing to music. They seem to modulate my periods. They ought at least to do so—for in the voice of that tender age there is a kind of poetry, far unlike the harsh prose-accents of man’s conversation.—I should but spoil their sport, and diminish my own sympathy for them, by mingling in their pastime.”

Though childless, Lamb knew kids. Last week we transferred our 4-year-old from a conventional pre-school program in a public school to a Montessori program in another public grade school. His new teacher is a Swedish translation of Mr. Rogers, all attentiveness and empathy, and David is much happier. Later in his essay, Lamb confirms a frequent observation of mine:

“Why are we never quite at our ease in the presence of a schoolmaster?—because we are conscious that he is not quite at his ease in ours. He is awkward, and out of place, in the society of his equals. He comes like Gulliver from among his little people, and he cannot fit the stature of his understanding to yours. He cannot meet you on the square. He wants a point given him, like an indifferent whist-player. He is so used to teaching, that he wants to be teaching you.”

But this is not the case with Mr. Johanson. He has ideas, but is content to keep them to himself. He is not that monster of pedagogy, the proselytizer, even for Maria Montessori, whose precepts he honors. His temperament seems naturally balanced. A petty part of me is tempted, as an experiment, to irritate him, but he has invited me to read to the kids next month -- Caps for Sale, by Esphyr Slobodkina, which I deliver with a juicy, pan-Slavic accent. And Mr. Johanson has already rendered the supreme act of a civilized person: He loaned me a book.

Pere Ubu: `Breath'

Another reason to be proud of my Cleveland heritage is Pere Ubu, a band that organized in my home town in 1975, when I was still living there. Click here for a video of Pere Ubu, with front man David Thomas, performing on Night Music, a short-lived television show hosted by David Sanborn. The song is "Breath," from Cloudland (1989). Here are the lyrics, from the Pere Ubu web site:

"Dog day afternoon by the sea.
I think about you.
What am I gonna do?
Sorrow's hangin over me.

"Let me walk with you cuz it's breaking my heart.
The things that we had,
the good and the bad -- now it's parking lots.
Don't let's talk about tomorrow --
Baby, standin at the edge of sorrow.
Let's watch the whole world goin slow.
Let's watch the whole world goin.

"I know my way round town.
Used to live around here.
I know the sites to see,
the things they mean to me,
and how we tore it down.
Let me walk with you cuz it's breaking my heart.
The things that we had,
the good and the bad -- now it's parking lots.
Don't let's talk about tomorrow --
Baby, standin at the edge of sorrow.
Let's watch the whole world just goin slow.
Let's watch the whole world goin slow."

`With This I Will Try to be Content'

Today is Samuel Johnson's 298th birthday. On the subject of aging, of another year passing, Johnson was characteristically philosophical. In a Sept. 21, 1773, letter to Hester Thrale he wrote:

"Boswell, with some of his troublesome kindness, has informed this family, and reminded me that the eighteenth of September is my birthday. The return of my birthday, if I remember it, fills me with thoughts which it seems to be the general care of humanity to escape. I can now look back upon threescore and four years, in which little has been done, and little has been enjoyed, a life diversified by misery, spent part in the sluggishness of penury, and part under the violence of pain, in gloomy discontent, or importunate distress. But perhaps I am better than I should have been, if I had been less afflicted. With this I will try to be content."

Jerome Weeks at Critical Mass today has a fine appreciation of Johnson; his great biographer, W. Jackson Bate; and even the other Samuel, Beckett.

`A Testy, Choleric Game'

Almost daily since I taught him the game in June, my 7-year-old son and I have played chess, usually sprawled on the floor like boys waging war with toy soldiers. Michael joined the chess club at school, and last Thursday he won his first match. He also joined Cub Scouts recently and earned his first “loop” – in chess (next realm to conquer: geology). He’s monstrously competitive but to his credit he keeps playing even though I’ve lost to him only once.

Almost 400 years ago, in the section devoted to cures in The Anatomy of Melancholy, Robert Burton recommended chess, along with hunting, fowling, fishing, hawking and other diversions as useful in dispelling the “settled humour” of melancholy. A caveat accompanies the cure:

“Chess-play is a good and witty exercise of the mind for some kind of men, and fit for such melancholy, Rhasis holds, as are idle, and have extravagant impertinent thoughts, or troubled with cares, nothing better to distract their mind and alter their meditations; invented (some say) by the general of an army in a famine, to keep soldiers from mutiny; but if it proceed from overmuch study, in such a case it may do more harm than good; it is a game too troublesome for some men’s brains, too full of anxiety, all out as bad as study; besides it is a testy, choleric game, and very offensive to him that loseth the mate.”

As such, Michael is easily offended, but then I remember my own early experience with chess. My brother and I learned the game from older boys in the neighborhood. Our parents didn’t play, so chess became another alternate, no-adults-admitted refuge. We were lucky: The John G. White Collection of Chess and Checkers, downtown in the Cleveland Public Library, was, and remains, the largest chess library in the world, with 32,568 volumes today. I spent days among the chess stacks, enjoying history as much as strategy, and I ordered chess reprints from Dover Books.

I was 12 and cocky when I learned my older cousin, Julie, enjoyed chess. We played, and she trounced me. Instantly, my ardor cooled, never to return with comparable adolescent ferocity. About the same time I stopped reading science fiction and began to find females oddly attractive. When Julie, who today works for Jane Goodall, beat me, I didn’t clear the board with the back of my hand but I was not gracious in defeat (“testy, choleric”). Burton anatomized another sore loser like this:

“William the Conqueror, in his younger years, playing at chess with the Prince of France
(Dauphiné was not annexed to that crown in those days), losing a mate, knocked the chess-board about his pate, which was the cause afterward of much enmity between them.”

By way of a Burtonian digression, the Rhasis mentioned by Burton was Abu Bakar Muhammad bin Zakaria al-Razi, a ninth-century Persian physician, chemist and alchemist. Known popularly as Al-Rhasis, he was born near Tehran and served as director of a Baghdad hospital. Many books on medicine, chemistry and philosophy are ascribed to him. “Razi Day,” or “Pharmacy Day” is celebrated in Iran on Aug. 27. I don’t know what Rhasis wrote about chess or how Burton got his hands on it, though he seems to have read everything.

`A Deficit of Precise Data'

Last week my brother shipped me an assemblage he made last spring after reading The Collected Poems: 1956-1998, by Zbigniew Herbert. I had sent him an uncorrected proof of the book after reviewing it for the Philadelphia Inquirer, and he read the great Pole’s work avidly and created “Ten Things Made After Reading Herbert.” Several included poems or parts of poems by Herbert, and I finally saw them in August while visiting him in Cleveland. He asked which one I most liked, and gave it to me. Now it hangs above the couch in our den, where I do a lot of reading.

The picture, which makes no overt allusion to Herbert, is titled “Kontrolliert und Eingepackt,” from a headline clipped from Der Spiegel and glued to the center of the assemblage. We think it means “controlled and prepackaged.” Framed, the whole thing measures 24 by 25 inches. The outer matting in off-white, the narrow inner matting is gray, and the picture itself is on light brown ragboard matting that measures 16 by 17 inches. Near the top is a horizontal line, three-quarters of an inch thick, made by placing 33 washers in a row, applying tape to the edges and spray-painting them. The result resembles a belt made of linked rings. With a Sharpie, he bisected the line of rings with 32 short vertical lines, brushed lightly with water to give them a slightly blurred appearance.

Below the belt are two more horizontal lines, a blank space, then another two very fine lines, part of a grid of verticals and horizontals that fill the bottom of the picture. At the center is “Kontrolliert und Eingepackt” on white magazine stock, below which, at the center of the grid, are two overlapping circles, each five inches in diameter. Using watercolors, Ken painted the left circle a pale pink, the color of juice from a watermelon. The right circle is not colored and not completed, and reminds me of the broken circles I’ve seen in paintings by Zen practitioners. All that remains are four small red rectangles integrated into the grid, and the signature centered at the bottom: “KURP 2007.”

The German phrase seems to comment on the graphic tension between openness and closure. The belt above and grid below demarcate space. The circles, variously flesh-colored, are part of the grid but seem to defy it. I won’t presume to fix a single interpretation, but it implies a squaring off between a German draftsman and a softer, fleshier, kindlier, perhaps more Slavic spirit. The picture is not pinned to any specific Herbert poem, but was part of the cycle of pictures inspired by my brother’s first reading of Herbert. I see correspondances in the poem, especially “Mr Cogito on the Need for Precision,” which is five pages long and contains these lines:

“particles of matter are measured
the heavenly body is weighed
and only in human affairs
a criminal neglect runs rampant
a deficit of precise data”

And this from “Mr Cogito and the Imagination”:

“he loves
a flat horizon
a straight line
earth’s gravity”

And finally, an early prose poem, “Objects”:

“Inanimate objects are always correct and cannot, unfortunately, be reproached with anything. I have never observed a chair shift from one foot to another, or a bed rear on its hind legs. And tables, even when they are tired, will not dare to bend their knees. I suspect that objects do this from pedagogical considerations, to reprove us constantly for our instability.”

I don’t want to freight my brother’s picture with a lot of gratuitous meaning. Principally, it’s beautiful, a pleasure to contemplate, like Herbert’s poems. Thanks, Ken.

ADDENDUM: In answer to one of today's comments, I don't have a digital camera and wouldn't know how to use it or how to post an image anyway. Sorry, but we're stuck with words.

`Glee and Admiration'

Above all personal qualities I admire resilience. By this I mean indifference to adversity, an enthusiasm for getting on with the business at hand and unwillingness to linger over pain, fear, inconvenience, resentment or self-pity. Resilience is associated with soldiers and saints, but among the most resilient characters I know was the unwarlike, unsaintly William James, who wrestled with depression, neurasthenia and thoughts of suicide but worked like a slave and maintained a confounding zest for life.

At 5:12 a.m. on Wednesday, April 18, 1906, James was lying in bed, awake, in his apartment on the campus of Stanford University, in Palo Alto, Calif. His wife was still asleep in the adjoining room when, in James’ words, his bed began to “waggle.” This was the start of what we know as the great San Francisco earthquake. It last 48 seconds. James was 64 years old, and he described his experiences at Stanford in “On Some Mental Effects of the Earthquake.” The article, collected in Essays on Psychology, is less than eight pages long in the standard edition published by Harvard University Press. What interests me most about the piece is not James’ speculations on the psychological impact of trauma, or his reports from the epicenter of the quake in San Francisco in the subsequent days, but his initial reaction to the event: “…my first consciousness was one of gleeful recognition of the nature of the movement.” This is more than the studied coolness of a scientist observing violent phenomena. This is a man having fun:

“The emotion consisted wholly of glee and admiration; glee at the vividness which such an abstract idea or verbal term as `earthquake’ could put on when translated into sensible reality and verified concretely; and admiration at the way in which the frail little wooden house could hold itself together in spite of such a shaking. I felt no trace whatever of fear; it was pure delight and welcome.

“`Go it,’ I almost cried aloud, `and go it stronger!’”

Don’t confuse his spirited response with bluster and braggadocio. James’ instinct was to revel in new, disorienting, even dangerous experiences. I say I admire resilience, but even more I admire James’ energetic embrace of the unexpected. In his essay, he clearly relives the earthquake, milks it for all its novelty and shock value. I write this as a person who shuns rides at the amusement park, who drives the speed limit out of fear, and who avoids tall buildings and their imminent collapse. James reminds of another writer I admire inordinately, Isaac Babel, the Jew who rode with the Cossacks. James’ latest biographer, Robert D. Richardson, says this about the philosopher and the earthquake:

“This risk-taking, this avidity for the widest possible range of conscious experience, predisposed him to embrace things that many of us might find unsettling. It has been suggested that the earthquake experience was for James the near equivalent of a war experience. It may have been that, and it may have been even more than that. He no longer believed – if he ever had – in a fixed world built on a solid foundation. The earthquake was for him a hint of the real condition of thing, the real situation. The earthquake revealed a world (likes James’ own conception of consciousness) that was pure flux having nothing stable, permanent, or absolute in it.”

`A Symbol and a Sign'

In Houston, for several weeks late in the summer, swarms of butterflies share air space with hummingbirds. When the sun is high and clouds are sparse, the backyard is dense with color and motion. The woman from whom we bought the house three years ago had lived in it since 1955, when it was built, and was a serious, systematic gardener. At least one plant is always flowering in our yard, and she may have planted with hummingbirds in mind. They are attracted most to salvia, trumpet honeysuckle, firebush, butterfly weed and cardinal flower, and to the red glass feeder I hang from the eve.

Texas is tied with Arizona for the most hummingbird species – 16. Each county is home to at least two species, and Houston officially is visited by seven, though I can’t distinguish one species from another. The birds are so small and move so rapidly I mistake them for moths, wasps or acid flashbacks. They are lessons in applied epistemology: Am I real? If so, what am I?

I thought about our surfeit of beauty while reading Primo Levi’s Other People’s Trades, a collection of essays originally published in La Stampa, the newspaper in his native Turin, mostly in the 1980s. Levi makes few concessions to journalism or its readers. The essays are informal and engagingly discursive, but also deeply thoughtful and learned. One is devoted to his love of Rabelais, and he casually alludes to Kant, Borges, J.B.S. Haldane, Leopardi and Paul Celan. In “Butterflies,” Levi writes:

“Why are they beautiful? Certainly not for the pleasure of man, as Darwin’s opponents claimed: butterflies existed at least one hundred million years before the first man. I believe that our very concept of beauty, necessarily relative and cultural, has over the centuries patterned itself on them, as on the stars, the mountains, and the sea. We have proof of this if we consider what happens when we examine the head of a butterfly under the microscope; for the greater number of observers, admiration is replaced by horror or revulsion. Not being culturally accustomed to it, we find this new object disconcerting; the enormous eyes without pupils, the horn-like antennae, the monstrous, juglike mouth, look to us like a diabolical mask, a distorted parody of a human face.”

What struck me was Levi’s idea that our aesthetic sense has its origin in our responses to the natural world, which implies that natural selection hardwired us to appreciate the beautiful. Consider the disproportionate beauty of the paintings of animals in the caves at Lascaux, which date from 15,000 to 17,000 years ago. Often I’ve asked biologists if they thought the capacity to create and appreciate beauty might lend an evolutionary advantage to a given species. Most thought so, but agreed the hypothesis could not be proven. Levi deepens the mystery. He describes butterflies as “beautiful by definition, indeed our yardstick for beauty,” and writes:

“But the butterflies' attractiveness derives not only from colors and symmetry: deeper motive contribute to it. We would not think them so beautiful if they did not fly, or if they flew straight and briskly like bees, or if they stung, or above all if they did not enact the perturbing mystery of metamorphosis: the latter assumes in our eyes the value of an incompletely decoded message, a symbol and a sign.”

That final phrase, coincidentally, brings us to the poet of Lepidoptera, Vladimir Nabokov, who wrote a sad story titled “Signs and Symbols.” I think Levi is on to something. The beauty of butterflies is heightened by our knowledge of their evanescence, by the way “the perturbing mystery of metamorphosis” emphasizes their mortality, their vulnerability to time. There’s a lovely passage at the end of Chapter Six in Speak, Memory, when Nabokov describes a butterfly hunt in a Russian, around 1910, when he was 11 years old. In this pre-Revolutionary Eden, he lovingly identifies the species and notes “a paradise of lupines, columbines, and pentstemons,” before entering the metaphysical stratosphere:

“I confess I do not believe in time. I like to fold my magic carpet, after use, in such a way as to superimpose one part of the pattern upon another. Let visitors trip. And the highest enjoyment of timelessness -- in a landscape selected at random -- is when I stand among rare butterflies and their food plants. This is ecstasy, and behind the ecstasy is something else, which is hard to explain. It is like a momentary vacuum into which rushes all that I love. A sense of oneness with sun and stone. A thrill of gratitude to whom it may concern -- to the contrapuntal genius of human fate or to tender ghosts humoring a lucky mortal.”

`To Write is to Transmit'

Primo Levi practiced anthologizing as a form of autobiography. In The Need for Roots: A Personal Anthology, he invites us to read selections from the mixed bag of writers in his private pantheon who reflect and refract his personal history. As we move through the book, a multi-lensed image of the elusive author of The Periodic Table comes into focus. In the preface he writes:

“…I have read a great deal, above all in my apprentice years, which in memory seems strangely extended; as if time, then, could be stretched like an elastic band, doubled, tripled. Perhaps the same thing happens to those animals of short life and rapid reproduction like the sparrows and squirrels, and, generally, in anyone who manages, in the same span of time, to do and perceive more things than the average middle-aged man: subjective time becomes longer.”

It’s unsurprising Levi likens himself to backyard animals. In the preface he adopts the woodworm as a persona. He prized routine and quiet over the exotic and shrill. He worked as an industrial chemist in paint factories for more than 30 years, specializing in electrical resins. He lived in the same apartment in Turin for most of his life, excluding the 11 months he spent in Auschwitz. He died in 1987, probably by suicide, in a fall from the third-floor landing of his building. Elie Wiesel said, “Primo Levi died at Auschwitz forty years later.”

Of the 30 selections in the anthology, two are devoted to the Holocaust, the defining event of the 20th century and Levi’s life -- excerpts from Hermann Langbein’s Menschen in Auschwitz and Paul Celan’s poem “Todesfuge,” translated as “Death Fugue” by the late Michael Hamburger. The first I had never before read, but in the 37 years since I first encountered “Death Fugue” I have read it hundreds of times. In his introduction to Celan’s poem, Levi writes:

“The idea of writing `for everyone’ flirts with utopianism, but I feel distrust for whoever is a poet for the few, or for himself alone. To write is to transmit; what can you say if the message is coded and no one has the key? You can say that to transmit this particular message, in this specific way, was necessary to the author, but with the rider that it is also useless to the rest of the world.

“I think that this is the case with Paul Celan, the Jewish-German poet, upon whose shoulders fell burden after burden, grief after grief, culminating in his suicide at the age of fifty in 1970. I have not succeeded in penetrating the sense of many of his lyrics; the exception being this `Death Fugue.’ I read that Celan repudiated the poem, not considering it among his most typical poetry; that doesn’t matter to me, I wear it inside me like a graft.”

To reduce Levi and Celan to the category of “Holocaust writers,” as though they were punched out along the assembly line, is simple-minded. Both were masters, but their approaches to writing and language are unimaginably different. Levi’s prose is transparent. He told an interviewer: “I believe it is the task of every writer to describe what he sees in plain language, and I hope I have achieved this. Not that it is impossible to write about the death-camps in a highly experimental prose with all manner of linguistic pyrotechnics (although I think, a priori, this would be somehow indecent)…”

When Philip Roth visited Levi as the paint factory in Turin in 1986, Roth wrote, “It is hardly the world’s ugliest industrial environment, but a very long way, nonetheless, from those sentences suffused with mind that are the hallmarks of Levi’s autobiographical narratives.”

Celan’s poetry grew increasingly hermetic – allusive, fractured, approaching the dead end of language. “Todesfuge” dates from the immediate postwar period and is accessible to any attentive reader. It may, indeed, be the best known work written by a survivor of the camps. But reading late Celan, even with the aid of trots and good translations (like Hamburger’s) is a frustrating exercise is decryption. Meaning is rare and uncertain, and must rely on educated speculation. In an interview, Levi referred to Celan’s “extremely obscure, not to say hermetic poems.” In yet another interview, given in 1981 when he published The Need for Roots in Italy, Levi mentions Celan again while explaining his inclusion of two stories by Isaac Babel:

“I think the desperation we see in Babel is posthumous, attributed to him only in the light of his murder. He seems to me rather a man of adventure, an explorer of the spirit. There is pure despair, however, in Celan, and yet I have also put him in my anthology.”

I find Levi’s vacillation over Celan very moving. The human content of Celan’s poems, the terrible bond they shared, makes it impossible for Levi to dismiss Celan as beyond meaning. Yet, his own his strategy for transmuting unspeakable experience into language was to strive for a chemist’s clarity. He wished to be understood, and believed understanding was possible and every writer’s obligation.

“To write is to transmit; what can you say if the message is coded and no one has the key?”

`A Whiff of Impiety'

I squandered the first 47 years of my life not reading Lucretius. Almost eight years later, I see his likeness everywhere. I’ve detected traces of De Rerum Natura, usually translated On the Nature of Things, in Emerson, Darwin, Thoreau, George Santayana, Wallace Stevens, and Guy Davenport. Of Titus Lucretius Carus the man, we know little. His birth and death dates are approximate -- c. 99 BCE-c. 55 BCE. – and his manuscript history is a scholarly nightmare.

I’ve stumbled over Lucretius again reading The Search for Roots: A Personal Anthology, edited by Primo Levi and published in Italy in 1981. The collection is an inspired hodgepodge Levi describes as “a harvesting, retrospectively and in good faith, which could bring to light the possible traces of what has been read on what has been written.” He starts with excerpts from “The Book of Job” and concludes with a 1974 article from Scientific American, by Kip S. Thorne, on black holes. In between he packs Rabelais, Darwin, Swift, Conrad, Melville, selections from Sir William Bragg’s Lucretian-titled Concerning the Nature of Things, Giuseppe Belli, Paul Celan, T.S. Eliot, and many other other delights.

In his introduction, the translator, Peter Forbes, says baldly: “It is Lucretius who provides the link between Levi’s scientific, moral and aesthetic worldviews.” Levi worked for decades as an industrial chemist, and credited his reading of Bragg’s book at age 16 with inspiring his choice of careers. Bragg had won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1915 for development of the first X-ray spectrometer. In his introduction to the excerpt from Bragg’s book, Levi says the physicist “belonged to an epoch in which a pioneering genius could still do brilliant work in isolation.” The same, of course, was true for Levi.

Appropriately, he titles his selection from Lucretius “The Poet-Researcher” (as translated from the Latin by Sir Ronald Melville), and says in his introduction:

“If I had read Lucretius in high school I would have been enchanted, but he is not willingly read in school, officially because he is too difficult, actually because there has always been a whiff of impiety about his verses. For this reason, at the end of antiquity a cloak of silence was wrapped around him and today almost nothing is known of this extraordinary man. Consciously or not, for a long time he was regarded as dangerous, because he sought a purely rational explanation of nature, had faith in the evidence of his own senses, wanted to liberate man from suffering and fear, rebelled against all superstition, and described earthly love in lucid poetry.”

In his introduction to The Need for Roots, Forbes revels, as does Levi, in Lucretius’ proto-scientific thinking and the sheer pleasure he took in it:

“In Lucretius the world of sensation is a joy: it sings with the sights and sounds and feel of the world, with the spirit of healthy animals enjoying their animality. There is a wonderful Italian tradition of science writing that derives from Lucretius. Galileo is its greatest figure as a scientist, and Italo Calvino, Levi’s contemporary and friend is another exponent. In Levi’s case, his philosophy was put to the starkest test in Auschwitz. The result is as if Lucretius had endured Dante’s hell and emerged, a survivor, tempered by the experience.”

What I most enjoy in Lucretius is the mingling of scientific observation and speculation, and a zest for the pure physicality of the universe. The examples he cites are vivid and humble. This comes from the C.H. Sisson translation, titled The Poem of Nature, the first version I read in the fall of 1999:

“….you notice the mind suffers with the body
And shares all the sensations of the body.
If the point of an arrow, without quite killing a man,
Pierces him and damages bones and nerves,
He is likely to faint and fall limply to the ground.
Once there, as it were the tide of in his mind rises
And he feels a vague inclination to get up.
So the mind must partake of the nature of the body
Since the impact of a weapon can make it suffer.”

And this:

“In any building, if the basic measure is wrong
And there is error in judging the perpendicular
Or the level somewhere is even the slightest bit wrong,
Everything will be out of true and lopsided,
Crooked, sloping, leaning this way or that;
It will threaten to fall and some of it actually will fall
And all on account of the first erroneous measurements:
So your reasoning about things is always bound to be false
If it is based on sense you cannot rely on.”

Read these passages alongside an excerpt from Kip S. Thorne’s 33-year-old article on black holes chosen by Levi:

“From a physical and mathematical standpoint a black hole is a marvelously simple object, far simpler than the earth or a human being. When a physicist is analyzing a black hole, he need not face the complexities of matter, with its molecular, atomic and nuclear structure. The matter that collapsed in the making of the black hole has simply disappeared. It exerts no influence on the hole’s surface or exterior. It makes no difference whether the collapsing matter was hydrogen, uranium or the antimatter equivalents of those elements. All the properties of the black hole are determined completely by Einstein’s laws for the structure of empty space.”

Another unexpected admirer of Lucretius is Ron Rosenbaum, who resolved to resume his study of Latin, in part, because he yearned to read Lucretius in the original. He wrote an essay about the experience, “To the Shores of Light – Or, My First Latin Lesson,” collected in The Secret Parts of Fortune:

“…I sensed in my readings of Lucretius, through the scrim of the translation, the presence of the kind of inspired vision that reaches from the origins to the furthest limits of the universe, that links the hearts of men to the heart of creation, the kind of vision of ultimate mystery one finds in the cabalists, whose metaphors for the opening moments of creation (`the breaking of the vessels’ and the like) seem to anticipate the most sophisticated contemporary conceptions of the formation of matter in the moments after the big bang.”

Ozick's Picks

At Critical Mass, the reliable Cynthia Ozick brings a little sanity to the remarkably silly world of book reviewing and literary criticism.

`Quid Pro Crow'

For charm, wit and beauty, and for pure galling displays of joie de vivre, no bird can match the crow, and I’m pleased Kay Ryan shares my admiration, in “Felix Crow”:

“Crow school
is basic and
short as a rule –
just the rudiments
of quid pro crow
for most students.
Then each lives out
his unenlightened
span, adding his
bit of blight
to the collected
history of pushing out
the sweeter species;
briefly swaggering the
swagger of his
aggravating ancestors
down my street.
And every time
I like him
when we meet.”

I take the title of the poem, published in The Niagara River, to mean “Happy Crow,” an act of ornithological revisionism. For centuries, crows and other black birds have been unfairly associated with death. I’m always surprised by the fear and revulsion they inspire, a libel on the most intelligent of birds. One guy, while I was writing a story about crows, told me he hoped the West Nile virus wiped them out. He was not a farmer or gardener with a putative reason for his hatred. He just saw them as vermin, not among “the sweeter species.” On the other hand, I interviewed the owner of a pizzeria in upstate New York who had adopted a one-legged crow as a sort of qualified pet. He would stand behind his shop and whistle, and the bird would fly out of the adjoining woods and land on his arm, waiting to be fed pizza crust. The relationship was textbook symbiosis. Both parties benefited, both were happy.

Mark Twain recognized the happiness of crows, and linked their happiness to their intelligence. In 1896, while on a lecture tour in India, he was plagued by the birds, who stole his food and cigars. In Following the Equator: A Journal Around the World (1897), he tempered his irritation with admiration, and produced a tour de force of slowly accelerating comedy. Here’s Twain on crows:

“In the course of his evolutionary promotions, his sublime march toward ultimate perfection, he has been a gambler, a low comedian, a dissolute priest, a fussy woman, a blackguard, a scoffer, a liar, a thief, a spy, an informer, a trading politician, a swindler, a professional hypocrite, a patriot for cash, a reformer, a lecturer, a lawyer, a conspirator, a rebel, a royalist, a democrat, a practicer and propagator of irreverence, a meddler, an intruder, a busybody, an infidel, and a wallower in sin for the mere love of it. The strange result, the incredible result, of this patient accumulation of all damnable traits is, that he does not know what care is, he does not know what sorrow is, he does not know what remorse is, his life is one long thundering ecstasy of happiness, and he will go to his death untroubled, knowing that he will soon turn up again as an author or something, and be even more intolerably capable and comfortable than ever he was before.”

As portrayed by Twain, crows are gifted with the raffish style of a riverboat captain, the Duke and Dauphin, Melville’s Confidence Man and Twain himself.

`Order is Always Starting Over'

A poem by Kay Ryan, “Odd Blocks,” appears in the Fall 2007 edition of The Threepenny Review:

“Every Swiss-village
calendar instructs
as to how stone
gather the landscape
around it, how
glacier-scattered
thousand-ton
monuments to
randomness become
fixed points in
finding home.
Order is always
starting over.
And why not
also in the self,
the odd blocks,
all lost and left,
become first facts
toward which later
a little town
looks back?”

Ryan’s formal rigor frees her to navigate serpentine sentences while encouraging the impression they wander like “monuments/to randomness.” Recall Ezra Pound’s dictum to Harriet Monroe in a January 1915 letter: “Poetry must be as well written as prose” – a witty observation rarely heeded except by poets of Ryan’s scrupulosity. We long not for order but for orderly order – reliable, convenient and available on demand, like dialing 911. But Ryan reminds us, “Order is always/starting over.” Understanding is tentative and incomplete. Her thought and choice of imagery in “Odd Blocks” recall William James in A Pluralistic Universe:

“We carve out order by leaving the disorderly parts out; and the world is conceived thus after the analogy of a forest or a block of marble from which parks or statues may be produced by eliminating irrelevant trees or chips of stone.”

In her recent review in Poetry of The Notebooks of Robert Frost, Ryan writes approvingly that Frost “really likes the sensation of drawing a grid over life. And it makes sense: if you're going to be losing your way—which is half of the definition of being a poet—isn't it good to have some cardinal points to come back to?” Only by being scrupulous can we, and a poet like Ryan, look back and find our way. Embracing the chaos, though romantically enticing, is beside the point. Odd blocks – of stone, of type – become useful truths. In A Stroll with William James, Jacques Barzun writes:

“While others cry `Be realistic!’ the pragmatist knows that reality is elusive. In the abstract, reality is a legitimate standard to appeal to; it is the general goal that all truths aim at; but concretely, the real is not there ready to shake hands with the adventurer. He must expect disappointment and bad surprises.”

`Still Life is a Minor Art'

Of the few paintings I own, my favorite was done in 1994 by a friend in Schenectady, N.Y., who retired after decades as a lineman with the telephone company. Bob is now almost 80 years old, but until a decade ago he was still teaching phone company recruits how to climb wooden poles. He had no formal training in art but had painted for years, for his own amusement, in a studio he built at the back of his garage. One Sunday morning I admired the picture and without pause he took it off the wall and gave it to me.

It’s a 10-by-13-inch watercolor of an old washing machine with three green tomatoes on the lid. The body of the machine is blue-gray and the lid is white. It sits on a triangular metal frame with a small wheel under each of the three angles. Sticking out to the left is the hand-cranked wringer. Bob painted the plank floor a marbled blue and white. Behind the machine is white wainscoting and the wall above it looks like a cloudy sky of blue, white, gray and hints of rusty orange. The machine casts its shadow to the right, on the floor. The picture has no title, as Bob has never titled his paintings.

Bob told me he based the scene on a real washing machine he found in an abandoned farmhouse near Cooperstown, N.Y. He added the tomatoes because he wanted something green in contrast to all the icy blues and whites. I have always loved still-life painting, especially as practiced by the Dutch and Flemish masters of the 17th century. I take pleasure in realistic renderings of common, recognizable, unheroic objects. The paintings of gooseberries and asparagus spears by Adriaen Coorte, for instance, are prayers of thanksgiving for creation. In Objects on a Table: Harmonious Disarray in Art and Literature, Guy Davenport writes of still life painting:

“Still life is a minor art, and one with a residue of didacticism that will never bleach out; a homely art. From the artist’s point of view, it has always served as a contemplative form useful for working out ideas, color schemes, opinions. It has the same relation to larger, more ambitious paintings as the sonnet to the long poem.”

Fine work done in a minor art results in major accomplishment (consider Shakespeare’s sonnets, to use Davenport’s example). “Minor” is not pejorative. Based on a cursory Web search, the machine Bob painted seems to date from the 1920s, his childhood, so the picture has documentary value, but more so it possesses a bittersweet human aura. Someone, probably a woman, used the machine in rural upstate New York, perhaps when it was still “modern,” a wonder of labor-saving invention. Technology tends to erase memories of its precursors, but I wash clothes for four people every day, and I can’t imagine the bother of washing them in a pot of water steaming over a fire. John Cheever, of all people, gives us a priceless description of what a washing machine meant to a woman who had never seen one before, in his story “Clementina,” first published in The New Yorker on May 7, 1960. The title character was born in a village in Italy, and comes to the United States to work for an American family:

“At first she was suspicious of the washing machine, for it used a fortune in soap and hot water and did not clean the clothes, and it reminded her of how happy she had been at the fountain in Nascosta, talking with her friends and making everything as clean as new. But little by little the machine seemed to her more carina, for it was after all only a machine, and it filled itself and emptied itself and turned around and around, and it seemed marvelous to her that a machine could remember so much and was always there, ready and waiting to do its work.”

In Italian, carina means “pretty” or “nice,” in this context probably the latter. The washing machine is both pretty and nice, as is Bob’s painting, which hangs on the wall in my kitchen.

`Tree of Smoke'

My review of Tree of Smoke, by Denis Johnson, appears in the Houston Chronicle today.

Trees III

I am reading Exit Ghost, Philip Roth’s new novel, and will review it for a newspaper, and already the experience, just a few pages into the book, has triggered unexpected memories. At the start of the novel, Nathan Zuckerman, Roth’s perennial protagonist, lives alone in the Berkshires, the beautiful, humanly scaled, heavily wooded mountains of Western Massachusetts. For 19 years I lived across the state line, in Albany, N.Y., and environs, and often visited Pittsfield (where Melville wrote most of Moby-Dick), Lenox, Stockbridge and other towns in the region.

In the fall of 1987 I took a day off in the middle of the week to visit Williamstown. I wanted to see a Rube Goldberg exhibit at Williams College and browse the bookstores. That morning, along the north side of Route 2, having already crested the mountain that marks the state line and begun my descent into town, I noticed a copse of poplars at the far end of a field, perhaps 300 yards off the road. The leaves of the poplars had turned vividly yellow, and against the brown field looked more like flowers than leaves. On my way back to New York that afternoon, I pulled over for a closer look.

Poplars (or trembling aspen, or quaking aspen, because of the appearance of their leaves in a breeze) are an opportunistic softwood and often are judged the vermin of trees. They are tough, take root anywhere and grow quickly – a triumph of adaptation. I discovered the the brilliantly yellow copse was growing in the foundation of an old house. Wind-borne seeds had germinated in the rectangular hole, taken root and now stood 25 or 30 feet tall. The roof and walls were gone, and only stones remained. In the weed-choked hole were bottles, broken window glass, rusting cans and a galvanized washtub – all that remained of the lives of the anonymous former residents. Like flowers on a grave, the butter-colored leaves of the poplar marked their absence. Without the conspicuous beauty of the foliage, I would never have suspected someone had once lived there.

In A Natural History of Trees of Eastern and Central North America, Donald Culross Peattie explains the successful propagation strategy of poplars: “From the flask-shaped, thin-walled seed pod escape the minute, short-lived, innumerable seeds, which are borne on the wind by their cottony down.”

And he notes the colorful foliage that attracted my attention: “In autumn the foliage turns clear gold, brilliant even on a dark day, but when the sunshine slants through the Aspens they blaze with yellow light. In Colorado people are so rich in Aspen gold they can forget how poor they are in all the other hues of the eastern forest.”

The poplar has an ugly side. About 10 years ago I spent a day with naturalists, students and volunteers in the Pine Bush, a threatened ecosystem once lepped by Vladimir Nabokov. Read about the Pine Bush and its endangered Karner blue butterfly here. As a newspaper reporter, I accompanied the crews as they “girdled” some of the thousands of poplars that had invaded the Pine Bush. The procedure involves stripping bark off the lower portion of the trunk, which quickly kills the trees and permits them to be cut down and removed. As of last year, more than 40,000 invasive trees had been destroyed, giving native species a chance to thrive. It’s always unpleasant to watch the destruction of trees, but the girdling makes good counter-intuitive sense. Peattie addresses the poplar’s mixed reputation:

“Despised once as the veriest weed of a tree, Popple, as the lumberman prefers to call it, has in our age of paper come to the fore as a valuable pulp source, not, like the Spruce, for newspapers, but for magazine stock. Deflated boom towns of the worked-out pineries are coming back where Popple grows. When it has been cut, it reproduces itself within 50 years by its unaided exertions and fertility. And so what seems like a shallow-rooted, frail vagabond of a tree may prove to have more value than many a species with a more solid reputation. All that – and charm as well!”

Trees II

There’s a lovely passage in “Paper Pills,” the second story in Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio:

“The story of Doctor Reefy and his courtship of the tall dark girl who became his wife and left her money to him is a very curious story. It is delicious, like the twisted little apples that grow in the orchards of Winesburg. In the fall one walks in the orchards and the ground is hard with frost underfoot. The apples have been taken from the trees by the pickers. They have been put in barrels and shipped to the cities where they will be eaten in apartments that are filled with books, magazines, furniture, and people. On the trees are only a few gnarled apples that the pickers have rejected. They look like the knuckles of Doctor Reefy’s hands. One nibbles at them and they are delicious. Into a little round place at the side of the apple has been gathered all of its sweetness. One runs from tree to tree over the frosted ground picking the gnarled, twisted apples and filling his pockets with them. Only the few know the sweetness of the twisted apples.”

I first read the story in high school, and the poetry and science of “twisted little apples” remain vivid. In the first autumn after reading it, I walked through an old orchard that was no longer harvested, half-wild and overgrown with weeds and saplings. The day was bright and cold, probably in mid-October, and the first frost had already come and gone. The apples, even in summer, were hard, wormy and irregularly shaped, like small green gourds. By mid-autumn they were spotted and some were brown and puckered into angry little faces. I bite into one and it was achingly sweet. I felt as though I had performed an experiment and confirmed Anderson’s metaphor.

In A Natural History of Trees of Eastern and Central North America, Donald Culross Peattie describes three varieties of wild apple – the wild sweet crab, the Iowa crab and the southern crab. The first I knew growing up in Ohio. The apples were small and inedible, though squirrels and yellow jackets savored them. Their name seems appropriate because the trees were often crabbed – twisted and dense with small branches. Two fields behind our house was a crab apple about 20 feet tall and 30 feet across, shaped like an inverted bowl. Generations of kids had turned it into a den or clubhouse. At noon on a summer day, the interior was almost as dark as a closet. In spring, the inelegant crab apple turned into a stack of pink and white flowers. In “The Apple Trees at Olema,” Robert Hass notes “the raw, white, backlit flaring/of the apple blossoms,” and Peattie dramatizes the crab apple’s seasonal renewal:

“Long after the orchard Apple trees have come into bloom, the Wild Sweet Crab still stands in its dense thickets on the edges of abandoned fields, along fence rows, behind the moving dunes of the Great Lakes, naked, leafless, dark, secretive, and spiny, as if it intended never to awake to the seduction of spring. Then, when the petals of the cultivated Apple are falling, this Crab at last puts forth its little new leaves, tinged red and very downy when they unfold from the bud, and at the same time the flowers open swiftly. So swiftly, indeed, that suddenly the dead-seeming thicket seems to burst into bloom upon the naked wood.”

In February 1860, Thoreau delivered a lecture titled “Wild Apples.” Shortly before his death in May 1862, he sent a revised version to the Atlantic Monthly, where it was published six months later. It’s one of Thoreau’s best essays, dense with learning, observation and humor. Here’s a passage that reminds me of Anderson’s but with greater botanical detail:

“In October, the leaves falling, the apples are more distinct on the trees. I saw one year in a neighboring town some trees fuller of fruit than I remember to have ever seen before, small yellow apples hanging over the road. The branches were gracefully drooping with their weight, like a barberry bush, so that the whole tree acquired a new character. Even the topmost branches, instead of standing erect, spread and drooped in all directions; and there were so many poles supporting the lower ones that they looked like pictures of banyan trees.”

And this, from the section titled “The `Frozen-Thawed’ Apple”:

“Before the end of December, generally, they experience their first thawing. Those which a month ago were sour, crabbed, and quite unpalatable to the civilized taste, such at least as were frozen while sound, let a warmer sun come to thaw them, -- for they are extremely sensitive to its rays, -- are found to be filled with a rich, sweet cider, better than any bottled cider that I know of, and with which I am better acquainted than with wine. All apples are good in this state, and your jaws are the cider-press.”

At the end of the essay, Thoreau foresees the extinction of the wild apple: “I fear that he who walks over these fields a century hence will not know the pleasure of knocking off wild apples. Ah, poor man, there are many pleasures which he will not know!” This is the playful Thoreau, flourishing in the middle of what could have turned into an ecological rant. Thoreau “knocking off wild apples” reminds me of the pleasure Samuel Johnson took in rolling down hills in the country.